SATAN IN HIGH HEELS (1962)

Stacy, a buxom carnival stripper, threatens to leave before the evening show unless she gets a raise, but when her junkie husband Rudy, just out of jail, shows up with a wad of cash and wants her to go to New York with him, she steals the money and heads out to the airport alone to start a new life. The man next to her on the plane is a lonely businessman who takes an interest in her, and once in the city, he takes her to a nightclub run by Pepe, a tough but friendly lesbian who is impressed with her audition and hires her, and also lets Stacy live with her, no strings attached. Paul, the gay bartender, resents Stacy as a lucky amateur, but ends up impressed with her singing talent. Arnold, the club owner, shows up and is quite taken with Stacy much to the dismay of his mistress Felice (not to mention Arnold's wife who lives in Paris). Stacy knows Arnold can do good things for her career but she's more interested is his wastrel son Larry who can no longer rely on his father for the means to live a playboy life. Pepe warns Stacy that "Larry isn't a man" (referring, I presume, to his immaturity) and Stacy replies, "Then I'll make him one!" She sleeps with Larry, then after a confrontation with Arnold, sleeps with him as well. Just when it seems like things couldn't get more messed up, who should show up but Rudy, back on heroin and looking for Stacy.

This grindhouse film is often referred to as sexploitation but the sex is implied rather than shown, though there are a couple of semi-strip dances done by large-breasted women (Meg Myles, who plays Stacy, and real-life stripper Sabrina playing herself—and though she is apparently genuinely British, her accent sounds laughably fake). Myles, who has a good singing voice, does a song in leather brandishing a riding crop. The acting is about what you'd expect for the low budget, but Grayson Hall (a stage actor later known as Dr. Hoffman on Dark Shadows) is quite good as Pepe, and the guy playing the junkie husband (Earl Hammond) has a nice intensity going for him—he went on to a prolific career as a voice actor. Robert Yuro as Larry is a letdown with average looks and no charisma; same for Mike Keene as his dad. I enjoyed Del Tenney (Paul) who gives a relatively subtle performance as a gay man. He has a fun line when he refers to the innocent and slightly dumpy assistant Peter as a "clean cut kid," making the line the filthiest sounding one in the movie. Tenney went on to direct the cult horror film THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH. The atmosphere is sleazy throughout, but the restored version I saw looks crisp and clean. Considering that Pepe's club is supposed to be rather high-toned, there are several cutaway shots of sweaty, intense men enjoying the show perhaps a little too much. There's a great jazz score by Mundell Lowe. The ending is a bit downbeat without being depressing. Stacy, though perhaps not admirable, is never really satanic as she tries to get ahead in a world in which men always want to dominate her. Overall, worth watching, especially in the gorgeous print available on YouTube. Pictured are Tenney and Myles. [YouTube]

NO QUESTIONS ASKED (1951)

Insurance lawyer Steve Kiever (Barry Sullivan) is on the run from the cops through the nighttime city streets (film noir element #1). In a flashback (noir element #2), we see how he came to this spot. Steve is a good lawyer but not quite good enough to get the raise his fiancée Ellen (Arlene Dahl) wants to ensure the good life for them. Steve does some negotiating with his boss Manstan and with some gangsters and initiates a plan whereby the company would pay a large sum to the criminals to get insured stolen property back. The company wouldn't have to pay out an exorbitant sum to the claimants, and Steve would get a cut of the money for himself. This works and Steve buys Ellen an expensive ring, but she has already left him and married a wealthy man while on vacation. Steve keeps up his contacts and Inspector Duggan (George Murphy) thinks that Steve, though technically within the law, has triggered a crime wave. Steve starts dating Joan (Jean Hagan), a secretary at work, but when Ellen returns to town, Steve gravitates back to her (film noir element #3). While the three run into each other at a Broadway show, two women pull a big jewelry heist in the ladies room, though they wind up being men in drag (and, it's hinted, gay men). Franko, a burly crook who prides himself on how long he can stay underwater without breathing (yes, this is a 'Chekhov's gun'), has the jewels but this time, Steve may not be able to pull off his rescue job. This is a legit film noir, for the three plot elements pointed out above, and mostly because the hero is morally flawed—he is generally a good person but gets caught up in the gray area of hanging out with gangsters to enrich his bank account and may not be able to extricate himself from his mob ties. The central trio of actors are OK. Sullivan as the conflicted hero isn’t particularly compelling, though the women fare much better: Dahl as the femme fatale and Hagan as the understanding good girl who might be able to save the hero from himself. The two thieves in drag (one of whom is the busy supporting actor William Reynolds, billed for some reason as Regnolds) are fun; when they claim that their drag performances are from their background in vaudeville, one thug says, "Stick to dancing, Nijinsky!" Their drag is good though obvious from the moment we see them. Pretty average film noir. Pictured are Reynolds and Sullivan. [TCM]

THE SWORD AND THE CROSS (1958)

In 33 A.D., the Roman emperor Tiberius has sent special envoy Gaius Marcellus to Judea, a sign that Rome is not happy with the way that possible rebels are being handled by Pontius Pilate. The two biggest threats are Barabbas, bandit and political revolutionary, and Jesus, an itinerant preacher who has gathered a crowd of restless followers. On the road, Gaius and his men clash with Barabbas and they rescue Mary Magdalene, the mistress of the wealthy Anan, from abduction. She tends to Gaius' wounds, and when he asks if she'll be easy to find when he arrives in Jerusalem, she replies, "Perhaps." It turns out that Gaius and Anan knew each other back in Rome, but Gaius starts an affair with Mary who, to be fair, has a past as a courtesan—it was never clear to me if Anan actually expected Mary to be true to him (perhaps, as in the Cole Porter song, true in her fashion). Tensions increase as the Jewish crowds tear down the Roman Eagle erected outside the temple. Later, at a party thrown by Anan for Gaius, Anan makes Mary perform a lascivious dance aimed at an elderly follower of Christ who has been captured to be mocked. During the dance, Mary suddenly stares at his face and stops the dance. That evening, she sees an apparition of Jesus outside her window. She tells Anan that he must never touch her again; in fact, she wants no men to touch her. After having the old Christian freed she goes to the temple where the crowds threaten to stone her until Jesus intervenes with, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Mary's critically ill brother Lazarus dies and Jesus intervenes again, resurrecting him. From here on, it's the basic Passion story from the Bible with Gaius and Anan taking supporting roles, though it is Gaius who leads the arrest of Jesus at Gethsemane, thanks to the betrayal of Judas for thirty pieces of silver. The film ends short of the resurrection, with Mary watching the crucifixion as a storm gathers.

