Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison, Stan Levitt, Tom McGinnis, Forbes Caldwell, Dan Palmquist, Bill de Jarnette, Steve Boozer. Screenplay: John Clifford. Cinematography: Maurice Prather. Film editing: Bill de Jarnette, Dan Palmquist. Music: Gene Moore.

There aren't many one-offs in movie history, films like Carnival of Souls that come out of nowhere, made by unknown directors who never make another commercial feature, but which capture the imagination enough to develop -- after time passes -- not only a cult following but also critical admiration. Herk Harvey was an employee of a firm based in Laurence, Kansas, that made industrial and education films, when he had an idea for a horror movie that would be set, at least in part, in an abandoned amusement park like the one he had seen near Salt Lake City. He mentioned the idea to his colleague, a writer named John Clifford, who whipped up a screenplay about a woman who survives an accident but then begins to feel that she's going mad. It needed, Harvey told Clifford, to climax with a scene in which ghoulish figures were dancing in the abandoned amusement park. Harvey scraped together the money and hired an actress and model named Candace Hilligoss, who agreed to take $2,000 for her role in the film. There is no credited art director for Carnival of Souls, but Harvey or whoever assisted him found a great variety of evocative locations, including the Saltair pavilion, a former dance hall and amusement park that had fallen on hard times and was standing derelict near the Great Salt Lake. The settings also include a factory that makes pipe organs and a carpenter gothic rooming house, both of which serve the creepy atmosphere of the film. Not all of the semi- and non-professional actors Harvey cast in the film are up to their jobs, but there's a somnambulant quality to Hilligoss's performance as the haunted Mary Henry that's just right, and while Clifford's dialogue is sometimes tin-eared, the story he crafted around Harvey's suggestions takes hold of the imagination. That's Harvey himself as the spookily made-up man who menaces Mary. 

Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Adolphe Menjou, Mary Duncan, C. Aubrey Smith, Don Alvarado, Fred Santley, Richard Carle, Tyler Brooke, Geneva Mitchell, Helen Ware. Screenplay: Howard J. Green, based on a play by Zoe Akins. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Max Steiner.

Morning Glory earned Katharine Hepburn her first Oscar. It was only the sixth Academy Award for best actress ever given, and in some ways it was the first "modern" Oscar for acting. The initial one went to Janet Gaynor for a silent-film performance, and the subsequent ones were for Hollywood grande dames making their way out of silence, Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer; for beloved old trouper Marie Dressler; and for a Broadway diva making a temporary detour into movies, Helen Hayes. That last one shows what Hollywood was looking for, and what it found in Hepburn: actors who could talk. But unlike the diminutive and rather plain Hayes, Hepburn could hold the camera. Hollywood had never seen anything quite like her: beautiful in an imperious way, she had real presence and a unique style. That style would harden into mannerism after a few years and get her branded as "box-office poison" until she managed to turn things around again in the 1940s, with The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and the subsequent potent teaming with Spencer Tracy. But for the time she was praised for a tonic, refreshing hold on the screen. Morning Glory itself is not much: the familiar story of the hopeful who goes out there and comes back a star. Lowell Sherman, who directed, had just appeared in a similar fable, the ur-Star Is Born movie What Price Hollywood? (Cukor, 1932), and the pattern hardened when Ruby Keeler subbed in for Bebe Daniels in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Hepburn manages to segue convincingly from the naive chatterbox trying to muscle her way onto Broadway to the mature, toughened but still insecure character at the end, though it's a little unclear why such veterans as Adolphe Menjou's producer and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s playwright would be so susceptible to the pest that Eva Lovelace makes of herself at first. Also unclear is why Eva's performances of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and Juliet's part of the balcony scene so impress the guests at the party: Hepburn rattles them off with no attention to the meaning behind the familiar words. She seems, for example, to take the line "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" as a question about his location rather than about his name. The film is pre-Code, so one thing is clear:  that Eva and the producer have slept together after she gets soused at the party. 

10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999)

Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You

Cast: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, David Krumholtz, Andrew Keegan, Larry Miller, Susan May Pratt, Gabrielle Union, Daryl Mitchell, Allison Janney, David Leisure. Screenplay: Karen McCullah, Kirsten Smith, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Production design: Carol Winstead Wood. Film editing: O. Nicholas Brown. Music: Richard Gibbs.

10 Things I Hate About You is a reminder of what we lost with Heath Ledger's early death: an actor capable of elevating even a formulaic teen comedy whose obvious source makes the taming of the shrewish Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) a foregone conclusion. Ledger brings a buoyancy to the role of Patrick Verona, the film's Petruchio, that makes the clichéd role of teen-movie hunk into something fresh and engaging. But that's not to undervalue Stiles's contribution to helping the on-again, off-again role of Kate become somewhat credible. It's not clear why sometimes Kat is clearly infatuated with Patrick and the next minute keeping him at arm's length. I suspect the script underwent so many revisions that everyone lost sight of the thread it was supposed to be following. Stiles gives Kat an edge of wit and charm that is, of course, lost on her fellow high school students, as it must be to keep the story moving. But there are other pleasures to the film, too, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, making a breakthrough out of sitcom celebrity into full-fledged movie actor, and the always welcome David Krumholtz as his geeky sidekick. The adult roles are sidelined: Allison Janney is wasted as the horny guidance counselor, irritated that the kids are always interrupting her attempt to write a pornographic bodice-ripper; Daryl Mitchell's irascible English teacher makes no sense; and David Leisure's gym teacher is there mostly to get shot in the ass during archery practice and to be distracted by Kat's flashing him to help Patrick escape detention. Larry Miller does what he can with Walter Stratford, the uptight father of Kat and Bianca, but here again the script isn't helping him much. Still, 10 Things has plenty of enjoyable moments and a glimpse of some young performers with bright (if in Ledger's case shadowed) futures.

Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)

Aleksey Kravchenko in Come and See

Cast: Aleksey Kravchenko, Olga Mironova, Ljubomiras Laucevicius, Vladas Bagdonas, Jüri Lumiste, Viktors Lorencs, Evgeniy Tilicheev. Screenplay: Ales Adamovich, Elem Klimov. Cinematography: Aleksey Rodionov. Production design: Viktor Petrov. Film editing: Valeriya Belova. Music: Oleg Yanchenko.

Elem Klimov's hard and harrowing Come and See runs a risk that it almost doesn't avoid: Parts of it are filled with such sustained horror and tension that a viewer can grow almost numb and dismissive. It elicits the response: "It's only a movie. These are actors." But such actors, especially Aleksey Kravchenko, then only 14 and picked by the director precisely for his lack of acting experience, even though Klimov was concerned that putting him through what the character must undergo in the film might be damaging to his mental health. (Kravchenko apparently survived intact, and went on to study acting and to build a steady career in film and television.) It's perhaps worth comparing the intensity of Klimov's film to that of Larisa Shepitko's The Ascent (1977), which put its actors through real hardships to create its portrait of life during wartime. Shepitko, married to Klimov, died in an automobile accident in 1979, and her film almost seems like a challenge to her husband to match or excel. In fact, Come and See seems to have exhausted Klimov as a filmmaker: He didn't make another film for the remainder of his life; he died at 70 in 2003. As harsh as the realism of Come and See is, it also has poetic touches in its cinematography and use of landscape, reminding me of another film about a war-torn boyhood, Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1966).

