I Was a Male War Bride (1949)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

I Was a Male War Bride (1949) – H. Hawks

The title may say it all but it takes over an hour for the punchline to materialise.  Before that, Ann Sheridan and Cary Grant are, respectively, a US WAC and a French Captain on a mission in post-war Germany to help a scientist to escape to France.  They have one of those antagonistic wise-cracking relationships that you know will lead to love as soon as they stop fighting.  Director Howard Hawks allows the stars to find their own rhythm, which seems to keep Grant on the wrong foot while Sheridan gets the breaks.  After the plot sees the couple tie the knot, there is the little matter of getting Grant a visa to the United States (absurdly, you must remember he’s French).  Fortunately, there is a Congressional order allowing “war brides” of US service personnel to enter the US and thus begins Grant’s comic predicament and, wait for it, the final punchline.  Hawks somehow manages to sustain an epic gradual build and the film doesn’t disappoint.  Not laugh aloud funny but better than expected; I suspect audiences in the 1940s found it amusingly transgressive.

Our Little Sister (2015)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Our Little Sister (2015) – H. Kore-eda

Kore-eda makes mature family dramas that are filled with warmth and sensitivity, not as serious as Ozu often got and with less rancor and hurt than Naruse let in.  Perhaps things sometimes get too mushy, as the films yearn to touch your heart, but they never lose their grasp on realism.  Our Little Sister, based on a manga called Umi-Machi Diary, shows us three sisters, abandoned by their parents but living fine under one old roof in Kamakura, Japan, who take in their younger half-sister when their father dies up north.  We observe their relationships with each other, with the boys/men in their lives (relegated to bit parts), with their absentee mother, and with the dying owner of a local café.  Loss, betrayal, forgiveness, and our common humanity are on display. The four actresses (some who are popular celebrities in Japan) create distinctive characters with different foibles and trajectories, although the plot does not bring any of these trajectories to a resolution. We partake in this slice of life. All the while, Kore-eda creates sublime images, often in the quiet spaces between scenes, and Japan looks stunningly beautiful (cherry blossoms, fireworks, and all).  

The Flame and the Arrow (1950)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Flame and the Arrow (1950) – J. Tourneur

Fun swashbuckler with Burt Lancaster in the Robin Hood-styled role (presumably meant for then broken-down Errol Flynn) demonstrating his real acrobatic talents after a few years in films noir at the start of his career.  Here, he is an Italian rascal drawn into fighting the Hessians after his wife leaves him for the evil Ulrich the Hawk and they kidnap his son.  Virginia Mayo plays the Hawk’s niece who inevitably falls for Dardo (Lancaster).  Naturally, there are lots of fight scenes in the castle including some swordfighting and Lancaster’s partner from his days as an acrobat (Nick Cravat) plays a key role as a mute (apparently because his Brooklyn accent was too thick for period pieces).  The director was Jacques Tourneur who worked across many genres (starting with Val Lewton in horror but making excellent westerns and war pictures as well as Night of the Demon, an all time great, later in his career) and doesn’t miss a trick in this one.  In the end, we have nothing more than a rip-snorting genre picture that knows its audience, winks a few times, and offers a lot of cheeky and bravado entertainment -- and often that’s enough. 

The Street with No Name (1948)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Street with No Name (1948) – W. Keighley

One of the subgenre of films noir that offer up “true stories of the FBI” in a faux documentary style that begins with voiceover narration and lots of exposition but soon inserts us into the drama and leaves us there.  In this case, we follow Mark Stevens, playing an undercover cop, who infiltrates a gang led by ruthless Richard Widmark (in only his second film, but commanding the screen).  The suspense is built as the case unfolds methodically with Inspector Briggs (Lloyd Nolan) and partner Cy Gordon (John McIntire) keeping tabs on Stevens’ progress trying to gather evidence against Widmark.  Of course, eventually Stevens’ cover is blown and the FBI must scramble to extricate him.  We’ve seen this plot again in more recent years but it is exciting here nevertheless. We are also treated to many of the common tropes of the film noir (boxing ring, abandoned warehouses, Skid Row, low key lighting, night shooting, and of course crime and corruption).  Unlike some of the darker noirs to come, in this sub-genre, the G-Men always win (as if you didn’t know).  Hoover approved.

