Flirt (Hal Hartley, 1995)

Bill Sage and Martin Donovan in Flirt

Cast: Bill Sage, Dwight Ewell, Miho Nikaido, Robert John Burke, Martin Donovan, Erica Gimpel, Michael Imperioli, Holt MckCallany, Harold Perrineau, Parker Posey, Karen Sillas, Sebastian Koch, Geno Lechner, Elina Löwensohn, Hal Hartley. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor.

Every experiment is valuable, even (maybe especially) the failed ones. Thomas Edison went through any number of potential filaments for his electric light bulb before finding the one that would provide sustained illumination, but he learned something from each attempt to work with cardboard or hemp or bamboo. So to dismiss Hal Hartley's Flirt as a failed experiment, as some have done, is to miss the point. Hartley is trying to show the primacy of context, to demonstrate that where and by whom something is said and done matters even in the most mundane of instances: a relationship on the verge of ending, for example. Flirt has a precursor in a scene in Hartley's 1992 film Surviving Desire, in which a young writer reads to her professor a passage from a story she's writing. The first time she reads it, the speaker in her story is a man talking about his relationship with a woman. The professor then asks her to read it again, but to change the speaker to a woman talking about her relationship with a man. The change is revelatory. In Flirt, Hartley tries a similar experiment but on a larger scale, not only sexual but cultural. He does the same scene, a couple at a crucial moment in their relationship, with the same dialogue, and with the same follow-up scenes -- an encounter at a public phone, the introduction and firing of a gun, a session in an emergency room, and an attempt by one partner to contact the other -- but he does it first with a straight white man in New York, then with a gay Black man in Berlin, and finally with a Japanese woman in Tokyo as the central character. The results are sometimes predictable: A gun brandished in New York is bound to elicit a different reaction from one brandished in Tokyo. In New York, no one seems to take much notice, so there's a scene in which the protagonist and the gun owner sit at a table in a bar and talk while one takes the bullets out of the gun and the other puts them back in again. But passersby in Tokyo are terrified at the site of the weapon and the police are called, precipitating a kind of chase. In the relationship of protagonist and lover, the changes in sexual identity have more inward results, exposing different vulnerabilities in each partner. Flirt probably has to be called a failed experiment because nothing like sustained illumination is achieved. But experiments are also often contaminated by the observer, so we have to take into account that the observer is Hartley, a filmmaker who has a distinct and familiar way of looking at things. 

Blanche Fury (Marc Allégret, 1948)

Valerie Hobson and Stewart Granger in Blanche Fury

Cast: Valerie Hobson, Stewart Granger, Michael Gough, Walter Fitzgerald, Maurice Denham, Sybille Bender, Allan Jeaves, Edward Lexy, Susanne Gibbs, Ernest Jay, Townsend Whitling, J.H. Roberts. Screenplay: Audrey Erskine-Lindop, Cecil McGivern, Hugh Mills, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Guy Green, Geoffrey Unsworth. Production design: John Bryan. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: Clifton Parker. 

Timidity is fatal in moviemaking, and Blanche Fury, whose very title promises turbulent emotions, is a timid movie. It failed at the box office, and its producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, acknowledged that it didn't turn out the way he wanted, leading to his departure from the producing company, Cineguild, and its eventual collapse. It’s a story, involving as it does an ancient curse, that demands high passion and exquisite villainy, but it gets neither. The key failure is in the protagonists, Blanche Fury (Valerie Hobson) and Philip Thorn (Stewart Granger). They should be modeled on the Macbeths, the very byword for glamorous wickedness. She is an impoverished gentlewoman, née Blanche Fuller, from the wrong side of the family. He is the manager of the country estate of the Fury family, their own kin but from the wrong side of the blanket. Thorn has been scheming to be declared the legitimate heir to the estate, hiring a lawyer to track down any evidence that his father, Adam Fury, actually married his mother. Blanche comes to the estate to serve as governess to the daughter of Laurence Fury (Michael Gough), current heir to the estate and a widower. So you guessed it: Blanche is going to marry the insipid Laurence and fall in love with the virile Thorn, and the two will scheme to get their own hands on the estate. Except that in the portrayal of their schemes, the film goes out of its way to make Blanche and Thorn look better than they are, to justify their wicked ways. Blanche is shown struggling to put up with the harshness of her previous employer, an imperious dowager, and Thorn likewise suffers the abuse and indignity of becoming essentially a servant to a household he believes he should head. Blanche and Thorn should flame, or at least smolder, with passion, but Hobson and Granger strike only the feeblest of sparks, partly because the screenplay doesn't give them enough opportunity to ignite. Much of the film seems to be derived from better costume dramas; there is, for example, a death that comes straight out of Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939). There's also a lot of nonsense about marauding gypsies: The film's Roma are the stereotypical fortune tellers, trinket peddlers, and horse thieves. It has to be said that the movie is quite handsomely filmed in Technicolor by two eminent cinematographers, Guy Green, who did the interior scenes, and Geoffrey Unsworth, who shot the lovely exteriors in Staffordshire and Bedfordshire. If the story and the characters had the depth and color of its images, Blanche Fury might have been more than the routine costume drama it is. 

The Faculty (Robert Rodriguez, 1998)

Laura Harris, Shawn Hatosy, Josh Hartnett, Clea DuVall, Elijah Wood, and Jordana Brewster in The Faculty

Cast: Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Christopher McDonald, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Usher, Jon Stewart, Daniel von Bargen. Screenplay: Kevin Williamson, David Wechter, Bruce Kimmel. Cinematography: Enrique Chediak. Production design: Cary White. Film editing: Robert Rodriguez. Music: Marco Beltrami.

