Star Trek Into Darkness (J.J. Abrams, 2013)

I'm not a Trekkie. I never watched TOS* when it was first on TV, and only got hooked on TNG* when it went into re-runs. I don't speak a word of Klingon. But I can do the "Live long and prosper" hand sign, so I guess I can pass among those who aren't really hardcore. In fact, when I learned that J.J. Abrams, the rebooter of moribund franchises, was going to make his first Star Trek film (2009), I was neither appalled nor intrigued, as a real Trekkie would be. Only one of the movies featuring the cast of TOS was really very good: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), aka "the one with the whales." And even then, it was the script that made William Shatner in rug and corset trying to recapture the old Capt. Kirk swagger even plausible. Fortunately, it will take a few more years before the new cast -- Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Anton Yelchin -- need their own reboot. The great charm of Star Trek has always been its ensemble work. No one watching the series either on TV or in movies really cares that much about the story. It's the interplay of characters -- the bromance of Kirk and Spock (heightened to near-homoeroticism in the Pine-Quinto version), the grumpiness of Bones McCoy, the devotion of Scotty to his engines, and so on -- that makes the creaky old sci-fi clichés come to life. Throw in some in-jokes for longtime fans, such as the Tribble in this film, and you've got a surefire hit. The remarkable thing about the cast of the Abrams films is that they so far have transcended the paint-by-numbers quality of the plots and managed to make the CGI effects secondary to the humanity. Benedict Cumberbatch is a far more terrifying Khan than Ricardo Montalban with his rubber pecs ever was. And I admit that I teared up a bit seeing Leonard Nimoy in what turned out to be his farewell cameo. No, this is not a great movie, but there is great shrewdness in its casting.

*If you're reading this entry, I assume you don't have to be told that this is Trekkiese for Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. But if you're reading this footnote, I guess you do.

The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean, 1957)

Alec Guinness and David Lean made six features together, starting with Guinness's film debut in Great Expectations (1946). The Bridge on the River Kwai won him his only Oscar, but he seems to have been as much a good-luck charm for Lean as vice versa, since Lean miscast him rather badly in two otherwise successful films: Lawrence of Arabia (1962), in which he is rather embarrassingly non-Arab as King Feisal, and A Passage to India (1984), in which he plays Prof. Godbole with an accent that sounds more like Apu on The Simpsons than any actual Brahmin scholar. The part of Col. Nicholson in Bridge is a bit underwritten: We never really learn what the character's motives are for his eventual collaboration with the Japanese in building the bridge, and his moment of self-awareness as he says, "What have I done?" when he realizes the bridge is about to be blown up, is not adequately prepared for. But Guinness was a consummate trouper, even though he often clashed with Lean about the character, whom he wanted to be less of a stiff-upper-lip type than the director did. The movie won seven Oscars, including one for screenplay that was presented to Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel on which it was based. In fact, Boulle spoke and wrote no English; the screenplay was by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who were blacklisted for supposed communist ties and were judged ineligible under Academy rules. Their Oscars and their screen credit were restored posthumously in 1984. Today, Bridge looks like a well-made entertainment with some major flaws: The moral dilemma that centers on Col. Nicholson, who wants to demonstrate the superiority of the British at the expense of actually serving the Japanese cause, feels artificially created -- surely some of the officers and enlisted men under Nicholson's command had something to say about the colonel's plans. Sessue Hayakawa deserved his supporting actor nomination as Col. Saito, though the part verges on stereotype. The role of the American, Shears (William Holden), who opposes Nicholson, seems to be cooked up to provide something for a major movie star to play: Note that Holden receives top billing, and that Guinness, even though he was nominated for and won a leading actor Oscar, is billed third. The trek through the jungle by Shears, Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins), Lt. Joyce (Geoffrey Horne), and their attractively nubile team of female bearers takes up a lot of not very involving screen time. And the demolition of the bridge and the train crossing it seems oddly anticlimactic, owing to some complications in blowing up and filming an actual full-size bridge and train. Today, of course, miniatures and special effects would be used to make the scene more exciting, but even for an actual blowing up of a bridge and a train, a sequence that had to be got right the first time, the one in Bridge is actually less successful than the one done 30 years earlier by Buster Keaton in The General (1926).

Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

Woody Allen's admiration of Ingmar Bergman's films is so well known that it becomes a gag in Manhattan when, at their first meeting, Mary (Diane Keaton) gives Isaac (Allen) a list of artists she thinks are overrated, concluding, to his astonishment, with Bergman. But Manhattan reminds me less of Bergman's films than of those of the French New Wave. Maybe it's just because I've seen several of them recently, but it strikes me that, other things being equal, Manhattan could add a seventh to Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales. In Claire's Knee (1970), for example, the middle-aged Jerôme (Jean-Claude Brialy) is inspired to lust by the eponymous joint of the teenage Claire (Laurence de Monaghan). In My Night at Maud's (1969), the middle-aged Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) marries the much younger Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), and 20-year-old Haydée (Haydée Politoff) is the object of desire for both Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) and Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) in La Collectionneuse (1967). Allen carries the premise further in Manhattan by making 42-year-old Isaac and 17-year-old Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) lovers. Is it too much to say that Allen may have found license in Rohmer's films for their somewhat shocking relationship? But Manhattan also features a familiar triangle present in several New Wave films: two men in competition for a single woman. Isaac and his friend Yale (Michael Murphy) both get involved with Mary, just as Adrien and François were involved with Haydée, and more famously, Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) fall in love with Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962). Similarly, both Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) pursue Odile (Anna Karina) in Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964), and Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy) and Charles (Gérard Blain) contend for the affections of Florence in Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959). Allen's celebration of New York City also reminds me strongly of the way Godard pays homage to Paris in Breathless (1960) and Chabrol has Paul give Charles a tour of the city in Les Cousins. Of course, no New Wave film was filled with wisecracks and one-liners the way Manhattan is. (Not that any Bergman film is, either.) Yet I think it's not too far-fetched to think of Allen's movie as a kind of hommage to Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, et al. And if it is an hommage, it is often a handsome one, thanks to Gordon Willis's magisterial black-and-white cinematography and the wall-to-wall Gershwin soundtrack. Allen's personal life has made us more queasy about Manhattan's May-December (or at least April-September) relationship, though I'm not sure audiences ever found Isaac and Tracy a normative couple.

The Letter (William Wyler, 1940)

As Tony Gaudio's camera travels across the Malayan rubber plantation we hear shots being fired, and as we track closer we see Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), coming down her front steps with a grimly determined look on her face, firing the remaining bullets from her revolver into a man on the ground. And we sit back and relax and think, "Oh, yeah, Bette's here. This is gonna be good." Davis is one of the few stars who can almost always make us feel this way -- maybe Cary Grant or Barbara Stanwyck for me -- who else for you? And it is good, perhaps the best of the three films Davis made with William Wyler. For me, Jezebel (1938) is too steeped in the Hollywood Old South myth, and The Little Foxes (1941) too hamstrung by Lillian Hellman's dramaturgy. This one has a very fine screenplay by Howard Koch that deftly steps on and around the restrictions placed on it by the Production Code. For one thing, Leslie has to be punished for her crime, which involves not only murder but also, with the help of her lawyer, Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), suborning justice. (Joyce somehow gets off scot-free, though with an embittered conscience.) Wyler got a bad rap from the auteur critics like Andrew Sarris, who found his technical skills insufficiently personal. But we see something of Wyler's daring early in the film as Leslie is recounting her version of why she shot Geoffrey Hammond to her lawyer, her husband (Herbert Marshall), and a government official (Bruce Lester) who has been called to the scene. Wyler chooses to shoot a long segment of Leslie's story with the backs of Leslie and the three men to the camera: We don't see their faces, but only the room where the initial shooting took place. The effect, relying heavily on Davis's voice acting and Koch's script, is to place Leslie's narrative -- which as others comment rarely varies by a word -- in our minds instead of the truth. It is, for Davis, a splendidly icy and controlled performance. The major fault in the film today is in the condescension toward Asian characters typical of Hollywood in the era, though it's not as bad perhaps in 1940 as it would be after Pearl Harbor a year later. We learn that Hammond had a Eurasian wife (the Code-enforced substitute for the Chinese mistress of W. Somerset Maugham's 1927 play), and in 1940s Hollywood "Eurasian" invariable meant "sinister," especially when she's played by Gale Sondergaard. The other Asians in the film are treated as subordinates, including Joyce's Chinese law clerk, Ong Chi Seng (Victor Sen Yung), who is all smiles and passive aggressiveness. That we are expected to share in this colonialist order of things is especially apparent when Leslie is forced to deliver the payment for the incriminating letter to Mrs. Hammond, who lords it over Leslie, making her remove her shawl to bare her head and to place the money in her hands; then Mrs. Hammond drops the letter on the floor, making Leslie pick it up. If today we cheer at Mrs. Hammond's abasement of Leslie, who after all killed her husband, you can bet that 1940s audiences didn't.

Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)

I gave up on the Mission: Impossible series after the first two installments (Brian De Palma, 1996; John Woo, 2000) partly because they featured the world's most annoying major movie star, but also because they lacked some of the things that made the old TV series so entertaining. One of those things is intelligence, by which I mean not just spycraft but also the application of thought, rather than muscle and firepower, to problem-solving. Another is that the TV show was an ensemble affair, with Peter Graves, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris, and Peter Lupus (and various successors) working together to thwart the bad guys. The films, on the other hand, were very much about Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) as a James Bond-style one-man band -- no surprise, since Cruise is the producer of the M:I movies. The other members of the Impossible Missions Force were expendable, with the exception of Ving Rhames, who has been the only other constant in the film series. I was persuaded to take another look at the series after I found myself enjoying Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman, 2014), which made me think that Cruise still had some valid claim to his stardom. And since J.J. Abrams has become maybe the world's most successful producer-writer-director, it also behooved me to check out the first film he directed. Abrams made a laudable effort to restore some of the ensemble work of the TV series, bringing on a team including Rhames, Billy Crudup, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q, Simon Pegg, and Laurence Fishburne to flesh out the IMF. It doesn't quite work because Cruise still hogs the film, but there are some good bits from all of the supporting actors, and a nice contribution to IMF lore: the souped-up 3-D printer that churns out one of the famous masks the agents wind up wearing. This time it's a mask of the film's villain, Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and one of the best scenes in the film involves Hoffman playing Cruise playing Hoffman. But there are simply too many climaxes to the movie. I wish some of them had been cut to expand on the film's most enjoyable section, in which the team infiltrates the Vatican to kidnap Davian. I would have liked to see the planning -- the intelligence, if you will -- that went into the scheme. But I liked M:I III more than I expected. I'm told that Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011) and Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (Christopher McQuarrie, 2015) are better, so maybe I'll eventually get around to checking them out.  

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941)

If Hitchcock's name were not attached to this movie, would we remember it at all today? Perhaps as one of the last films of Carole Lombard -- it was the last released before her death in January 1942, though the posthumously released To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942) was the last one she completed filming. Or perhaps as one of the lesser examples of the romantic/screwball  comedy genre that flourished in the 1930s and '40s. But even hardcore Hitchcockians find it difficult to fit it into the director's canon. Hitchcock had said he wanted to work with Lombard, and when Lombard liked Norman Krasna's story and screenplay, the teaming was put into play. Lombard and Robert Montgomery play Ann and David Smith, who discover that their three-year-old marriage is invalid, owing to a legal technicality. Complications ensue, especially when David doesn't rush into remarriage as quickly as Ann likes. She kicks him out of the apartment, and then his law partner, Jeff Custer (Gene Raymond), makes a play for her affections. Lombard is very much at home in this kind of comedy, but Montgomery is surprisingly good at it too. The weak link is Raymond, who has the kind of role, the "other man" patsy, at which actors like Ralph Bellamy in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) and John Howard in The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) excelled. Raymond plays his part with a pinched, rather prissy manner that hardly sits well with the fact that he's supposed to have been the best fullback at the University of Alabama. In fact, the character seems to have been coded as latently gay: Witness Lombard's reaction when Ann learns that he decorated his own very tasteful apartment. Much of the film skirts around matters forbidden by the Production Code, including whether the now-unmarried Smiths should sleep together, which a director like Lubitsch or Hawks would have treated with more wit and finesse than Hitchcock does. This was only his third film made in Hollywood, and it was his first with a completely American setting; the first two, Rebecca (1940) and Foreign Correspondent (1940), were set in Europe and England. His unfamiliarity with American idiom shows up particularly in his treatment of Jeff and his parents (Philip Merivale and Lucile Watson), proper Southerners who are shocked at the suggestion that Ann has been sleeping with David. But whenever Hitchcock is working with Lombard and Montgomery, especially using Lombard's great gift for uninhibited physical comedy, the movie comes to fitful life.

