Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)

Cast: Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Max von Sydow, Oscar Isaac, William Hurt, Mark Strong, Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Mark Addy, Matthew Macfadyen, Kevin Durand, Scott Grimes, Alan Doyle, Douglas Hodge, Léa Seydoux. Screenplay: Brian Helgeland, Ethan Reiff, Cyrus Voris. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: Arthur Max. Film editing: Pietro Scalia. Music: Marc Streitenfeld.

Did the world really need another Robin Hood movie? From the lack of interest at the box office, it would seem not. At least Ridley Scott and screenwriter Brian Helgeland tried to give us something slightly different: a prequel, in which Robin finds his identity and mission and only at the very end goes off into Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men, presumably to rob from the rich and give to the poor. We've had a sequel before in Richard Lester's 1976 Robin and Marian, in which the aging couple find an end to their adventures. (Interestingly, the Robin Hood of Lester's film, Sean Connery, was 46 when it was made, the same age that Russell Crowe was when he made Scott's. Lester's Marian, Audrey Hepburn, was 47, and Scott's, Cate Blanchett, was 41.) Unfortunately, the prequel doesn't give us much that's new or revealing about the characters: The villains, King John (Oscar Isaac) and the Sheriff of Nottingham (Matthew Macfadyen), remain the same, with an additional twist that they're being duped by another villain named Godfrey (Mark Strong), a supporter of the French King Philip, who is plotting an invasion now that the English army is still straggling back from the Crusades. Robin is a soldier of fortune named Robin Longstride, who has been to the Crusades and is making it back with the crown of the fallen Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston) as well as a sword he promised the dying Sir Robert Loxley (Douglas Hodge) he would return to his father, Sir Walter (Max von Sydow) in Nottingham.  When he does, Robin meets Marian, no longer a maid but the widow of Sir Robert. On the way, he has gathered a retinue comprising Little John (Kevin Durand), Will Scarlet (Scott Grimes), and Allan A'Dayle (Alan Doyle), and in Nottingham he will add Friar Tuck (Mark Addy) to the not terribly merry company. They'll take part in repelling the French invasion, which Scott makes into a kind of small scale D-Day, to the extent of borrowing unabashedly from Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), including some landing craft whose historical existence has been questioned (along with much else of the movie's history). Robin and his fellow soldiers, including Marian, who arrives disguised in chain mail, save the day, but their hopes for a new charter of rights that has been promised them by King John are dashed when he proclaims Robin an outlaw. So everything seems to be set up for a sequel that will culminate at Runnymede and the signing of Magna Carta, but the film's flop at the box office put paid to that. Robin Hood certainly has some good performances, which you might expect from its cast packed with Oscar-winners and -contenders, but it feels routine and a little tired. It also resorts to filming much of the action with the now too common "gloomycam," in which fight scenes always seem to be taking place at night, so you can't tell who's killing whom.

Not Wanted (Elmer Clifton, Ida Lupino, 1949)

Not Wanted (Elmer Clifton, Ida Lupino, 1949)

Cast: Sally Forrest, Keefe Brasselle, Leo Penn, Dorothy Adams, Wheaton Chambers, Ruth Clifford, Ruthelma Stevens, Lawrence Dobkin, Patrick White, Rita Lupino, Audrey Farr, Carole Dunn. Screenplay: Paul Jarrico, Ida Lupino, Malvin Wald. Cinematography: Henry Freulich. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: William H. Ziegler. Music: Leith Stevens.

Not Wanted, Ida Lupino's first feature as director, begins well (after a gratuitous assertion of the film's moral intentions in a title card), with Sally Kelton (Sally Forrest) trudging uphill toward the camera, a glazed look in her eyes, until she reaches the top, where an infant has been left in a carriage outside a shop. It gurgles and coos at her and Sally can't resist: She picks up the baby and walks away with it, only to be accosted by the mother who calls the cops and has her arrested. In jail, where Sally is thrown in with some tough-looking dames (there's a rather clichéd touch of predatory lesbianism here), she looks at the camera and begins to ponder what brought her to this moment. Cue flashback. The sequence is handled deftly, and we can only assume that it was directed by Lupino instead of the credited Elmer Clifton, who suffered a heart attack three days into shooting the film. Lupino, who was the producer, took over for the rest, but declined credit because she wasn't yet a member of the Directors Guild. The movie also ends well, with an exciting chase sequence in which a guilt-ridden Sally runs from the man who loves her, Drew Baxter (Keefe Brasselle), climbing steps to a bridge that crosses the railroad tracks and at one point threatening to leap onto the tracks below. Only when Drew collapses -- he's a World War II veteran with a prosthetic leg and has struggled to follow her -- does Sally turn and go to him for the inevitable happy ending. What comes between these scenes is often less impressive: a tear-drenched story about a young woman who falls for the wrong man (a musician, of course), gets pregnant, has the baby and gives it up for adoption, and suffers from self-loathing and remorse. To appreciate it we have to remember what was deemed possible for American filmmakers under the Production Code, as well as what was deemed possible for American women of the era. Even within the confines of the "problem picture" compromises, Lupino provides some interesting touches, such as the giddy, speeded-up carousel in the background when when Sally faints -- a sure indication for anyone familiar with movie pregnancy clichés that she's going to have a baby -- and the subjective camera that takes over during Sally's Demerol-numbed labor and delivery. Lupino's ability to think originally even when the material lacks originality is one of her strengths as a director.