This Italian film is a quasi-peplum rendering of the story of Mary Magdalene, conflating her story from the Gospels as a follower of Jesus with the figure of Mary of Bethany, sister to Lazarus and Martha. As such, it's an odd duck of a film. The first half is relatively involving melodrama concerning the love triangle between Mary, Anan, and Gaius. It's clear we're to identify more with Gaius than Anan, but because this plotline is more or less derailed by Mary's slow transformation into a Jesus follower, any tension generated is dissipated. Anan (Massimo Serato) is a more interesting character, and Serato is a more appealing actor than Jorge Mistral who plays Gaius. But for me, neither character is developed very well, though I must admit I liked the ambiguity about how traditionally good or bad either one is. The young and handsome Terence Hill, better known for his spaghetti westerns of the 1970s, is Lazarus, whom we never see after his resurrection. Many critics find Yvonne De Carlo (pictured with Serato) problematic as Mary. At the time, she was 36 and a bit past her prime, though she sustained a lengthy career as a character actor into the 1990s. She gets the occasional glamor shot here, and it's not really her age that's the problem. It's that she plays this leading role very much as she played the supporting role of Sephora in The Ten Commandments, adequately but with a lack of star charisma. I came to wish that the actress playing her sister Martha (Rossana Podesta) had been cast as Mary instead. Martha's role is fairly slight, but Podesta is very good and went on to have a decent career in peplum films. There is a nice sword fight between Gaius and Barabbas (Andrea Aureli) but otherwise not a lot of action. A nice try for something a little different but not terribly compelling. Italian title: LA SPADA E LA CROCE. [YouTube]

THE WANDERING SHADOW (1920)

Wil, who considers himself the legal heir of his cousin, the recently deceased free-love philosopher Georg, is attempting to sue Irmgard, Georg's lover, so she doesn't get what Wil thinks is his inheritance. Coincidentally, he sees her on a train, looking desperate and distraught, so he decides to hold off on the suit temporarily and follows her. On the train, she gets a telegram from John, Georg's twin brother, saying "If you think you can escape me, you are surely mistaken." Irmgard arrives at a mountain village where a large wedding is taking place. She hears a death knell ringing for a monk at a nearby monastery and is told that is a bad omen. The room Irmgard has booked has been given to someone else, but with Wil's help (though he doesn’t tell her who he is), she gets a room in an inn across the river. John is soon directly on her trail, telling people she is mentally ill and needs his help. She takes off for the mountains to hide; Wil offers to help her but she says she must bear her cross alone. When she runs across a bearded shepherd up in the hills, she melodramatically announces to him, "I am looking for a path that leads away from misery." He replies that he can't point her to somewhere that doesn't exist. Standing before a statue of a Madonna and child, she prays for help. With bad weather coming, the shepherd takes her to his isolated cabin for the night. Irmgard hears another death knell and sees an image of a skeleton hand ringing the bell. Suddenly, there is an avalanche that leaves the two trapped in the buried cabin.

We now get a long backstory flashback. Years ago, Georg, famous for his free love views, hires Irmgard as an assistant. They fall in love and she wants to marry, but he won't contradict his beliefs and says he will only take her symbolically as a "wife in free love." When she becomes pregnant, he still refuses to engage in a legal marriage so, in secret, she marries Georg's twin brother John but puts Georg's name in the marriage register so her baby will be considered legitimate. Georg learns of this and fakes an accidental death then escapes for the mountains to live alone, vowing by the Madonna statue that he will not leave the mountains until the statue walks through the snow. Back in civilization, Georg's will leaves everything to Irmgard, but John claims it as his because he is the man actually married to her. Wil feels he has a solid claim as well. Back in the present, we realize the shepherd is actually Georg. As a rescue team tries to dig out the buried cabin, the now crazed John begins throwing rocks at the rescuers, while Wil decides he wants to marry Irmgard. How will this wild melodrama end?

Some fans of director Fritz Lang consider this a strange one-off as it doesn't fit with the rest of his oeuvre (sci-fi films like Metropolis, crime films like Spies or the Dr. Mabuse movies, or his later Hollywood noir films). But Lang was no stranger to melodrama (as in the Metropolis narrative) and this is even spiced with mysticism, like The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in the element of the death knell and the Madonna. Many online reviewers find this film hard to follow. No complete version of the film is known to exist, but the print in the Kino Classics Blu-ray set contains a handful of title cards that explain missing scenes, and this version is easy to follow, considering the convoluted nature of the narrative and its structure. This has been seen as a forerunner of the German “mountain movie” genre; it is set in the mountains, and there is a natural disaster, but otherwise it's not all that similar to those films. The whole thing actually feels rather fresh and interesting for the era: the free-love aspect, the doppelganger element, the character of Wil who goes from revenge-seeker to marriage-seeker, and the potentially miraculous set-up of the Madonna statue coming to life. The acting is generally more naturalistic than the average for the time. Rudolf Klein-Rogge, much better known later as Dr. Mabuse and the villain Rotwang in Metropolis, is Wil; Mia May makes for a rather plain Irmgard; Hans Marr is fine in the dual roles of the brothers. It takes a good ten to fifteen minutes to acclimate yourself to the narrative, but I was quite glad I stuck with this. Also released as The Wandering Image, which is a more exact translation of its German title. Pictured at top are Marr, Klein-Rogge and May. [Blu-ray]

THE WOMAN RACKET (1930)

The police raid a speakeasy called the Blue Moon and round up most of the rich patrons as they try to escape through the back. As police officer Tom Hayes makes a last check, he sees a young woman in a sparkly outfit named Julia trying to climb up a tree. She pleads with him to let her go since she was just the entertainment, not a patron. Taken with her, Tom lets her go and also starts dating her. Before long, she agrees to stop working and they get married, but in a few months, she's complaining about living on a cop's salary and wants to go back to work. Tom won't allow it, partly because he knows the manager of the club, Chris Miller, is involved in shady dealings. Eventually Julia leaves Tom and gets her old job back. She lives at the club and has a casual affair with the slimy Chris before beginning to distance herself from him for his thuggish ways. She becomes buddies with a new pianist, Rags, and his girl singer, Buddy, and when Chris starts tempting the innocent Buddy with promises of a big job in Chicago with a Broadway bound show, Julia warns him to knock it off. Soon she admits to her friends that if Tom ever asked her to come back, she would. When a patron named Wardell breaks the club's gambling bank, Chris tells Julia to take Wardell to a nearby chop suey joint and get him drunk so Chris's men can roll him and get the cash back. Feeling pressured, she does, but the evening ends with Wardell beaten into unconsciousness. Tom, alone and unhappy but not actually divorced, has been promoted to sergeant and when he arrives at the scene, he finds a compact that he gave Julia as a gift. He hides it but goes to Chris to let him know that he is under suspicion. When Wardell dies, Chris finds things getting too hot, so he gets tickets for himself and Buddy to get away to Chicago. When Julia finds out, she threatens to talk, so Chris knocks her out and stuffs her in a Chicago-bound trunk. Will Tom arrive in time to set things right? And will Julia still be alive?

This pre-Code melodrama provides a rare chance to see the silent film star Blanche Sweet (Julia) in a talkie. Her career was already in decline and she retired from the screen in 1930 at the age of 34. She's fine here, coming off as strong and energetic, and still quite attractive, and there was nothing wrong with her voice. The Irish Tom Moore (Tom) was one of the three Moore brothers—Matt and Owen are the others—who were known for their character roles in the 1930s. Though he seems a bit rough and tumble to attract a sort like Julia, he does have a forceful screen presence and is sympathetic despite his dismissive treatment of Julia. John Miljan, who specialized in slick bad guys, is OK if a bit restrained as Chris; he could have turned up the slime quotient a bit. I liked Sally Starr and Bobby Agnew as Buddy and Rags. Oddly, the last shot of the movie isn't of our main romantic couple (yes, there’s a happy ending) but of Buddy and Rags reuniting. Sweet and Starr each get a musical number, with Starr dancing with more enthusiasm than talent. Agnew gave up acting a few years later and had a long career as an assistant director in movies and TV. Stylistically, the movie is a notch above many of the other early talkies of 1930. Static shots alternate with a moving camera, though occasionally a shot is held too long or a minor flub stays in. The opening raid is shot mostly from floor view, focusing on the shoes and legs of the fleeing patrons. The climax, with some gunplay, is shot in the dark so we hear but don't see the violence. One oddity which other viewers have noticed: though the club is raided in the opening, it never seems threatened by the law later, with Tom even visiting without the intent to raid. Pictured are Moore and Sweet. [TCM]

THE APPOINTMENT (1969)