La Collectionneuse (Éric Rohmer, 1967)

The French New Wave films launched numerous film acting careers, most notably those of the hyphenated Jeans: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Jean-Pierre Léaud. One of the longest of them has been that of Patrick Bauchau, the lead actor of Éric Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. Though his name may not be as well-known as the other three, he has worked steadily since his uncredited debut in Rohmer's short film Suzanne's Career (1963), the second of the director's "Six Moral Tales." La Collectionneuse is the fourth of the tales. though it was filmed before the third in the series, My Night at Maud's (1969). It was an impressive feature debut for Bauchau, whose later work includes a turn as a Bond villain in A View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985), and appearances on many American TV series. Bauchau's character, Adrien, is introduced to us in one of three brief prologues. The first shows Haydée (Haydée Politoff) walking along the beach in a bikini. In the second, the artist Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) discusses one of his pieces, a paint can studded with razor blades, with a writer (Alain Jouffroy). And in the third Adrien and his girlfriend, Carole (Mijanou Bardot), and a friend of hers (Annik Morice), talk about beauty in that elevated French intellectual way familiar to viewers of Rohmer's films. We learn that Adrien is going to stay with Daniel in a house in the south of France while Carole does a modeling job in London. When the two men get to the villa they discover that they're sharing it with the 20-year-old Haydée. The potential of this ménage à trois is obvious, especially after Adrien finds Haydée in bed with a young man -- the first of many. But this being one of Rohmer's morality plays, things do not go quite so obviously. For one thing, Adrien has sworn that he will spend his vacation doing nothing, which includes having sex. He calls Haydée a "collector" because of her sleeping around. But with actors as attractive as the young Bauchau and Politoff the sexual tension persists. The film develops into a satire on the pretensions and artifice of intellectuals, without ever tipping its hand in the direction it's going. (Though there is a priceless Chinese vase -- Adrien is an art dealer -- that is something of a Chekhov's gun.) Much of the film's dialogue was improvised by the three principals. The brilliant cinematography is by Rohmer's frequent collaborator Néstor Almendros.

My Night at Maud's (Éric Rohmer, 1969)

A moral tale: Once upon a time, a brave and chaste knight saw a fair young lady in church, and wished that she were his. The devil, hearing this, arranged for the knight to be tempted by a beautiful sorceress. But when the knight resisted the carnal temptations of the sorceress, he was rewarded with the love and the hand of the fair young lady. Éric Rohmer's moral tale: Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), an engineer who has recently moved to Clermont-Ferrand, is an intellectual Catholic, determined at the age of 34 to settle down and get married after several failed love affairs. At mass one day he sees a beautiful young woman (Marie-Christine Barrault), and longs to get to know her. Leaving the church, he sees the woman get on a moped, and he follows her in his car until they are separated by traffic. Jean-Louis runs into an old friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a philosophy professor and a Marxist, who takes him to see his friend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorcee. Vidal gets drunk and leaves early, and when it begins to snow heavily, Jean-Louis stays to spend the night with Maud. But they do little more than talk -- about his Catholicism, about the philosophy of Pascal, about his life and hers. She and her husband were unfaithful to each other, and her lover was killed when his car skidded on the ice -- one reason she forbids Jean-Louis to drive in the snow. They literally sleep together: She in the nude, he fully clothed and wrapped in a coverlet she lends him, though both are in the same bed. In the morning he makes a pass at her that she brushes off, and as he looks out the window he sees the young woman he saw at mass, and runs out to introduce himself to her. Her name is Françoise, and she is a student at the university where Vidal teaches. They make a date for later in the day, and afterward he drives her home to her student apartment. Stuck in the snow again, he spends the night, but not in her room: She gives him a key to the apartment of another student who is away. Five years later, they are married and taking their young son to the beach, when they meet Maud on the path. Jean-Louis realizes from Françoise's reaction that she knows Maud -- in fact, Françoise, who has confessed that she had an affair with a married man, may have been the lover of Maud's husband. This is the third of Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales," and perhaps the most successful: It was nominated for Oscars for Rohmer's screenplay and as the best foreign-language film. But a lot of critics and viewers found it insufferably talky in that peculiarly French over-intellectualized way -- a curious objection to a film that features four attractive actors and a strong emphasis on sex. And the talk is far wittier than anything you're likely to hear in a movie today.

