Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Chris Cooper, Louis Garrel, Jayne Houdyshell. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I didn't read Little Women as a child: Boys didn't read "girls' books" back then. And when I finally read it -- out loud, to my daughter -- I found it a little stiff and starchy. But it has made for some very good movies, particularly the 1933 Katharine Hepburn version directed by George Cukor and the 1994 Winona Ryder version directed by Gillian Armstrong. Somehow, I don't think we'll be calling this 2019 film the Soirse Ronan version, but rather the Greta Gerwig version. As writer and director, Gerwig has developed a complete and insightful view of the Louisa May Alcott novel, one that takes into account what was always present in the novel but brings it into the light of the 21st century: the changes in the roles and attitudes of women. By rearranging the chronology of the novel and structuring it around the development of Jo March (Ronan) as a writer, Gerwig has accomplished two things: She has allowed the other March sisters to share the spotlight that Jo hogged when she was played by Hepburn and Ryder. She has also revealed the rather sentimental endings of the other films as what they were: contrivances designed to please moviegoers, as they did readers, more than to reflect actual life. By establishing in the film that Jo is accommodating the desire of her publisher (Tracy Letts) that the heroine of her Little Women not remain a spinster, Gerwig is able to go a little bit over the top in the film, bringing back Prof. Bhaer (Louis Garrel), with whom Jo broke off over his criticisms of her writing, for a giddy reunion and wedding to Jo. This is all staged with the kind of unabashed sentimentality, including a glimpse of Jo's very improbable school, in which all the sisters and their husbands are the instructors and the curriculum includes fencing, that can't be taken with a straight face. We are meant to sense that the real Jo March might well have remained a spinster rather than capitulate to, as she puts it in the movie, "people saying that love is just all that women are fit for." It's also an ending that wouldn't have worked if Gerwig and her performers hadn't created characters that have a little more body than the source gives them: Timothée Chalamet's Laurie isn't just the slightly odd young man he is in the book (and in the performances of Douglass Montgomery and Christian Bale in the earlier versions), but rather spoiled, dilettantish, and probably alcoholic. Florence Pugh deserved the Oscar nomination she got for bringing more than just flightiness to the character of Amy. Even Beth (Eliza Scanlen) in this version is more than just the saintly innocent who dies young, and we have Gerwig's script and direction for allowing them to blossom rather than being overwhelmed by Jo, good as Ronan's performance is. I can't quite subscribe to Anthony Lane's comment that her Little Women "may just be the best film yet made by an American woman," which hardly seems fair to the work of directors from Dorothy Arzner to Ida Lupino to Kathryn Bigelow and Kelly Reichardt, but it's certainly a provocative and sometimes audacious triumph. 

Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011)

Malonn Lévana and Zoé Héran in Tomboy

Cast: Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson, Sophie Cattani, Mathieu Demy, Ryan Boubekri, Yohan Vero, Noah Vero, Cheyenne Lainé, Christel Baras, Valérie Roucher. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Chrystel Fournier. Production design: Thomas Grézaud. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Jerôme Echenoz. 

In Tomboy, Céline Sciamma tells a simple story straightforwardly, which is in itself no small achievement. Laure (Zoé Héran), is a 10-year-old girl who moves with her family to a new neighborhood where, in search of kids to play with, she meets Lisa (Jeanne Disson), who seems to be the only girl her age in the neighborhood, since she runs around with a gang of boys. When Lisa asks her name, Laure, whose hair is cut short and who wears tank tops and shorts, impulsively introduces herself as Mikael. And from then on she's* just one of the boys, playing a good game of soccer and mimicking the boys' habits like spitting. There are some uneasy moments, of course. When she can't urinate alongside the boys, she sneaks off into the woods where she's startled by a boy and wets her pants. Invited to go swimming, she cuts the top off of her swimsuit and makes a penis out of modeling clay to stuff in the bottom. And most fraught of all, Lisa develops a crush on Mikael and kisses him. At home, Laure continues to be a girl in the eyes of her mother (Sophie Cattani), who is in the late stages of a difficult pregnancy that means she must rest as much as possible, and her father (Mathieu Demy), who works long hours in the computer business. But she has a confidante in her 6-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), who keeps quiet about the deception and aids in it. The crisis comes when Laure takes Jeanne out to play with the gang and one of the boys, Rayan (Rayan Boubekri), shoves Jeanne for annoying him. Laure/Mikael retorts by beating him up, which brings Rayan's angry mother to their house to complain to Laure's mother that Rayan was beaten by her son. Painful disclosures follow. The directness with which Sciamma tells the story is the film's great strength. It doesn't devolve into "Afterschool Special" sentimentality, melodrama, or message-peddling. It understands Laure, but doesn't dabble in causalities: We see, for example, that she's much closer to her father, who lets her sit on his lap and steer their automobile, and who takes a more tolerant air toward the situation than does Laure's mother, but the film doesn't project any psychological "insight" into their relationship. Zoé Héran is extraordinary, superbly androgynous as Laure/Mikael, but all of the very young cast give the film its sturdy underpinning of truth.   

*Yes, there's a pronoun problem. I've mostly stuck with feminine pronouns for Laure because it's not entirely clear that she will continue the transition from female to male in later life. 

Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941)

Constance Bennett, Melvyn Douglas, Greta Garbo, and Robert Sterling in Two-Faced Woman

Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Ruth Gordon, Robert Sterling, Frances Carson. Screenplay: S.N. Behrman, Salka Viertel, George Oppenheimer, based on a play by Ludwig Fulda. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart. Film editing: George Boemler. Music: Bronislau Kaper. 