Two premises are key to The Faculty: that adolescents see adults in authority as alien figures, and that high school is an instrument for instilling social conformity. The former has been the stuff of movies since Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). The latter is in evidence today in the efforts of states like Florida and Texas to remake education along conservative ideological lines. Unfortunately, Kevin Williamson's screenplay and Robert Rodriguez's direction don't take either premise seriously enough to make more than a raucous but routine sci-fi/horror movie out of the material. The result is exactly as the Criterion Channel describes it: "The Breakfast Club meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers." John Hughes's 1985 movie put a Jock, a Brain, a Criminal, a Princess, and a Basket Case together in detention and explored the interaction of disparate high school stereotypes. The Faculty's misfit crew is a little more complex: Stan (Shawn Hatosy), the Jock, wants to quit the team, and Zeke (Josh Hartnett) is both Brain and Criminal: He concocts his own drug (unfortunately called "scat") in his lab, selling it out of the trunk of his car, and he has an off-the-charts IQ. Elijah Wood's Casey is bullied the way Brains typically are in teen movies, and Clea DuVall's Stokely is more of a goth-punk rebel than a Basket Case. Jordana Brewster's Delilah is an overachieving Princess, both editor of the school newspaper and captain of the cheerleading squad. They are joined by a New Girl, Marybeth Louise Hutchinson (Laura Harris), a transfer from Atlanta to their Ohio high school who comes complete with a somewhat cloying Southern accent. If The Faculty had kept its focus steadily on this group as they uncover the fact that their teachers have been taken over by an extraterrestrial organism, the movie would have had more coherence and suspense. Instead, it opens with the revelation that something is clearly causing the teachers and the principal to go mad and murderous. The principal (Bebe Neuwirth) is attacked in her office by the coach (Robert Patrick), and when she tries to escape, her way is blocked by a teacher, Mrs. Olson (Piper Laurie), who suddenly turns from meek to menacing. After missing work for a day or so, the principal returns as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, other teachers have been showing personality changes that begin to spread into the student body. It's not long before the movie begins to invoke the other half of its inspiration, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978). Williamson, whose screenplay for Scream (1996) was full of allusions to other horror films, can't resist making the source for The Faculty explicit, so when his teenagers cite the movie themselves and use it as a guide to fighting the alien, The Faculty becomes too meta for its own good. There's enough to enjoy in the movie, including good performances by most of the cast. Hartnett is particularly good in the role of a guy who's embarrassed by his own intelligence. It's fun to see Jon Stewart, who plays a science teacher, in one of the acting performances he likes to make fun of. But when it comes to making good on its key premises and developing a real satiric edge, The Faculty has to be called a missed opportunity. 

Frontier Marshal (Allan Dwan, 1939)

Cesar Romero and Nancy Kelly in Frontier Marshal

Cast: Randolph Scott, Nancy Kelly, Cesar Romero, Binnie Barnes, John Carradine, Edward Norris, Eddie Foy Jr., Ward Bond, Lon Chaney Jr., Chris-Pin Martin, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay: Sam Hellman, based on a book by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke. Art direction: Lewis H. Creber, Richard Day. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin, Charles Maxwell, David Raksin, Walter Scharf.

The title Frontier Marshal sounds like a generic Western, and it doesn't lie. It's about a stranger who comes to a lawless mining town and cleans it up with his fists and his guns. The stranger, played by Randolph Scott, is Wyatt Earp, and the movie is based on Stuart N. Lake's heavily fictionalized 1931 biography of Earp that established his legend as the man who cleaned up Tombstone by fighting it out with the bad guys at the OK Corral. So yes, you've seen it all before, in later and more celebrated films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and John Sturges's Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). Allan Dwan's film (from which Ford borrowed liberally) is a more modest affair. The famous gunfight in the movie  is almost over before it starts. Nor is Scott's Earp a particularly mythic figure; he even gets seriously beat up before he's able to seize authority in the town. If there's a mythic figure in Frontier Marshal it's Doc Halliday*, played with surprising charm and finesse by Cesar Romero. The character of Earp is also overshadowed by two women: Jerry (Binnie Barnes), a tough-as-nails dance hall hostess, and Sarah (Nancy Kelly), a nurse who has followed her former lover, Doc, to Tombstone, trying to save him from himself. Refreshingly, the two women are given significant agency in the movie, beyond just battling for Doc's affections. What distinguishes Dwan as a director is that he never seems to take for granted the material he's given to work with. Yes, Frontier Marshal is generic and predictable, but Dwan doesn't condescend to it: He gives the scenes snap and vigor, and he gets performances that are in some ways better than they're written. Barnes, for example, turns Jerry into a force to be reckoned with. It took me a moment to recognize her as the same actress who played the snooty Linda Cram in Holiday (George Cukor, 1938). Kelly's Sarah isn't the pallid schoolmarm played by Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, but a woman out to get her man. And if Romero, usually a lounge lizard type, ever gave a better performance I haven't seen it. I could have done with less of Eddie Foy Jr., clownishly playing his own father, and Chris-Pin Martin's milking of the stereotypical Chicano bartender role, but they keep the film lively. Scott is less memorable than the other players, but he provides a quiet stability to the film. 

Usually spelled "Holliday," but the alternate spelling was used, reportedly because of concern about litigation from the Holliday family. 

Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)

Ron O'Neal and Sheila Frazier in Super Fly

Cast: Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Sheila Frazier, Julius Harris, Charles McGregor, Sig Shore, Polly Niles, Yvonne Delaine. Screenplay: Phillip Fenty. Cinematography: James Signorelli. Costume design: Nate Adams. Film editing: Bob Brady. Music: Curtis Mayfield. 

I know why the Criterion Channel grouped Super Fly into its "'70s Car Movies" collection, because there's nothing more evocative of the milieu than the shots of Priest's tricked-out Cadillac Eldorado nosing its sharklike way through the streets of 1970s Manhattan. But it's a movie that transcends categorization, especially the "blaxploitation" one with which it has become synonymous. It's a portrait of an American subculture at a pivotal moment in history, when Black lives were moving out of physical and cultural ghettoization and into their still problematic place in the American mainstream. Gordon Parks Jr.'s film is rough-hewn and raw, sometimes awkwardly scripted and acted, but also darkly vital. It's a near-tragic story about a man's hope to be freed from the affluence of criminality, only to be thwarted by both the whites who don't want him to be free and those of his own kind who choose to remain exploited. Curtis Mayfield's songs tell the story of Youngblood Priest (Ron O'Neal) in their own way, operatically heightening the screenplay's narrative and the camera's images. And it has to be reiterated that Super Fly has a lot in common with a film from the same year, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Youngblood Priest and Michael Corleone share the same hopes and face the same cruel forces.

Amateur (Hal Hartley, 1994)

Martin Donovan and Elina Löwensohn in Amateur

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, Damian Young, Chuck Montgomery, Dave Simonds. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor.

The protagonists of Hal Hartley's movies invariably have a secret past. The problem with Thomas (Martin Donovan) is that he isn't in on the secret. When we first see him he is lying on the cobblestones of an alley in New York City. Is he dead? That's the conclusion reached by the young woman who peers into the alley and cautiously approaches the body, extends a foot to prod it, and then inspects more closely. Then she disappears. She is Sofia Ludens (Elina Löwensohn), a porn star who thinks she has killed Thomas. After she's gone, he will awake with a start, pick himself up, and stagger out into the streets and into a cafe, where he meets Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a former nun who writes pornographic stories for a living. He tells her he doesn't know who he is, that his past and even his name is a complete blank. So they set out together to solve the puzzle. And so goes the setup for Hartley's excursion into the tropes (not to say clichés) of the crime thriller. In addition to amnesia, there's also an international conspiracy of some sort, and even a MacGuffin: some floppy disks (which we are twice reminded, as we were so frequently in the early 1990s when they were a thing, are neither floppy nor disks) that contain shocking secrets. Thomas and Isabelle will team up with Sofia -- reluctantly on her part, since she was the one who had reason to try to kill him -- and go on the run from some hit men working for a crime boss who used to be Thomas's employer. Played straight, the story might be entertaining enough, but of course Hartley never plays anything straight. The performances are good, given that everyone has to work in Hartley's deadpan mode. Huppert slips with apparent ease into the punch-drunk milieu of his films, but she has already proved that she can play almost anything. The supporting cast is filled out with some now-familiar faces like Michael Imperioli, Parker Posey, and Tim Blake Nelson in bit parts. Amateur never transcends spoofery into significance, but why ask for that anyway?

