Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957)

Lana Turner and Diane Varsi in Peyton Place

Cast: Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Diane Varsi, Hope Lange, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Russ Tamblyn, Terry Moore, David Nelson, Barry Coe, Betty Field, Mildred Dunnock, Leon Ames, Lorne Greene. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, based on a novel by Grace Metalious. Cinematography: William C. Mellor. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Franz Waxman.

Take the sex away from Grace Metalious's lurid novel Peyton Place and what you have left is a portrait of small-town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, very much in the tradition of fiction by much better writers, from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner. Squeezed by the strictures of the Production Code, the film version of the novel becomes a kind of reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. There was narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy in Wilder's Grover's Corners, but only in the background. It bubbles to the surface in the adaptation of Metalious's novel, which replaces Wilder's heroine, the romantic Emily Webb, who loves her family and her town, with the embittered Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who hates not only the gossip-ridden town but also her mother, Constance (Lana Turner), for having withheld the information that Allison is the product of Constance's liaison with a married man. The film version of Peyton Place turns what in the novel was sexual molestation of a girl by her father into a rape by her stepfather, side-stepping the incest issue a bit, and converts an abortion into a miscarriage. The randy teenagers of the novel do nothing more shocking in the film than make out a bit and go skinny-dipping. The film hints a little that the shy mama's boy Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn) may be gay -- he refers to himself as a "sissy" once -- but relieves him of that stigma by having him join the paratroopers when war breaks out and come home bold and no longer shy. (It would never occur to Hollywood or its audiences of the day that a gay man could be bold and masculine.) In short, Peyton Place makes today's viewer do a lot of decoding. Which, aside from the fact that at 157 minutes it's overlong and a lot of the dialogue is heavy-handedly expository (and sometimes just banal), doesn't fatally undermine it as entertainment. There are some very good performances: Varsi, Turner, and Tamblyn received Oscar nominations, as did Arthur Kennedy as the slavering rapist stepfather, and Hope Lange as his victim-stepdaughter. Metalious, of course, hated it all the way to the bank.

Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine, 1954)

Mickey Rooney and Dianne Foster in Drive a Crooked Road

Cast: Mickey Rooney, Dianne Foster, Kevin McCarthy, Jack Kelly, Harry Landers, Paul Picerni, Dick Crockett. Screenplay: Blake Edwards, Richard Quine, based on a story by James Benson Nablo. Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: George Duning.

Mickey Rooney, usually the most ebullient, not to say overbearing, of actors, gives a subtle, reined-in performance in Drive a Crooked Road as a shy, quiet auto mechanic and amateur race-car driver who is seduced into becoming the getaway driver for bank robbers. But the film is also subtextually about sex in that most ostensibly repressed of decades, the 1950s. Rooney's Eddie Shannon works in a repair shop where the fellow mechanics gather at the windows and hoot lasciviously at any passing "dame." One mechanic even slobbers on the plate glass. They poke fun at Eddie, whom they call "Shorty" for obvious reasons, because he doesn't follow suit, questioning him on his sex life. The pack behavior suggests that any male who doesn't behave the way they do must be "queer." And then one day a beautiful woman named Barbara Mathews (Dianne Foster) shows up at the auto shop wanting her car checked out and asks for Eddie by name. She flirts with him, and though he responds with shy embarrassment, she calls on him again the next day, after he has repaired her car, to say that she can't start it. So he pays Barbara a visit at her apartment, fixes the connection that had somehow come loose, and gets flirted with a bit more. Gradually, she breaks down his reticence and, though even at the height of their relationship he's still so awkward that he doesn't even kiss her good night, he's hooked. We know by now that she's up to something, and we find out that her real boyfriend, Steve Norris (Kevin McCarthy), who had seen Eddie in an auto race, needs a driver who can negotiate the backroads between Palm Springs and the highway to Los Angeles, so he and his friend Harold (Jack Kelly) can rob a bank and make their getaway before the police have time to set up a roadblock. Barbara has grown ashamed of deceiving Eddie, but she's forced to go through with the plan of persuading him to take part in the job. This can't end well for anyone, and surprisingly for a Hollywood film of the era, it doesn't. Drive a Crooked Road lags a bit in its storytelling and doesn't build the suspense it should, but the performances are good. And the sexual subtext is what makes the film fascinating. In the depiction of Eddie's repressed sexuality, there's a suggestion that he may be afraid that he really is gay, just as there are suggestions that Steve and Harold may be more than just friends. The rampant machismo of the garage mechanics is also present in Steve's treatment of Barbara, whom he expects to do his bidding come what may. Sometimes hindsight makes a film more interesting than it was when it was released.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946)

Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, and Van Heflin in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Judith Anderson, Roman Bohnen, Darryl Hickman, Janis Wilson, Ann Doran, Frank Orth, James Flavin, Mickey Kuhn, Charles D. Brown. Screenplay: Robert Rossen, John Patrick. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier, John Meehan. Film editing: Archie Marshek. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers doubles up on Lorenz Hart's line about "the double-crossing of a pair of heels" to give us a quartet of duplicity. There are no really good guys in the movie, though it tries to persuade us that tough guy Sam Masterson (Van Heflin) and lost girl Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott) are more to be admired than ruthless Martha Ivers O'Neil (Barbara Stanwyck) and her weakling alcoholic husband, Walter (Kirk Douglas). After all, teenage Martha (Janis Wilson)  did kill her imperious aunt (Judith Anderson) and, with the connivance of young Walter (Mickey Kuhn) and his father (Roman Bohnen), not only cover up the murder but also frame someone else for the job. So when Sam returns to Iverstown after 18 years, Martha and Walter naturally think that he witnessed the murder and is there to blackmail them. Actually, young Sam (Darryl Hickman) beat it out the door before the aunt was conked on the head and fell downstairs, so he's ignorant -- until well into the film -- of their crime. It's not exactly clear why Sam, who makes a living by gambling, has drifted back in town, but he's not there long before he hooks up with Toni, fresh out of prison for a theft she didn't really commit, and the two of them get dragged unwittingly into the machinations of Martha and Walter. The movie was Douglas's film debut, so he receives fourth billing after Scott. He feels a little miscast as the manipulated Walter. For one thing, he was nine years younger than Stanwyck, but he also had, even then, a stronger hold on the screen than Heflin. This is, I think, a movie that doesn't have the courage of its own nastiness, trying to make us think that Sam and Toni really deserve a happy ending when it's more likely that they will eat each other alive. Trivia note: The sailor in the car with Sam when he has his accident is played by future writer-producer-director Blake Edwards. 

Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)

Yoo Ah-in, Jun Jong-seo, and Steven Yeun in Burning

Cast: Yoo Ah-in, Steven Yeun, Jun Jong-seo, Kim Soo-Kyung, Choi Seung-ho, Mun Seong-kun, Min Bok-gi, Lee Soo-Jeong, Ban Hye-ra, Cha Mi-Kyung, Lee Bong-ryeon. Screenplay: Oh Jungmi, Lee Chang-dong, based on a story by Haruki Murakami. Cinematography: Hong Kyung-pyo. Production design: Shin Jum-hee. Film editing: Kim Da-won, Kim Hyun. Music: Mowg.

Not surprisingly, given that it's based on one of his short stories, Burning gave me the unsettled feeling I get from reading Haruki Murakami's fiction: the sense that the world is stranger than it appears when we go about our daily routines. And that looking too closely at its anomalies can be dangerous. Certainly, if Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) had never paused to reacquaint himself with Shin Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seao), a friend from his childhood now grown up, he would never have been drawn into the mystery that surrounds her and Ben (Steven Yeun), the acquaintance she brings back from a trip to Africa. But who's to say that Jong-su's life, marked by his mother's abandoning the family when he was a child and by his father's trial for an act of angry violence, would have taken an easy course? The tension that builds throughout Burning is born of peeling back the layers of the quotidian. If we all did that, we probably wouldn't encounter elusive cats, disappearing women, Korean Gatsbys, and compulsive acts of arson the way Jong-su does, but Lee Chang-dong makes it entirely plausible that we might, which results in a brilliant, challenging, haunting film.

Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954)

William Holden and June Allyson in Executive Suite

Cast: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, Dean Jagger, Tim Considine. Screenplay: Ernest Lehman, based on a novel by Cameron Hawley. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Edward C. Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters.