Two-Faced Woman is famous for only one thing: It was Greta Garbo's last film. Otherwise, it's a confused attempt at a screwball comedy, meant in part to revamp Garbo's image, which had largely been created in costume dramas like Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935), and her greatest triumph, Camille (George Cukor, 1936). Her most recent hit, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), had been hyped with the tagline "Garbo Laughs," and MGM thought giving Garbo a looser, more contemporary image might be profitable. So in Two-Faced Woman, she not only laughs, she skis, swims, and even dances. She's also reunited with her Ninotchka co-star, Melvyn Douglas, who plays Larry Blake, a New York magazine editor-publisher who falls (quite literally, down a mountainside) for Garbo's outdoorsy ski instructor. They marry in haste, and you know what that means. Garbo's character, Karin, doesn't want to live in the city, but when Larry spends more and more time there, she gets fed up and pursues him. Eventually, through a variety of plot contrivances, she pretends to be her own twin sister, Katherine, a vamp who drinks and smokes and dances -- all things that Karin doesn't do. At some point, the censors intervened and made the script indicate that Larry sees through this imposture, so that when he falls for the vivacious Katherine instead of the virtuous Karin, we know that he's just pretending. It's a familiar trope in sitcoms and screwball comedy, but the screenplay botches it badly. There are some bright moments contributed by Constance Bennett as the "other woman" in Larry's life and Ruth Gordon as his secretary, but for the most part it's confused and unfunny -- even the usually reliably brilliant Roland Young feels off his game, and Cukor, who had often demonstrated such a sure hand with this kind of material, doesn't seem to have his heart in it. That it was a critical and box office flop is often cited as the reason Garbo never made another movie; she asked to be let out of her MGM contract after it was made, but there's plenty of evidence that she toyed with returning to the screen over the remaining almost 50 years of her life.  

The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971)

Bibi Andersson and Elliott Gould in The Touch

Cast: Bibi Andersson, Elliott Gould, Max von Sydow, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: Ann-Christin Lobråten, P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren. Music: Carl Michael Bellman, Peter Covent, Jan Johansson. 

I didn't believe a minute of The Touch, and not just because Elliott Gould was so terribly miscast as the male lead in a romantic drama. The film struck me as formulaic in so many predictable ways, particularly the heavy-handed contrast of the milieu from which Karin Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) comes -- pristine, middle-class, Nordic -- and the one from which her lover, David Kovac (Gould), comes -- sloppy, intellectual, Jewish. There's also a thudding use of symbols, like the long-immured statue of the Virgin and Child that's infested with a species of beetles that has lain dormant until David, an archaeologist, uncovers it. It's a film with nothing new to tell us, or at least nothing that Ingmar Bergman hasn't told us in better films about troubled marriages and destructive love affairs. It was heavily panned on release and a box office failure, but it has since been revived by admirers who find it carefully crafted and subtly unsettling. I admire the craft, including Sven Nykvist's always evocative photography and Andersson's dedicated performance, but it still seems to me a flawed and obvious story.  

The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010)

Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Mark Wahlberg in The Fighter

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Melissa Leo, Mickey O'Keefe, Jack McGee, Melissa McMeekin, Bianca Hunter, Erica McDermott, Jill Quigg, Dendrie Taylor, Kate B. O'Brien, Jenna Lamia, Frank Renzulli. Screenplay: Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, Keith Dorrington. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Judy Becker. Film editing: Pamela Martin. Music: Michael Brook. 

You don't have to be familiar with the real-life Micky Ward to know that the movie about him is going to end with the scrappy underdog coming from behind to win the championship. All you need is to be familiar with the genre of sports movies, especially boxing movies, to which The Fighter belongs. And you don't have to know much about the acting careers of Christian Bale and Melissa Leo to know that they were shoo-ins for the Oscars for best performances in supporting roles. All you need to know is that the Academy loves flamboyant acting in roles as working-class characters. If that sounds a little cynical, I don't really mean it that way: Bale and Leo deserved their awards, partly because they help bring a perhaps overfamiliar (not to say clichéd) story to life. The Fighter works because it's nuanced and textured in ways that films heavily shadowed by genre history have to be in order to hold our interest. And a lot of the nuance and texture was contributed by the less showy performances of Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams -- and she at least got a nomination. It helps, too, that Wahlberg, who grew up in a Boston-area working class neighborhood much like the Lowell of the film, loved the story and its characters, and as producer made it work. You might gather from my opening that boxing movies are a genre I don't have a great fondness for, and you'd be right. But there's a lot to enjoy about The Fighter, including the ambience Wahlberg probably had a lot of say in creating, like the chorus of Micky Ward's big-haired sisters, waiting to pounce on an intruder like Charlene Fleming (Adams) who had the effrontery to go to college but return to the neighborhood and claim equality. The fight scenes are well-done, I guess, and I couldn't help getting caught up in their momentum. Still, it'll be a while before I choose to watch another boxing movie.     

Here Is Your Life (Jan Troell, 1966)

Eddie Axberg in Here Is Your Life

Cast: Eddie Axberg, Ulla Sjöblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, Per Oscarsson, Ulf Palme, Signe Stade, Allan Edwall, Max von Sydow, Ulla Akselson, Stig Törnblom. Screenplay: Bengt Forslund, Jan Troell, based on novels by Eyvind Johnson. Cinematography: Jan Troell. Art direction: Rolf Boman. Film editing: Jan Troell. Music: Erik Nordgren. 

Life doesn't have a plot. It's a series of incidents, some causally connected, some not. At least that's the life presented in Here Is Your Life, a coming-of-age story about a boy in Sweden during the years that comprised World War I. (Not that the war had much to do with it in neutral Sweden.) What we see is the emerging consciousness of Olof Persson (Eddie Axberg), a boy who, because his father is seriously ill, was sent to live with a foster family and when he is on the brink of turning 14, goes off to seek his fortune. That takes him first to dangerous places like a logging camp and a sawmill, then to work for a man who runs a movie theater, including a stint as an itinerant projectionist, carrying the camera from place to place. We also see him working on the railroad and trying to organize workers into a strike. Bright and highly literate, he gets his ideas from Nietzsche and Marx, and tries to apply them to the world he encounters. The film ends with Olof, now on the verge of manhood, striking out alone as the camera soars away from him, a tiny figure isolated on the railroad tracks running through a snowy landscape. It's a lovely, disjointed but somehow coherent movie, with enigmatic characters and violent events mixed with mundane but often striking ones. His sexual awakening occurs, too, though not without a bit of violence and confusion there: Once, his rough male coworkers indulge in a bit of horseplay with Olof that verges on rape. Later, he strikes up a friendship with a somewhat older man that has homoerotic overtones when the two swim naked and afterward dance together. The encounters with girls are more typical of the portrayal of growing sexual awareness in film: He falls for a pretty girl but rejects her when he sees her with someone else and a friend tells him she's promiscuous. He deflowers another young girl and leaves her in tears. And he has an affair with a very experienced older woman, marvelously played by Ulla Sjöblom. Yet Troell's film never sinks into clichés or banality, and it's held together by the director-cinematographer-editor's vision and by the steady, attractive performance of Axberg in the key role of Olof. There are also some appearances by such familiar Swedish actors as Allan Edwall, Ulf Palme, Gunnar Björnstrand, and, of course, Max von Sydow. The film's 168-minute length is a bit daunting -- it lost 45 minutes in its American release -- and Troell never spells things out for the viewer, leaving us to explicate the changes in Olof's life on our own. But the epic ambition involved in adapting a quartet of novels by Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson somehow results in an intimate portrait of growing up.    