Moss Rose (Gregory Ratoff, 1947)

Vincent Price and Ethel Barrymore in Moss Rose

Cast: Peggy Cummins, Victor Mature, Ethel Barrymore, Vincent Price, Margo Woode, George Zucco, Patricia Medina, Rhys Williams. Screenplay: Niven Busch, Jules Furthman, Tom Reed, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: Richard Day, Mark-Lee Kirk. Film editing: James B. Clark. Music: David Buttolph. 

Ethel was my favorite Barrymore, not so given to posing and scene-hogging as her brothers John and Lionel, and she's by far the best thing about Moss Rose. It's a somewhat rickety whodunit set in Victorian London, in which a pretty chorus girl  blackmails a wealthy man, but not for money. Instead, she wants to fulfill her dream of living like a fine lady. Peggy Cummins plays Belle Adair (née Rose Lynton), who sees Michael Drego (Victor Mature) coming out of the room of her friend Daisy Arrow (Margo Woode), a fellow lady of the chorus who lives in the same lodging house. When Belle enters Daisy's room, she finds her dead. But during the official inquiry, led by Police Inspector Clinner (a nice, silky performance by Vincent Price), Belle doesn't let on about seeing Drego. Instead, she seeks him out and presents him with her audacious (if improbable) demand: If he'll let her pretend to be a lady and be received in his home -- he lives in the family estate with his mother, Lady Margaret Drego (Barrymore) -- she'll keep mum about seeing him at the crime scene. The plan is complicated by the announcement of the impending marriage of Drego to the socially prominent Audrey Ashton (Patricia Medina). But somehow Drego is persuaded to go through with Belle's scheme, and he takes her home to meet his mother and, as it turns out, his fiancée. Belle drops her stage name and is introduced as Rose. Meanwhile, Clinner is still on the job of trying to find out who killed Daisy. It's a promising setup, but it's undone by questionable casting, slack direction, and confused writing. The beefy Mature is scarcely credible as an English gentleman, though his lack of an accent and his rough edges are explained by his being taken from his home as child and raised in Canada. Cummins, who was Irish, struggles with the cockney accent of Belle and the "proper" one of Rose, especially when she has to switch between the two. Gregory Ratoff, who was best known as a comic character actor, never distinguished himself as a director, despite numerous attempts. His best outing as director was the 1939 Intermezzo, which marked Ingrid Bergman's American debut and was produced by David O. Selznick, who loved directing his directors. The script for Moss Rose is marred by abrupt leaps and inconsistencies in point of view. It begins with Rose on a train, introducing the story in voiceover, and then flashes back to the events above, with her occasionally narrating what happened between scenes. But having established Rose's as the film's point of view, it sometimes breaks away to see things she couldn't have witnessed, like the scene in which Clinner questions Lady Margaret about moss roses -- a rose in a bible was left at the scene of Daisy's murder. Establishing Rose as the point of view also takes away some of the logic of the character and undermines the film's suspense: After all, if Drego is a murderer, and one so little concerned about being caught that he leaves obvious clues at the crime scene, shouldn't she be more worried about putting herself in harm's way by seeking him out and meeting him in secret?  

I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997)

Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe in I Know What You Did Last Summer 

Cast; Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr., Muse Watson, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Anne Heche, Johnny Galecki, Stuart Greer. Screenplay: Kevin Williamson, based on a novel by Lois Duncan. Cinematography: Dennis Crossan. Production design: Gary Wissner. Film editing: Steve Mirkovich. Music: John Debney. 

I Know What You Did Last Summer has enough going for it to be watchable: an attractive cast, a handsome setting in a North Carolina fishing town (sweetened by coastal shots from California), and a solid horror story premise. Four teens, just graduated from high school and looking forward to life as young adults, accidentally hit a pedestrian on a lonely back road and decide to cover up the death and swear to secrecy. (It's not a novel setup: See Paul Lynch's 1980 Prom Night for an analogous one.) But they are haunted by guilt. Top student Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) almost flunks out of college. Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the beauty queen who dreams of stardom, fails to make it in New York and comes home to work in the family department store. The jock, Barry (Ryan Phillippe), doesn't make it big in college athletics. The poor boy, Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), is stuck in the family fishing business. And then, on the anniversary of the accident, which just happens to be the Fourth of July, each of them starts getting warnings that someone knows their guilty secret. So far, so good, as suspense setups go. Unfortunately, the screenplay starts getting ragged as soon as the implied threat manifests itself, and the rest, as the body count rises, is a tangle of improbabilities and loose ends. By the ending, which is a clear setup for a sequel, I wasn't entirely certain who the killer was or even why they did it. It's a movie full of things you're not supposed to think about, like how Barry covered up the damage to his car after the accident, or how the killer can make bodies disappear so quickly after they're first discovered. Unfortunately, the screenplay doesn't give you enough to get your attention away from these questions. 

One Mile From Heaven (Allan Dwan, 1937)

Joan Carroll and Bill Robinson in One Mile From Heaven

Cast: Claire Trevor, Sally Blane, Douglas Fowley, Fredi Washington, Bill Robinson, Joan Carroll, Ralf Harolde, John Eldredge, Paul McVey, Ray Walker, Russell Hopton, Chick Chandler, Eddie Anderson, Howard HIckman. Screenplay: Robin Harris, Alfred Golden, Lou Breslow, John Patrick, based on a story by Ben B. Lindsey. Cinematography: Sidney Wagner. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin.

In One Mile From Heaven, a reporter happens upon a Black woman who is raising a white child and says that the little girl is her own daughter. The reporter immediately sees it as a hot news item. It's an odd and distasteful premise for a movie, especially if, as in this case, the child is happy, well cared-for, and loves her mother, who's entirely capable of raising her. It's the mere fact of the racial disparity that sets Lucy Warren (Claire Trevor) on the course of exposing the relationship of Flora Jackson (Fredi Washington) and her putative daughter, Sunny (Joan Carroll), leading to the discovery of Sunny's birth mother, the wealthy (and white) Barbara Harrison (Sally Blane). It winds up with what's supposed to be a happy ending. That the movie is played as a sentimental comedy laced with musical numbers supplied by a tap-dancing Black policeman (Bill Robinson) only makes it seem odder. It could, after all, have been an indictment of nosy journalism, or a story of racial injustice, but instead it's a grab-bag of movie tropes, including a press room filled with anything-for-a-scoop reporters straight out of The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931), and a thwarted prison escape that comes out of nowhere and has only a tangential relationship to the main plot. Allan Dwan handles all of this with his usual finesse, but is never quite able to make a coherent film out of it. This was Washington's last film before she retired from acting and devoted her life to civil rights activism. The movie, based on an actual case in Denver, serves as evidence why that activism was needed. 