The Ruling Class (Peter Medak, 1972)

Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class

Cast: Peter O'Toole, Arthur Lowe, William Mervyn, Coral Browne, Michael Bryant, Alastair Sim, Carolyn Seymour, Harry Andrews, James Villiers. Screenplay: Peter Barnes, based on his play. Cinematography: Ken Hodges. Production design: Peter Murton. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: John Cameron.

The Ruling Class is one of those movies that don't know when to stop. Up to and including the scene in which Jack (Peter O'Toole) is judged sane by an obviously dotty authority after he discovers that they are fellow Old Etonians, Peter Medak's film, which has a screenplay by Peter Barnes derived from his play, is an often amusing, sometimes hilarious blend of the kind of skewering of British eccentricity and class consciousness found in the Ealing Studios movies of the 1950s, with some of the surreal cheekiness of the Monty Python skits and films. Then the whole thing turns dark, as Jack discovers that he isn't God but instead Jack the Ripper. It's a shift in tone that might have worked, if it hadn't been delivered with such heavy-handedness as the flashes that show the members of the House of Lords as desiccated corpses shrouded in cobwebs. Believe me, we have gotten the point by then. There's a good biting satire of about 100 minutes inside this 154-minute film, including a few buoyantly daffy musical numbers. The Ruling Class remains worth seeing for O'Toole's performance, which earned him one of his eight unsuccessful Oscar nominations, along with some delicious work from Arthur Lowe as the communist butler who stays on with the Gurney family to torment them after he gets a £30,000 bequest in the late Earl of Gurney's will; Harry Andrews as that nutty nobleman; Alastair Sim as a befuddled bishop (Sim makes even the act of sitting down funny); Coral Browne as the sardonic Lady Claire; James Villiers as her upperclass twit of a son; William Mervyn as the perpetually scheming Sir Charles; and Carolyn Seymour as Sir Charles's mistress, brought in to pretend to be Marguerite Gautier, the Lady of the Camellias, whom Jack/God believes to be his wife. But the nihilism into which the film descends casts a pall over even these performances.

The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Nino Bignamini, Marino Masé, Amadei Amodio. Screenplay: Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Art direction: Nedo Azzini, Jean Marie Simon. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Daniele Paris.

I don't mind if a movie is offensive as long as what it makes me think and feel is more significant than what offends me. But Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, celebrated and damned for its offensive central story, the doomed love affair of a former SS officer and the concentration camp survivor whom he loved and abused, doesn't have enough substance to its characters to make its offensiveness meaningful or even credible. Despite performances of deep conviction by Dirk Bogarde as Max and Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, we still know them by their labels: ex-Nazi and masochistic victim. We can only infer why they were drawn together in the camp and why they remain drawn together years later, when he has become a night porter in a Viennese hotel that's a hotbed of decadent characters and she has married a celebrated orchestra conductor. What causes Lucia to give up this apparently successful marriage to degrade herself with this creep? And what's with this assortment of ex-Nazis who are destroying old records and eliminating witnesses to their wartime crimes -- other than, of course, a plot device that puts the lives of Max and Lucia in jeopardy. Why is there a long sequence about the ballet dancer who used to perform shirtless for the SS and now seems to be restricted to private performances for Max, who works the lights for the performances? Is it to evoke the homoerotic element of Nazism, itself a wrongheaded and offensive trope? Nothing in The Night Porter holds up to very close scrutiny. And yet it's a hypnotically watchable film that dares you to take it seriously as it unrolls, but just left me feeling jaded and unsatisfied when it was over.

La Poison (Sacha Guitry, 1951)

Michel Simon and Germaine Reuver in La Poison

Cast: Michel Simon, Jean Debucourt, Jacques Varennes, Jeanne Fusier-Gir, Germaine Reuver, Pauline Carton, Albert Duvaleix, Georges Bever. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Jean Bachelet. Production design: Robert Dumesnil. Film editing: Raymond Lamy. Music: Louiguy.

I thought there was something off about the title of Sacha Guitry's La Poison, and I was right: The French word for substances like arsenic and strychnine is masculine -- le poison. When the word becomes feminine, la poison, it can be roughly translated as "pest" or "nuisance." Exploring the psychology behind the genders assigned to words in languages that have such inflections is dangerous, but it seems somehow in keeping with what some have called the film's "misogyny" that the feminine form of the word should take on such connotations. La Poison is a dark comedy about wife-killing, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), though without Chaplin's sentimentality and tendency to moralize. The great Michel Simon, who is lionized in Guitry's extended opening credits sequence, plays Paul Braconnier, married to a slatternly drunkard, Blandine. She hates him as much as he does her, and is in fact the first to put in motion an attempt to do away with him when she buys a supply of rat poison. Eventually, however, he gets the upper hand (which holds a knife). But the film is most centrally about the justice system, in which sharp lawyers like the defense attorney Aubanel (Jean Debucourt) are able to help the guilty escape the guillotine. Braconnier hears Aubanel on the radio, talking about how he has just achieved his hundredth acquittal, so Braconnier goes to see him, pretending that he has just murdered his wife, when in fact he's really there to figure out the safest way to do it. Shrewdly, Braconnier tricks the attorney into pointing him in the direction of the best ways to murder someone -- by, for example, staging it to look like self-defense and to avoid any hints of premeditation. So Braconnier goes back to his village and does Blandine in, then recruits Aubanel for the defense. The lawyer is indignant at being so used, but Braconnier has the goods on him as an unwitting accomplice in the crime. He stands trial and is acquitted. Guitry has learned a lot about filmmaking since his movies of the 1930s, which were often more static and talky than was good for them, and there's a crispness and fluidity to La Poison that's admirable. Simon is at his best in the trial scene, but there's a sourness to the concept that keeps the film from being entirely enjoyable. Critics and scholars of Guitry's work have pointed out that it's a bit of revenge flick, its hits at the judicial system expressive of Guitry's resentment at having been interned as a collaborator after World War II, when in fact he was always anti-Nazi and even helped some Jewish friends escape.

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006)

Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz in The Fountain

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis, Stephen McHattie, Fernando Hernandez, Cliff Curtis, Sean Patrick Thomas, Donna Murphy, Ethan Suplee, Richard McMillan. Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky, Ari Handel. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Clint Mansell.