The Place Beyond the Pines (Derek Cianfrance, 2012)

Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes in The Place Beyond the Pines

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Ben Mendelsohn, Emory Cohen, Dane DeHaan, Mahershala Ali, Harris Yulin, Rose Byrne, Robert Clohessy, Bruce Greenwood, Ray Liotta. Screenplay: Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Inbal Weinberg. Film editing: Jim Helton, Ron Patane. Music: Mike Patton. 

There's a line in the middle of The Place Beyond the Pines that perhaps echoes more in the year of George Floyd than it did even in the year the film was released. A veteran cop named Deluca (Ray Liotta) is praising the rookie Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper) for taking out robbery suspect Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), who crashed through a window and died after they exchanged gunfire. Deluca says he's been on the force for years and has only had to draw his gun two or three times, and here Avery is with a righteous kill at the start of his career. "And he was white," Deluca adds, marveling, as if killing any other kind of suspect would be routine. To his credit, Avery is not so happy about the kill, aware that he shot first and that he maybe doesn't really deserve being celebrated as a hero. Before long he will finger Deluca as a key figure in the corruption of the Schenectady, N.Y., police department. Avery has a law degree, but he joined the force -- over the objections of his father, a judge (Harris Yulin) -- because he wanted firsthand experience of law enforcement, so he parlays his exposure of the bad cops into a job as an assistant D.A., and 15 years later is running for state attorney general. But this is, as director Derek Cianfrance has said, a fable about the sins of the fathers. Both Avery and Luke had infant sons at the time of their encounter, and the boys are fated to meet. The movie actually begins with Luke's story: When he learns that he has fathered a child with Romina (Eva Mendes), Luke quits his job as a carnival motorcycle stuntman and tries to settle down and become the boy's father. Romina isn't too happy about this: She has moved on and married Kofi Kancam (Mahershala Ali), who is the only father the boy, named Jacob, will ever really know. Luke's efforts to go straight don't last long: Wanting to earn money to help support his son, he gets involved in a string of bank robberies, which eventually lead to the confrontation with Avery that results in Luke's death. The paths of Jacob (Dane DeHaan) and Avery's son, A.J. (Emory Cohen), finally cross in high school. A.J., who has been sidelined by his father's political ambitions, has turned into a swaggering, partying adolescent, and he gets Jacob into real trouble that eventuates in a confrontation with the man who killed his father. Cianfrance delivers a vivid crime thriller, but the film is a little overwhelmed by its epic ambitions, especially the thundering coincidence of the meeting of Jacob and A.J., which the filmmakers want us to see as a mythic working out of fate, but which really boils down to old-fashioned melodrama. The 140-minute run time also betrays the film's slackness, and the starry casting, especially of Ryan Gosling in a role that ends halfway through the movie, doesn't pay off very well. Fine actors like Ali and Rose Byrne (as Avery's wife) are wasted in tiny parts. In short, ambition is as much Cianfrance's undoing as it is that of his characters.  

Brink of Life (Ingmar Bergman, 1958)

Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson in Brink of Life

Cast: Eva Dahlbeck, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Sjöberg, Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz, Inga Landgré. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman, Ulla Isaaksson, based on novels by Isaksson. Cinematography: Max Wilén. Production design: Bibi Lindström. Film editing: Carl-Olov Skeppstedt. 

For all the frankness of its subject matter, Ingmar Bergman's Brink of Life is as formulaic as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s. Three women are sharing a room in the obstetrics ward of a hospital. One of them, Cecilia (Ingrid Thulin), has miscarried and is being treated for bleeding. Another, Stina (Eva Dahlbeck), is in almost the opposite condition: She has gone well past term in her pregnancy and is there hoping that labor will be induced if it doesn't occur right away. The third, Hjördis (Bibi Andersson), is only in her third month, but she has experienced some bleeding -- perhaps, we learn, because she's unwed and doesn't want the baby, so she's been trying to cause a spontaneous abortion. Cecilia is in the throes of depression, blaming herself for the miscarriage because neither she nor her cold, priggish husband, Anders (Erland Josephson), was entirely certain that they wanted a child. Again, Stina is the precise opposite: She's rapturous about having a baby, and so is her husband, Harry (Max von Sydow). Between these polarities, Hjördis is fighting with the social worker who is trying to advise her on how she can live after the baby arrives. The best advice is, of course, to go home to her parents, but since she left precisely because she doesn't get along with her mother, she strongly rejects the idea of facing the disapproval she expects to encounter from her. It's all a setup for the kind of plot resolutions you might expect: Cecilia grows stronger and chooses to face up to her disintegrating marriage and a childless future. Stina loses the baby in a prolonged and difficult labor. And Hjördis discovers that maybe her mother isn't so bad after all. There's a feeling of anticlimax about these eventualities. That the film works at all is the product of the performances of the three actresses, along with Bergman's steadily unsentimental direction, which makes the predictability of the story more tolerable than it might be in a Hollywood tearjerker. Still, I can't help feeling that the stories of what happens to Cecilia, Stina, and Hjördis after the film ends would make a more interesting movie.   