Fear Is the Key (Michael Tuchner, 1972)

Cast: Barry Newman, Suzy Kendall, John Vernon, Dolph Sweet, Ben Kingsley, Ray McAnally, Peter Marinker, Elliott Sullivan. Screenplay: Robert Carrington, based on a novel by Alistair MacLean. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: Syd Cain, Maurice Carter. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: Roy Budd. 

Fear Is the Key is a somewhat preposterous thriller that begins well with the protagonist resisting arrest and arraignment and leading law enforcement on a car chase through the Louisiana bayous and backroads. And it ends well with a scene of high suspense in a bathyscaphe under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But what comes in between is often muddled and hard to follow, with too much exposition crammed into too tight a space. Barry Newman plays John Talbot, an underwater salvage expert who winds up working for some crooks in the employ of a wealthy oil company executive, trying to retrieve a fabulous fortune from the undersea wreckage of an airplane. For much of the film, it looks like a case of bad guys vs. worse guys: Talbot as we see him is a stone-cold killer, who guns down a deputy in the courtroom where he's being arraigned, kidnaps a woman in the courtroom, and takes her along on the aforementioned high-speed chase, driving a stolen car. But then there's a twist in mid-film, one that necessitates Talbot doing a lot of gabbled explanation to the terrified hostage, Sarah Ruthven (Suzy Kendall), who turns out to be the oilman's daughter. Well, if she can believe him after he's put her life in serious danger speeding through the backwoods, why can't we? John Vernon is the chief villain, and his sinister sidekick is played by Ben Kingsley in his film debut; he looks a little confused about what he's being asked to do. This is one of those movies to ride along with and not think about much while you're doing it or afterward. 

Simple Men (Hal Hartley, 1992)

Robert John Burke and Bill Sage in Simple Men

Cast: Robert John Burke, Bill Sage, Karen Sillas, Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan, Mark Chandler Bailey, Chris Cooke, Jeffrey Howard, Holly Marie Combs, Joe Stevens, Damian Young, Marietta Marich, John MacKay. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Daniel Ouellette. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Yo La Tengo, Hal Hartley. 

When does style become mannerism? As I work my way chronologically through the Criterion Channel's Hal Hartley retrospective, I find myself beginning to ask that question. Because Simple Men seems to me to show some slight atrophy in the deadpan, off-beat style that Hartley established in his first films, a kind of predictable unpredictability, if you will. We sense that nothing in the movie will turn out quite right, that it may not even end but just stop. Granted, I'm comfortable with the eccentricity of Hartley's narrative and characters, and I laughed out loud at several points in the film. I particularly enjoyed, for example, the character of the sheriff of the small Long Island town where the protagonists, as usual in Hartley's films, wind up. Played by Damian Young, the sheriff is a kind of walking thesaurus, a cynical, irritable officer of the law who delights in parsing what's said to him into an endless string of mocking synonyms. And I enjoyed the irruption of a musical number into the story, as the players dance to Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing." But it also felt like a needed break in the slow plod of the narrative. With his earlier films I felt that Hartley was challenging us with some ideas about family and relationships. Simple Men hinges on a family situation, two brothers in search of their father, and there are budding relationships, Bill (Robert John Burke) with Kate (Karen Sillas) and Dennis (Bill Sage) with Elina (Elina Löwensohn), but they are so abstractly conceived that it's hard to get involved in them. At its worst, which is mercifully not very often, Simple Men seems to be an exercise in quirk for quirk's sake.  

Ivy (Sam Wood, 1947)

Joan Fontaine in Ivy

Cast: Joan Fontaine, Patric Knowles, Herbert Marshall, Richard Ney, Cedric Hardwicke, Lucile Watson, Sara Allgood, Henry Stephenson, Rosalind Ivan, Lilian Fontaine, Molly Lamont, Una O'Connor, Isobel Elsom, Alan Napier. Screenplay: Charles Bennett, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography: Russell Metty. Art direction: Richard H. Riedel. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Ivy is a fair-to-middling melodrama made memorable by its production design and cinematography, which evokes Edwardian London as a place of contrasts, from the ornately affluent milieu to which Ivy (Joan Fontaine) aspires to the sparse and gloomy world which she tries to escape. Russell Metty's images are filled with shadows and Expressionist angles even when they're showing us the gilded life of the privileged classes. The nominal art director is Richard H. Riedel, but he was working for a producer better known today as a production designer, William Cameron Menzies. Ivy is stuck in a marriage to the feckless Jervis Lexton (Richard Ney) but is carrying on an affair with a doctor, Roger Gretorex (Patric Knowles), who has chosen to work among the city's poor. So when she catches the eye of the wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall), she sees the chance to make it big if she can escape from her current entanglements. The doctor has poisons in his lab, so the rest is obvious. But Ivy has the bad luck to run up against one of those impossibly intuitive Scotland Yard detectives (Cedric Hardwicke), who manages to riddle through the motives, means, and opportunity, and to do so at a crucial moment. Director Sam Wood isn't very skilled at building suspense, preferring to let the screenplay do it on its own, so Ivy doesn't have the tension and snap that it needs. The story comes from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, who is better known as the author of The Lodger, which helped Alfred Hitchcock make his name when he filmed it as a silent in 1927 and gave Laird Cregar a memorable role in John Brahm's 1944 film. Ivy, unfortunately, isn't in the league of either of those films.

The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996)

Cast: Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Rachel True, Skeet Ulrich, Cliff DeYoung, Christine Taylor, Breckin Meyer, Nathaniel Marston, Helen Shaver, Assumpta Serna. Screenplay: Peter Filardi, Andrew Fleming. Cinematography: Alexander Gruszynski. Production design: Marek Dobrowolski. Film editing: Jeff Freeman. Music: Graeme Revell.