A single lawyer nearing middle age (Omar Sharif, at right) gets dressed one morning and, looking in the mirror, thinks that he's looking more and more like his father as he ages, referring to seeing "the black nostrils of death" on his face. Driving through Rome, he is caught in a traffic jam and winds up captivated by a woman he sees walking down the street. Later, at lunch with an old friend and fellow lawyer (Fausto Tozzi), Sharif discovers that the woman (Anouk Aimee) is a high-class model and the fiancée of Tozzi. Some time later, Tozzi tells Sharif that he found out that Aimee is also a high-class call girl, or so he suspects when a friend shows Tozzi a pin he took from a hooker that is identical to a pin that Tozzi gave Aimee and she has since said she lost. Tozzi dumps her, which leads Sharif to begin dating her. Without telling her about his suspicions about her, he investigates her, going so far as to contact an infamous high-class madam (Lotte Lenya) who sets him up with someone he suspects is Aimee. Sharif and Aimee go off for a romantic weekend in Sardinia but she refuses to have sex so he leaves in a huff. He eventually is called by Lenya for an appointment with the whore he thinks is Aimee, but she never shows up. After Aimee tries to kill herself, she and Sharif reconcile and get married, and they're happy for maybe five minutes until Tozzi replants the seed of suspicion in Sharif. Sharif sets up another appointment through Lenya, and the consequences are a bit unexpected and tragic.

This may have been a well-shot movie (the director is old pro Sidney Lumet) but the print I saw on TCM was ugly, with murky browns and yellows predominating. That might have been intentional, but I suspect this forgotten movie could stand a restoration. But will anyone want to watch it? The score is lush and the melodrama is old-fashioned, though the explicitness of Sharif's suspicions are only possible due to the end of the production code. In addition to a drab look, the acting is similarly drab. The two main supporting actors, Lenya and Tozzi, are fine, but Sharif and Aimee seem to alternate between low-energy and overacting, and it's difficult to care about the tensions that attract and repel these two. At the very end, when you think that the issue of Aimee's occupation will be left up in the air, there is a twist that does answer the question and I did appreciate that, but I was still left with the unlikability of both Sharif and Aimee. [TCM]

SHIP OF FOOLS (1965)

It’s 1933. A passenger liner takes off from Vera Cruz in Mexico on a month-long trip to Bremerhaven in Germany and a dwarf on the ship (Michael Dunn, at left) talks directly to the camera about it being a ship of fools, wondering if we might recognize anyone on board. We get to know a large cast of characters. The German captain is fond of the young ship's doctor (Oskar Werner) who has a weak heart and who, despite his blond good looks, seems inexperienced in love; this is his last trip on the ship and the captain encourages him to live it up. Jose Ferrer is a loud, antisemitic German publisher who dallies with a young good-time girl and makes obnoxious proclamations about race at the Captain's dining table. An insecure and struggling young artist (George Segal) is traveling with his mistress (Elizabeth Ashley), also an artist, though they are bunked in separate cabins and seem anxious to see if a month of not having sex will strengthen their tenuous bond—though talented, he's a bit hotheaded and produces political art that she doesn’t care for. A lonely but aloof middle-aged woman (Vivian Leigh) drinks and flirts without much success. Heinz Ruhmann, a German Jew, has been ejected by Ferrer from the Captain's table where most of the German passengers sit; he shares his exile table with Dunn and later with another German who makes the mistake of mentioning that his wife is Jewish. Lee Marvin is a washed-up baseball player who has regrets. There is also a wheelchair-bound evangelist and his weakling nephew who is getting tired of pushing him around and not having a life of his own. The ship stops in Cuba to pick up hundreds of Spanish workers who have no jobs after the sugar market collapses; they are pressed in tightly in steerage. Arriving with them is a countess (Simone Signoret), being deported after taking sides with labor agitators. She asks Werner for sleeping medicine, but he figures out she is an opium addict looking for a fix. However, the two slowly bond and have a tender relationship that becomes physical—she picks up a dry medical book from his shelves and reads from it, pretending it’s "Lady Chatterley’s Lover."

Other episodic setpieces involve a flamenco dancer (Jose Greco) and his largely female troupe, some of whom Greco pimps out to passengers. The evangelist's nephew falls for one of the dancers, then is disillusioned when she asks him for money before she lets him in her room. A rich couple insist on having their bulldog sit at the Captain's table at dinner; when two beastly children throw the dog overboard, a Spanish woodcarver from steerage (whom Segal has been chummy with) jumps over to save it, which he does at the cost of his own life, but the couple only care about the dog. Leigh leads an officer (Werner Klemperer) on but dismisses him, and he tells her she will end her years sitting at sidewalk cafes with a paid escort. A drunken Marvin comes on to her, but when he assumes she's a whore, she beats him and throws him out of her room. When Ruhmann seems not at all concerned about the status of Jews in Germany, Dunn berates him and he replies, "There are a million Jews in Germany—what are they going to do, kill all of us?" By the end, as they disembark in Germany, some stories are tied up, others are not, and the coming Nazi horrors are foreshadowed. Dunn turns to us again and corrects his opening remarks: "What has all this to do with us? Nothing."

Based on a novel by Katherine Anne Porter, drawn from an actual trip she took, this film is often criticized for being a puffed-up and overlong all-star vehicle (sort of true), or a Grand Hotel imitation set at sea (definitely true). At 150 minutes, it is certainly too long by almost a half an hour, but its length does give the various characters and stories room to breathe, with Signoret, Werner and Leigh given the most focus—those three also give the best performances, though most everyone is good. Michael Dunn, who got an Oscar nomination, is especially fine and deserved more screen time; because he functions as a kind of Greek chorus, his character is the only one that is never fleshed out. Segal and Ashley, early in their careers, are sexy and charismatic. Charles de Vries is good in a one-note but effective performance as the nephew. Leigh, in her last screen performance, feels a bit artificial at times, like she's giving us a reheated version of Blanche DuBois, but that is sort of what the character calls for. She has a moment near the end where she slips in a Scarlett O’Hara simper that is perfection. Signoret and Werner (pictured at right) give well-measured performances that could have tipped over into overdone sentimentality, but they never do. The blustery Ferrer strikes the only false note. The ship sets look real enough; it's obvious that it was all shot in a studio with ocean backgrounds, but that's not bothersome in this melodrama. Stanley Kramer directed in widescreen black & white and you really don’t miss the color. Set aside an afternoon for this, overlong but not painfully so. [TCM]

HAMLET (1964—Russian version)

This visually stunning film from Russian director Grigoriy Kozintsev may be the best film adaptation of Shakespeare that I've seen. I imagine it helps to have some familiarity with the original play; this is in Russian with English subtitles, and I don't know if the subtitles are taken directly from Shakespeare—the most famous speeches and lines are, but I wondered if some lines were translations into English of the Russian translations (written by Doctor Zhivago author Boris Pasternak) of the original. Partly because my eyes were dazzled by the visuals, I occasionally had a hard time keeping up with the subtitles, but I know the play so I had no problem keeping up. The performances are all solid. I think Hamlet is a difficult role because the text leaves it open to so much interpretation. The play has famously been described as being about a man who can't make up his mind—I won't do a full plot summary, but basically Hamlet spends the whole play trying to decide when and how to take revenge against Claudius (Hamlet's uncle) who killed the king (Hamlet's father) and married the widowed queen (Hamlet's mother). The general consensus among the play's characters is that Hamlet, who is acting acting strange from the start, goes insane, but is he really or is he faking it? The famous phrase about there being a "method to the madness" comes from this play, but it's not always clear how much of Hamlet's behavior is deliberate method. Some actors have made him almost playful at times, others make him fixate on revenge more seriously, and some play him as psychologically confused. Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy leans into the confusion. His performance is not especially layered but it is effective enough. At nearly 40, he’s a bit too old for the part of the student prince, but most other major films have featured actors between 35 and 40 in the role (Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Mel Gibson) so we're used to that—in fact, Ethan Hawke in the modern 2000 adaptation is probably the youngest big screen Hamlet at thirty. Smoktunovskiy goes the naturalistic route, with his monologues delivered as voiceovers, and gives the part the gravitas it needs. The other actors are fine, though none really stand out except for Anastasiya Vertinskaya who is the best Ophelia I've seen, handling the sad downward spiral of the character with restraint and believability. 

