Cover of Swamp Thing
If there were any critics in 1982 who praised the movie Swamp Thing, I don’t want to know about it. It is ludicrous and cheap and poorly acted.
As well, it is the most sensual movie apropos of a woman’s breasts I have seen. Usually covered, the breasts are those of Adrienne Barbeau. I don’t think I’ll be recommending the flick on that basis.
The 1952 Man Bait is the first British film noir for Hammer (Brit)/Lippert (U.S.), and a tasteful, civilized film noir it is. But most certainly there is heinous behavior: killings and a near-killing most foul.
Actor George Brent, an American, is not very good, but Peter Reynolds is; and Diana Dors, in her first movie, is passable. Brent plays Dors’s boss in a bookshop, whom Dors is talked into blackmailing by Reynolds, Dors’s new beau. Dors is, or becomes, nearly as morally awful as Reynolds, and she soon alienates the cad. A mistake. Gradually a fellow bookshop employee (Marguerite Chapman) gets entangled in the dreadful affair.
Directed by Terence Fisher, Man Bait is a not-bad, not-boring caper movie. Based on a story by James Hadley Chase, though low-budget, it was promising for the Hammer/Lippert association, especially with its likable cast. I’m glad all British films are not like O Lucky Man! (a dismal dud).
Cover of In a Lonely Place
In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray, is a love story with dangerous neuroticism.
Screenwriter Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) loves one woman (Laurel, acted by Gloria Grahame) and is indifferent to the mysterious murder of another (a hat-check girl acquaintance). This is where it all begins. Steele, not an ordinary man, is often aggressive, and the police know it. They suspect him of the murder. Laurel knows darn well he didn’t do it, but she also grows deeply scared of the gent. There is plenty of grit in the film, and, for once in an old American movie, a sad ending. Maybe his wreck of a marriage to Grahame led Ray to insist on a sad ending.
In any case, the screenplay by Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt is compelling, and the film is nice to look at, with a good number of comely women. As has been claimed, the film’s supporting cast is nothing to crow about, but Bogart is the absolute right fit. Grahame, though limited, is interesting and winsome. A beauty with a preteen voice.
A crime movie with a difference, this.
Cover of Pretty Persuasion
Marcos Siega‘s tragicomic Pretty Persuasion (2005), scripted by Skander Halim, isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. But it didn’t win me over. The plot is literally incredible, concerning three high-school girls, one of them a bashful Muslim, who avenge themselves on a neurotic English teacher by falsely accusing him of sexual harassment. The iniquitous Kimberly Joyce (Evan Rachel Wood) dreams up the idea. Impossible to swallow is the Muslim girl’s going along with it. Impossible to swallow is Kimberly’s ultimate aim. Impossible to swallow is . . . Kimberly’s father, played by James Woods.
What David Denby wrote in The New Yorker is defensible: the film is a “poison-pen letter to a country [America] swollen with self-esteem.” It has a lot to do with disagreeable, narcissistic behavior throughout American society, involving all ages. Even the falsely accused teacher is sorely self-serving. But the truth of the matter is that Evan Wood deserves better than a film which turns its misanthropic attitude toward a 15-year-old girl and not only the film’s adults. Miss Wood handles speech and timing unerringly, and is pleasantly assured in her unrealistic part. Pretty Persuasion is unworthy. As frequently happens in movies nowadays, its dirty-mindedness, to lift Denby’s word, quickly gets boring.
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First it was a short story and a radio play, then it became a Hollywood classic with direction and script by Joseph Mankiewicz. All About Eve (1950) is an appealing picture about two faulty women, especially Anne Baxter‘s Eve Harrington.
The themes are self-seeking ambition, hypocrisy (when humility is a mask for treachery), love versus cold striving, and aging. Bette Davis is extraordinary in the film, Baxter is solid. Marilyn Monroe has a small part but is unimpressive.
Eve is not a great explorer of character, but few movies are. At least it’s distinctly interesting. And, in fact, anyone enamored of the theatre ought to see it because it, too, is enamored of the theatre.