If the makers of The Craft had had the courage and the skill to parody or transcend the teen-movie clichés and characters -- the mean girl, the horny jock, the embarrassing or absent parents, and so on -- it might have been a genre classic like Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) or Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989). That the filmmakers even come close enough to elicit the comparison owes much to the performances of the four young actresses who play the film's mischief-working coven. Robin Tunney is Sarah, the new girl in town with untested magic powers; Fairuza Balk is Nancy, the punk-gothic misfit; Neve Campbell is Bonnie, who bears disfiguring burn scars; and Rachel True is Rochelle, the biracial girl in an apparently all-white Catholic high school. Balk got most of the attention for her amusingly over-the-top performance, but Tunney deserves credit for underplaying her role, creating an outwardly normal but deeply troubled teenage girl. Sarah once tried to kill herself -- "the right way," says Nancy approvingly, noting that the scars on Sarah's wrists are vertical, along the vein, rather than horizontal. Falling in with the other three, Sarah not only discovers her own latent powers but also helps the other girls develop their own. Bonnie erases her scars, Rochelle gets even with the racist blonde (Christine Taylor) who referred to her as "Negroid," and Sarah causes the scornful jock (Skeet Ulrich) to fall in love with her. Nancy, however, goes to the dark side, and mayhem ensues. Unfortunately, the plot gets predictable at this turn, and the ending is anticlimactic.  

High Tension (Allan Dwan, 1936)

Brian Donlevy and Glenda Farrell in High Tension

Cast: Brian Donlevy, Glenda Farrell, Norman Foster, Helen Wood, Robert McWade, Theodore von Eltz, Romaine Callender, Hattie McDaniel, Joe Sawyer, Murray Alper. Screenplay: Lou Breslau, Edward Eliscu, John Patrick, J. Robert Bren, Norman Houston. Cinematography: Barney McGill. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. 

High Tension is a lively little action comedy that comes in at 63 minutes, just right for the bottom half of a double feature. Brian Donlevy has the boisterous role of Steve Reardon, an underwater engineer for a transoceanic cable company who unwinds from his stressful job by getting drunk, telling tall tales of his undersea adventures, getting into fights, and messing around with his girlfriend, Edith McNeil (Glenda Farrell). It's a little hard to see why she puts up with Steve, let alone wants to marry him, except that she makes a good living writing pulp fiction based on those tall tales. Allan Dwan sets a nice pace for the movie, which puts Steve into a couple of knock-down, drag-out fights, one of which involves Steve and his opponent shoving a piano at each other in Edith's apartment. The more important fight, for the sake of the plot, comes when a couple of guys (one of them played by an unbilled Ward Bond) set upon him with the aim of picking his pocket. The movie's second lead, Eddie Mitchell (Norman Foster), manages to save the money that the thugs stole from Steve when he was knocked cold. Steve wakes up the next morning to find himself in bed with Eddie, who took him home for the night. It's the beginning of a beautiful friendship, with whatever homoerotic undertones you might want to find in it. Grateful for Eddie's help, and discovering that he has a degree from Caltech, Steve gets him a job with the company he works for and trains him to be his right hand man. Eventually, all this winds up with a some romantic complications, with Steve, who has broken up with Edith, putting the moves on Eddie's pretty secretary (Helen Wood), whom the shy Eddie secretly loves. And there's a big underwater rescue scene (done pretty much on the cheap) that sets everything straight again. The whole thing is quite watchable, except for the sexist and racist elements that don't go down as well today as they did in the '30s. Steve has to deal with his boss's prissy assistant, F. Willoughby Tuttle (Romaine Callender in a role probably written with Franklin Pangborn in mind), a prime example of the "pansy" stereotype that afflicted movies of the era. And Hattie McDaniel is cast as Edith's maid, unimaginatively named Hattie, a role that McDaniel plays with more sass and vigor than it deserves -- McDaniel was a true professional, and if you can overlook the stereotyping her performance is a delight. 

The Last Run (Richard Fleischer, 1971)

George C. Scott in The Last Run

Cast: George C. Scott, Tony Musante, Trish Van Devere, Colleen Dewhurst, Aldo Sambrell. Screenplay: Alan Sharp. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Art direction: José María Tapiador, Roy Walker. Film editing: Russell Lloyd. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. 

The Last Run begins with a love scene so intense it might have needed an intimacy coordinator if it weren't between a man and his car. The man is Harry Garmes (George C. Scott), a retired driver for the Chicago mob, now living in Portugal. The car is a souped-up BMW 503, and it's practically the last thing in the world Harry loves after his small son's death and his wife's disappearance. He does occasionally visit a friendly prostitute named Monique (Colleen Dewhurst) and he gets along with Miguel (Aldo Sambrell), who sails his fishing boat for him. Otherwise, there's not much to keep him from coming out of retirement to meet up with an escaped con, Paul Rickard (Tony Musante), and drive him across Spain to connect with some guys who say they're going to smuggle Rickard into France. Harry doesn't know that Rickard will make him stop along the way to pick up Claudie Scherrer (Trish Van Devere), but when Harry meets Claudie he doesn't much mind. Naturally, none of this goes exactly as planned. The Last Run was a critical flop when it was first released, partly because of stories about behind-the-scenes problems. The first director attached to it, John Boorman, disliked the script. So did the second one, John Huston, whose efforts to rewrite the screenplay led to conflicts with Scott. When Huston left the film, it was assigned to a journeyman director of no great distinction, Richard Fleischer, who mostly went back to Alan Sharp's original screenplay. Meanwhile, Scott, whose wife, Dewhurst, had taken the small role of Monique, began an affair with Van Devere; after filming ended, Dewhurst and Scott divorced and he married Van Devere. I think critics may have seen the film through a lens smudged with such gossip, because it's by no means a bad movie. Roger Ebert's review, for example, makes much of the fact that it could have been directed by Huston instead of Fleischer, whom Ebert calls a "prince of mediocrities." Huston, he says, "would have been incapable of [the] mawkishness" that occurs at a key moment in the final scene. But who knows for sure? I, for one, didn't find the moment Ebert singles out particularly mawkish, but rather an effective link to the film's opening scene. Ebert is right in criticizing the film's failures of tone and inconsistencies in characterization, and the ending is a bit of a muddle. Still, Scott is always fun to watch and the Spanish landscape, handsomely filmed by Sven Nykvist, making a 180 away from his work for Ingmar Bergman, is spectacular.

Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1992)

Martin Donovan and Mary B. Ward in Surviving Desire

Cast: Martin Donovan, Mary B. Ward, Matt Malloy, Rebecca Nelson, Julie Kessler. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: The Great Outdoors, Hal Hartley.