The Devil, Probably (1977)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Devil, Probably (1977) – R. Bresson

Robert Bresson was known for his austere style, which focused the camera on the hands and feet of people doing actions and avoided psychologizing.  His films often raised spiritual questions and he seemed particularly interested in the problem of undeserved suffering. One of his most famous films, Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966, is about a donkey and its harsh existence.  Bresson seems to be in awe of those who persist through suffering unbowed although they may end defeated or dead (or very occasionally they succeed, as in A Man Escaped, 1956, about a prison break).  However, The Devil, Probably, is a more difficult case.  In this film, the young protagonist, Charles, doesn’t actually suffer much himself – however, he sees the environmental degradation of the world around him (pollution, unrestricted logging, nuclear weapons, etc.) and he knows that it will lead to the suffering of all humankind.  He investigates various solutions, religion, political action, marriage, escape into sex/drugs but finds them wanting, although his friends vary in terms of their reactions to the oncoming despair.  None of them, however, show any emotion, which is another aspect of Bresson’s style (said to heighten the viewer’s reactions); the actors are taught to be as inexpressive as possible, and here they are nearly somnambulant. In the end, Charles chooses suicide, not because his own life is hopeless but because the world is a dead end.  Or so we can conclude from what is really a very sterile (and bleak) intellectual exercise.  The young people around him are concerned about Charles (whose fate we know from the very start of the film) but they seem powerless to stop him (or perhaps they understand him all too well).  The ending is rather horrific after a sombre 90 minutes of mundane actions and some ambiguous talk.  Only a brief scene on a bus where a few other riders chime in, like a Greek chorus, to suggest that it is the Devil (probably) who is responsible for the world’s decline, contains any spark -- and if by Devil, we mean human weakness, then I would elevate the level of probability to certainty.   Depressingly relevant, forty years on. 

Dracula A. D. 1972 (1972)

☆ ☆ ☆

Dracula A. D. 1972 (1972) – A. Gibson

A good premise from Hammer Horror that finds Christopher Lee (Dracula) and Peter Cushing (Van Helsing) transposed to then modern day (but now very dated) London.  Of course, Dracula has been resurrected once again, this time by Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame) who somehow has remained young for 100 years.  Or alternately, it is Alucard’s descendant who has inherited Dracula’s ashes and now uses them for the horrible ritual which brings his master back to life, just as it is the descendant of the original Van Helsing who must fight Dracula again in the 20^th century.  As you would expect, there is the usual teensploitation element here, with our 70s kids experimenting with drugs and sex and tight clothes.  The movie plods for a while as they get around to raising Dracula and then being killed by him.  Fortunately, Cushing is soon to the rescue, running across London to the sound of a Shaft-like score (to save his grand-daughter who has been kidnapped by the Count).  And, as usual, things do not end well for Dracula.   

  

The Time of Their Lives (1946)

☆ ☆ ☆

The Time of Their Lives (1946) – C. Barton

Abbott and Costello are, respectively, a butler and a tinker in the Revolutionary War era United States.  They both love the same woman, a maid, but she only has eyes for Lou.  Although Bud hopes to dispatch his rival, a group of soldiers mistakenly shoots and kills Costello and Marjorie Reynolds, thinking them traitors, when in fact Lou has a letter of reference from General George Washington and Reynolds (playing Melody Allen) was just about to expose the real traitors (including her fiancé). Fast forward 165 years and Costello and Reynolds are stuck haunting the same estate where they were killed.  A group of modern young people, including Abbott playing his own descendant, now a psychiatrist, are staying overnight in the house, now restocked with its original furniture.  The only way that Costello and Reynolds can be freed from the curse that keeps them in the house is to get those people in the house to find the hidden letter from Washington that reveals that they aren’t traitors.  But enough about the plot, there is a bit of slapstick and some ghostly special effects to please the 1940s audiences; however, I didn’t find myself laughing too much.  Other films by the comedy team seem funnier (despite the high rating on IMDb for this one).