The Night of the Iguana (John Huston, 1964)

Ava Gardner and Richard Burton in The Night of the Iguana

Cast: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon, Grayson Hall, Skip Ward, Cyril Delevanti, Mary Boylan. Screenplay: Anthony Veiller, John Huston, based on a play by Tennessee Williams. Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa. Art direction: Stephen B. Grimes. Film editing: Ralph Kemplen. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

It's a movie adaptation of a play by Tennessee Williams, so you know you're going to see a lot of Acting and hear a lot of rather florid dialogue. As for the capital-A acting, it's Ava Gardner who almost steals the show, just by being her gorgeous, free-spirited self. It's a great part for an actress in her middle years (Gardner was 42), as the casting of Bette Davis in the original Broadway production suggests. Gardner plays Maxine Faulk, the proprietor of a slightly louche Puerto Vallarta hotel, who finds herself welcoming to the hostelry an old friend, the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton), along with a company of teachers from a Texas Baptist women's college, whose tour bus he has just hijacked. He has come to recuperate from a variety of scandals, including some carrying-on with the nubile Charlotte Goodall (Sue Lyon), who is chaperoned by the up-tight Judith Fellowes (Grayson Hall in an Oscar-nominated performance). Maxine is reluctant to shelter Shannon's flock, but his apparent disordered state of body and mind breaks down her resistance. Soon they are joined by another itinerant pair, Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and her nonagenarian grandfather, known as Nonno (Cyril Delevanti) and billed by Hannah as "the world's oldest living poet." If I give the acting award to Gardner out of this company it's because her part is the most entertaining and she knows it. Kerr is stuck in yet another of her spinster roles, and she's given the burden of becoming the voice of truth and righteousness in the film. Fortunately, she's more than up to it, making Hannah a more interesting character than you might expect. It's Burton who comes off worst in the film, maybe because the screenplay's opening-up of the role, giving Shannon scenes that weren't originally contrived by Williams, fragments the character and causes Burton to have to act out what should have been a backstory better left to our imagination. We didn't need the prologue in which Shannon scandalizes his church and the scenes of rebellious misbehavior along the tour to understand why he's so close to a breakdown when they arrive at Maxine's hotel -- Burton is more than capable of delivering that kind of exposition, and seeing them only complicates our reaction to the character. So it's a mixed bag as a movie, though not without its pleasures and some genuinely moving scenes. It also suffers less from Hollywood censorship than most of the film adaptations of Williams's plays: By 1964 things had loosened up enough that the screenplay can be a little more explicit about things that had been swept under the carpet in the 1950s. I do happen to find that the implication that Miss Fellowes is a closeted lesbian unnecessary and tasteless, especially since it inspires disgust in the otherwise freewheeling Maxine, but such were the times.   

Revenge (Yermek Shinarbayev, 1989)

Cast: Aleksandr Pan, Valentina Te, Kasim Zhakibayev, Lyubov Germanova, Oleg Li, Juozas Budraitis, Zinaida Em, Maksim Munzuk, Yerik Zholzhaksynov, Nikolai Tacheyev. Screenplay: Anatoli Kim, based on his novel. Cinematography: Sergei Kosmanev. Production design: Yelena Yelitseyeva. Film editing: Polina Shtain. Music: Vladislav Shut. 

Rhapsodic, enigmatic, brutal, poetic, probing, obscure ... I could go on assembling adjectives to describe Yermek Shinarbayev's Revenge. It may just suffice to say that it was a film made in Kazakhstan as the Soviet Union was crumbling around it, and that it's an attempt to bridge civilizations: The dialogue is in Russian, while the story deals with Koreans. The director is Kazakh, the screenwriter a Russian citizen with Korean ancestry. The story deals with the attempt to avenge the murder of a little girl by her half-crazed teacher, and it spans several decades in the 20th century -- not to mention that it's preceded by a prologue set in 17th-century Korea. But it's not as head-spinning as that sounds: Though there are mysterious, even magical characters involved in its plot, that plot is relatively traditional, a matter of crime and retribution. Those versed in the history of the Korean diaspora into Russia may have an edge on those of us who aren't, but the impact of the story, or perhaps stories -- the film is divided into seven "tales" plus the prologue -- is strong even if you let the eccentricity of the way they're told just wash over you. 

Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948)

Kurt Kreuger, Linda Darnell, and Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours

Cast: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Kurt Kreuger, Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, Al Bridge, Julius Tannen, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Robert Finch, Stuart Gilmore. Musical director: Alfred Newman. 

Preston Sturges's familiar "stock company" of character actors like William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Julius Tannen, Robert Greig, and others served an important role in creating a context in which otherwise straight leading actor types like Joel McCrea, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck could let themselves go and behave in ways that they normally wouldn't on screen. No film demonstrates this function better than Unfaithfully Yours, in which the silliness of performers like Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, and others let Rex Harrison and Linda Darnell loosen up and go a little bit crazy -- or in Harrison's case, quite a bit more than crazy. Psychotic, to be blunt about it. This was Sturges's least successful with audiences of his major comic films of the 1940s, and it marked the start of the  decline of his career. It may be that postwar audiences were not ready to laugh at the kind of mayhem that Unfaithfully Yours contains -- after all, a man brutally slashing his wife with a freshly sharpened razor is not an image that normally elicits laughs. There's a failure of tone in the way Sturges writes and stages the scene, which takes place only in the mind of Harrison's character, Sir Alfred De Carter, as he conducts a symphony orchestra in a performance of Rossini's Overture to Semiramide (somewhat padded out with a Rossiniesque pastiche by music director Alfred Newman). It's all a setup, of course, for the slapstick sequence in which Sir Alfred tries to follow through on the imagined murder, only to screw things up monumentally and hilariously. But the premise is sour to start with. It encourages us to believe that Sir Alfred is the kind of man who would not only imagine killing his wife but also follow through on the idea persistently, like Wile E. Coyote attempting to off the Road Runner. The film may end with the restoration of order, and the De Carters cozily snuggling up to each other, but it's hard to resist the thought that something else could happen to make him snap tomorrow. Still, that's the major blemish on what is, if you don't think too closely about it, a very funny movie with one of Harrison's best performances, and a lot of sublime comic bits supplied by the stock company players. Sturges's dialogue, as usual, is mile-a-minute laugh lines, going by so fast that the captioners have trouble keeping up with them. It would be pure giddy fun, if the plot weren't intrinsically so dark. 

Law of the Border (Lütfi Akad, 1966)

Yilmaz Güney and Hikmet Olgun in Law of the Border

Cast: Yilmaz Güney, Pervin Par, Erol Tas, Atilla Ergün, Tuncer Necmioglu, Muharrem Gürses, Hikmet Olgun, Aydemir Akbas, Sirri Elitas, Tuncel Kurtiz, Osman Alyanak, Ahmet Dunyal Topatan. Screenplay: Lütfi Akad, Yilmaz Güney. Cinematography: Ali Ugur. Film editing: Ali Ün. Music: Nida Tüfekçi. 

