Monday, June 23, 2008

12:01

Midnight (1939)
directed by Mitchell Leisen
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Robert Osborne should know better than to dare his audience to spot the scenes where John Barrymore reads from cue cards. By insisting it's never obvious, Osborne only means that Barrymore's drunken shorthand is most obvious in an early dialogue with Claudette Colbert, in which the lion of the frazzled mane comes off like an eleventh-hour fill-in on Saturday Night Live. Not that Barrymore doesn't steal the best scene in the movie right out from under his able co-stars, but he does it with his eyes on a higher horizon.

In the old days a movie star could drive a cab, belong to a cab driver's union, and be proud of the heart on his sleeve. It isn't that heroes today don't mingle with the proletariat, but the camaraderie between Don Ameche and his co-workers in Midnight is so closely knit as to unabashedly be love. It's as carefree as the "bromance" is defensive. Maybe the cabbies are more like a team than friends, but the seriousness they accord love makes love a more necessary sentiment, somehow - one to be artfully re-arranged, perhaps, by wiser, hurting hearts, but mature enough to make us all adults. It's the opposite of nostalgia for your teenage years, and it means the best is yet to come.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Poppy Seeds Around the Tombstone

The Rape of the Vampire (1967)
directed by Jean Rollin
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Another French "master" of the macabre can't move his hippie antics past the provocation of a few strangely passive scenes of vampiric sexuality. You know when the DVD menu features a color photo of a late-1990s Gothic bride with a set of fangs and an over-imaginative veil that the black-and-white arthouse movie you read about somewhere probably didn't get a home-video release with expectations much beyond the average Friday night teenage voyeur. Which makes me feel... a little embarrassed, frankly.

I'll be generous with two particular creative points: one, that vampirism is a disease with an antidote (a la Near Dark), and two, that a vampire whose eyes have been branded from her head cannot be killed by daylight. That makes the myth of a vampire slain by the sun (per Wikipedia: "though folkloric vampires were believed to be more active at night, they were not generally considered vulnerable to sunlight," emphasis mine) less an alarming allergic reaction and more a blasphemy against the bright face of God.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Magreek to Me

La Belle Captive (1983)
directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

The screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad - which you'd think would be right up my alley, and might be, if I remembered it - liked René Magritte enough to pepper an otherwise static "erotic thriller" with oblique re-enactments of famous paintings that I do remember enough to remember an ongoing indifference to. The same rich stink of Eyes Wide Shut's eerily dark and pedigreed recesses finds an outlet in the shadows of the most open-ended of La Belle Captive's enigmas, as if a more sinister power play lurked just beyond Robbe-Grillet's willingness to really exploit it. But aside from a few memorable faces (the inspector especially) and a once-menacing, twice-horrific encroaching circle of tuxedoed sadists, no clear line emerges between passive and passionate intentions. The result, per usual in cases of authorial abdication, is a wash.

Friday, June 13, 2008

The Drive

Track of the Cat (1954)
directed by William A. Wellman
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

I like Robert Mitchum for the same reason I like John Elway (or Dan Marino in his Papa John's campaign): in the big games, he goes deep. When Mitchum grows a beard, his weak chin - the only demure feature of a larger-than-life star - gives way to the mountain man, and Old Rumple Eyes' low incantations of resentment and empire set his bedroom peepers back into the monolithic register of dull, bloody instinct. The movie is betrayed by its own ambitions towards myth, Expressionism, and iconography, but a bad half-hour still buys those first fleet sixty minutes (a nickel gets you a dime), and the cinematography is more than worth the tumid Eugene O'Neill theatrics.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The Title Speaks for Itself

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
directed by Cecil B. DeMille
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from B. Sweet

"Bloated" is so synonymous with the Oscars that the floundering galleon of gold men can't contain enough overlong epics already saturated with too much heavy-handed praise (or else the same reactionary dismissal). Make it an ark and take it to the circus, and how could it possibly float? But The Greatest Show on Earth floats, as if DeMille really cared about his audience more than his Spectacle (and what does the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby cameo say if not that?). I am most impressed by Technicolor when I am not expecting to be, I am always impressed by Jimmy Stewart as a homicidal doctor in clown makeup, and my surprise at Charlton Heston as Indiana Jones goes a long way in explaining why Steven Spielberg was as good as he was for so long. First impressions mean a lot.

I'll be it's been at least ten years since Spielberg's seen this.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The Big Schlep

The Big Sleep (1978)
directed by Michael Winner
rating: 1 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from B. Sweet

The joke in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that 54-year old James Stewart wasn't particularly passable in the early scenes where he plays a fresh-faced law school grad. It's undeniably (but pleasingly) awkward, and never more than when whip-smart immigrant matriarch Nora Ericson spikes a cup of coffee with aquavit, and young Jim drinks deeply, blinks his eyes, and smacks his lips like he's a horse mouthing the wrong cube of sugar. In that sequence, Stewart looks ninety-four, but if ever an expression could be brought to bear on the moment when Vivian and Carmen's dad salivates while watching Philip Marlowe drink cognac in the sweltering Sternwood terrarium, teetotaler Ransom Stoddard's old-age naïvete is it.

In Mrs. Winner's adaptation, the hothouse looks as cold as the flat British countryside, and Sternwood is less a crippled, secretive tyrant than an overwhelmed old man. He joins Marlowe in that glass of brandy, and as soon as the vessel hits the General's lips, everything repressed and festering in the late, great version 1.0 bleeds away like so many phoned-in lines.