I don't know why Darren Aronofsky's film is called The Fountain, unless Terrence Malick had already reserved The Tree of Life for his 2011 film. There's no fountain of significance in Aronofsky's movie unless it's the Tree itself and the viscous ooze it secretes. Actually, it's worth comparing the two films because both belong to a peculiarly overreaching genre of metaphysical-speculation movies. Malick's works better because it is grounded in a vividly actual portrait of growing up, whereas Aronofsky centers his film on a rather melodramatic story about a research scientist (Hugh Jackman) looking for a cure for the brain tumor that is killing his wife. This story dovetails awkwardly into a story the wife, nicely played by Rachel Weisz, is writing about a 16th-century conquistador's search for the Tree of Life at the behest of the queen of Spain (also Weisz). The Fountain begins in the middle of that story, with an Indiana Jones-like sequence of the conquistador (also Jackman) hacking through the jungle and battling Mayan warriors in his quest. But wait, there's a third story, in which Jackman is now a futuristic spaceman traveling in a transparent sphere -- I couldn't help thinking of Glinda the Good Witch -- along with the Tree itself, whose secrets he is attempting to uncover. No, I don't get it either. Jackman and Weisz give it all they've got, which is a lot, and Ellen Burstyn is always a welcome presence. Here she's the boss to Jackman's scientist, trying to keep him from flipping out when he discovers a cure at the very moment his wife dies. She doesn't succeed. There's a good deal of ponderous pronouncement like "Death is the road to awe" and a few nice special effects, as when the spaceman ingests the ooze from the Tree and begins to turn into a flowerbed. But the film as a whole is too unfocused to be either coherent or convincing.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972)

Bulle Ogier, Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, Stéphane Audran,
and Jean-Pierre Cassel in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Cast: Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Paul Frankeur, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Julien Bertheau, Milena Vukotic, Claude Piéplu. Screenplay: Luis Buñuel, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Edmond Richard. Production design: Pierre Guffroy. Film editing: Hélène Plemiannikov.

The frustration of the bourgeoises in Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at having their various attempts to sit down at a table and have something like a meal never reaches the furious breaking point that it does for the characters who try to escape from a house party in his The Exterminating Angel (1962), but not because the director had mellowed in the decade between the two films. He had grown more sly and subtle, I think. The world of The Discreet Charm is liminal; the characters are trapped somewhere between dream and reality, between past and future, in a place they're determined to enjoy come what may. In the celebrated dream-within-a-dream, in which one character dreams what another character is dreaming, namely that they're on stage in a play without knowing what their lines are, even then they seem determined to make a go of it, just as the Sénéchals are determined to have sex even though they know their guests have just arrived for luncheon. There's a "keep calm and carry on" quality to these characters that's almost admirable, even when they're faced with the most absurd situations, like a corpse in the next room of the bistro, or a restaurant that has run out of tea and coffee. Not everything in the movie works, I think: The character of the priest/gardener who listens to an old man's confession that he murdered the priest's parents, gives him absolution, then blows him away with a shotgun, seems to me gratuitous -- Buñuel determined to exhibit his contempt for the clergy come what may. But on the other hand, it stayed with me even when I couldn't quite fit it into my overall experience of the film, which is a mad masterpiece.

The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985)

Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, and Judd Nelson
in The Breakfast Club

Cast: Emilio Estevez, Paul Gleason, Anthony Michael Hall, John Kapelos, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy. Screenplay: John Hughes. Cinematography: Thomas Del Ruth. Production design: John W. Corso. Film editing: Dede Allen. Music: Keith Forsey.

John Hughes's movies have stood the test of time, not by evoking nostalgia so much as reflecting a moment in American cultural history: the peaking of the Baby Boom. The central figure in The Breakfast Club is none of the teenage detainees -- the jock Andrew (Emilio Estevez), the nerd Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), the hood John (Judd Nelson), the princess Claire (Molly Ringwald), and the basket case Allison (Ally Sheedy) -- but rather their harried detainer, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), struggling to assert the authority that he thinks belongs to him. The year of the film's release, 1985, is the point at which the Boomers were on the cusp of turning 40, with all the anxious reappraisal that comes with that birthday. It's summed up in a conversation between Vernon and the janitor, Carl (John Kapelos), in which Vernon expresses his angst at the thought that when he gets older, the detainees are "going to be running the country ... these kids are going to take care of me." To which Carl responds, "I wouldn't count on it." The fear being expressed is clearly that of writer-director Hughes, born in 1950 and hence right in that moment of recognition. A lot of the movie's contemporary critics didn't see this, dismissing The Breakfast Club -- and most of Hughes's other films -- as entertainment for the kind of kids shown in the film, whose actors became rather condescendingly known as the Brat Pack. Hughes, however, recognized and even celebrated the self-awareness that develops in these teenagers, contrasting it with the worn-down cynicism of their parents, who want the kids to achieve the things they failed to do: Brian's parents pressure him to excel in school; Andrew's father looks to him to accomplish the athletic feats he failed at; Claire's obviously see her social status as a validation of their own tenuous success; meanwhile, John's and Allison's have simply given up, letting him run wild and her slump into disarray. The Breakfast Club could have been stronger in moving its subtext into the explicit substance of the movie, but to do so would probably have heightened the didacticism into which the film threatens to fall when Brian reads aloud his essay, protesting against being stereotyped and insisting that each of them is a little bit of a brain, jock, princess, basket case, and hood.

Quadrille (Sacha Guitry, 1938)

Georges Grey and Gaby Morlay in Quadrille

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Gaby Morlay, Jacqueline Delubac, Georges Grey, Pauline Carton, Jacques Vitry. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Robert Lefebvre. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

One of Sacha Guitry's strengths as a filmmaker was that he was a prolific playwright who knew how to craft dialogue and plot. One of Sacha Guitry's weaknesses is that he was a prolific playwright who never quite mastered the difference between a play and a film -- namely, that the actors in a film have to perform without benefit of an audience, and the dialogue they're speaking shouldn't ramble on, as it tends to do without the interruptions of laughter or other unscripted responses of a live audience. The masters of film comedy -- I'm thinking here of directors like Howard Hawks and George Cukor -- knew that a continued stream of bons mots or wisecracks needed the right pacing to keep a movie theater audience from covering up the best moments. But Guitry's characters in Quadrille talk non-stop, none more so than the director-writer-star himself, never giving us a break to savor what has been so wittily said or so poignantly evoked. Quadrille is a pleasant French romantic comedy about a publisher with a mistress who's a star on the stage. She cuckolds him with a handsome American movie star, just as the publisher is about to propose marriage to her. When she learns that she has just blown the possibility of marrying him, and it looks like the movie star has decamped, she attempts suicide. But things are set right by the fourth player in this quadrille, a pretty reporter who manages to sort things out, rescuing the actress in the nick of time, sending her off with the movie star, and taking the publisher for herself. Guitry plays the publisher, with Gaby Morlay as the actress, Jacqueline Delubard as the reporter, and Georges Grey -- who had made his film debut in a small role in Guitry's The Pearls of the Crown (1937) -- as the movie star. There's a certain French insouciance about playing the actress's suicide attempt for comedy -- it doesn't work in the more American context of Billy Wilder's Sabrina (1954), for example.

Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)

Gena Rowlands in Opening Night

Cast: Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Joan Blondell, Paul Stewart, Zohra Lampert, Laura Johnson, John Tuell. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Al Ruban. Production design: Brian Ryman. Film editing: Tom Cornwell. Music: Bo Harwood.

If at some moments you're uncertain whether what's happening in Opening Night is taking place on-stage or off-, that's the point. Gena Rowlands's Myrtle Gordon is no longer able, in part (but not entirely) because of her alcoholism, to distinguish art from life. This, to me, is John Cassavetes's most accessible film -- which is ironic, since it was a critical and commercial disaster on its initial release in the United States. Cassavetes was unable to find an American distributor for the film, and it didn't get one until two years after his death. Myrtle is struggling through the New Haven tryouts for a play called The Second Woman, which is about the difficulties the character she's playing has with getting older. After one performance, a hyped-up young fan all but assaults her with adoration, but then, as Myrtle's limousine pulls away from the theater, the fan is struck by a car and killed as Myrtle looks back in horror. The fan's death precipitates a breakdown: Myrtle acts up on stage, objecting to a scene in which her co-star and former lover Maurice (Cassavetes) slaps her, arguing with the playwright (Joan Blondell, in a role that was first offered to Bette Davis) that the play's preoccupation with aging is wrong-headed, fighting with her director, Manny (Ben Gazzara), and breaking character on stage during performances. She also begins to see the young woman who was killed, sometimes explaining the vision away as an actress's technique for getting into character, but eventually resorting to consultations with spiritualists. Rowlands is simply phenomenal throughout the film, a performance that must be seen. But Opening Night is overlong at 144 minutes, and it has some of its writer-director's too-loose improvisatory qualities, especially in the scene in which the play finally opens on Broadway and Myrtle and Maurice improvise the final act to the great amusement of the audience, turning the opening night into a hit. In fact, it doesn't seem nearly as hilarious as that audience finds it, and Myrtle's transition from falling-down drunk at the beginning of the opening night performance into quick-witted improviser is hardly convincing. But it's a mistake to try to put any Cassavetes story into a conventional context; he's doing his own thing, and you either appreciate it or you don't. Look for Cassavetes regulars Peter Falk and Seymour Cassel, along with his friend Peter Bogdanovich, in the crowd at the opening night.

Désiré (Sacha Guitry, 1937)

Alys Delonce, Jacques Baumer, Sacha Guitry, Arletty, and Jacqueline Delubac in Désiré

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Jacques Baumer, Arletty, Pauline Carton, Saturnin Fabre, Alys Delonce. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Jean Bachelet. Production design: Jean Perrier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

Sacha Guitry's Désiré -- not to be confused with Frank Borzage's Desire (1936) or Henry Koster's Désirée (1954) -- is an upstairs-downstairs comedy about a valet and the woman he serves. It's stagy and talky -- especially when Guitry himself is onscreen, as in the scene near the start of the movie when he delivers a lengthy plea to Mme. Cléry to hire him despite a rather sensational report from his former employer, and in the scene near the end when he apologizes at length for his behavior, which he sees as inherent in the relationship between master and servant, as well as between men and women. Odette Cléry, played by Guitry's wife and frequent co-star Jacqueline Delubac, is a former actress who is the mistress of a French cabinet minister, Felix Montignac. She'd like to marry Montignac, but he's reluctant because he feels it's good for his image as a prominent government official to have a mistress. That comedy of manners premise sets up what follows when she hires a new valet, named Désiré and played by Guitry. He's clued in to the nature of the household by his fellow servants, Madeleine the maid, played by Arletty, and Adèle the cook, played by Pauline Carton. Complications ensue when Madeleine overhears Désiré, through the thin wall separating their bedrooms, talking in his sleep about his passion for Mme. Cléry, while Montignac hears Odette talking in her sleep about making love with Désiré. There's some farcical goings-on involving a book of dream interpretations, and the whole thing comes to a crisis at a dinner party for Adrien Corniche (Saturnin Fabre) and his very deaf wife, Henriette (Alys Delonce). There's some very funny, albeit cruel, comic business involving Henriette's deafness, but the whole film may be just a little too arch and loquacious for its own good. It's also a little hard to imagine Guitry as the kind of man who inspires forbidden passion in his female employers, as Désiré is said to do.

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Cast: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon De Wilde, Whit Bissell, Crahan Denton, John Ashley, Val Avery, George Petrie. Screenplay: Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Tambi Larsen, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Frank Bracht. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Hud and Mud as back-to-back blog entries: Purely accidental, but I rather like it. It set me to thinking that if Hud were ever (god forbid!) remade, Matthew McConaughey would be a good substitute for Paul Newman. Or rather, would have been, since McConaughey is 50, where Newman was exactly the right age when he played Hud. But both actors have that innate charisma blended with a soupçon of something not quite trustworthy that makes them such fun to watch. And fun to watch is what Hud is, despite the title character's anti-heroicness and the story's serious overtones about the passing of a way of life. On the latter count, think of the hopefulness of the cattle drivers in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) as compared with the sour fate of the Bannons in Hud. The mantra of Red River was Dunson's "Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make 'em strong, make 'em grow." In Hud it might be Homer Bannon's "It don't take long to kill things, not like it does to grow." But mostly the pleasures of Hud are in the performances: Newman's obviously, and Patricia Neal's as Alma, but most especially Melvyn Douglas's as Homer, when you remember Douglas as the actor who wooed Irene Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936), Marlene Dietrich in Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937), and Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939). The movie won Oscars for Neal and Douglas, as it should have. Only Brandon De Wilde's performance didn't quite work for me: He seems a little too soft and well-scrubbed for someone who grew up in a landscape as lean and hard as the one James Wong Howe's (also Oscar-winning) images display. We have to think of the randy teenagers in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), also based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, to see what the character might really have been -- a young Jeff Bridges would have been wonderful as Lonnie Bannon. Hud is still hamstrung a little by the moribund Production Code: Characters in it say things like "crap" and "crud" instead of "shit." Like a lot of very good pictures, Hud sometimes has the feeling of having been made at the wrong time in film history.

Mud (Jeff Nichols, 2012)

Jacob Lofland, Matthew McConaughey, and Tye Sheridan in Mud

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland, Reese Witherspoon, Sam Shepard, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Michael Shannon, Joe Don Baker, Paul Sparks, Bonnie Sturdivant. Screenplay: Jeff Nichols. Cinematography: Adam Stone. Production design: Richard A. Wright. Film editing: Julie Monroe. Music: David Wingo.