There's a new lawman in this border town, and a pretty new schoolteacher. There's a charismatic outlaw who wants to go straight for the sake of his young son. There's a predatory landowner. There are gunfights and shootouts and a conflict between farmers and ranchers (well, sheepherders). There are, in short, all the tropes and formulas (not to say clichés) of the American Western. But the border in this case is the one between Turkey and Syria, which only goes to show how potent and universal the myth and melodrama that informs both our Westerns and Lütfi Akad's Law of the Border really is. The presiding genius behind this film is not so much the director, although Akad is a fine one, as the star, Yilmaz Güney, who plays the would-be reformed outlaw, Hidir. The film was based on his story, although much revised by Akad, and it solidified him as a major star, kind of the Clint Eastwood of Turkish film. Like Eastwood, Güney not only acted but also directed and dabbled in politics. He was a Kurd, a member of an ethnic group that is the nexus of conflict in at least three countries. His political activity got him in trouble with the Turkish junta and led to his exile and an attempt to destroy all copies of his movies, including Law of the Border. Only one badly deteriorated print of the film remained by the time it was unearthed and an attempt was made to restore it. Even the flawed restoration, however, is a fascinating look at a region that still pervades the headlines. But as the comparison to our Westerns suggests, it's a film that transcends boundaries, a story about old and new, freedom and repression, tradition and change, and other eternal dichotomies. Güney's performance is mesmerizing, and he's well-supported by a cast that includes non-professionals drawn from the village where the film was shot, adding a documentary realism to a familiar story.  

Manila in the Claws of Light (Lino Brocka, 1975)

Bembol Roco in Manila in the Claws of Light

Cast: Bembol Roco, Hilda Koronel, Lou Salvador Jr., Joonee Gamboa, Pio De Castro III, Danilo Posadas, Joe Jardi, Spanky Manikan, Edipolo Erosido, Pancho Pelagio, Lily Gamboa Mendoza, Tommy Yap, Juling Bagabaldo. Screenplay: Clodualdo Del Mundo Jr., based on a novel by Edgardo Reyes. Cinematography: Mike De Leon, Clodualdo Del Mundo Jr. Film editing: Ike Jarlego Jr., Edgardo Jarlego. Music: Max Jocson.

The title, Manila in the Claws of Light (in which "Light" is sometimes translated as "Neon"), is enigmatic. But there's nothing enigmatic about this straightforwardly harrowing look at the working class in the Marcos-era Philippines. The protagonist, Julio (Bembol Roco), has left his village, where he was a fisherman, to search for his girlfriend, Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), who was lured away to Manila with other girls by a woman who called herself "Mrs. Cruz" and promised good factory jobs and schooling. When we first meet Julio, he's scrounging for work at construction sites, having been robbed of the money he brought with him to the city. The other workmen help Julio survive after he collapses from hunger on the first day, and their friendship and solidarity in the face of the bosses who routinely cheat them of their full pay help get him on his feet. In his spare time, he continues his search for Ligaya, having learned that she's been lured into prostitution and is now the mistress of Ah Tek, who runs an import-export business. Julio stakes out Ah Tek's business in Manila's Chinatown, hoping for a glimpse of Ligaya. Meanwhile, he endures unemployment with the help of his friends, and survives a bad period by working briefly in a male brothel. His eventual reunion with Ligaya is brief and tragic. The film provides a fascinating look at the underworld of a city that could stand for almost any other metropolis, and director Lino Brocka keeps it moving with a well-paced alternation between desperation and recovery until the shattering end. The cast is uniformly fine, and the realistic view of the city keeps the story from tilting into melodrama.

Bigger (George Gallo, 2018)

Tyler Hoechlin, Calum Von Moger, and Aneurin Barnard in Bigger

Cast: Tyler Hoechlin, Julianne Hough, Kevin Durand, Aneurin Barnard, Robert Forster, DJ Qualls, Victoria Justice, Steve Guttenberg, Calum Von Moger, Max Martini, Colton Haynes, Tom Arnold. Screenplay: Andy Weiss, George Gallo, Brad Furman, Ellen Furman. Cinematography: Michael Negrin. Production design: Stephen J. Lineweaver. Film editing: Sophie Corra. Music: Jeff Beal. 

There is probably a good movie to be made about bodybuilding and fitness, but Bigger isn't it. A good one would deal with the ongoing questions about supplement use and abuse, the influence of steroids and other performance enhancers and practices, and the role of LGBT people in popularizing the bodybuilder image. Bigger ignores the role of supplements and enhancers almost entirely, and reduces the effect of gays on bodybuilding to just one of the stigmas Joe Weider (Tyler Hoechlin) encounters on his way to success as a promoter. What we get instead is a cliché rags to riches story, in which Weider battles antisemitism and a ruthless publisher-promoter called Bill Hauk (Kevin Durand) in the film, but based on fitness entrepreneur Bob Hoffman, to become a leading magazine publisher, fitness equipment and supplement manufacturer, and promoter of professional bodybuilding competitors, most notably Arnold Schwarzenegger (Calum Von Moger). Unfortunately, the film generates no real tension in tracking Weider's rise: The ugliness of the antisemitism he encounters feels incidental, rather than pervasive, and the tension with his apparently mentally disturbed mother (Nadine Lewington) feels like hack psychology. Hoechlin is a good, attractive actor, but he's forced to deliver his lines in a strange, tight accent that is, I suppose, meant to be Montreal-Canadian, but just manages to be distracting, especially since it doesn't match the one used by Robert Forster in the scenes in which he plays the older Joe Weider. Durand goes way over the top as the movie's villain, but there's some fun to be had in Von Moger's imitation of Schwarzenegger. It's a little hard to see who the film is for: People into bodybuilding won't learn anything they didn't already know -- and will probably take issue with what the film tells them about the actual people involved -- and people who aren't will take issue with the uncritical approach to the subject. 

