by Dean | Dec 19, 2016 | General
Bob Rafelson‘s The King of Marvin Gardens (1972) concerns the busting-up of foolish dreams in a country of runaway commercialism and fading respectable culture. (Why, there’s even troilism in the culture now, leading to fatal sexual jealousy!) It also presents the theme of an individual’s tragic non-control of events in another person’s life. Thus we have a deeply serious film here, but, sadly, one with a third-rate screenplay by Jacob Brackman.
Cover of The King of Marvin Gardens
Almost as bad is that Rafelson’s direction, besides being pretentious, is rather too imitative of Fellini and Antonioni, something not true of the filmmaker’s Five Easy Pieces. Still, a few very pleasant scenes and images show up, to which it should be added that one man and one woman—Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn—perform their roles suitably. Jack Nicholson and Julia Anne Robinson do not.
by Dean | Dec 19, 2016 | General
There is quite a wrinkle in the old Western, The Texas Rangers (1936), in that the two principal characters who join the famous Rangers are fakers—stagecoach robbers hiding out in the organization. Fred MacMurray is one of them, jocular Jack Oakie is another; but as time goes on, both of them reform, and remain Rangers.
The let’s-roll adventures begin early: wild Indians entrap the motley lawmen, and later MacMurray, though still unscrupulous, forces a murdering kingpin to be tried. At this point scriptwriter Louis Stevens keeps up the captivating work by having one of MacMurray’s buddies, a fellow stagecoach robber (Lloyd Nolan), save MacMurray’s life by shooting down two men who want to kill him. Nolan’s character, even so, is bad news. In The Texas Rangers, an antihero, MacMurray, becomes a hero (also, it seems that all along he’s a believer in God) while his buddy, Nolan, is a heavy who gets morally worse.
All of it is enjoyable enough to possibly make Rangers one of director King Vidor‘s best films. The pacing is good, the principal acting—well—not bad. MacMurray’s love interest is a young Jean Arthur, spunky and looking like Claudette Colbert.
by Dean | Dec 13, 2016 | General
Cover of Clean
Clean, the engrossing 2003 picture by Olivier Assayas, stretches from Canada to Western Europe, and from heroin to methadone to “clean.”
Maggie Cheung gets jailed in Canada for possession, then moves to Paris to beat her addiction. Plus she wants to see her young son in London. It’s all very hard. Cheung’s recovering addict is a stumbling bisexual and would-be Deborah Harry (another former addict), living with humiliation. Speaking now in French, now in English, Maggie’s acting is outstanding, full of depth. She and director-writer Assayas were married but got divorced during the filming of Clean, and Cheung is not in good spirits. Sad. There are some things just as lamentable as drug addition.
by Dean | Dec 6, 2016 | General
Oliver (David Suchet) is a laid-off IBM technician, and he is homeless. Every day is Sunday for such a man; he has no job to go to. On one particular Sunday, he meets Madeleine (Lisa Harrow), a little-known actress separated from her husband. After Madeleine mistakes Oliver for a movie director, the two talk and then engage in sex, which—count on it—will never happen again. They realize that what has developed is a charade.
Jonathan Rossiter‘s characters in Sunday (1997) are bereft. The film is nonchalantly concerned to show us what would be rightly considered beside the point, as the copulation in the hallway between Madeleine and Oliver turns out to be. Likewise with the activities of the men from the homeless shelter (again: bereft) where Oliver is staying. Like Oliver, they’re inescapably wasting their time.
A poetic American indie, Sunday is sad but, because it’s also amusing, not quite a heartbreaker. There is more acumen than pathos. Rossiter provides some masterly direction, and Suchet and Harrow are distinguished. ‘Tain’t for children, though. Lisa Harrow gets stripped to an extent she never did in The Last Days of Chez Nous (the only other movie I’ve seen her in).
by Dean | Dec 4, 2016 | General
Cover of Save the Tiger
The star of the film Save the Tiger (1973), Jack Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, a Los Angeles clothing manufacturer who, in financial dire straits, plots to have one of his factories set on fire for the insurance money. . . As it happens, Harry prefers the past to his depraved self in the 1970s present. In the Forties, after all, he was an American soldier at Anzio. But Harry also prefers the past to the moral condition of present-day America, with, for example, its deep incivility. A parking attendant snaps at him, a cab driver is angrily sarcastic to him.
What’s wrong with the film is that not only does Harry romanticize the past, so does Steve Shagan‘s script. Harry says there used to be rules but not anymore—which is why such things as pornography and a lack of patriotism exist in our culture—and the movie seems to accept this. Well, as objectionable as pornography, etc. are, and despite the collapse of so many traditional Western values, it is of course false that there are no rules. What is true is that many otherwise decent or likable people keep pushing against the rules, often for the sake of an agenda.
Save the Tiger avoids self-righteousness and condescension—toward, for instance, the hippie girl (Laurie Heineman) whom Harry beds even though he is married. Directed by John Avildsen, it is largely intelligent, but problematic. Indeed, Avildsen should have known that the bright big-band song at the end of the film was inappropriate in light of the very dark incidents that Tiger was setting in motion.
by Dean | Dec 1, 2016 | General
Cover of Nothing Sacred
Was there ever a time when American cities gave great adulation to young women dying of something like radium poisoning? I don’t know, but in the comic (and funny) Nothing Sacred (1937), the Big Apple does so for Vermont girl Hazel—without knowing that Hazel is shamelessly faking. It is not even known by the newspaper reporter (Frederic March) who wants the scoop and all the crazy hoopla it leads to.
Pauline Kael wrote that “What are generally sentimentalized as ‘the little people’ are the targets” of this film. So is Hazel, played by a grounded and never-strident Carole Lombard. Nothing Sacred is short but filler-free, and peppery. It’s the Billy Wilder pic that Wilder never made; William Wellman—and writer Ben Hecht—did.