Mud is often cited as the beginning of the "McConaughnaissance" -- i.e., the start of the resurgence of Matthew McConaughey's career after a spell of vapid romantic comedies and forgotten action movies. His scruffy and sly but deeply self-deluding title character -- we never learn his full name, or even if he has one -- is not so much a departure from his previous persona as it is a new spin on the good looks and charisma of his earlier roles. It would take a physical transformation in Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013) to earn him an Oscar, but what that film, along with Mud and his much-talked-about performance in the 2014 TV series True Detective, really proved is that good actors need good scripts. And Jeff Nichols's screenplay for Mud is a good one, even if it falls back at the end on a conventional shootout and happy ending. Nichols has acknowledged that the river setting and the role played by two boys in the story are inspired by Mark Twain. Tye Sheridan as the Tom Sawyer analogue named Ellis and Jacob Lofland as the Huck Finn equivalent called Neckbone are superbly natural performers. Sam Shepard brings his usual gravitas to the part of the enigmatic Tom Blankenship, but Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Paulson are wasted in the chief female roles.

Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick, 1949)

Cast: Basil Radford, Catherine Lacey, Bruce Seton, Joan Greenwood, Wylie Watson, Gordon Jackson, Gabrielle Blunt, Jean Cadell, James Robertson Justice. Screenplay: Compton MacKenzie, Angus MacPhail, based on a novel by MacKenzie. Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs. Art direction: Jim Morahan. Film editing: Joseph Sterling, Charles Crichton. Music: Ernest Irving.

Alexander Mackendrick was unhappy with his first feature as a director, saying that it looked like "a home movie." But Whisky Galore! was a huge and enduring success, perhaps thanks in large part to its editors, Joseph Sterling and the uncredited Charles Crichton, who reassembled its footage and even had some additional takes shot, after initial dissatisfaction from Ealing Studios. In fact, the film helped launch Ealing as one of the major forces in what has come to be known as a kind of golden age of British film comedy, and Mackendrick went on to make two more hit comedies, The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), in that era. Whisky Galore! is the story of the residents of an island in the Outer Hebrides who face calamity when wartime shipping blockades deprive them of a vital necessity, the water of life itself, whisky. And then a cargo ship carrying cases of the stuff hits the rocks nearby, is abandoned by its crew, and shunned by salvage authorities. Only the determined Capt. Waggett of the Home Guard stands between the townsfolk and the shipwreck. Waggett, played by Basil Radford, is a stern by-the-books man, despite the fact that no one, including his wife, takes him seriously. There's a subplot involving two sisters, played by Joan Greenwood and Gabrielle Blunt, and their suitors, played respectively by Bruce Seton and Gordon Jackson, but most of the film is about the clash between what authority Capt. Waggett can muster and the efforts of the people to get at the whisky.

The Pearls of the Crown (Sacha Guitry, 1937)

Arletty and Claude Dauphin in The Pearls of the Crown

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Jacqueline Delubac, Lyn Harding, Renée Saint-Cyr, Enrico Glori, Ermete Zacconi, Barbara Shaw, Marguerite Moreno, Arletty, Marcel Dalio, Claude Dauphin, Raimu, Jean-Louis Barrault. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry, Christian-Jaque. Cinematography: Jules Kruger. Art direction: Jean Perrier. Film editing: William Barache, Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Jean Françaix.

Sacha Guitry's The Pearls of the Crown is a romp through French and English history that tells the story of how four pearls came to be placed on the royal crown of Great Britain -- and what happened to three other similar pearls that didn't make it. It purports (with tongue in cheek) to be a true story, and it gives Guitry a chance to play four distinct roles, including Francis I and Napoleon III. It also features cameos by some celebrated French actors, including Arletty in blackface as the queen of Abyssinia, Claude Dauphin as her pearl-hunting lover, Jean-Louis Barrault as the young Napoleon I, and Raimu as the owner of one of the three missing pearls. Guitry's wife and frequent co-star, Jacqueline Delubac, plays a key role as the wife of the chief pearl-hunter, Jean Martin (Guitry), as well as bits as Mary Stuart and Josephine de Beauharnais. It's made in three languages -- four if you count the gibberish spoken by the queen of Abyssinia and her courtiers -- but mostly in French. Engaging enough, though you may want to bone up on French and English history to get the full value.

Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1984)

Cast: Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern, Treat Williams, Tuesday Weld, Burt Young, Joe Pesci, Danny Aiello, William Forsythe, James Hayden, Darlanne Fluegel, Larry Rapp, Jennifer Connelly, Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Brian Bloom, Adrian Curran, Mike Monetti, Noah Moazezi, James Russo. Screenplay: Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone, Stuart Kaminsky, based on a novel by Harry Grey. Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli. Production design: Giovanni Natalucci. Film editing: Nino Baragli. Music: Ennio Morricone.

Sergio Leone's romantic epic Once Upon a Time in America is some kind of great film, but I'm not sure what. It's about gangsters, to be sure, but is it really a gangster movie, in the lineage that stretches from the Warner Bros. gangster movies to the familiar parts of the oeuvre of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese? It seems to me to more of a character study, a kind of Bildungsroman about the moral education of David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro), whose internal life seems to me very different from that of the paradigmatic troubled gangster, Michael Corleone. That the whole story of OUATIA may in fact be Noodles's opium dream, as the concluding shot seems to suggest, gives a quality of fantasy to the film, as even its fairytale title underscores. I have to admit that at first I wasn't happy about giving up four hours of my movie-watching time to Leone's film, which still lingers in a kind of sad obscurity in the minds of the general public, especially since it was mistreated, panned, and tanked on its original release, when it was cut by 90 minutes. It was only the efforts of a few critics and cinéastes that promoted its rehabilitation, and its recent showing on TCM was a "premiere" for that network after 35 years. There are some self-indulgent moments to the movie, too -- scenes that move more slowly than they might, setups that don't quite deliver on their potential. It's very much a "foreign film" in narrative technique, more redolent of Antonioni than of Coppola. What American director of the 1980s would have come up with such an enigmatic ending as the garbage truck and the flashback to the opium den? (The American cut by the Ladd Company ended with an off-screen gunshot suggesting that Max/Bailey had killed himself.) But even its flaws have a hint of greatness about them.  

The Story of a Cheat (Sacha Guitry, 1936)

Marguerite Moreno and Sacha Guitry in The Story of a Cheat

Cast: Sacha Guitry, Marguerite Moreno, Jacqueline Delubac, Rosine Deréan, Roger Duchesne, Elmire Vautier, Serge Grave, Fréhel, Pierre Assy, Henri Peiffert. Screenplay: Sacha Guitry. Cinematography: Marcel Lucien. Art direction: Henri Ménessier. Film editing: Myriam Borsoutsky. Music: Adolphe Borchard.

The word that occurs to me for Sacha Guitry's The Story of a Cheat is "droll." It reminds me of a Gallic version of those postwar Alec Guinness comedies, like Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949) and The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), in which people do criminal and even cruel things but the film remains lighthearted. It begins, after all, with the death of 11 people, all members of the protagonist's family, when he is 12 years old. Eventually, he is seduced into a life of thievery by three women. In the film, he is in his 50s, writing his memoirs at a table in a café, narrating the film in voiceover -- there is little actual dialogue. For those of us who aren't fluent in French and rely on subtitles, it's almost like a silent movie with a constant flow of title cards. Guitry -- writer, director, and star -- is a charmer whose work was profoundly influential on French film, and I hope to see more of his work in the coming weeks.

Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)

Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell

Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Dan Stevens, Cara Delevingne, Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin, Eric Stoltz, Ashley Benson, Dylan Gelula, Eka Darville, Amber Heard, Virginia Madsen. Screenplay: Alex Ross Perry. Cinematography: Sean Price Williams. Production design: Fletcher Chancey. Film editing: Robert Greene. Music: Keegan DeWitt.

Sometimes the opportunity to watch good actors act is almost the only thing a movie gives us. (That's true, I'm afraid, of a lot of the Meryl Streep oeuvre.) Certainly it's the chief thing the punk-titled Her Smell offers: Elisabeth Moss tearing up the screen as a self-destructive rock star. But we've seen the story before and Alex Ross Perry has nothing novel to give us in his version of it. Moss's Becky Something collapses at the peak of her career, leaving a broken marriage, an infant, and a mountain of lawsuits, including those by her producer, Howard Goodman (Eric Stoltz). She sobers up -- the film doesn't show how -- and retreats into seclusion. But the ever-forgiving Howard persuades her back for a final gig at a concert featuring the many acts he has produced over a 20-year career. Is she strong enough to make it? Her long-suffering bandmates and her ex-husband (Dan Stevens) have forgiven her trespasses, but they still have some doubts about her continued stability. She is something of a head case where it comes to New Agey guidance -- she still, for example, believes in the guru called Ya-Ema (whose real name, someone says, is Alvin), even though he has gone to prison for defrauding her and others. Yet the film has to end with a triumph, and it does. I have no ear for the music in Her Smell, so I can't comment on that other than to say it seemed mediocre, but Moss gives it her all, doing her own singing. But it's her acting we came to see, and that's exceptional.

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

Carey Mulligan and Ryan Gosling in Drive

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, Kaden Leos, Jeff Wolfe, James Biberi, Russ Tamblyn. Screenplay: Hossein Amini, based on a novel by James Sallis. Cinematography: Newton Thomas Sigel. Production design: Beth Mickle. Film editing: Matthew Newman. Music: Cliff Martinez.

I wasn't surprised, in reading about Drive after I watched it, to find the film being compared to Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy of the 1960s. Both, of course, feature a protagonist with no name who has a slight oral fixation -- a cheroot in the case of Clint Eastwood in the Leone films, a toothpick in the case of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn's. And both are taciturn and impassive, Eastwood with his squint a little more consistently menacing than Gosling with his bland, unemotional mien. The difference is that Gosling makes us sense that there's something going on deep inside, behind that façade, but we won't really know what it is until he stomps a man to death in an elevator late in the film. With Eastwood it's more a matter of what you see is what you can expect to get. I admire the style with which Refn pulls off his story, with the occasional casting against type, as with Albert Brooks as a thug, and the effective use of actors who can play almost anything, namely, Bryan Cranston and Oscar Isaac. The risk of concentrating on style is that everything remains on the surface, and that's the real problem I have with Drive, that it feels superficial if occasionally witty, as in its use of pop songs to comment on the characters and action. The repetitions of "A Real Hero" are, I think, meant to be ironic: There's nothing especially heroic about Gosling's driver, except that he does what he does to help Carey Mulligan's Irene and her young son. But when he finally boils over into an act that amounts to overkill, she's forced to question his character. Still, the movie is a cut above most recent attempts at neo-noir.

John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum (Chad Stahelski, 2019)

Mark Dacascos and Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Mark Dacascos, Asia Kate Dillon, Lance Reddick, Anjelica Huston, Saïd Taghmaoui, Jerome Flynn, Tobias Segal, Randall Duk Kim. Screenplay: Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins, Marc Abrams. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Kevin Kavanaugh. Film editing: Evan Schiff. Music: Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard.

I'll admit that I haven't seen the first two John Wick movies, for much the same reason that I've never watched any of the Taken or Fast and Furious movies: Who needs another action movie franchise? But the films have gotten enough positive response, and I like Keanu Reeves enough, that I gave in and watched the latest in the series. I wasn't disappointed: It's full of well-choreographed fight scenes that are almost balletic (not to mention ballistic) in character. The sets and cinematography are handsome. Reeves doesn't disappoint, Halle Berry is terrific, and I liked seeing old favorites like Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, and Anjelica Huston. It was nice to see Mark Dacascos, whom I knew only as the Chairman on Iron Chef America, in his martial arts element. On the whole, I'd say it's on a par with the best of the James Bond and Mission: Impossible movies. Will I watch another John Wick movie if one comes my way? Probably. But let me say it again: Who needs another action movie franchise?

Anthony Adverse (Mervyn LeRoy, 1936)

Fredric March and Olivia de Havilland in Anthony Adverse

Cast: Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, Donald Woods, Anita Louise, Edmund Gwenn, Claude Rains, Gale Sondergaard, Louis Hayward, Steffi Duna, Akim Tamiroff, Ralph Morgan, Fritz Leiber, Luis Alberni, Billy Mauch, Henry O'Neill, Pedro de Cordoba, Scotty Beckett. Screenplay: Sheridan Gibney, based on a novel by Hervey Allen. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. 

This lead-footed, tin-eared attempt at an epic runs for almost two and a half hours, but it seems longer. Warner Bros. threw a lot of resources into it, including some top-flight actors, and earned Oscars for Gale Sondergaard (the first ever supporting actress award), cinematography, film editing, and score (an award that at the time went to the head of the studio music department, Leo Forbstein, and not to the one who deserved it, Erich Wolfgang Korngold). In fact, Korngold's score is the liveliest thing about the film, which is hamstrung by Fredric March's lack of charisma in the title role. March was a fine actor, but he seems miscast and a little too old (he was in his late 30s) in a role that calls on him to be dashing and occasionally reckless. The script, drawn from the first volume of Hervey Allen's doorstop bestseller, is full of contrivances and coincidences, made worse by some cliché-clotted dialogue and characters. The villains, Claude Rains and Gale Sondergaard, are as deep-dyed as you could want. Scheming and sneering at virtue, Rains produces one of the most memorable of villainous cackles when he laughs triumphantly, and Sondergaard narrows her eyes and flashes her teeth with snakelike relish. There's also an unfortunate episode in which Anthony goes to the Warners backlot version of Africa and becomes a slave trader, taking as a mistress a vixen named Neleta, played by the Viennese actress Steffi Duna, who does a hoochy-koochy dance that's surely not African. The problem with any summary of the movie is that it makes it sound like more fun than it is. 

Take Aim at the Police Van (Seijun Suzuki, 1960)

Misako Watanabe and Michitaro Mizushima in Take Aim at the Police Van

Cast: Michitaro Mizushima, Misako Watanabe, Shoichi Ozawa, Shinsuke Ashida, Mari Shiraki, Toru Abe. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa, Kazuo Shimada. Cinematography: Shigeyoshi Mine. Production design: Takehara Sakeguchi. Film editing: Akira Suzuki. Music: Koichi Kawabe.