But as I've noted, it's the look of the film that will impress you. Much of the movie is shot on outdoor locations, hence hills and beaches and fields galore. The traveling players' play is performed in an outdoor setting and it works well. The very impressive castle looks for all the world like a real castle but it's apparently a set that took six months to build. Much if not most of the action takes place at night, taking advantage of the stark black and white cinematography. In widescreen, the deep focus shots are remarkable. One online reviewer noted a resemblance to the style of Ingmar Bergman, and that is emphasized by the leading man's blond hair and Max von Sydow look. The voiceover "To be or not to be" soliloquy starts with Hamlet looking right at the camera, then walking along the castle walls against the tumult of the sea next to him. The appearance of the king's ghost is a fantastic visual effect. At two and half hours, the text has obviously been cut, but as far as I'm concerned, no harm has been done. A beautiful and powerful movie. [YouTube]

THE KING AND THE CHORUS GIRL (1937)

The deposed King Alfred VII is living a dissolute life in Paris with his only two subjects, Count Humbert and Duchess Anna, who act as his servants. One morning, Alfred lies in bed, seemingly dying but actually hungover—he never has any fun because, as the Duchess says, it takes him "three days to pass out, three days to come to," then Humbert notes, "And then it's always Sunday." His doctor diagnoses him with acute boredom. They take him out to the Folies Bergère where he is smitten with Dorothy, a chorus girl who he thinks is flirting with him by flashing light in his face with a small mirror, though it turns out that she flashes that light at whoever happens to be sitting where he sat. Attracted to her, he asks her over for dinner, but when she arrives, he's already forgotten about her and is asleep in bed. The next day, to goad Alfred, Humbert tells him that Dorothy never even showed up, which intrigues Alfred who is used to getting what he wants. Humbert and Anna contact Dorothy and enlist her in a plan: Anna thinks that Alfred needs someone who will resist him in order to come back to life, and she agrees to be the resister. Their first date at her place is a disaster because he's already drunk when he shows up. He passes out on her bed and she goes to his apartment to sleep. Slowly he warms up to her, and she to him, but when she realizes that a King would most likely not marry a commoner, she gets Humbert to hire an American waiter to pose as her fiancé to help her break things off. As you might expect, there is eventually a happy ending for the king and the chorus girl who are last seen heading to Niagara Falls.

This is, for the most part, a totally average 1930s rom-com, in many ways not that different from more modern iterations today on the Hallmark Channel. The script was co-written by Groucho Marx, and many critics find it disappointing that it's so pedestrian. But I suspect he was brought in as a joke doctor to work on the screenplay by Norman Krasna. Some of the lines are fairly Marxian: "How did you find Belgium?"; "I didn’t look for it." When Dorothy says to Humbert that there is no royalty in America, he replies, "A smart, well-dressed royalty is awfully good for the tourist trade." There is also a fun running gag about an ancestor who was Alfred IV & V. These bits are sprinkled throughout the movie, but the actors' delivery doesn’t always do them justice. Joan Blondell, as Dorothy, is quite good, as is Edward Everett Horton as the scheming and dithering Humbert. Mary Nash is a bit bland as Anna, though it's nice to see Jane Wyman in a small role. Fernand Gravet (who later went by Gravey) is a letdown as the King—he seems to be trying to throw himself into the part, but he's all surface, no depth. He only made a handful of movies in Hollywood, with his biggest role as Johann Strauss in THE GREAT WALTZ, but he had a long career in French films up to his death in 1970. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy who went on to better things, like THE WIZARD OF OZ. Pictured are Nash, Gravet, and Horton. [TCM]

THE ROCKET FROM CALABUCH (1956)

Prof. Hamilton (Edmund Gwenn), an American rocket scientist, is unhappy that his work is being used for warlike ends, so he walks away one day and secretly goes to the Spanish island of Calabuch to live a simple existence. When he arrives on the beach, Juan, a small-time smuggler, sends him into the village to take a small package to a man nicknamed Lobster. Lobster happens to be in jail, and the police chief (and military leader) Matias throws Hamilton in jail with Lobster, assuming he's a smuggler as well. Matias seems like a hard ass at first (we see him marching soldiers dressed in ancient Roman garb about town in an army drill), but it turns out not so much: the lock on Lobster's jail cell is broken, so Lobster and Hamilton can basically come and go at will—and because Lobster is the only projectionist in town, his presence is necessary on movie night. We meet the various charming and eccentric inhabitants of the town, including Matias's daughter Teresa who plans to elope with Juan; Elisa, the schoolteacher who has her students sing their multiplication tables; Vicente, who takes days to paint a name on a canoe on the beach; Fermin, a sad sack soldier left out in the elements to guard against an imagined threat from the sea. There is also a lighthouse keeper who plays chess over the phone with the village priest; a bullfighter to comes to the village for a festival with an older, lazy bull who manages to chase the bullfighters into the sea, and a fireworks maker who ends up getting some help from Hamilton for a festival display that they hope will win the village a prize. As in other movies filled with odd but good-hearted townspeople (Ealing comedies like TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT and WHISKY GALORE, any number of Frank Capra movies, the TV show Northern Exposure), there aren't really any bad guys, and everyone comes together at the end to try and save the outsider from a menacing force—in this case, the US government helicopter that arrives to take Hamilton back home.

I was unfamiliar with the Spanish director Luis Garcia Berlanga, but he displays a fine, light touch here; you occasionally expect things to move in the direction of magical realism, but it never goes that far. Gwenn, in his last film role, is fine, often coming off in personality like Kris Kringle (MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET), even going so far as to play matchmaker for Lobster and the schoolteacher. It's disappointing that, though it appears that Gwenn is reciting his lines in Spanish, a different actor dubs him, who sounds nothing like Gwenn. The only other actor I was familiar with is the Italian Valentina Cortese as Elisa. Lobster, the main secondary character, is played well by the handsome and charismatic Franco Fabrizi. The various plotlines are easy to follow, though I never figured out what was up with the Roman garb in the opening scene. This is a light and charming film (which is predictable in its unpredictability, if that makes sense) that should be better known. Pictured are Fabrizi and Gwenn. [Criterion Channel]

SADDLES AND SAGEBRUSH (1943)

Cowboy Lucky Randall (Russell Hayden) is hangin' with a gang of singin' cowboys (Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys) when he gets an offer to work as a hired gun and bodyguard for Krag Savin (William Wright) in the frontier town of Pinon City. Savin claims he needs protection from a group of violent squatters living illegally on land outside the town, but Lucky's comic relief sidekick Cannonball (Dub Taylor) thinks the setup sounds suspicious so he follows Lucky. In Pinion City, Savin says that Lafe Parker is stirring up the squatters and needs to be fought, and he sends his men to the Parker ranch to set fire to the land. Lafe goes into town looking for a showdown with Savin but is wounded by Blackie, a Savin henchman. Lucky and Cannonball get the lowdown from Parker and his daughter Ann (Ann Savage). The squatters are actually legitimate homesteaders, but Savin and his men have been rustling cattle and fencing off grazing land in an attempt to claim the land for themselves. Lucky shifts his allegiance to Parker and Ann, deals with an ambush by Savin's thugs (resulting in two of them shot and two of them captured by lasso) and sends a telegram to the state capitol to find out the legal status of the land. Knowing the reply will confirm the free range status of the land, Savin's men rob the mail stagecoach that contains the reply. Lucky, Cannonball and Ann seem to be defeated, but Bob Willis and his gang arrive to help save the day.