On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951)

Doris Day and Gordon MacRae in On Moonlight Bay

Cast: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, Billy Gray, Leon Ames, Rosemary DeCamp, Jack Smith, Mary Wickes, Ellen Corby, Sig Arno, Jeffrey Stevens, Eddie Marr, Henry East. Screenplay: Jack Rose, Melville Shavelson, based on stories by Booth Tarkington. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Douglas Bacon. Film editing: Thomas Reilly. Music: Max Steiner. 

Leon Ames must have felt right at home playing the paterfamilias of a Midwestern household in 1917 in the Warner Bros. musical On Moonlight Bay: It was the same role he had played in 1944, when he was the paterfamilias of a St. Louis household in 1904 in Vincente Minnelli's MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. In both films he comes under fire for making the household move, upsetting his wife (Rosemary DeCamp in the former movie, Mary Astor in the latter), his daughter (Doris Day/Judy Garland), his bratty kid (Billy Gray/Margaret O'Brien), and even the family servant (Mary Wickes/Marjorie Main). In both films, the daughter falls in love with the boy next door (Gordon MacRae/Tom Drake). There's even a big scene set at Christmas in both movies. Granted, On Moonlight Bay suffers from comparison with Meet Me in St. Louis. For one thing, the songs in the latter are better, and Garland brings a note of heartbreak to the film that Day can't quite match. But the Warners movie gets a little life from a screenplay based on the Penrod stories by Booth Tarkington, a writer not much read anymore but who inspired two classic movies, Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935) and The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942). The stories, about the misadventures of an 11-year-old boy, clearly inspired On Moonlight Bay's subplot about Wesley Winfield (Gray), kid brother to Marjorie Winfield (Day). Wesley is a scamp who purloins one of Marjorie's letters to her boyfriend, William Sherman (MacRae), and tries to pass it off in English class as his own composition. He torments Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith), who tries to court Marjorie, and he even manages to convince his teacher, Miss Stevens (Ellen Corby), that the reason he falls asleep in class is that his father is a drunkard who abuses his mother and sister. Much of this stuff is clumsily directed, but it's an effective enough distraction from the rather routine romance of Marjorie and William and from the tepid musical numbers, set mostly to old parlor ballads and turn-of-the-century love songs like the one that gives the film its title. Day is in sweet voice as usual, but her role in the movie and the songs she's asked to sing don't give her much to do, and she doesn't really have much chemistry with MacRae. Nevertheless, On Moonlight Bay was popular enough that it inspired a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler, 1953), that reunited most of the cast. 

Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006)

Will Oldham and Daniel London in Old Joy

Cast: Daniel London, Will Oldham, Tanya Smith, Robin Rosenberg, Keri Moran, Autumn Campbell, Steve Doughton, Matt McCormick, Darren Prolsen, Jillian Wiseneck. Screenplay: Jonathan Raymond, Kelly Reichardt. Cinematography: Peter Sillen. Film editing: Kelly Reichardt. Music: Yo La Tengo. 

After watching Old Joy, I went to IMDb to check if I had ever seen Daniel London or Will Oldham in anything else. Turns out, I probably have: Both have done several movies and a lot of TV, but never anything else that forces them to hold the screen the way they do in Kelly Reichardt's film. Often, the very unfamiliarity of the "stars" of a movie is its greatest strength, allowing you to see the characters they play unfiltered through a previously established persona. No matter how effectively someone like Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis may transform themselves from film to film, you're still watching them act rather than be a character; you're conscious to some degree of what they've done before. The freshness of Old Joy lies in getting to know Mark (London) and Kurt (Oldham), to work out their backstories and speculate about their motives. If Mark and Kurt had been played by, let's say, Jake Gyllenhaal and Seth Rogen, we'd have different responses to the characters than we do. Old Joy is a movie without a plot: Mark gets a call from his old friend, Kurt, who wants to take him to a hot springs he has discovered in the Oregon backwoods. Mark feels obligated to check with his pregnant wife, Tanya (Tanya Smith), before setting out on this weekend adventure -- the slight tension in their conversation hints that Tanya doesn't quite trust Kurt, and that maybe Mark would be happy with an excuse not to go. But the two men, accompanied by Mark's dog, Lucy (played by Reichardt's own dog, Lucy, the "co-star" of her 2008 film Wendy and Lucy), set out for the weekend. They get lost on the way to the springs and spend the night camping out in a sort of dumping ground on a back road, but get their bearings in the morning and hike to their destination, an isolated spring in the middle of the forest with no one else around. Mark soaks blissfully in his hot tub, but Kurt is more unsettled, getting out to smoke some weed and to give Mark a shoulder rub. Then they return to the city, where at the end we see Kurt wandering restlessly at night. There are no feral mountain men to threaten the two, as in Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), and no animal predators menace them -- any such tensions we supply from our own imaginations. What we are left with is a portrait of an aging, fraying friendship of two men who have gone different ways in their lives, so that at midlife Mark is settled and relatively prosperous (he drives a Volvo, that token vehicle of the middle class urban liberal), whereas Kurt is still feckless, rootless, and maybe intensely frustrated -- there are some hints that Kurt is sexually attracted to Mark. The past weighs on both of them: The film's title comes from a line spoken by Kurt, "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy." It's a film to be savored, to be recalled in the hours after you've watched it. 

Too Late to Die Young (Dominga Sotomayor, 2018)

Demian Hernández in Too Late to Die Young

Cast: Demian Hernández, Antar Machado, Magdalena Tótoro, Matías Oviedo, Andrés Aliaga, Antonia Zegers, Mercedes Mujica, Gabriel Cañas, Alejandro Goic, Eyal Meyer, Cecilia Rainero, Michael Silva, Luciano Jadrievich, Pablo Giesen, Millantú Hilbert, Alejandro Garrós. Screenplay: Domingo Sotomayor. Cinematography: Inti Briones. Production design: Estefania Larrain. Film editing: Catalina Marín Duarte. 