Seijun Suzuki's early-career Take Aim at the Police Van is a sold, somewhat overplotted excursion into the realms of film noir, but with none of the flash and dazzle of such later films as Story of a Prostitute (1965), Tokyo Drifter (1966), or Branded to Kill (1967). It's the story of Daijiro Tamon (Michitaro Mizushima), a prison guard who's on a bus transporting prisoners when it's attacked and two of the prisoners are shot dead. The attackers get away and Tamon gets suspended -- really scapegoated -- for his inability to stop them, so because he has nothing else to do he decides to figure out what was behind the assault. One of the prisoners who survived the attack, Goro (Shoichi Ozawa), was released on bail the day of the incident, and following up on some things Goro did and said on the bus, Tamon seeks him out. In the process, he winds up uncovering a human trafficking gang, gets slugged and chased a couple of times, and becomes involved with Yuko (Misako Watanabe), the noir "mystery woman" who has some connections to the traffickers. There's big thriller sequence in which Tamon and Yuko are tied up by the bad guys in a gasoline tanker truck that's sent rolling downhill with gas spilling out behind. The bad guys set the trail of gasoline alight and Tamon and Yuko have to free themselves before the burning gas reaches the truck and it explodes. I have to admit that this gimmick was spoiled for me by the TV series Mythbusters, on which Adam and Jamie demonstrated that a truck in that situation probably wouldn't explode, but I also wondered why, if the bad guys wanted to get rid of them, they didn't just kill them outright. But if you go questioning that sort of thing you'll never have any fun at the movies.

Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)

Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast

Cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, James Fox, Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, Álvaro Monje. Screenplay: Louis Mellis, David Scinto. Cinematography: Ivan Bird. Production design: Jan Houllevigue. Film editing: John Scott, Sam Sneade. Music: Roque Baños.

As paunchy, suntanned Gal Dove, a retired safecracker played by Ray Winstone, stands beside the swimming pool of his Spanish villa, a huge boulder comes crashing down the hillside behind him. But just as it seems about to flatten him, it takes a bounce and sails over his head to land in the pool. The incident is metaphorical for what's about to occur to Gal with the arrival of deranged motormouth Don Logan, played by Ben Kingsley in an Oscar-nominated performance. Don has been dispatched by crime boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane) to persuade Gal to participate in an elaborate heist back in London. Don is as deadly as the boulder, and like it, he too winds up in the pool, but not before doing a good deal of damage. Kingsley's hilariously sinister performance as the unhinged mobster is the most celebrated thing about Sexy Beast, but this decidedly eccentric spin on a film noir plot is also an invigorating reworking of the conventional heist movie. The heist itself, which involves breaking into an impregnable vault underwater, would have been the center of an ordinary movie, but here it's intercut with a flashback to what happened in the confrontation of Don with Gal and his wife, Deedee (Amanda Redman). Jonathan Glazer's work directing TV commercials and music videos is reflected in the film's occasional hyperactivity and elements of the surreal and bizarre, but he's also able to sustain moments of tension before and between eruptions of violent action.

Return to Oz (Walter Murch, 1985)

Cast: Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh, Piper Laurie, Matt Clark, Emma Ridley, Sophie Ward, Fiona Victory, Pons Maar, voices of Sean Barrett, Denise Bryer, Brian Henson, and Lyle Conway. Screenplay: Walter Murch, Gill Dennis, based on books by L. Frank Baum. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Norman Reynolds. Film editing: Leslie Hodgson. Music: David Shire.

As a kid I was completely enthralled by the Oz books, a passion made more difficult by the odd fact that school libraries of the day refused to stock them, so I had to order my copies from the small printing and stationery shop in my town that also stocked a few books. Which is why I have always loved Walter Murch's Return to Oz, even though it was a commercial and mostly critical flop. I suspect that the 1939 Judy Garland movie had so cast its own particular spell that people who didn't know the subsequent books by L. Frank Baum (which were continued not so well by Ruth Plumly Thompson but excellently by Baum's illustrator John R. Neill) were expecting Murch's film to be as brightly colored and as tuneful as the Garland movie. But the Oz books were a much darker business entirely, and Murch's film reflects not only that but also Baum's ambivalence toward technology. In Return to Oz, there's a late 19th and early 20th century mistrust of electricity but a fondness for mechanism, hence the rotund wind-up Tik-Tok, an engaging steampunk character before anyone knew to call it steampunk. Murch and production designer Norman Reynolds have gone back to the source in visualizing Baum's characters, so that the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly lion look more like illustrator Neill's visions of them than like Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr in costumes and makeup. The filmmakers rely on puppetry and the stop-motion artistry of clay animation as developed by Will Vinton. The effect is sometimes creepy, and much of the movie is probably too dark for very young viewers, which explains some of the difficulty the movie had finding an audience. There are scenes that evoke horror movies in their dark menace, which is all to the point: The era in which Baum lived was more inured to threats to children than our nervously overprotective one. Unfortunately, the box office failure discouraged Murch, the winner of three Oscars for sound design and film editing, and one of the best-known collaborators with directors like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, from directing more movies, and put the kibosh on further equally imaginative explorations of the Oz books.

Widows (Steve McQueen, 2018)

Elizabeth Debicki, Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo in Widows

Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Garret Dillahunt, Liam Neeson, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Jacki Weaver, Lukas Haas, Jon Bernthal, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Kevin J. O'Connor. Screenplay: Gillian Flynn, Steve McQueen, based on a TV series by Lynda LaPlante. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Joe Walker. Music: Hans Zimmer.

A solid dark thriller with a powerhouse cast, Widows tells the story of four women married to professional thieves who are bereaved when a major heist goes wrong and the van the men are in goes up in a fiery explosion. The problem is that the loot was also incinerated and it belonged to a powerful Chicago politician and crime boss, Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), who shows up at the home of one of the women, Veronica (Viola Davis), demanding repayment. Veronica, who had no part in her husband's crimes, is desperate to raise the money, but her husband's chauffeur had the key to his safety deposit box, in which she discovers a notebook full of detailed plans for all of his heists, including one he had yet to pull off. Eventually, she concludes that the only way to raise the necessary millions is to do that heist herself, for which she enlists two of her fellow widows. The film casts fine actors like Liam Neeson, Daniel Kaluuya, Robert Duvall, Carrie Coon, Lukas Haas, and Jon Bernthal in secondary roles as the complications and surprise twists ensue. Steve McQueen's no-nonsense direction and the skill of his cast make the whole thing mostly plausible, mainly by not giving you time to question some of the plot's weaknesses. There's a subplot about the election battle between Jamal Manning and Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell), the scion of an old Irish political family, which is tied to the main plot by some fairly tenuous threads, a few of which are blatant contrivances. But the focus is on Veronica and her crew, played superbly by Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Michelle Rodriguez, and Cynthia Erivo.

Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960)

Jean Keraudy, Marc Michel, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, and Michel Constantin in Le Trou

Cast: Michel Constantin, Jean Keraudy, Philippe Leroy, Raymond Meunier, Marc Michel, Jean-Paul Coquelin, André Bervil, Eddy Rasimi. Screenplay: Jacques Becker, José Giovanni, Jean Aurel, based on a novel by Giovanni. Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet. Production design: Rino Mondellini. Film editing: Marguerite Renoir, Geneviève Vaury. 

All prison break movies have to be judged by the standard set by Robert Bresson's 1956 masterpiece A Man Escaped. Most of them are found wanting, but Jacques Becker's last film, Le Trou, though it lacks Bresson's moral intensity and political significance, makes a good try at it. What Becker's film has going for it is a fine ensemble of actors, including one of the men who participated in the attempted prison escape in 1947 on which José Giovanni based the novel that Becker turned into a film. Under a screen name, Jean Keraudy, Roland Barbat not only plays the prisoner Roland Darbant but also introduces the film as a "true story." This touch of documentary realism gives Le Trou a solid grounding, and Becker uses it to great effect, especially in a long take in which the prisoners break through the subflooring of their cell into the basement beneath. For a long time we see them hammering away almost ineffectively at the concrete, but just as we fear that this is going to be like watching paint dry, the seemingly impervious substance begins to chip away, revealing the larger rocks and looser material underneath. It's a tour de force of sorts, because the concrete must have been poured especially for the filming and designed to resist the hammering just enough to build suspense. What plot there is other than the elaborately detailed escape focuses on Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel), a young prisoner who is moved into the cell after the other four have already made their plans for the escape. Initially they mistrust the newcomer, but he earns their acceptance -- up to a point. The film eschews a music soundtrack, relying instead on the sounds of the prison for atmosphere. There are some darkly comic moments, as when two of the prisoners, having made it into the basement, have to hide from guards making their rounds. We don't see how they do it at first, but then it's revealed that one of the prisoners is standing on the shoulders of the other, dodging the patrol behind a convenient pillar, around which they just barely manage to make their way as the guards circle it. In hindsight, there are lots of things to cavil about, such as how the escape plan was devised and the necessary tools acquired -- matters that A Man Escaped details more interestingly -- but Le Trou holds up well while you're watching it, relying on solid characterization and vivid details to disarm skepticism.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976)

Ben Gazzara in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Cast: Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, John Kullers, Al Ruban, Azizi Johari, Virginia Carrington, Meade Roberts. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Mitch Breit, Al Ruban. Production design: Sam Shaw. Film editing: Tom Cornwell. Music: Bo Harwood.

I am never going to be a fan of John Cassavetes's movies, and I don't care if I ever see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie again, but I have to admit that his unconventional moviemaking had a deep influence on American movies. What could be more conventional, after all, than a film about a club owner forced by the mob into assassinating a rival mob leader? It's the stuff of 1940s film noir, and of countless movies afterward. But Cassavetes's unconventional approach to conventional material obviously exerted an influence on directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, to name only the best. The club owner is Cosmo Vitelli, played superbly by Ben Gazzara, who runs up gambling debts he can't start to pay. So the mobsters agree to forgive the debt if he will kill their chief rival, the Chinese bookie of the title, who turns out to be the capo di tutti capi in L.A.'s Chinatown. (The film was made two years after Roman Polanski had Jake Gittes told to forget it.) And although a full plot summary would reveal its conventional bones, it's what Cassavetes, along with the improvisatory crew of actors and his freewheling cameramen, does with the material that matters. Cosmo's club, for example, is a strip joint with a master of ceremonies called Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts), who resembles Joel Grey's M.C. of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) only in that he's heavily made up and a bit epicene. As the girls sashay about topless in shabby costumes, he sings (very badly) sentimental oldies like "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "After the Ball," and "Imagination." The effect is gruesomely hilarious, a tone that persists throughout the film. When Cosmo sets out to accomplish his murderous mission, he's been provided with a stolen car that's been hot-wired, so he can't stop anywhere once he's started. But the car blows a tire in the middle of freeway traffic, eliminating that part of the plans. Nevertheless, he persists, calling a cab to get him closer to the target. First, however, he has to buy a dozen hamburgers to feed and quiet the guard dogs, but the waitress argues with him that he really doesn't want them all put unwrapped in a single bag. These mishaps are the stuff of black comedy, and they're nicely handled. But Cassavetes's improvisatory style and the somewhat dizzying hand-held closeups on the action seem more mannered than is really good for the film. There's brilliance here, especially in the performances of Gazzara and the mainstay of many Cassavetes films, Seymour Cassel, but the whole thing seems like a rough draft of a better movie.

Ferdinando and Carolina (Lina Wertmüller, 1999)

Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (Silvana De Santis) with her daughters in Ferdinando and Carolina

Cast: Sergio Assisi, Gabriella Pession, Nicole Grimaudo, Lola Pagnani, Silvana De Santis, Matt Patresi, Carlo Caprioli, Yari Gugliucci, Mario Scacci. Screenplay: Lina Wertmüller, Raffaele La Capria. Cinematography: Blasco Giurato. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Pierluigi Leonardi. Music: Italo Greco, Paolo Raffone, Marcello Vitale.

For a time in the early to mid-1970s, Lina Wertmüller was one of the hottest directors in the world, becoming among other things the first woman ever nominated for an Oscar for best director. The film, Seven Beauties (1977), also earned her a nomination for screenwriting. And then somehow her reputation, at least in the United States, faded. She had signed a five-film contract with Warner Bros. to make movies in the English language, but the first of them, A Night Full of Rain (1978), was a box office failure and the contract was canceled. She continued to make movies in Italy, but they received little attention in the United States. Ferdinando and Carolina wasn't released theatrically here, but was available on a DVD. I caught up with it on the Criterion Channel. It's a lively and opulent historical comedy-drama about the marriage of Ferdinando of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria -- one of the 11 daughters of the Empress Maria Theresa and, incidentally, a sister of Marie Antoinette. There is a certain frenzied, over-the-top character to all of Wertmüller's films, and Ferdinando and Carolina is no exception. It consists of the reminiscences of Ferdinando, King of Naples, as he lies on his deathbed. That most of these memories are sexual is no surprise. Although he was reluctant to marry Carolina, especially after the deaths from smallpox of two of her sisters, and she was equally reluctant to marry him because his portraits showed him to be a man with a large nose, they take to each other almost instantly on their wedding night. Eventually, court intrigue and their own love affairs take a toll on the marriage. The principals, Sergio Assisi as the young Ferdinando and Gabriella Pession as Carolina, are appropriately handsome, and they throw themselves into their roles with abandon. As history, the movie is no better than most, lacking any center but the libidos of its principals, but it has a kind of energy that carries one along. And it features some spectacular interior and exterior scenes shot in various Italian locations, so that the major honors of the film really belong to production designer Enrico Job.