At less than an hour (and with at least ten minutes taken up with songs), this B-western zips along quickly. It's nothing special but it's a good example of its genre, the singing cowboy western. It is predictable but there is a certain pleasure in watching the gears turn, as there is with most genre films. Russell Hayden does not cut a particularly strong heroic figure (he could be sturdier and better looking) but he's OK. Ann Savage, who hit B-film femme fatale icon status thanks to a fierce performance in DETOUR, is fairly bland here. You just have to go with flow as far as Bob Willis and company, well known performers of Western swing who released over 100 singles during their career, with a handful hitting #1 on the country charts. They perform five songs here, including "Hubbin' It," which was used as the title for a biography of Willis. I'm not sure what that phrase means; it seems to be a version of "keep on keepin' on' or "humping" in terms of struggling along with a heavy load: "It's your wagon load / Keep right on hubbin' it / Down that lonesome road." The songs don't further the plot, they're just like little distractions. William Wright, a B-actor who was in around 40 movies in the 1940s, is a little wooden as Savin. I very much liked Dub Taylor as Cannonball. He was in hundreds of movies and TV shows, and I think of him as a classic-era M. Emmet Walsh. Takeaway line, in defense of the settlers: "It's the sweat of the little man that makes this country great." Pictured are Hayden and Taylor. [YouTube]

HERCULES AND HYLAS AGAINST THE CAT-MEN OF MERCURY (1962)

Burly Hercules and his young blond ward Hylas are enjoying a relaxing swim on the shore of Photia Island when a contingent of battered and tattered men from the town of Phallogos beg for help. Cat-human mutants—full grown men with cat faces and furry bodies—have been ransacking the town at night and hiding in the hills in the daytime. No one knows where they came from, though guards Stephanus and Gordano reported seeing a bright light in the sky the night before the first attack. Those who have tried to stop or capture them wind up hypnotized into immobility by the swishing of the Cat-Men's tails. Even worse, Queen Newmara has apparently fallen in love with one of the Cat-Men, Felixus, and is rumored to be planning to let the city be overrun by the mutants. Hercules and Hylas accompany the men back to the city where Hylas is immediately kidnapped by the Cat-Men and held for ransom in the hills. Queen Newmara takes Hercules' mind off of rescuing Hylas by mixing him cocktails made with the Gin of Forgetfulness and making out with him in the daytime even as she hides the hairy, lithe Felixus as her midnight lover, leaving poor King Reg lots of time for his hobby, astronomy. But it is Reg who discovers strange flashes of light coming from the planet Mercury, apparently in communication with Earth. Could the Cat-Men have arrived from Mercury as a pre-invasion force? And can Hercules pry himself from the charms of Newmara to save both Hylas and the city?

This may be the first science fiction peplum movie (but not the last, with HERCULES AGAINST THE MOON MEN coming two years later), though some argue that 1956’s FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE was more peplum than sci-fi. The planet Mercury wasn't officially recognized until the 1500s, but it's called by that name here—of course, when have muscleman movies ever been sticklers for facts? If you take away the element of alien invaders, this is a run-of-the-mill sword and sandal movie: oiled, muscled men in togas; evil queens in flowing robes, a populace in trouble. One difference: the shiny silver spaceship, hidden in the hills, in which Hylas is held captive. Mark Forest is an impressively muscled Hercules; Angelo Zanolli, with his hair dyed silver blond, is a cute but broody Hylas. In myth, Hercules and Hylas were lovers, though that is mostly covered up here, except for the hints we get from the way Herc melts when Hylas bats his baby blues at him. And, of course, there's the final scene: with Queen Newmara packed away in the silver spaceship which Hercules flings back into the heavens, Herc picks up Hylas and takes him to the royal bedroom where, as far as we know, Felixus is still present and waiting for company. Cassandra Cassamassima, in her only screen credit, is appropriately buxom and flirty as the queen. Pictured are Zanolli and Forest. This is getting a special April 1st airing on TCM so catch it while you can.

I VITELLONI (1953)

It's a night at the end of summer in a small coastal Italian town. Miss Mermaid is being chosen at an outdoor festival, and we meet the "vitelloni" (variously translated as calves, idlers, loafers, or slackers) of the title: Fausto, the handsome self-styled ladies man and group leader; Leopoldo, the glasses-wearing intellectual and would-be playwright; Riccardo, a singing tenor; Alberto, a somewhat childlike, lighthearted guy; and the narrator, Moraldo, the youngest of the group but also the quietest and most thoughtful. These guys, despite having some ambitions, are all in their mid-to-late 20s and still live with their families. Moraldo's sister Sandra wins the Miss Mermaid award but faints as she has the sash put on. We realize this is movie shorthand for 'pregnant,' and Fausto, the impregnator, is forced by his father to do right by the girl; the father says Fausto will marry Sandra "if I have to kick your ass all the way to church." Reluctantly, he does, and while in Rome on his honeymoon, the gang is a bit adrift. Leopoldo calls Fausto a man of passions, but Alberto says he's just horny. Leopoldo, who lives with his aunts and types out his plays into the night, carries on a tentative flirtation with a neighbor girl from their windows. Riccardo is concerned with his growing gut. Alberto has to sneak drinks out of sight of his mother and sister, who has her own secret: she's stepping out with a married man. Moraldo walks the city streets alone at 3 a.m. and strikes up a friendship with a teenage boy who is also out at three on his way to his job as a luggage handler at the train station. Fausto returns with a mustache (which is big news in the village) and Sandra's father gets him a job at an antique gift shop, but it's not long before Fausto is back to his flirtatious ways, first with his boss’s wife and later with a dolled-up high class woman he sits next to at the theater (flirting even with his wife right next to him). 

Come winter, the most exciting events in their lives involve facial hair: Riccardo grows a mustache, Leopoldo grows a goatee, and Alberto gets sideburns. But soon, after Fausto is fired for his flirty behavior (he has always considered the job menial but it brought money into his household), he and Moraldo plot a revenge robbery: stealing a large angel statue from the store's warehouse—their attempt at carting it around trying to sell it to local churches is amusing. When an famous but washed-up older actor comes to town, Riccardo sends him a copy of one of his plays and the actor wants to meet with him to talk about producing it. But the actor gets drunk, takes him down to the nighttime docks and makes a pass at him. Alberto gets obnoxiously drunk at a big party and later feels helpless when his sister goes against his advice about her affair. Finally, after the birth of Sandra's baby, Fausto spends the night with an actress; Sandra gets wind of it and disappears, leaving the five buddies to set out in search of her.