There's a brilliant moment in the middle of Hal Hartley's short film Surviving Desire when Sofie (Mary B. Ward). who is on the cusp of an affair with her professor, Jude (Martin Donovan), reads to him from a story she's been writing. It recounts the thoughts of a man articulating his feelings about the relationship he is in with a woman. When she finishes, Jude asks her to read it again, but to change the voice in the story from a man's to a woman's. When she does, the effect of the same words, with only the pronouns changed from "he" to "she," is subtly and poignantly different. Unfortunately, any insight the change might have made in the relationship between Jude and Sofie doesn't persist. This little film, just under an hour, is a case study in postmodernism and its sometimes paralyzing irony. I can imagine D.H. Lawrence, for example, might run screaming from the room if he could have been shown Surviving Desire. It's an object lesson in what he most disliked about modern life: the disjunction from the instinctual and the immediate -- what he referred to as "sex in the head." Henry James might have marveled at the exquisite self-consciousness of Hartley's characters, and E.M. Forster, who chose as epigraph for Howards End the phrase "only connect," would have nodded in sorrow at the failed connections in the film. But I think the presiding influence on Hartley's movie is Jean-Luc Godard, whose men and women talk their way through relationships just as Jude and Sofie do, but who are also capable of bursting into moments of irrational play, like the dance number Jude segues into after falling in love with Sofie. It's a steal from the Madison scene in Godard's Bande à Part (1964). Hartley's movie is a bittersweet comedy. It opens with Jude reading from The Brothers Karamazov, trying to get his students to comprehend Dostoevsky. They don't: Someone literally throws the book at him and others walk out. We come to realize that perhaps Jude doesn't comprehend Dostoevsky either: When he recounts the writer's tortured life to the class, it's easy to see that Jude has never experienced anything of that order, that the intellectual content of the novel eclipses for him the emotional content that comes from Dostoevsky's life. The film ends with Sofie, working in a bookstore, repeating the works "Can I help anyone?" to the customers who mill around her, her tone of voice suggesting that she hopes no one will answer. Hartley's characters are beyond help, stuck in their own minds. A bartender in the movie says that "Americans ... want a tragedy with a happy ending." What Hartley gives them is a comedy with an ending that's neither tragic nor comic but rather that special postmodern blend of both.

Dragonwyck (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946)

Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in Dragonwyck

Cast: Gene Tierney, Vincent Price, Walter Huston, Glenn Langan, Anne Revere, Spring Byington, Connie Marshall, Harry Morgan, Jessica Tandy. Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on a novel by Anya Seton. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Dorothy Spencer. Music: Alfred Newman. 

Dragonwyck both courts and suffers from comparison to those other paradigmatic gloomy old house movies of the 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1941) and Robert Stevenson's Jane Eyre (1943). As the imperious master of the titular gloomy old house, Vincent Price can hardly compete with Laurence Olivier in the former or Orson Welles in the latter. Price had an aura of camp, present not only today after his many horror movies, but apparent even then, after playing Shelby Carpenter in Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944). Gene Tierney, on the other hand, holds up well in a comparison with Joan Fontaine, the heroine of both of the other two movies. There's also some distinguished supporting work from first-rate actors like Walter Huston, Anne Revere, and Jessica Tandy, and solid contributions by familiar character actors Spring Byington and Harry Morgan. So Dragonwyck isn't a total loss. Where it falls apart is in adapting Any Seton's hefty novel, which concentrates as much on history as on gothic romance. The historical element in both novel and film centers on the overthrow of the semi-feudal patroon system that was established in the Hudson River Valley by the Dutch in the 17th century and persisted through the mid-1840s. In adapting the novel, even the gifted screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz can't do much to stuff the history into the confines of his movie, which was also his debut as a director. But I got the feeling that he was stymied by the demands of the characters as well: We get only an outline of the backstory of his heroine, Miranda Wells (Tierney), in an opening scene with her stern, puritanical father (Huston) and her more understanding mother (Revere), before she is carried off to Dragonwyck to serve as governess to Katrine Van Ryn (Connie Marshall) and companion to the invalid Mrs.Van Ryn (Vivienne Osborne). The mystery of how and why Miranda's distant cousin-by-marriage, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price), decided to hire Miranda is never explained. The faithful Van Ryn housekeeper (Byington) shows her the house and tells her its creepy history, and then warns her, "One day you'll wish with all your heart you'd never come to Dragonwyck." But there's also a handsome young doctor (the forgettable Glenn Langan) to suggest alternative possibilities. The spook factor consists of a portrait of an ill-fated ancestor and her harpsichord, whose ghost can be heard singing and playing at ominous moments, such as the death of Mrs. Van Ryn. Mankiewicz has some trouble putting all of these pieces into play: For example, little Katrine disappear from the story entirely in mid-film, even after Miranda nominally becomes Katrine's stepmother. The best way to watch a movie like Dragonwyck is to disengage all expectations of logical character development and plot structure and just go with the mood supplied by the sets and Arthur C. Miller's cinematography.  

Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Stevens in Prom Night

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Stevens, Anne-Marie Martin, Michael Tough, Mary Beth Rubens, Joy Thompson, Antoinette Bower, Robert A. Silverman, Pita Oliver, David Mucci, George Touliatos, Sheldon Rybowski, Debbie Greenfield, Brock Simpson, Leslie Scott, Dean Bosacki, Joyce Kite, Karen Forbes. Screenplay: William Gray, Robert Guza Jr. Cinematography: Robert C. New. Art direction: Reuben Freed. Film editing: Brian Ravok. Music: Paul Zaza, Carl Zittrer. 

High school prom is scary enough without letting a killer loose at one: It's a nexus of adolescent anxieties about sex, style, and status. But of course that makes it a natural locus for the overkill of a horror movie like the classic Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976). It would be nice to say that Paul Lynch's Prom Night is a classic of that order, but I really can't. It has a promising setup: A group of grade-school kids terrifies another kid into a fatal fall from the window of a spooky old building and, led by the snottiest girl in the group, cover up the fact that they witnessed and partly caused the accident. Six years later, they become the target for threatening phone calls, threats planted in their school lockers, and eventual murders at the prom. The identity of the murderer is slyly withheld until the very end -- although if you've seen enough of these movies you know how to eliminate the obvious suspects and maybe to catch the clues to whodunit. There are a couple of well-staged and suspenseful scenes as the victims get offed. But the film is loaded with too many dance-floor scenes that remind one of how nobody mourned when disco died. The top billing for the film goes to Leslie Nielsen, who plays the principal of the school and the father of the little girl who died, as well as her siblings Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Alex (Michael Tough). But Nielsen has only a few scenes in the movie, and the role is a kind of valedictory to his career in "serious" parts: Airplane! (David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) came out the same year as Prom Night and launched him into the most memorable part of his career, as a deadpan comic actor. Though it was a big success in its day, Prom Night is more artifact than art, valuable mostly as a picture of its era. 

Ladies' Man (Lothar Mendes, 1931)

Kay Francis and William Powell in Ladies' Man

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Carole Lombard, Olive Tell, Gilbert Emery, Martin Burton, John Holland, Frank Atkinson, Maude Turner Gordon. Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on a novel by Rupert Hughes. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Costume design: Travis Banton. Music: Karl Hajos, Herman Hand, John Leipold.