With the 2010 Somewhere, Sofia Coppola wrote and directed a film that has more in common with the films of Olmi and Antonioni than with today’s serious pictures, which is to the good.
It has to do with a popular, recently divorced movie actor (Stephen Dorff) and his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning), the latter of whom fears she is losing her intimate connection with her mom and dad. This rattles Dorff. Fanning’s departure from him, and from the frivolous, vacuous film-industry world in which he lives, leaves the man sobbing over being a self-identified “nothing.” Somewhere eventually becomes a bit dull and would probably be better as a short. But it’s an astute film from an artist whose clear talent makes me regret that I declined to see The Bling Ring, her follow-up to Somewhere (albeit I did see, and enjoyed, Marie Antoniette).
Once again, in 2011, we had Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, this time from the perspective of Anne’s close friend Meg Wyatt. Sandra Byrd‘s novel, To Die For, is about both Anne and Meg, with the latter as narrator—and, I might add, nonsupporter of Katherine of Aragon.
Meg accepts Anne’s marriage to Henry but has vexing difficulties regarding marriage for herself. The man she loves joins the priesthood and Meg blames God, implacably rebelling against Him. She is also a mistreated woman, but as Anne Boleyn tells her, “You blame God for the deeds of men, I blame the men themselves.” In the middle of the novel, Meg repents and becomes a genuine Christian. She starts giving more attention to Anne, who needs it, and less to herself.
Now, in the 1530s, Protestantism lives, and Byrd does a good job of depicting an England where, as Byrd herself puts it, “God was now on His way to being at home in both the cathedral and the croft” (although I happen to believe it was actually that way before the Reformation). Byrd is more of a craftsman than an artist. Although her prose is not quite perfect, she does know how to write. Hers is a Christian vision, and she can make both Young Adult novels and period novels engaging. She has done so with To Die For.
Cover of The Women (Keepcase)
George Cukor, in filming Clare Booth Luce’s play, The Women, put out in 1939 a jangled, vivacious—almost too vivacious—domestic comedy about female dreadfulness and female resilience. There is also an element, to be sure, of a woman-needs-a-manism (i.e. a man to love).
Norma Shearer is too weepy as Mary Haines, but provides otherwise distinguished acting. Rosalind Russell plays bitchy Sylvia exaggeratedly and exhaustingly, though Joan Crawford does commanding work as a home wrecker. The woman who sparkled in Modern Times, Paulette Goddard, tries too hard as a saucy divorcee. Virginia Weidler, a child actor, however, is unself-consciously true as Shearer’s daughter.
The Women is quite a confection, smartly directed and in black and white with, nonetheless, an in-color fashion show sequence.
I could not care less about the perverse, monstrously irresponsible father (played by Woody Harrelson) of a New York magazine writer named Jeanette Walls. Admittedly, The Glass Castle (2017), based on Walls’s memoir, is incessantly interesting—and vivid—but that’s all. I mostly agree with Stephen Whitty: “This is grim material, but well worth a movie. The problem is that this film seems reluctant to really confront it.” MAYBE it’s well worth a movie; I don’t know. The stuff about its reluctance, though, is incontestably true.
What is not reluctant, or unknowing, is the honest acting. It nearly makes this an valuable film.
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Suddenly (1954) is a pulp fiction film about a trio of punks hired to murder, as he passes through the tiny town of Suddenly, the President of the United States. It’s properly economical with some vigorous action, as in a strong scene where one of the killers uncontrollably fires his rifle, tat-tat-tat, while being electrocuted.
The movie is respectful of middle-class—and certifiably small-town—American values. E.g., Sterling Hayden (as a sheriff) keeps inviting Nancy Gates to ride to church with him. And, yes, the main assassin is a WWII veteran, but was enough of a cur to be discharged from the army. Frank Sinatra is the star here. Suddenly is such a basically conservative pic, I’m surprised Ol’ Blue Eyes was initially a Democrat.
Directed by Lewis Allen, written by Richard Sale.