It has been called "Grand Hotel in the boardroom" more than a few times, because what it has in common with Edmund Goulding's 1932 best picture winner is that it was made by MGM and features an all-star cast. Executive Suite doesn't have much else in common with the earlier film, which was an entertaining stew of intrigue among the glamorous guests of a Berlin hotel. This is a story about power plays in a Pennsylvania furniture manufacturing company, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. The company's president has died without leaving a designated successor. We even see him die -- or rather, we die with him, as the film opens with a subjective camera as Avery Bullard leaves his Manhattan office to take a plane to Pennsylvania for a meeting with his vice-presidents. Through his eyes we see employees greet him as he leaves his office, the elevator doors closing on him, and finally the sidewalk as he collapses from a stroke. A passerby filches the wallet he drops, empties it of cash, and tosses it in a trashcan, thereby postponing the identification of his body. So much for any real action in the movie: The rest is talk, as the company's vice-presidents gather for the meeting and then gradually learn of his death. But one person knew of Bullard's death before them: George Caswell (Louis Calhern), a member of the company's board of directors who from his office window saw Bullard's body taken away by an ambulance and now uses this knowledge to try to pull a fast one with the company's stock. Eventually, there will be a struggle among the vice-presidents to take over Bullard's job as president. It will pit Loren Shaw (Fredric March), the bean-counting company controller, against Don Walling (William Holden), the v.p. for development who is excited about a new manufacturing technique he and his staff have been working on. And that's about as dramatic as it sounds. We all know that Walling will triumph over Shaw, probably because Walling has a nice, faithful wife played by June Allyson and a son who plays Little League baseball, and Shaw doesn't. It looks for a long time like Shaw will win, partly because he is in cahoots with Caswell, promising to make his stock deal work in exchange for his vote. Walling has to win over the other members of the board, who include old-timer Fred Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), who is on his side from the start; Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas), the v.p. for sales who is carrying on an affair with his secretary (Shelley Winters), making him susceptible to blackmail by Shaw; and most crucially of all, the daughter of the company's founder, Julia Tredway (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been involved in a frustrating love affair with Bullard and now threatens to dump her stock in the company. In the end, Walling triumphs with a big speech about the company's ideals and how they're being undermined by Shaw's insistence that the only thing that matters is the stockholders' return on investment, which has led to the construction of cheap and shoddy products. It's a sentimental fable about the "good capitalist" that mercifully doesn't indulge in the red-baiting that might have been expected in a film of the 1950s but ultimately rings false. Ernest Lehman's screenplay does what it can with Cameron Hawley's novel, Robert Wise directs as if it were a better film than it is, and Nina Foch won an Oscar for her role as the company's capable executive secretary, the only woman in the film who isn't completely under the thumb of the men. A trivia note: The narrator and the off-screen voice of Tredway is future NBC newman Chet Huntley.

Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954)

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in Human Desire

Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford, Edgar Buchanan, Kathleen Case, Peggy Maley, Diane DeLare, Grandon Rhodes. Screenplay: Alfred Hayes, based on a novel by Émile Zola. Cinematography: Burnett Guffey. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Glenn Ford's boyish nice-guy looks and personality always seemed to me to make him an odd choice for tough-guy roles like the ones he played in Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) and The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953). Lang apparently didn't have a problem with that disjunction: Having cast Ford opposite Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, he reteamed them in the latter film, with good effect. Still, Ford's limitations are apparent when you compare him with Jean Gabin, who played much the same role, a railroad engineer caught up in seamy doings, in Jean Renoir's earlier version of the Émile Zola novel, La Bête Humaine (1938). Gabin had a solidity that Ford lacks. Human Desire is, for the most part, a good contribution to the film noir genre, especially Burnett Guffey's cinematography, which uses the railway yard shadows to good effect. The screenplay has a few good lines -- "All women are alike. They just got different faces so the men can tell them apart." -- but it cheats with a happy ending for Ford's character that's at odds with the spirit of both Zola's novel and Renoir's version of it. Daniele Amfitheatrof's score is laid on too heavily, as if the filmmakers didn't trust the actors or the screenplay to carry the burden of what's being done and said.

Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy, Al Waxman, Robert Goulet, Moses Znaimer, Angus MacInnes, Sean Sullivan, Wallace Shawn. Screenplay: John Guare. Cinematography: Richard Ciupka. Production design: Anne Pritchard. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. Music: Michel Legrand*.