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

Cast: James Wilby, Kristin Scott Thomas, Rupert Graves, Judi Dench, Alec Guinness, Anjelica Huston, Pip Torrens, Stephen Fry, Jackson Kyle, Christopher Godwin. Screenplay: Tim Sullivan, Derek Granger, Charles Sturridge, based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Eileen Diss, Chris Townsend. Film editing: Peter Coulson. Music: George Fenton.

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a sharp-edged, cold-hearted satirical novel whose plot turns on the death of a child. Any adaptation needs to be willing to be as ruthless as the novelist in its portrait of the feckless upper classes of Great Britain in the period between two World Wars, but instead Charles Sturridge's version gives us yet another handsomely mounted, elegantly clad film in the Merchant Ivory vein -- without the intelligence of Ismail Merchant's producing, James Ivory's direction, and particularly Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplays, which managed to capture the tone of the novels they adapted with precision. Its leads, James Wilby as the ill-fated Tony Last and Kristin Scott Thomas as his unfaithful wife, Brenda, are handsome but a little too attractive to capture the fatal emptiness of the characters. Scott Thomas almost suggests the depths of Brenda's vanity in the crucial scene in which she receives the news of her young son's death -- at first she thinks she's being told that her lover has died, but when she hears that it's her son, she impulsively mutters, "Oh, thank God," before realizing the enormity of what she has just said. Unfortunately, Sturridge hasn't prepared us for the moment -- he has made Brenda too engaging a character for so wicked a reaction. Nor has Sturridge allowed Tony to be enough of a silly ass for him to deserve the fate he receives at the end of the film. The supporting players fare better: Rupert Graves lets us know from the start that John Beaver is a callow gold-digger; Judi Dench is suitably brassy as his upwardly mobile mother; and Alec Guinness makes a convincingly subtle monster out of Mr. Todd. Anjelica Huston brings her usual smartness to what amounts to a cameo role as Mrs. Rattery, a rich American whose perspective on the Brits and their preoccupation with class and the past opens Tony's eyes, even if a bit too late. Unfortunately, any substance that the film carries over from Waugh's novel has been slicked over with glossy production values and sapped by a timidity about depicting the characters as sharply as the author did.

Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955)

Killer's Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955)

Cast: Jamie Smith, Irene Kane, Frank Silvera, Jerry Jarrett, Mike Dana, Felice Orlandi, Shaun O'Brien, Barbara Brand, David Vaughan, Alec Rubin, Ruth Sobotka. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Howard Sackler. Cinematography: Stanley Kubrick. Film editing: Stanley Kubrick. Music: Gerald Fried.

If only Stanley Kubrick hadn't had to worry about such incidentals as plot and characters, Killer's Kiss might have been a classic film noir. It has a gritty urban atmosphere, striking visuals of well-chosen locations, and a perhaps slightly overdone jazz score. But it doesn't have much of a story to tell: Boxer on the skids meets attractive blond and rescues her from her brutal boss. It's not enough to carry a film for even the bit over an hour that the film runs. (It only seems longer.) What holds our attention are some skillful photography -- a reminder that Kubrick began his career as a staff photographer for Look magazine -- evoking a now mostly lost New York City, including Penn Station before its demolition, and a few set pieces: the prize fight; the larking, drunk conventioneers who steal the protagonist's scarf; the chase across the rooftops; and the fight in a warehouse full of mannequins, in which Kubrick comes up with some striking setups such as a shot of the protagonist with plaster hands dangling over his head. There are some attempts to give the characters a backstory: his family in Seattle, her gloomy tale about her father and sister. But these don't give enough depth to the characters. They remain excuses for camera setups rather than actual human beings.

First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018)

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, Patrick Fugit, Christopher Abbott, Ciarán Hinds, Olivia Hamilton, Pablo Schreiber, Shea Whigham, Lukas Haas, Ethan Embry, Brian D'Arcy James. Screenplay: Josh Singer, based on a book by James R. Hansen. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Nathan Crowley. Film editing: Tom Cross. Music: Justin Hurwitz.

Sometime in the middle of First Man, I found myself wishing that Buzz Aldrin had been the first person to set foot on the moon. Not that Neil Armstrong didn't deserve the honor -- Damien Chazelle's movie makes us certain that he had the right stuff -- but because Armstrong, as conceived by screenwriter Josh Singer and played by Ryan Gosling, is so remote, chilly, and uptight. Aldrin at least had a sense of humor and was a bit of a maverick, but all we get of Armstrong is a grim determination, a sense of duty that the job was paramount and had to be suffered through at the expense of human tenderness. Gosling's Armstrong is death-haunted, emotionally frozen by the deaths of his young daughter and of his fellow pilots and astronauts. We don't connect with him except through his wife, Janet, played by Claire Foy, who endures her husband's remoteness but is powerless to get him to snap out of it. The result is a somewhat depressing treatment of heroism as a kind of dead end, which seems to fit the facts of Armstrong's rather colorless and uneventful later life, and also suggests why he and Janet separated in 1990 and divorced four years later. It's a well-made movie but a curiously unsettling one.