Too Late to Die Young tosses viewers into an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and leaves us to figure out where and who they are, and why they're doing things. It's usual for movies to do this, of course, and we've all learned to follow the clues that lead us to the answers. But Dominga Sotomayor doesn't make it easy for us, especially because there are so many characters that it takes us time to figure out which one is the center of the film. In this case, it's Sofia (Demian Hernández), a teenage girl struggling to find her way into womanhood, and that's a situation familiar enough to give us some grounding. Eventually, we realize, if we're patient and attentive, that the group of people around Sofia are Chilean families who are fleeing urban life (and politics) in the city of Santiago, the lights of which we can see from their mountainside retreat, a kind of latter-day hippie commune. As the sometimes feckless adults do their thing, Sofia develops an infatuation with the somewhat older Ignacio (Matías Oviedo), as meanwhile a boy her own age, Lucas (Antar Machado), is falling for her. Sofia's father and mother have separated, and she has come to this new community with him but longs to live with her mother. She expects the mother to visit them for the New Year's celebration but is crushed when she doesn't arrive. The other character on whom the film focuses is young Clara Magdalena Tótoro), who gets separated from her dog, Frida, finds her again (perhaps), but loses her once more. It's a kind of metaphor for the unstable relationships that are the core of the film, which has been seen as a commentary on the instability of Chilean politics and society after the fall of Pinochet. The New Year's party becomes a central focus of the film, and it precipitates the film's denouement by sparking a forest fire that destroys the encampment. It's a movie full of well-observed moments and fine performances by its mostly young cast, especially Hernández, who transitioned to male after the film's shooting ended. 

The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996)

Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, and Parker Posey in The Daytrippers

Cast: Hope Davis, Anne Meara, Parker Posey, Liev Schreiber, Pat McNamara, Stanley Tucci, Campbell Scott, Stephanie Venditto, Marc Grapey, Douglas McGrath, Marcia Gay Harden. Screenplay: Greg Mottola. Cinematography: John Inwood. Production design: Bonnie J. Brinkley. Film editing: Anne McCabe. Music: Richard Martinez.

The Daytrippers is a mashup of subgenres: It's a road movie, a marital dramedy, a midlife crisis fable, and even an extended mother-in-law joke. No wonder it took so long to find a distributor: How do you market a movie like this? But it's also a wonderful sleeper find, if you just happen to come across it on the Criterion Channel, as I did. First of all, it's a terrific ensemble of skilled actors, some of them cast against type, like Marcia Gay Harden as a ditz in an extended cameo. The premise is this: Louis and Eliza D'Amico (Stanley Tucci and Hope Davis) are apparently happily married, but when he leaves their Long Island home one day for his editorial job in the city, she finds a note that suggests he may be having an affair with someone named Sandy. When she tells her mother (Anne Meara) about this, Mom insists that her husband (Pat McNamara) drive everyone into Manhattan to confront Louis and uncover the identity of Sandy. "Everyone" includes Eliza's sister, Jo (Parker Posey), and her boyfriend, Carl (Liev Schreiber), who happen to be visiting for the Thanksgiving holiday. This is not exactly your close-knit family, as it's held together loosely by the domineering mother, kept just this side of caricature by Meara's shrewdly calculated performance. The rest is a series of misadventures, as the family follows a series of clues and false leads, winding up in often hilarious but also poignant little side trips. It's the lack of go-ahead story that I think tripped up some of the movie's initial critics, like Roger Ebert, who found the movie, especially Meara's character, annoying. But there's so much about The Daytrippers that's closely observed and skillfully performed that I found myself wanting to see it again just to watch the way some brilliant performances -- Schreiber is especially wonderful in a role that's a 180 from tough guy Ray Donovan -- mesh into a true ensemble.

Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953)

Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel in Kiss Me Kate

Cast: Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Tommy Rall, Bobby Van, Bob Fosse, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore, Kurt Kasznar, Ann Codee, Willard Parker, Ron Randell, Carol Haney, Jeanne Coyne. Screenplay: Dorothy Kingsley, based on a musical play by Sam Spewack and Bella Spewack, and on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Charles Rosher. Art direction: Urie McCleary, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters. Music: musical direction by Saul Chaplin, André Previn, songs by Cole Porter.

Censorship has erased some of the bawdiness from Cole Porter's lyrics but his music still remains. Howard Keel is swaggeringly handsome as Fred Graham/Petruchio and Ann Miller is thoroughly vivacious as Lois Lane/Bianca. She is accompanied by a trio of terrific dancers, Tommy Rall, Bobby Van, and Bob Fosse, in numbers choreographed by Hermes Pan (with some uncredited assistance from Fosse in the "From This Moment On" number, where he gets an extended duo with an almost unbilled Carol Haney). The adaptation of the Broadway hit stumbles a little in Dorothy Kingsley's screenplay, but rights itself in most of the musical numbers. George Sidney was never as skillful a director as his MGM contemporaries Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, but the stretches between the story parts and the song and dance parts aren't overlong. The only major drawback to this version of Kiss Me Kate is Kathryn Grayson, who pouts a lot as Lilli Vanessi/Katherine, but doesn't have much chemistry with Keel and fails to make the character someone we care about. Her voice, too, has that vinegary edge to it that even careful miking can't hide. Nor do Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore succeed in their attempts at clowning as the goofy gangsters with their supposedly show-stopping number, "Brush Up Your Shakespeare." (How, by the way, did the line "Kick her right in the Coriolanus" get past the censors?) Still, this is a solid B-plus MGM musical, and an honorable attempt at remaking a stage version. It was made in 3-D, during the brief period in the 1950s when the studios were trying to win audiences back away from their televisions, which explains some of the exaggerated perspective of the stage sets and the occasional instances of things being tossed at the camera.

Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)

Bill Gunn and Seret Scott in Losing Ground

Cast: Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, Duane Jones, Billie Allen, Maritza Rivera. Screenplay: Kathleen Collins. Cinematography: Ronald K. Gray. Film editing: Kathleen Collins, Ronald K. Gray. Music: Michael Minard.

A philosophy professor and her husband, a successful artist, lease a summer home in the country, where she tries to work on a paper about ecstatic experience and he is struck by the beauty of the countryside as well as the young Puerto Rican women in the neighborhood. Her discontent with the isolation and his flirtations leads to some reassessments of their marriage. This is the stuff of which New Yorker short stories are written, and writer-director Kathleen Collins makes her best of it. But did we mention that Sara Rogers (Seret Scott) and her husband, Victor (Bill Gunn), are Black? It's not something that Collins makes much of in the expected sense: They don't experience bigotry or discrimination in the course of the film. Collins, who was also Black, does something more deft with the fact: She keeps it present in the consciousness and the dialogue of the Rogerses, who seem to cling to the antiquated term "Negro" in ways that we don't expect from hip, educated people in the 1980s. Losing Ground is not about race, but it's informed by it in subtle ways. The film was made on a shoestring budget and sometimes shows it: The photography is sometimes murky and some of the acting a little amateurish. But its exploration of ideas and emotions is the product of keen observation and sharp writing. Collins died only a few years after the film was made, and didn't get to see it find an audience: The film played only at a few festivals and never received a theatrical release, but it was greeted with praise by critics after it was screened at a retrospective of Black films in 2015.

Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975)

Thierno Leye and Dyella Touré in Xala

Cast: Thierno Leye, Myriam Niang, Seune Samb, Fatim Diagne, Younouss Seye, Mustapha Ture, Iliaman Sagna, Dieynaba Niang, Langouste Drobe, Farba Sarr, Abdoulaye Boye, Papa Diop, Martin Sow, Mamadou Sarr, Makhouredia Gueye. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene, based on his novel. Cinematography: Georges Caristan, Orlando L. López, Seydina D. Saye, Farba Seck. Film editing: Florence Eymon. Music: Samba Diabare Samb.

Xala is a sharp-edged, often very funny satire on the failings of postcolonial Africa, namely, the adoption of European ways to the neglect of traditional African culture. The result is a kind of impotence, which is what the title means, and which manifests itself not only in the sexual dysfunction experienced by El Hadj Aboucader Beye (Thierno Leye) on the night of his wedding to his third wife but also in the dysfunctional business and political world to which El Hadj belongs. His first wife, Adja (Seune Samb), and his second, Oumi (Younouss Seye), are very much alive and present to kibitz at the wedding reception. Adja sticks to traditional garb, while Oumi adopts European dress, so they represent two polarities in El Hadj's life and culture. He also has a daughter by Adja, Rama (Myriam Niang), who is sharply critical of his Westernized ways: When he offers her a glass of water and pours it from an Evian bottle, she snaps that she doesn't drink imported water. (Evian becomes another symbol of his European ways, when we see his chauffeur use a bottle of it to wash El Hadj's Mercedes and another to fill up the radiator.) Rama also refuses to speak anything but Wolof to El Hadj, even though he replies in French. The film deals largely with El Hadj's attempts to cure his sexual dysfunction, which leads him eventually to the holy man of his chauffeur's village, who temporarily cures him, but then exacts a revenge when El Hadj's check bounces, teaching him a lesson about ignoring the people of his country while kowtowing to the Europeans. Xala is a keenly observant movie, sometimes to the point of discomfort, and though its two-hour run time is a little slackly paced and the acting sometimes not all you could wish, it makes its point effectively.

Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match

Cast: Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Buster Phelps. Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard, Kubec Glasmon, John Bright. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ray Curtiss.

This crisply directed and tightly edited Warner Bros. crime movie is almost too snugly put together. It runs for only a little over an hour and still manages to tell a pretty complex story that spans the years from 1919 to 1932 in the lives of three women as they grow from schoolgirls to adults. The "bad girl," Mary Keaton, is first played by Virginia Davis as a tomboy showing off her black bloomers on the monkey bars. She barely graduates from elementary school, then spends time in a reformatory before taking a job as a show girl, played by Joan Blondell. The "rich girl," Vivian Revere, played by Anne Shirley under her first screen name, Dawn O'Day, is a bit of a flirt, who confides in the boys that her bloomers are pink, but doesn't show them off. She grows up to be played by Ann Dvorak as a bored socialite married to Robert Kirkwood (Warren William) with whom she has an adorable (read: cloyingly cute) child (Buster Phelps), but runs off with a ne'er-do-well played by Lyle Talbot, who gets in trouble with the mob, headed by Ace (Edward Arnold) and his enforcer, Harve (Humphrey Bogart). The "smart girl," Ruth Westcott, starts out as the class valedictorian (Betty Carse) and goes to business school. Her story, even though she's played by Bette Davis, is the least interesting of the three. In fact, she seems to be there only to make it possible for the three women to light their cigarettes on one match, setting off the supposed curse on the third to catch the flame, who happens to be Mary. The result is that Dvorak, though her career never took off like that of Blondell or Davis, gets the juiciest part in the film and makes the most of it. Of course, Warners didn't know that Davis would become its biggest star, but anyone who decides to watch Three on a Match thinking it's a "Bette Davis movie" is going to be disappointed. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching formative moments in the careers of stars like Davis -- or for that matter, Bogart, in one of his first gangster roles.

Invention for Destruction (Karel Zeman, 1958)

Cast: Lubor Tokos, Arnost Navrátil, Miroslav Holub, Frantisek Siégr, Václav Kyzlink, Jana Zatloukalová. Screenplay: Frantisek Hrubín, Milan Vácha, Karel Zeman, based on a novel by Jules Verne. Cinematography: Antonín Horák, Bohuslav Pikhart, Jirí Tarantik. Production design: Karel Zeman. Costume design: Karel Postrehovsky. Film editing: Zdenek Stehlík. Music: Zdenek Liska.

Where has this wonderful film been all my life? Invention for Destruction (aka The Deadly Invention and The Fabulous World of Jules Verne) is catnip to a lover of Victorian book illustration like me, with its miraculous transformation of old line engravings into sets and costumes as well as its astonishing blend of animation with live action. It makes other attempts to bring the steampunk aesthetic and the adventures in the books of Jules Verne, including such well-known movies as the Oscar-winning Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1958) and the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954), look phony -- they look like they were made in the 1950s, whereas the world of Karel Zeman's film looks authentically late 19th-century. This is the real thing: Verne, and just as importantly, his illustrator Léon Benett, brought to life with both respect and whimsy. The latter quality, which gives us some fantastic machinery and even some roller-skating camels, is just as important as the first. Zeman takes Verne more seriously than his great predecessor Georges Méliès did in his pioneering evocations of the Vernesque future, but not as seriously as Hollywood did, preferring occasional tongue-in-cheek renditions of the author's visions. Still, Invention for Destruction, based loosely on Verne's 1896 novel Facing the Flag, has serious undertones in its treatment of the titular invention, a clear analogue of Einstein's investigation into the potential of atomic energy and the terrifying weapons that evolved from it. I'm just astonished that it has taken almost a lifetime of movie-watching for me to get around to discovering this amazing film.