Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 01/07/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Roadblock (Harold Daniels, 1951)

Charles McGraw and Joan Dixon in Roadblock

Cast: Charles McGraw, Joan Dixon, Lowell Gilmore, Louis Jean Heydt, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Steve Fisher, George Bricker, Richard H. Landau, Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Robert Golden. Music: Paul Sawtell.

You know that movie about the insurance man who commits a crime for a femme fatale? No, not Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). That one starred Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. This one stars Joan Dixon and Charles McGraw, and it's called Roadblock. It was directed by Harold Daniels, an actor who turned B-movie and later TV director. Double Indemnity is a classic and Roadblock is ... well, not too bad. McGraw plays Joe Peters, an insurance investigator who falls for an attractive woman he encounters in an airport. She's Diane Morley (Dixon), a sometime model headed for LA in hopes that she'll strike gold in some guy's wallet. He's exactly not what she's looking for, a guy who makes $350 a month, but they wind up together anyway. Eventually, he'll use his knowledge as an investigator to bring off a million-dollar mail car heist, all for love. It won't end well. McGraw is effective as a soft-hearted tough guy who falls hard for the woman he loves. Dixon's performance, however, is less successful. She starts out as a tough girl on the make and becomes mistress of a mobster (rather swishily played by Lowell Gilmore), but falls so hard in love with Joe that she's willing to live on his salary after all. I doubt that even Stanwyck could have brought off the role as written, and Dixon certainly can't. Still, the plot is nicely complex and it moves along so swiftly. There are worse ways to spend 73 minutes.

Little Odessa (James Gray, 1994)

Tim Roth and Edward Furlong in Little Odessa

Cast: Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Moira Kelly, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, Paul Guilfoyle, Natalya Andrejchenko, David Vadim. Screenplay: James Gray. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Dorian Harris.

James Gray's debut film, Little Odessa, is a chilly movie about a dysfunctional family, set in wintry Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood adjacent to Coney Island. Gray uses the seasonally shut down amusement park and boardwalk as a correlative for the frozen lives of the Shapira family, for which a reviving spring will never arrive. The film won more favor from European critics, winning an award at the Venice Film Festival and praise from director Claude Chabrol, than it did from Americans, who have less taste for grimness. And Little Odessa is almost unrelievedly grim in its account of what happens when the older son, Joshua, returns to the home where his mother, Irina (Vanessa Redgrave), is dying of cancer. He hates his father, Arkady (Maximilian Schell), who is having an affair with a younger woman while tending to Irina in her final days. Joshua feels close, however, to his teenage brother, Reuben (Edward Furlong), who dutifully helps his father run a small newsstand and look after his mother, but he has secretly stopped going to school, hiding the letters to his parents from the school in his sock drawer. Joshua is a hitman for the Russian mob. He has avoided returning home, but he can't refuse an order to rub out an Iranian jeweler with a store located in Brighton Beach. There are violent consequences not only for Joshua's target but also for his own family. The Shapira family is not so poetic and articulate as the Tyrones of Long Day's Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962) but they have a similar lacerating candor that gives actors free rein to perform. And it's mostly the performances that justify spending 98 minutes with them (as compared to the nearly three hours we spend with the Tyrones in Lumet's film). Redgrave, as always, is a marvel, all fragility and grit and love for her family, and Furlong demonstrates the kind of promise as an actor that his personal problems have never allowed him to fulfill. I think Schell is somewhat miscast as the father, who gets the blame for what has happened to his sons, but he gives the role substance if not the undertones of selfishness and desperation that it needs. The real star is Roth, an undervalued actor who always performs to the mark and beyond. Gray's screenplay is a touch too melodramatic, especially in the final confrontation of Joshua and his father, but with the help of Tom Richmond's cinematography and Kevin Thompson's production design, he maintains the oppressive mood and gloomy milieu effectively.