With his receding hairline, big nose, and dubious chin, William Powell has always seemed to me an unlikely leading man, but he made quite a go of it teaming with actresses like Myrna Loy, Kay Francis, and Carole Lombard. But even Powell felt he was miscast as Jamie Darricott, the handsome gigolo of Ladies' Man who dines and wines the society matron Mrs. Fendley (Olive Tell), taking her, fashionably late, to the opera -- she muses that she's always wondered if Tosca really has a first act. He's performing a necessary service: Her banker husband, Horace (Gilbert Emery), is more devoted to making money than to being married, so even he tolerates Darricott's services -- at least for a while. Trouble starts when Rachel Fendley (Lombard), their daughter, takes a fancy to Darricott. Up to that point, Ladies' Man has been a passable sophisticated comedy of manners, but then Darricott meets Norma Page (Francis) and they fall in love. For a while the film turns into a romantic comedy tinged with farce, as Rachel tries to get Darricott away from Norma. And then it gets serious: Horace Fendley decides that he can't tolerate Darricott's involvement with both his wife and his daughter, and he threatens Darricott's life. This muddle of tones and genres is only made messier by miscasting, which extends beyond Powell's unsuitability for the role. Lombard tries at first to be suave and icy, affecting that hoity-toity mid-Atlantic accent actors used to resort to when playing uppercrust roles. Fortunately, she's allowed to loosen up in a scene when she gets drunk and confronts Norma and Darricott at a nightclub. It's not a good drunk scene, but at least it's closer to the free and funny Lombard we cherish. Francis comes across better in a thankless role: She has to pretend to be put off by Darricott's being a gigolo, but then be swept off her feet by him overnight. In short, it's a movie that a lot of top talent, including screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz's, isn't strong enough to save.

 

Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982)

 

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, Barnard Hughes, Dan Shor, Peter Jurasik. Screenplay: Steven Lisberger, Bonnie McBird, Charles S. Haas. Cinematography: Bruce Logan. Production design: Dean Edward Mitzner. Film editing: Jeff Gourson. Music: Wendy Carlos.

Epochal, visionary, pioneering, confusing, migraine-inducing, and occasionally inept. Tron is all those things and more. It would be almost 20 years before movies like The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, 1999) would begin to make full cinematic sense of some of Tron's key ideas about the relationship between humans and computers, and we are just now beginning to get seriously antsy about the promise and threat of artificial intelligence. At the time of its release, Tron was mostly discussed as an artifact of the Atari age: the growing popularity of computer games. Not many of us owned personal computers, and the internet was something only techies (and the military) knew anything about. So Steven Lisberger, the creative force behind the movie, has to be hailed as something of a prophet. And Disney has to be praised for a taking a risk (and suffering a loss when the film underperformed at the box office) on a movie as odd as Tron. Even Lisberger wasn't entirely sure that the visual effects he was playing with would work in a feature-length movie. Lisberger also has to be commended for not over-explaining in his film just what he's up to; instead, he plunged his audiences right into the strange world he created. That said, Tron is still sometimes a movie with one foot in chaos, and a lot of it seems to be just the filmmakers "trying stuff out." The acting is sometimes wooden, as if the performers, especially Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan, weren't sure what they were doing. The exceptions are David Warner, who could draw on a long career of playing villains on stage and screen, and Jeff Bridges, who seems incapable of giving a bad performance. As for the visuals, not everything works or even makes sense. There are moments of weird beauty, but too often what's meant to be dazzling is merely garish, and a lack of reference points sometimes makes the action incomprehensible. Boxleitner and Bridges have much the same build, so when they're suited up as Tron and Clu it's sometimes hard to tell which is which. (Lisberger originally planned to have them be distinctly different body types, but was unable to follow through in the casting.) Still, time has been kind to Tron, allowing its prophetic essence to prevail over its flaws.

One Way Passage (Tay Garnett, 1932)

Kay Francis and William Powell in One Way Passage

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Aline MacMahon, Frank McHugh, Warren Hymer, Frederick Burton, Roscoe Karns, Herbert Mundin. Screenplay: Wilson Mizner, Joseph Jackson, Robert Lord. Cinematography: Robert Kurrie. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Ralph Dawson.

One Way Passage is a small gem that won an Oscar for best story by Robert Lord, though the story is by no means the best thing about it. It is, for example, a prime demonstration of romantic movie chemistry in its teaming of Kay Francis and William Powell. She plays a woman dying of MHM (Mysterious Hollywood Malady), and he's a convicted murderer who is going to be hanged at San Quentin. They meet in a somewhat seedy bar in Hong Kong. She bumps into him and makes him spill his drink, and when they exchange glances it's love at first sight. If you ever want to know what the phrase "acting with the eyes" means, just check out that scene. When they part, they smash their glasses and leave the stems crossed on the bar -- a gesture that becomes a motif through the film, even providing a near-perfect ending for it. They meet again soon, boarding a ship bound for San Francisco, though she's accompanied by her doctor (Frederick Burton) and he by the cop (Warren Hymer) taking him to his doom. The rest is just a matter of working out ways to keep their fatal secrets from each other as their romance blossoms. And if that were all there were to it, One Way Passage really wouldn't be much of a movie. Fortunately, there's as much larceny as love on board, with the introduction of con artist Barrel House Betty (the wonderful Aline MacMahon), who is posing as the Comtesse Barilhaus and is aided by a lightfingered lush known as Skippy (Frank McHugh); they seem to have fleeced their way around the world. A romance even develops between Betty and the cop as a comic counterpart to the main one. The screenplay by Wilson Mizner (who was something of a con artist himself) and Joseph Jackson gives us some salty tough talk dialogue to offset the romantic melodrama of the main plot. (Mizner and Jackson probably deserved the Oscar at least as much as Lord, but at the time, the Academy treated story and screenplay as two discrete categories.) The Production Code would probably have forced the screenwriters to tell us more about the murder Powell's character committed, but all we get is a suggestion that the victim had it coming to him. That everything in the movie comes in at only a little over an hour -- 67 minutes -- is another reason to cherish One Way Passage.

 

Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

Milly Shapiro, Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff in Hereditary

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Woff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Mallory Bechtel. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Grace Yun. Film editing: Lucian Johnston, Jennifer Lame. Music: Colin Stetson.

