Hold Your Man (Sam Wood, 1933)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess, Muriel Kirkland, Garry Owen, Barbara Barondess, Elizabeth Patterson, Blanche Friderici, Theresa Harris, George Reed. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Howard Emmett Rogers. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. 

Part sexy pre-Code romp and part weepie melodrama, Hold Your Man succeeds on both counts. Clark Gable plays small-time con man Eddie Hall, who while fleeing from the cops winds up in the apartment of Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), while she's taking a bath. He winds up there for good until he slugs an intruder into her apartment, accidentally killing him. He takes it on the lam and she takes the rap, going to a women's prison where she learns that she's carrying his child. The denouement, in which Ruby's fellow inmates help unite her with Eddie, is full of suspense. In a surprisingly almost enlightened twist, the heroine of this section of the movie is a Black prisoner, Lily Mae (Theresa Harris), whose father, a minister (George Reed), just happens to be at the prison for visitors' day, and thus available with a little maneuvering to marry Ruby and Eddie. (I say "almost enlightened" because neither Harris nor Reed gets a screen credit, and an alternate ending was filmed for Southern release, in which the minister was played by Henry B. Walthall.) The switch from hijinks among lowlifes to redemptive love story is a little jarring, but Harlow was never more in her element, and Gable's smirky charm is engaging.  

Dheepan (Jacques Audiard, 2015)

Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, and Jesuthasan Antonythasan in Dheepan

Cast: Jesuthasan Antonythasan, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, Claudine Vinasithamby, Vincent Rottier, Faouzi Bensaïdi, Marc Zinga, Bass Dhem, Franck Falise, Joséphine de Meaux, Jean-Baptiste Pouilloux. Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Noé Debré. Cinematography: Éponine Momenceau. Production design: Marcel Barthélémy. Music: Nicolas Jaar. 

Writer-director Jacques Audiard has a recurring theme in his films: the search for redemption thwarted by past transgressions. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), for example, an enforcer for a corrupt real estate firm decides to turn away from the gangster life of his father and instead follow in the footsteps of his mother, a classical pianist, but doesn't succeed. And in his current film, Emilia Pérez, a drug lord transitions from male to female, but old relationships undo the attempt to become a better person. Much of Dheepan is a stirring, fascinating story about a makeshift family: three unrelated refugees from the civil war in Sri Lanka, who take on new names and pose as husband, wife, and daughter to escape the country and find safety in a suburb of Paris. How they manage to endure cultural, social, and linguistic changes and form a new family is the heart of the film. Unfortunately, they find themselves in a housing development that is the locus of a turf war between various drug cartels, and Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) discovers that his old identity as a fighter for the Tamils in Sri Lanka hasn't been hidden. Memories of that old conflict possess him, and Audiard climaxes his story by having Dheepan pull off a single-handed rescue of Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) and Ilayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby), resorting to old combat techniques. Although this part of the film is exciting, it's a reversion to conventional movie-making, turning Dheepan into Rambo, and it upends the neo-realistic style of the rest of the film.