Follow the Fleet (Mark Sandrich, 1936)

If Swing Time, as I suggested yesterday, has too little plot, then Follow the Fleet has a bit too much. Dwight Taylor and Allan Scott based their screenplay on a 1922 Broadway play, Shore Leave, by Hubert Osborne, which later became a musical, Hit the Deck. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of course spark real heat when they're dancing together: As the remark attributed to Katharine Hepburn about the team says, she made him sexy and he made her classy. But I don't find them terribly convincing as a romantic pair when they're not singing and dancing together, and this criticism was not uncommon even in their heyday. Which may be why RKO decided to try to spice things up by creating a parallel romantic team in Follow the Fleet, casting Randolph Scott and Harriet Hilliard as the lovers whose problems echo those of Astaire and Rogers. The trouble is, Scott and Hilliard generate much less chemistry than the lead couple. Scott had always been a sort of second-string Gary Cooper, but without Cooper's charm or acting ability, and Hilliard was best known as a singer with her husband Ozzie Nelson's band when she was signed for this film, her first feature. She sings, rather ineffectively, two of the lesser-known of the seven Irving Berlin songs in the score, "Get Thee Behind Me, Satan" and "But Where Are You?" Follow the Fleet did nothing for her film career. It wasn't until she teamed with Ozzie for the radio series The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1944, and later with their two sons, David and Ricky, for the long-running TV series of the same name, that she became really famous. Fame was in store, however, for several other members of the cast: Betty Grable and a blond Lucille Ball have small parts in the film, and Tony Martin, one of the sailors backing up Astaire, would later star in the film version of Hit the Deck (Roy Rowland, 1955), bringing Hollywood's use of Osborne's play full circle. As for Astaire and Rogers, Follow the Fleet contains two of their most memorable numbers. They do a slapstick dance routine to "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" that shows Rogers's great gift for physical comedy to full advantage. And then there's  "Let's Face the Music and Dance," which is one of their most balletic routines. Astaire does some remarkable footwork and Rogers is clad in an amazing dress that, thanks to weights in the sleeves and hem, swirls around her hypnotically. Once or twice, to be sure, you can see Astaire try to avoid getting swacked by her sleeves. (The designer credited with "gowns" is Bernard Newman.) At the end of this sublime routine, Astaire and Rogers slowly make their way off-stage and then suddenly exit with a breathtakingly unanticipated strut. But why try to describe it?

Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936)

The plot of a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers is typically a thread on which the gems (the songs and dances) are strung, and Swing Time is no exception. The screenplay by Howard Lindsay and Allan Scott seems to exist largely to provide opportunities for Astaire and Rogers to open their mouths, the better to sing with, or to find places to dance. For those who care, it's the one in which Astaire plays a gambler named Lucky Garnett, who is late for his wedding to Margaret Watson (Betty Furness), so her father calls it off and says that if Lucky can make $25,000, he can come back to claim her hand. So off he goes to New York, accompanied by his friend Pop Cardetti (Victor Moore), where he falls for Penny Carroll (Rogers), a dance teacher. And so on.... That anything this silly remains watchable 80 years later is the consequence of the unsurpassed artistry of Astaire and Rogers, the dance direction of Hermes Pan, the comic support of Moore, Helen Broderick, and Eric Blore, and six songs by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields. Rogers does more than her usual share of the singing in this one, taking the lead on both "Pick Yourself Up" and "A Fine Romance," but as usual it's Astaire's peerless phrasing that carries the songs, especially the Oscar-winning "The Way You Look Tonight," which is wittily staged when Rogers enters the room having lathered her hair with shampoo but not yet rinsed it out. The dance highlight is probably "Never Gonna Dance," the climactic number when Lucky and Penny each think they're doomed to marry someone else, but Astaire's solo, "Bojangles of Harlem," a tribute to the great Bill Robinson, is also superb -- as long as you're not offended by the fact that Astaire does it in blackface. (To my mind, the reverence paid to Robinson outweighs the minstrelsy, but only slightly.) Astaire always insisted that dance sequences be done in long takes, which led to 47 reprises of  "Never Gonna Dance" during the filming before a take that completely satisfied Astaire was achieved -- at the expense, it is said, of Rogers's feet, which began to bleed. This was the only film role of any consequence for Furness, whose chief claim to fame was that she opened countless refrigerator doors as the TV commercial spokesperson for Westinghouse in the 1950s.