Crime Of Old: “The Suspect”

What does a man in Edwardian England do when his marriage is hopeless?  Well, he should not fall in love with another woman.  This is what Philip Marshall in The Suspect (1944) does, and his outraged wife, Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West, refuses to give him a divorce.  The presence of young Mary, Philip’s love interest, keeps him in town and makes him desperate.  Ergo he kills his wife, in a murder  plot not exactly believable.  Very easily he becomes The Suspect.

This Robert Siodmak film is an Old Hollywood crime story set in Old London.  In polished black and white, it isn’t anything important but it is entertaining enough, what with, for one thing, Charles Laughton in the leading part.  Rosalind Ivan is good and true as the shrewish wife, and although I regard Ella Raines as perfectly passable as Mary, I wish Universal had hired a Brit, not an American, for the role.  Not bloody likely:  other women in the film are American too.

(Seen on YouTube)

Carlino Falling: “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea”

Directed and scripted by Lewis John CarlinoThe Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1976), is based on a novel by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima.  The homosexual Mishima wrought a book in which he presented 1) sexual longing, and 2) a pack of odd, early teen boys inclined to reject “adult” morality.  Connect the dots.  In the movie, and probably the book too (I’d have to read it again to be sure), the creation of the boys is all wrong, a silly embarrassment.  Then again, the entire film is preposterous, even if it focuses smartly on the extremes of human experience (namely, sex and death) which are integral to Mishima’s vision.

The cast includes Kris Kristofferson, who sleepwalks through his role, and Sarah Miles, who does some marvelously lived-in acting.

On the 2013 Film About “Renoir”

In France’s Renoir, released in the U.S. in 2013, the beloved impressionist (played by Michel Bouquet) has his new muse Andree (Christa Theret) pose for him regularly.  This she does contentedly until Renoir’s middle son Jean (Vincent Rottiers)—the future film director whose movie The Rules of the Game would artistically rival his father’s best paintings—returns from World War I to Renoir pere’s house.  There, Andree, who was an actual person, grows infatuated with Jean; frustrated too.  (The year is 1915.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir is an old man.)  We learn, in point of fact, that Andree eventually acted under the pseudonym of Catherine Hessling in Jean’s silent films.

Directed by Gilles Bourdos, Renoir uses the quiet existence of an elderly painter as an avenue for revealing life’s rich pageant. . . Regrettably, an unexciting, insignificant story develops here (Andree and Jean falling for each other), which prevents the movie from being anything like first-rate.  Yet Renoir has an unfolding aesthetic power.  Bourdos is good at creating unassumingly alluring shots and scenes, and the cinematography of Mark Ping Bing Lee is a sensuous wonder.

Really, present-day France with its economic troubles, etc. may have driven Bourdos and Company to the Gallic past, when things were so different.  Indeed, it is worth mentioning there is enough female nudity in the film to enrage a present-day Muslim immigrant in Paris.

(In French with English subtitles)

Nude

Nude (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Anti-Hero, “Dillinger”

Dillinger (1973), the John Milius film, is not much of a movie—for one thing, it doesn’t really care about character—but it is exciting.  Gun battles are battles.

The fine Warren Oates plays John Dillinger, and his character isn’t sanitized.  Neither is the violence of thuggish felons, or violence in general.  A lot of sloppy writing was done, but at least the film is better than Milius’s The Wind and the Lion.

 

I Have To Leaf It Alone: “A New Leaf”

Elaine May‘s 1971 film, A New Leaf, is a misfire, notwithstanding it was butchered through cutting by Paramount Pictures, a company May sued.  I’m skeptical of it regardless, though, since some pretty weak May-written comedy dominates the movie’s first few scenes and, several years later, May was willing to direct a movie as fuzzy and unsatisfying as The Heartbreak Kid.

As the concoction goes on, it gets invigoratingly bright and witty, and Walter Matthau does, as John Simon indicated, “a very neat job of humanizing” a wastrel who needs money and chooses to marry for it (and worse).  He rightly praises May, a co-star here, for the same kind of humanizing.  All the same, A New Leaf is messy.  Despite May’s talent, it isn’t nearly as good a comedy as the Harold Lloyd films I’ve reviewed.  Old Hollywood, this time, scores over the Seventies.

Another French Job – Truffaut’s “The Story of Adele H.”

Francois Truffaut’s French picture, The Story of Adele H. (1975), is a partly fictitious period piece about Adele Hugo’s unending pursuit of a British lieutenant with whom she once had a romance.  (Adele was the daughter of Victor Hugo.)  He doesn’t want her, but she obsessively wants him.