There are films that leave a depressive miasma with me for days. I'm thinking particularly of George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988, not the 1993 American remake) and Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997, not the 2007 American remake). For a time, I thought Ari Aster's Hereditary was going to have the same effect on me, and it might have, if it hadn't devolved into a mere gory supernatural thriller with an overcomplicated backstory. It begins extraordinarily and creepily well, with a pan through the miniatures created by Annie (Toni Collette) in which one of them turns into the actual room where her son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is oversleeping on the day of his grandmother's funeral. A menacing gloom remains in the film as the family, including father Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), goes to the funeral and returns home. Even when we come home, there's a sense that something is off about the family and their obvious mixed feelings about the deceased. Ari Aster, in his feature film debut, skillfully handles the atmosphere in the somewhat sinister old house (aided by Pawel Pogorzelski's dark but not too dark cinematography and Colin Stetson's ominous score). Aster manages to gradually introduce the exposition about what's eating at Annie and her family. The performances are marvelous, especially Shapiro's obviously but enigmatically disturbed 13-year-old Charlie. I was with Aster's film all the way through the appalling accident that turns the story in a new direction. Then Ann Dowd, a fine actress whose career seems to have become defined by her performance as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale, shows up to reveal the movie's indebtedness to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Unfortunately, Aster's film has neither the coherence of the former nor the wit of the latter. In the end, it has to be remembered for Collette's performance, which should have had an Oscar nomination, not just for Annie's distraught moments but also the one at the film's climax when her face turns from horror to a kind of pleased amazement.

Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932)

Kay Francis and William Powell in Jewel Robbery

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright, Alan Mowbray, André Luguet, Henry Kolker, Spencer Charters, Lee Kohlmar, Clarence Wilson. Screenplay: Erwin Gelsey, based on a play by Ladislas Fodor and a translation by Bertram Bloch. Cinematography: Robert Kurrle. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Jewel Robbery is a perfect storm of what would be taboos under the Production Code: Not only does it condone adultery and let crime go unpunished, but it also allows William Powell's jewel thief -- pardon me, robber -- to slip a cigarette laced with an uncommonly potent strain of cannabis to the jewelry store guard, thereby violating the forthcoming ban on drug references in movies. (We are assured that, after a case of the giggles, the guard will fall sound asleep to wake refreshed with no hangover but the munchies.) The adulteress is Baroness Teri (Kay Francis), a golddigger who has married the aging Baron von Horhenfels (Henry Kolker) for his money, while carrying on a liaison with the much younger cabinet member Paul (Hardie Albright). Unfortunately, as Teri tells her confidante Marianne (Helen Vinson), Paul is a bit of a bore. She makes the best of it, however, swanning around in gowns designed by Orry-Kelly that defy the law of gravity and raking in the jewels her husband provides. Which leads her to the jewelry store that is about to be robbed and to the robber himself, with whom she swiftly falls in love. The rest is a story of crime and absence of punishment that ends well for Teri and her thief -- uh, robber. Francis and Powell were never better, and there's a good deal of charm and wit to the film. It could have been directed with a lighter touch: William Dieterle is better known for the somewhat stuffy biopics The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), and he doesn't have the Viennese insouciance that the script needs. But he lets his actors provide that, with good results.

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan. Grace Edwards. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Barney Pilling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

On the Netflix series Heartstopper, a teenage boy works up the courage to ask a girl he likes (and who secretly likes him) to go on their first date. He takes her to a movie that he likes and she doesn't, and the date is a disaster. The key fact here is that the movie is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012). In my day, a comparable move would have been to take a date to see Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Like Demy, Anderson makes movies that display an uncompromising sense of style. The only question is whether that style works for you or not, whether you think it betrays a lack of substance or opens vistas of meaning. In Anderson's case it's certainly a consistent style: an absence of closeups, long takes with characters artfully placed, actors who deliver their lines deadpan facing front, tricks like switching the screen from standard Academy ratio to widescreen and from monochrome to color. Sometimes Anderson's style works for me and sometimes it doesn't -- I love The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), but I could barely sit through The French Dispatch (2021). In the case of Asteroid City, I still haven't made up my mind completely, but I'm leaning toward the favorable view. I think it captures something essential about the brutal innocence of 1950's America -- the film is set in 1955 -- and does it without clichés. There's an acidity of tone to the film that keeps it from becoming twee -- an adjective frequently applied to Anderson's movies. The performances of its all-star cast are often delightful: I particularly liked Bryan Cranston's performance as the TV host who serves as the narrator in the frame story. Cranston somehow manages to walk a line between Rod Serling and Walter Cronkite in his delivery. Scarlett Johansson and a bearded, pipe-smoking Jason Schwartzman manage to transcend the limitations of deadpan delivery as the film's romantic leads. Jeffrey Wright doesn't overplay the role of the pompous General Gibson, and there's a brief starry cameo by Margot Robbie. Asteroid City may be one of those films it's more rewarding to think about after you watch it, but watching it is fairly painless.

Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935)

Claire Trevor and Edmund Lowe in Black Sheep

Cast: Edmund Lowe, Claire Trevor, Tom Brown, Eugene Pallette, Adrienne Ames, Herbert Mundin, Ford Sterling, Jed Prouty, Billy Bevan, David Torrence. Screenplay: Allen Rivkin, Allan Dwan. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Alex Troffey. Music: Oscar Levant. 

Is it because it stars Edmund Lowe and Claire Trevor, and not, say, William Powell and Carole Lombard, that I had never seen Black Sheep before? Because Lowe, a second-string leading man at best, is perfectly fine as the suave but penniless gambler trying to recoup his fortunes on a ship sailing back to the States. And Trevor is delightful as the similarly broke actress going home after failing to make it big on the stage in Europe. Trevor, in fact, is something of a revelation: She's now best known for playing hard-bitten dames like Dallas, who was run out of town by the respectable ladies and put onto the titular vehicle of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). And she won an Oscar as the gangster's moll Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948). Who knew she had the gift for comedy that she shows in Black Sheep? And it's mostly a comedy, with a melodramatic twist provided by Allan Dwan, who wrote the story for which Allen Rivkin provided some lively dialogue. Lowe's John Francis Dugan and Trevor's Janette Foster team up to save the naïve young Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) from being fleeced by the card sharps Belcher (Eugene Pallette) and Schmelling (Jed Prouty) and by the slinky Millicent Bath (Adrienne Ames). Young Curtis, from a proper Bostonian family, owes Mrs. Bath a large sum, which she uses to blackmail him into helping her smuggle into the States a valuable pearl necklace that she has stolen. It's the usual shipboard intrigue plot we've seen before, played for comedy. But Dwan gives it a turn toward melodrama when Dugan discovers that the young man he's protecting is his own son. (Dwan seems to have borrowed this device from his own movie, East Side, West Side (1927), which likewise involves a father being separated from his son by a snooty family.) But it's mostly a comedy with some sharp repartee and a gallery of supporting actors like Pallette and Prouty, Herbert Mundin as a man in top hat and tails who's so drunk he doesn't know where he is or even who he is, and Ford Sterling as Mather, the shipboard detective who's Dugan's nemesis. There's also a sappy song, "In Other Words, I'm in Love," with lyrics by Sidney Clare and music by Oscar Levant, sung sappily by Dick Webster, which doesn't bear mentioning except that Levant's Gershwinesque music also serves as the film's score.