We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

We Own the Night (James Gray, 2007)

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Walhberg, Robert Duvall, Eva Mendes, Alex Veadov, Danny Hoch, Moni Moshonov, Oleg Taktarov, Antoni Corone, Tony Musante, Dominic Colón, Yelena Solovey. Screenplay: James Gray. Cinematography: Joaquín Baca-Asay. Production design: Ford Wheeler. Film editing: John Axelrad. Music: Wojciech Kilar.

It takes real talent to embrace movie clichés as whole-heartedly as James Gray does in We Own the Night and still come up with a watchable and frequently suspenseful film. We've seen the mean streets of New York in the 1980s so often in the movies before. Cops continue to battle mobsters on TV series, and the tale of brothers who go in radically different ways is as old as myth. There are misfit girlfriends in countless movies about working-class families, along with wives who suffer as their husbands go out into danger, and what's a mobster movie without snitches and turncoats? There's even a big car chase. It's in the last, I think, that Gray shows off his skill as director, for instead of shooting the speeding cars from the outside, Gray puts us inside the car carrying our protagonist, as a gunman in the pursuing car fires at him. It's a sequence as visually confusing to the audience as it would be to an actual driver. Of course, it helps if you have a cast as capable of transcending the clichés as Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, and Robert Duvall are. We Own the Night was not highly praised on release -- it has a 57% "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes -- but I think it's going to be one of those films that look better with age, when we recognize the skill with which it's made.

The Ritz (Richard Lester, 1976)

The Ritz (Richard Lester, 1976)

Cast: Jack Weston, Rita Moreno, Jerry Stiller, Kaye Ballard, F. Murray Abraham, Paul B. Price, Treat Williams. Screenplay: Terrence McNally, based on his play. Cinematography: Paul Wilson. Production design: Philip Harrison. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Ken Thorne.

The Ritz is not as funny as it wants to be -- or at least as I wanted it to be. Richard Lester sets the wrong pace for the action: uninterruptedly chaotic. Farce needs discipline and precise timing, but Lester lets everything devolve into a haphazard jumble of situations, one -- the identity switch between the brothers-in-law played by Jack Weston and Jerry Stiller -- intruding on another -- characters with elaborate fixations, like Paul B. Price's manic "chubby chaser." Noise drowns out many of Terrence McNally's best lines, though Rita Moreno and F. Murray Abraham in particular still manage to get a few good laughs with them. Unfortunately, time has also cast a pall over the anything-goes sexuality that takes place in the film's setting, a post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS gay bathhouse, which makes The Ritz very much a period piece.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Fumio Watanabe, Go Kato, Tomoko Mayama, Yuko Hama, Shigero Tsuyuguchi, Asao Uchida, Taketoshi Naito, Yoshi Kato, Azami Ogami, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Akira Naito. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Eiken Sakurai, Hideaki Sakurai.

The Lone Wolf and Cub series, of which Sword of Vengeance is the first, has something in common with the Zatoichi films, such as Zatoichi and the Chest of Gold (Kazuo Ikehiro, 1964) and Kenji Misumi's own The Tale of Zatoichi (1962): They're about handicapped warriors traveling through hostile territory. Zatoichi is blind, whereas Ogami Itto is simply encumbered with a small child, his son. Yet somehow they beat the odds, fighting off whole armies out to get them. It's a good premise, made more suspenseful in the Lone Wolf films because we naturally don't want to see small children put in harm's way. Which Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance does from the very outset, in which Ogami, the official executioner, is forced to behead an infant, setting up the plot which leads him into a very real hell. Ogami is an intriguing character, which helped me put up with the somewhat routine villainy and violence of the film.

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Du Barry Was a Lady (Roy Del Ruth, 1943)

Cast: Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly, Virginia O'Brien, Rags Ragland, Zero Mostel, Donald Meek, Douglass Dumbrille, George Givot, Louise Beavers, Tommy Dorsey. Screenplay: Nancy Hamilton, Irving Brecher, based on a play by Herbert Fields and Buddy G. DeSylva. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof, songs by Cole Porter, Burton Lane, Ralph Freed, Roger Edens, E.Y. Harburg. Costume design: Gile Steele.

Natalie Kalmus must have been in heaven. The ex-wife of Technicolor founder Herbert Kalmus, and the contract-designated "color supervisor" for any film using the process (as well as the bane of any directors or cinematographers who wanted to do it their own way), was surely delighted when MGM chose Red Skelton and Lucille Ball to star in Du Barry Was a Lady, thereby ensuring that Technicolor's most vivid hue, red, would be on display throughout the film. Ball's hair stylist, Sydney Guilaroff, even devised a new red hair dye for the star, one that she would continue to use -- even to make jokes about -- for the rest of her career. The movie itself is nonsense, one of MGM's second-string musicals, based on a Broadway hit that had starred Bert Lahr and Ethel Merman, but jettisoning not only its stars but also most of Porter's songs. Before it gets to the central gimmick -- Skelton accidentally gets slipped a mickey and dreams he's back in the court of Louis XV -- it's a string of night club routines, including a trio of singers who imitate the famous but now-forgotten big bands of the day, but also featuring one of the best big bands, Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Skelton mugs a lot, but Zero Mostel, cast as a fortune-teller, mugs even more. At least Gene Kelly, the nominal romantic lead, gets to dance a bit. Ball was still in that stage of her career in which nobody seemed to know what to do with a beautiful woman who was also a gifted clown. Her best moments in the film come when she gets to do her clowning, as in a sequence in which Skelton (as Louis XV) chases her (as Madame DuBarry) around a bedroom and across a trampoline disguised as a bed. She also gets some funny moments in the film's closing number, Porter's "Friendship," goofing around with the rest of the cast. (It's also the one number in which her own singing voice is heard; the rest of the time she's dubbed by Martha Mears.) This is one of those movies for which the fast-forward button on the remote control was designed: Skip anything savoring of plot, most of the tedious mugging, the calendar-girl fashion show, but stop for the Dorsey numbers, the Kelly dances, and any time Ball is allowed to show what she did best.