This early film from Federico Fellini looks and feels like none of his later movies from the 60s that made him an international name—one party scene, involving drunks and huge papier-maché heads, does feel like later Fellini. In many ways, it's a traditional coming of age story, though the characters are much older than is usual for this genre. It's unclear at the end if any of them have really grown. The narrator, Moraldo, gets the gumption to leave town in the final scene, but we don't know how much getting out of town will actually affect him. Though we see much of the action through his eyes, and the actor playing him, Franco Interlenghi, gives perhaps the best and most subtle performance, his character is the least developed. Some critics read the film as semi-autobiographical, in which case Moraldo's gift for observation may be what will serve him in his future as a filmmaker. Very few viewers take note of some gay subtext with the character. His first meeting with the teenage Guido definitely has the feel of an awkward after-hours pick-up, and Moraldo is the only one of the idlers who never seems interested in women. Moraldo is our way into the lives of these men, but Fausto is treated as the main character and Franco Fabrizi is excellent in the role; he’s attractive and generally remains sympathetic despite his caddishness, though some IMDb critics would absolutely disagree with me. While we don't condone his behavior, he also does not come across as deliberately hurtful (he does try to shield Sandra from his behavior), and there is a certain adolescent innocence in the way he acts on his urges, though of course we know he should have grown out of that years ago (his age is explicitly given as 30). Alberto Sordi (Alberto) went on to a very long career, known largely as a comic actor. Leopoldo Trieste is Leopoldo, Riccardo Fellini, the director’s brother, is Riccardo, and Leonora Ruffo is Sandra, and they are all fine. The five idlers have great chemistry and the film feels realistic without being grittily naturalistic. I had avoided this film in the past, never quite being in the mood for a dreary kitchen-sink film but my pre-judging was wrong and it's quite enjoyable. Pictured at left are Fabrizi and Interlenghi. [TCM]

BOMBER'S MOON (1943)

During WWII, American bomber pilot Jeff Dakin (George Montgomery), flying for the British, is trying to return to England after getting attacked in the air over Belgium. He tells his younger brother Danny, the bomb sighter, to use his parachute to escape the damaged plane, but as he falls, Danny is shot and killed by German pilot Streicher, who seems to take great delight in the killing. Jeff bails out, is captured, recovers from his injuries and is sent to a prison camp for officers. He is cared for by Russian nurse Alexandra (Annabella) and becomes buddies with Paul (Kent Taylor), a Czech prisoner who is planning an escape. The three manage to get out during an air raid and make their way to the home of Nazi economist Prof. Mueller who is actually a resistance leader who gives them papers and plans for getting out to Holland. But as they're about to leave, Paul is revealed to be a Nazi spy who kills Mueller and calls a Gestapo colonel to come and get Jeff and Alexandra. The two get away and pose as a married couple to get to Rotterdam where they make contact with another resistance fighter before the last leg of their trip to England. But when Jeff discovers that Nazi pilot Streicher is about to take off on a spy trip to assassinate Winston Churchill, he stays behind and poses as a German flier in an attempt to stop the assassination and to get revenge for his brother. This war film is thoroughly average and wastes an evocative title (it's referenced briefly at the beginning and end; it refers to a clear night with a bright full moon) and a good lead actor. I usually like Montgomery as a B-movie lead but he feels tamped down here by the script and direction. Certainly the storyline has promise, but the fairly quick pace of the proceedings, usually a plus in B-films, doesn’t allow much character or plot development. Annabella is OK in a mostly thankless role, Kent Taylor is also OK, and Martin Kosleck, one of Hollywood’s go-to Nazis, is a little better but his role is too small. The director of credit is Charles Fuhr, a pseudonym for three directors (mostly Edward Ludwig) and that may be one reason why the movie doesn't quite come together. Still, it's relatively painless and fans of George Montgomery (pictured) will like this enough. [YouTube]

BORN RECKLESS (1958)

It's Rodeo Week in the small town of Redrock and handsome, studly, nice-guy rodeo rider Kelly Cobb takes up a collection at the bar to help pay the medical bills for Charlie, a rider who took a bad spill. Across the room, buxom blonde singer Jackie Adams is fighting the drunken advances of a sports reporter, and when he gets aggressive and starts pawing her outside the bar, Kelly steps in and kicks some ass which starts a big brawl. Kelly, Jackie, and Kelly's old-timer buddy and assistant, nicknamed Cool Man, drive away before the cops come. Kelly's story: though still young, he is at the far end of prime rodeo cowboy age. He's trying to collect enough prize money so that he and his older buddy Papa Gomez can pool their cash and buy a nice-sized farm to retire to. Jackie's story: with good trick riding skills and a good singing voice, she is hoping to get a reputation as a glamorous rodeo queen. At the next rodeo in Little River, Kelly wins some money, but the crooked organizer absconds with all the cash. They travel on to a big 2-day rodeo event at Panamint, but Kelly spends the night drinking and carousing with Liz, a wealthy rodeo divorcée (whom Cool Man calls "cheap saddle trash"), and when she drops him off the next morning, he’s hungover from booze and worn out from their bed antics and he performs terribly in all of his events, even being responsible for getting Cool Man injured. That night, upset that Kelly hasn't even noticed that she's fallen in love with him, Jackie heads to Liz's house, catches them in heavy petting mode on the patio, and tosses them both in the pool. Between Jackie's outburst, Cool Man's cold shoulder, and Papa Gomez's obvious disappointment, Kelly tries his best to win every prize he can on the last day of the rodeo.

Though I do have some tolerance for B-westerns of the 30s and 40s, I'm not a fan of the rodeo western so this was a bit of a chore to sit through. I did it mostly because I’m a fan of Jeff Richards, the handsome B-actor (ISLAND OF LOST WOMEN, SECRET OF THE PURPLE REEF) who plays Kelly. He is convincing both as an aging rider who very much wants to settle down, and as a horndog who lets Liz sap his precious bodily fluids, as Sterling Hayden puts it in DR. STRANGELOVE. Mamie Van Doren, whose breasts are practically in 3D in her opening number, is serviceable, though her biggest strength here is in her musical numbers which she puts across well. There are several songs scattered throughout, the best being a catchy little number called something like "Huggable Loveable You" performed by rockabilly singer Johnny Olenn. Familiar supporting actor Arthur Hunnicut is good as Cool Man. Some viewers are baffled as to why the red-blooded heterosexual cowboy Kelly doesn't chase after Jackie from the start. That's a good question, and I assumed that he sensed that she was tired of lustful adulation and tried to just be a friend. But it's best not to think too hard about character and motivation here, and just enjoy the sexy leads and the occasional rodeo action. Pictured is Jeff Richards. [TCM]

THE ANDERSON TAPES (1971)

We meet career safecracker Duke Anderson (Sean Connery, at right) in his last therapy session before he is freed from a ten year prison sentence. He tells the group that blowing open a safe and plunging in was sexually arousing, comparing it to both seduction and rape. The session is routinely recorded on tape—a recurring motif here is how much of what we do in our modern life is caught on tape, video or audio. When he leaves prison, most of what Anderson does is recorded, the irony being that none of the surveillance is aimed at him; we see him caught on tapes intended to record the actions of others, whether Black Panther members, drug dealers, or cheating mistresses. Anderson visits his former lover Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) who has become a high class call girl who is kept by her older lover in a fancy apartment building. He comes up with the idea of one last big heist: break into the building over the quiet Labor Day weekend and clean out most of the residents' valuables. He collects some old gang members, enlists the aid of a gay antiques dealer (Martin Balsam) who can accompany the gang and let them know what's worth stealing, and begs favors from a Mafia boss who asks Anderson to employ a pain-in-the-ass psycho named Socks, then kill him afterwards. The plan works at first as the residents are burgled (and interact with the crooks in varying degrees of humor or danger), but a paraplegic boy whom Anderson didn't know about is able to call for help over his ham radio, and things don't wrap up as planned.