The idea was long ago expressed that there is in the one who obsessively and relentlessly loves a person unworthy of that love not only pathology but also greatness.  Critic John Simon pointed out that in Adele H. Truffaut failed to see this, and so his heroine’s greatness is casually ignored.  This is too bad, but at least the film has themes and beauty and is highly interesting.

Are there people who turn amatory love into a religion?  Sure.  They’re everywhere.  This is one of the themes in the film.  Isabelle Adjani enacts Adele and is perfect, supplying the character’s remoteness, determination and sheer fragility.  The British lieutenant is too cold—played well enough, however, by Bruce Robinson.  Truffaut’s direction is gratifyingly good, with those charming fadeouts and wipes included.  The costumes by Jacqueline Guyot and the production design by Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko are winning.

Somewhat underrated by critics, The Story of Adele H. needs to be given its due.

(In French with English subtitles.)

Cover of "The Story of Adele H."

Cover of The Story of Adele H.

Justice Or No? The Movie, “The Hangman”

Michael Curtiz (director) and Dudley Nichols (scriptwriter) gave us 1959’s The Hangman, a riveting Western about a U.S. marshal out to arrest a popular man.  Marshal Bovard (Robert Taylor) is dedicated to his job and distrustful of people, although he becomes a little less distrustful near the movie’s end.  The man he’s after, to be sure, rightly knows that a jury will probably pronounce him guilty when he isn’t.  There is constantly a specter of legal injustice.

What is most stellar about this movie is the cast, usually because of how inherently interesting and good-looking it is.  Taylor’s virility can rattle any cage.  Tina Louise, though limited as an actress, is effectually, amicably sensual and has a charming beauty.  Mickey Shaughnessy, Mabel Albertson and even Jack Lord all have their appeal.  So does Nichols’s relatively simple if imperfect script.  The Hangman is a respectable addition to the Curtiz oeuvre (which includes Casablanca).

From Down Under, A Movie Called “Winter of Our Dreams”

An Australian film, Winter of Our Dreams (1981), concentrates on a bookseller, Rob (Bryan Brown), who cheats on his wife, and now the two maintain what amounts to an open marriage.  Following the suicide of a former girlfriend, Rob wishes to talk about the woman to her friend Lou (Judy Davis), a prostitute and a junkie.  Lou becomes attracted to Rob and to a sexual relationship with him that promises nothing.  None of the characters finds the close consorting they effect very fulfilling.

During the “winter of our dreams,” people’s dreams are frozen; they go nowhere, they are unfulfilled.  This is particularly true for Lou, comforted at the end only by the melody of a song she hears at an anti-Bomb gathering.  John Duigan‘s film—written and directed by him—is astute and meaningful.  He stays away from longueurs, and his flick is not tedious.  Smooth Brown doesn’t have much to do, but Miss Davis does.  She is a fleshy wonder, convincing as a druggie who goes straight; fascinatingly fragile.  The film lives because of Duigan first, Davis second.

A Weekday Lover Every Week: “The Five Day Lover”

Jean Seberg is the star of a 1961 French film, The Five Day Lover, wherein she plays the mistress—a married one with children—of the currently unemployed Antoine (Jean-Pierre Cassel), regularly kept by his lover (Micheline Presle).

This is a Philippe de Broca movie, with some of the French New Wave’s froth, and it treats infidelity as lightly as it does romantic love in general.  That’s a problem.  What’s more, if this is a comedy, it’s nearly devoid of laughs.  Yet Lover is an artistically tasteful, genuinely romantic production—neither very strong nor a failure.  The main actors are careful and endearing. . . But, again, not very strong; and, in point of fact, I suspect it has weakened with time.

(In French with English subtitles)

Straight Shootin’: 1999’s “The Straight Story”

David Lynch  built a G-rated movie, The Straight Story (1999), around the event of 73-year-old Alvin Straight taking a trip by riding mower to visit his stroke-afflicted brother.  The trip, in 1994, began in Iowa and ended in Wisconsin.  A gentle picture with humor, it was meant to be deeply moving, and it is.  It concerns people, viz. Alvin and his daughter Rose, who have somehow endured.  The sentimentality with which Alvin (a perfect Richard Farnsworth) speaks of family is something he does not possess regarding old age, and neither does the film.

Lynch was content to forgo the elements of sex and nudity and violence and profanity this time lest they prevent an audience from “feeling” something.  For his next film, Mulholland Drive (2001), he went back to sex and nudity but this picture, too, can be moving, as well as sad.  But Lynch was going backwards; unlike The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive is a clunker.