  

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) – B. Ingster

Is this the first film noir?  Some think so -- but of course, the genre has no real beginning nor end and was never more than a loose association defined by the common elements.  Certainly, many of the elements are here, including low key (high contrast) lighting, voice-over narration, a horrifying dream sequence, a man or two poked by the fickle finger of fate, and the presence of Elisha Cook, Jr. and Peter Lorre (both of whom also appeared in another film also identified as a harbinger of the genre, The Maltese Falcon, 1941).  Here, Lorre is given top billing (as a result of his starring role in the Mr Moto series), but he has only a few scenes as the titular stranger who ultimately becomes a suspect for the two murders that reporter Mike Ward (played by John McGuire) gets entangled with. But there is quite a lot of action before we ever meet Lorre:  Ward is the star witness at a murder trial but he and his girlfriend come to have doubts about whether the poor shmuck who was convicted (yes, Elisha Cook, Jr.) really did it.  The style (by cinematographer Nicolas Musuraca) is influenced by the German Expressionist movement (though not to the level of Caligari) and Ward seems genuinely haunted (bring on the dream sequence).  But it is all over and done with in about an hour and the ending is unexpectedly upbeat.  The best noirs were yet to come!

Gummo (1997)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Gummo (1997) – H. Korine

There’s only one way to take Harmony Korine’s debut feature, Gummo, and that is as a punk rock attempt to be offensive or subversive (not unlike the early Butthole Surfers or some weird shit found on CDs that came with Bananafish).  Of course, it’s also a joke, a put-on, with some relation to the Paul Morrissey films that he did for Andy Warhol (e.g., Heat or Trash) and maybe von Trier’s subsequent The Idiots.  Fully scripted but coming across like a melange of found-footage with white trash denizens of some American shithole (presumed to be Nashville) – the use of amateurs as well as professional actors (such as Chloe Sevigny) raises the question of whether this is parody, condescension, political commentary, or some echo of the way things really are (the horror!).  Plotless, of course, but returning to the same characters as they idle their days away meaninglessly (killing cats, sniffing glue, and many other sordid acts – indeed, ordinary acts also seem sordid and dirty in this context).  Yet, despite the tolerance-testing content, Korine’s talents are not to be denied – Gummo is a feat of editing, art direction, sound design (music mostly) and WTF bravado.  This isn’t to say I want to watch it again (and I’ve felt less love for subsequent Korine flicks that I’ve seen) but I bet there are delirious (or fucked up) youngsters quoting lines from this somewhere.

Holiday (1938)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Holiday (1938) – G. Cukor

I thought this was going to be a screwball comedy, given the time (late ‘30s) and the stars (Cary Grant & Katharine Hepburn) but that isn’t what it was at all.  And I don’t even think it was a comedy at all – or maybe it just hit some kind of nerve that led me to ponder, not laugh.  Grant plays a free-thinking young man who is in the business world only to make money to allow him to take a long holiday and figure out the world and his place in it. He doesn’t really discuss this with the girl he gets engaged to (after a whirlwind romance at a ski resort on Lake Placid) who turns out to be from an enormously rich family with a father who values “good breeding” and “credentials”.  Grant has the latter but not the former.  Once he’s won over the father by his business acumen, he doesn’t seem to realise that his plan to drop out won’t go over as well – and he his shocked to find out that his fiancée also doesn’t agree.  They are too wedded to the capitalist and materialist values that were instilled in them.  But sister Linda (Hepburn) is the black sheep of the family and, of course, the perfect match for Grant – except that he’s engaged to her sister.  To me, this didn’t seem funny but more tragic.  Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon are around for some laughs – or at least they are jovial and sympathetic as Grant’s old mates (possibly his foster parents?) who also don’t care about status or position.  But the movie made me reflect on whether I, too, have gotten stuck in the grind and routine of life, forgetting my purpose, and in need of a holiday of the kind Grant desires -- but age 30 and age 50 are very different times.  Oh to be young and free (-thinking) again!