This is a fun heist movie, not a comedy exactly (though I can see "black comedy" being used as a descriptive genre) but generally played lightly. Connery gives a very good performance, trying to keep things under control and keep his cool as things slowly fall apart. Cannon is fine in the first half but has little to do later. Though the gay character is portrayed in a dated stereotypical fashion that modern viewers may not like, Balsam manages to make him interesting and relatively inoffensive. Christopher Walken has his first major film role as a young crook. Another film newcomer is Garrett Morris who plays a cop given an important part in the climax. Margaret Hamilton has what amounts to a cameo as an elderly resident whose reading habits incline toward The Story of O, and Judith Lowry is fun as Hamilton's disapproving roommate. There is fine support from Alan King (the Mafia boss), Conrad Bain, Stan Gottlieb, Anthony Holland and Ralph Meeker. I won't spoil what happens with the tapes (a lovely final moment of irony) except to say that they are no help to the police. If this was produced today, it would be a draggy 2 hours plus, or worse, a seven-hour streaming show, but at 100 minutes, the director, Sidney Lumet, keeps the action flying by. Recommended. [Criterion Channel]

JEOPARDY (1953)

A family travels into Mexico for a short fishing vacation at an isolated beach. Helen (Barbara Stanwyck), her husband Doug (Barry Sullivan), and their 10-year-old son Bobby (Lee Aaker) have an uneventful trip from Tijuana to Baja California. There are two obvious moments of foreshadowing: the car is stopped briefly at a Mexican police roadblock, and we see that Doug has brought a revolver along in the glove compartment. At the beach, Bobby goes out to play on an abandoned pier and when he comes back for lunch, his foot gets stuck under a wooden plank—no one noticed the sign, in Spanish, warning of danger. Doug goes out and frees him, but on the way back, Doug falls through some rotted wood and winds up trapped in shallow water, his feet pinned by a fallen piling. Helen and Bobby are unable to free him and, realizing that eventually the tide will come in, Helen takes the car to look for help. She drives back to find an uninhabited gas station, breaks into a tool shed to get some rope, and discovers an American named Lawson (Ralph Meeker) standing near the road. She asks him to come with her to help, not noticing the dead body near the road. Soon Lawson finds the gun and reveals that he is an escaped killer, the one the roadblock had been set up for. The rest of the film is a cat and mouse game with Helen trying to figure out how dangerous this guy really is, and Lawson keeping the upper hand with his gun and his bravado. (At one point, he tells her she talks so much, she must drive her husband crazy, one of the few bits of humor in the film.) Finally, after blowing through another roadblock and changing a flat tire, Helen lets Lawson know that she's willing to have sex with him, and even leave with him, in exchange for saving Doug's life. By the time they get to the pier, the water is getting close to Doug's face. Will Lawson come through on his promise (and did Helen already come through on hers)?

At a bit over an hour, this plays out like an episode of the old Alfred Hitchcock show. Actually, it's exactly the kind of plot that the Hitchcock show (1955-1965) would specialize in: a small cast, an atmosphere of tension, and a strong working-against-time element. Stanwyck had been extending her career by transitioning from roles of glamour and romance to tough dames with an almost masculine veneer of fortitude. She sort of combines both here, playing both a loving wife and mother, and a hardened woman determined to get what she wants. Viewers have debated whether or not Helen gives in and has sex with Lawson—who, by the way, as played by Ralph Meeker, is sexy in a sweaty, dangerous way—or has held out. We do see them kiss (without romance but with a bit of lust) and I assumed that they went a good deal further. Without spoiling the ending, Stanwyck's last bit of voiceover narration doesn't really clear the issue up, but can be seen if one wants to as one last smidge of evidence that they did. I assume the Production Code was one force in leaving things up in the air, although narratively, the ambiguity does work nicely. Sullivan hasn't much to do as the husband; Aaker is good as the kid; Meeker, as I noted above, does have sex appeal but also retains his edge of danger. The tension is built up well, and it’s a little weird to see publicity shots of the three adult actors more or less clowning around with the gun. Despite some claims, this isn't really noir, but a domestic crime melodrama, Though it's short, it does bog down a couple of times. Still, the ending is satisfying (if nicely ambiguous) and worth seeing for Stanwyck and Meeker, both pictured above. [TCM]

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1952)

I have tried and tried to like this ridiculous Oscar Wilde play. It has some very funny lines, amusing situations, and the Lady Bracknell character, an exaggerated figure of class privilege, is one an actor can sink her teeth into. But the characters and the story are so bizarre, it's hard to care a straw for anything that happens—yes, I know the very title warns me. Perhaps this is why it's almost always performed in a campy manner; it’s even become common for a man to play Lady Bracknell in drag. I recently saw a filmed production of the play by the National Theatre of Great Britain which is not only campy but throws in actively queer bits that don't really belong in a play which has little gay subtext (more on that later). So I decided to revisit this first filmed version, shot in a very stagy manner which seems appropriate for a story with no action.

Ernest Worthing (Michael Redgrave) and Algernon Moncrieff (Michael Denison) are buddies of some wealth and class. In the city, Worthing calls himself Ernest though his real name is Jack, the name he uses in the country where he lives most of the time as guardian to his young ward Cecily (Dorothy Tutin). Algernon only uses one name, but when he wants to skip out of his city obligations, he has made up a friend named Bunbury who he claims to visit in the country, usually saying Bunbury is sick and needs attending to. Jack/Ernest is in love with Gwendolen (Joan Greenwood), Algy's cousin, but her mother, Lady Bracknell (Edith Evans, pictured above right with Denison), is hesitant to give her consent, especially when she discovers that Jack has, as he puts it, "lost both parents"—Lady Bracknell replies, "To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"—and his lineage can only be traced to having been found abandoned in a handbag in a train station. Bracknell can't let Gwendolen "marry into a cloakroom and form an alliance with a parcel." For her part, Gwendolen has always been enamored of the name Ernest which is pretty much her only reason for wanting to marry him. To make trouble, Algernon goes out to Jack's country estate and poses as Ernest, whom Jack has always referred to as a bad sort. Cecily has, sight unseen, fallen in love with Ernest (she, like Gwendolen, loves his name) and has written a series of diary entries about her imaginary relationship. Of course, Algernon (as Ernest) is a hit in the country and falls head over heels for Cecily, and when Jack arrives, all hell breaks loose. Then Lady Bracknell shows up.

This is basically a farce with comedic wordplay rather than physical humor. The construction of the narrative is tight with everything locking together by the end, but I can't get past some of the ludicrous situations, primarily that two young women would have dreams of marrying someone named Ernest to the exclusion of anyone else. The circumstances of Jack's birth are equally silly but are dealt with more cleverly. It comes down to pacing and acting. Redgrave and Denison are both fine. Redgrave, though still handsome, was in his mid-40s and pretty much looks it; Denison, in his mid-30s, is a better match for his role. Cecily and Gwendolen don't have much in the way of character backgrounds or personalities, so any competent actress could handle these roles, and Tutin and Greenwood suffice. Lady Bracknell will make or break any production of this work, and Edith Evans is quite good, tamping down the camp element just a bit (her delivery of the line, "A handbag??" is a highlight). In the smaller but very important role of Miss Prism, Margaret Rutherford (Miss Marple in a series of 1960s movies) is every bit as good. I'd love to have seen her take on the role of Lady Bracknell. The production is stagy and static but colorful with great sets and costumes. Of course, the title of the movie mocks my own problem with it: when the line is uttered at the very end of the film, we know that Wilde thinks the whole idea of earnestness being important is silly, so I should just get over my problems with logic and enjoy the wit, and generally, I do. [DVD]

A word on the gay element in the National Theatre production: Wilde was gay, and queer subtext in Dorian Gray is important, both in the relationship between Dorian and his mentors and in the decadent but undescribed behavior that Dorian eventually falls into. Some critics have read a similar subtext in Earnest in terms of the "bunburying" that Algernon does, implying a homosexual double life, and the very term itself suggests such a reading. But nothing in the play suggests that Algernon and Jack are queer besties, nor Cecily and Gwendolen. But in the 2025 film, the four are constantly engaging in retro-gay asides like bumping asses or kissing on the lips. I could deal with a production that bares Algernon as a closet case, or suggests a repressed attraction between Algy and Jack, but otherwise the queering up of the performances feels like an empty gimmick. Still, the production, with colorblind casting, is energetic and colorful. Sharon D. Clarke as Bracknell is actually better than Judi Dench was in the 2002 film; Dench, as she admitted later, tempered her performance a bit too much. Pictured at left are Hugh Skinner as Jack and Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon. Gatwa does come very close to making Algernon a gay stereotype which makes hash of his sudden attraction to Cecily. A production making both men queer, marrying women only for money or position, might be interesting.

THE DIVORCEE (1930)

A group of high society friends have spent the weekend at a country lodge. Jerry (Norma Shearer) is out by the river canoodling with Ted (Chester Morris, pictured with Shearer), much to the dismay of the gloomy Paul (Conrad Nagel) who pines for her. Don (Robert Montgomery), the snarky wit of the group, also pines but not so obviously. Ted tells Jerry they should wait to marry until he has made more money, but she forthrightly tells him, "Waiting isn’t my idea of the king of indoor sports," so as night falls, they head back to the lodge and announce their upcoming nuptials. Don is able to hide his feelings as he flirts with Mary, but Paul gets drunk and, while driving his friend Dorothy home, gets in a car wreck which leaves Dorothy with a facial disfigurement. Out of guilt, he marries her in her hospital bed while she recovers. Years later, Jerry and Ted have friends over to celebrate their third anniversary just before Ted goes to Chicago for a business trip. Someone brings Janice, referred to as a "grass widow" (I had to look this up; it's a woman whose husband is frequently away) to the party, and Jerry is shocked to discover Ted and Janice in a passionate embrace in the kitchen. Ted admits to having had a fling with her some time ago, but insists it meant nothing. He tries to talk Jerry into a more modern view of marriage morals, which he calls a man's point of view; she is not so quick to forgive, referring later to the "marvelous latitude of a man's point of view," but while Ted is away, Jerry goes out on the town with Don and spends the night with him. When Ted returns, Jerry tells him she has "balanced our accounts” but doesn't say with whom. Instead of taking his own advice about modern thinking, he is outraged. That night at a party, Ted gets drunk and makes a scene, and later at home, they have an argument, leading to a split-up and to Jerry proclaiming the famous line, "You're the only man in the world my door is closed to." They divorce and in a quick montage, we see that Jerry does indeed open her door to several men, while Ted starts drinking heavily. Soon, Jerry meets up with Paul again. They decide they're in love and he says he will leave Dorothy to marry Jerry. But an awkward meeting of the three leads Jerry to wonder about their situation, and even to think that maybe she's still in love with Ted, who has been miserable all this time.

This has become known as practically the template for the pre-Code romantic melodrama. It's sexy (Shearer and Morris have good chemistry), allows immoral behavior to occur without tragic punishment, and contains some juicy dialogue, as in Shearer's line about her door being open to the world. When one of Jerry's lovers says he wants her to tell the truth, she replies that the truth is "the last thing any man wants to hear from a woman." The ending may surprise some modern viewers (Spoilers!) as, with no real resolution about Ted's double standard, Jerry and Ted do reconcile in the end. Shearer has to learn, as her character in THE WOMEN also learns, that love has no pride. Critics love Shearer but often find Morris to be a little stiff and mannered, but that fits his character perfectly. Nagel has a fairly thankless role, and Montgomery shines as the happy-go-lucky pal; unfortunately, he more or less vanishes from the last half hour of the movie. The face of the disfigured Dorothy is never seen clearly, and when she pops up near the end, she wears a black veil and looks a bit like Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Future. Despite a vaguely unsatisfying ending—I'd like to have seen Morris suffer a bit more—I recommend this, especially if you're curious about all the pre-Code hooha. [DVD]

NATIVE SON (1951)

A narrator introduces us to Chicago, a beautiful city that nevertheless has its secrets, one of which is the "Black belt," a carefully circumscribed set of neighborhoods, behind "an invisible color line," where most of the Black populace lives. Twenty-five year old Bigger Thomas lives in a slum apartment with his mother and two younger siblings. Bigger has dreams but, we are told, must keep them locked in his heart. His girlfriend Bessie, a waitress, has been given the chance to sing at a club, even as Bigger and his friends plot the burglary of a pawn shop which they ultimately abandon when one guy opts out. A social worker offers Bigger a job as a live-in chauffeur for a rich white family, the Daltons. It's an uncomfortable fit, made more so by the good intentions of the Dalton daughter Mary, who immediately has Bigger drive her and her boyfriend Jan, a left-wing firebrand, out for a night on the town. They bring him into the clubs, and even visit the place where Bessie is singing ("All colored people are so gifted," Mary says on hearing her sing). At the end of the evening, Bigger has to get the seriously drunken Mary up to her bedroom, and as he tries to settle her in bed, her blind mother comes in to check on her. Bigger panics, afraid that she will know he's there, and he presses a pillow on Mary's face to quiet her. When the mother leaves, Bigger discovers that he has smothered Mary to death. Still in a panic, Bigger throws her body in the basement furnace. When no one can find Mary the next day, Bigger gets Bessie to help him in a blackmail kidnap scheme to get money out of the Daltons. Mr. Dalton, thinking Jan and his radical friends are behind it, has Jan arrested, but soon enough evidence of human remains are found in the furnace. Going on the run, Bigger kills Bessie, thinking she was going to betray him. After a rooftop chase, Bigger is caught and, after some political wrangling involving Jan, he is found guilty and sentenced to death.

This is an unusual film, an adaptation of Richard Wright's controversial bestseller from 1940 which was seen as a highly effective protest novel. Hollywood wouldn't touch it—one company wanted to make it but to have Bigger be Italian—but in 1950, it was made independently in Argentina by Belgian director Pierre Chenal with a cast of unknowns, and with Wright himself in the lead role after professional actor Canada Lee had to bow out. Wright was over 40, and Bigger's age was changed from 20 to 25, but still, Wright is unconvincing as a young man. He's also very much an amateur at acting. You can see he's earnest and he plays emotional scenes fairly well, but otherwise he is stone faced, at times looking stunned, like he can't remember his next lines. If Wright had been the lead with studio resources and a full cast of Hollywood players in support, things might have worked better. But the production is clearly low budget, though it is said that it was the biggest budgeted Argentine film up to that time. The tenement set is solid, the rest not so much. The actors all seem like amateurs, either underplaying (Gloria Madison as Bessie) or overplaying (Jean Wallace as Mary, Gene Michael as Jan). Based on the tone of their performances, it's difficult to tell if we're supposed to think that Mary and Jan are supposed to be respected or ridiculed (possibly both, I suppose). The exception is Willa Pearl Curtis who is quite good as Bigger's mother—she went on to a long career in mostly uncredited roles in movies and TV. Leslie Straughn as Bigger's younger brother doesn't have much to do but he seems less artificial than most of the other supporting actors. Good intentions do not necessarily make a good movie, and today's audiences might fault the film for having a simplistic view of race relations. Often censored in its time, and rarely shown for years, the movie has been restored and makes for an interesting period piece. Pictured are Straughn and Wright. [Criterion Channel]