Old gangsters, like old gunfighters, make good movie protagonists, witness the success of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019). There's something about a survivor's story that draws us in, giving veteran actors good roles to play at the waning of their careers. But director Louis Malle and screenwriter John Guare give us a special twist on the survivor's story, eventually revealing their old gangster to be a bit of a fraud, a hanger-on after all the big guns have been killed off, a has-been who is really a never-was. Hence the glee of the elderly Lou Pascal when he actually guns down two thugs -- something he never had the nerve to do when he was a bit player in the mob. Atlantic City works neatly with two kind of dreamers, both with impossible dreams. Lou's dreams are impossible because they're about an illusory past in which he was a big shot, whereas the dreams of the young, like Sally Matthews's, are impossible because they don't have what it takes to fulfill them. Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon got Oscar nominations for playing Lou and Sally, and the film itself racked up nominations in the three other categories in the "top five": picture, director, and screenplay. It won none of them, but like so many Oscar also-rans it has become more valued over the years than most of the winners: Who today remembers Chariots of Fire, which won for best picture and for Colin Welland's screenplay, or has the endurance to sit through Reds, for which Warren Beatty won best director? I cherish Atlantic City for the many unexpected angles through which it views its sort-of-lovable losers, for its use of the crumbling old Atlantic City as a metaphor for the ravages of time, and for lines like Lou's "You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days."

*A courtesy credit: Although Malle commissioned a score from Legrand, he decided not to use it. The only music in the film is diegetic, like Sally's tape recording of Bellini's "Casta Diva" and Robert Goulet' s rendition of Paul Anka's "Atlantic City, My Old Friend."

Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

Cast: Candace Hilligoss, Frances Feist, Sidney Berger, Art Ellison, Stan Levitt, Tom McGinnis, Forbes Caldwell, Dan Palmquist, Bill de Jarnette, Steve Boozer. Screenplay: John Clifford. Cinematography: Maurice Prather. Film editing: Bill de Jarnette, Dan Palmquist. Music: Gene Moore.

There aren't many one-offs in movie history, films like Carnival of Souls that come out of nowhere, made by unknown directors who never make another commercial feature, but which capture the imagination enough to develop -- after time passes -- not only a cult following but also critical admiration. Herk Harvey was an employee of a firm based in Laurence, Kansas, that made industrial and education films, when he had an idea for a horror movie that would be set, at least in part, in an abandoned amusement park like the one he had seen near Salt Lake City. He mentioned the idea to his colleague, a writer named John Clifford, who whipped up a screenplay about a woman who survives an accident but then begins to feel that she's going mad. It needed, Harvey told Clifford, to climax with a scene in which ghoulish figures were dancing in the abandoned amusement park. Harvey scraped together the money and hired an actress and model named Candace Hilligoss, who agreed to take $2,000 for her role in the film. There is no credited art director for Carnival of Souls, but Harvey or whoever assisted him found a great variety of evocative locations, including the Saltair pavilion, a former dance hall and amusement park that had fallen on hard times and was standing derelict near the Great Salt Lake. The settings also include a factory that makes pipe organs and a carpenter gothic rooming house, both of which serve the creepy atmosphere of the film. Not all of the semi- and non-professional actors Harvey cast in the film are up to their jobs, but there's a somnambulant quality to Hilligoss's performance as the haunted Mary Henry that's just right, and while Clifford's dialogue is sometimes tin-eared, the story he crafted around Harvey's suggestions takes hold of the imagination. That's Harvey himself as the spookily made-up man who menaces Mary. 

Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Adolphe Menjou, Mary Duncan, C. Aubrey Smith, Don Alvarado, Fred Santley, Richard Carle, Tyler Brooke, Geneva Mitchell, Helen Ware. Screenplay: Howard J. Green, based on a play by Zoe Akins. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Max Steiner.

Morning Glory earned Katharine Hepburn her first Oscar. It was only the sixth Academy Award for best actress ever given, and in some ways it was the first "modern" Oscar for acting. The initial one went to Janet Gaynor for a silent-film performance, and the subsequent ones were for Hollywood grande dames making their way out of silence, Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer; for beloved old trouper Marie Dressler; and for a Broadway diva making a temporary detour into movies, Helen Hayes. That last one shows what Hollywood was looking for, and what it found in Hepburn: actors who could talk. But unlike the diminutive and rather plain Hayes, Hepburn could hold the camera. Hollywood had never seen anything quite like her: beautiful in an imperious way, she had real presence and a unique style. That style would harden into mannerism after a few years and get her branded as "box-office poison" until she managed to turn things around again in the 1940s, with The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and the subsequent potent teaming with Spencer Tracy. But for the time she was praised for a tonic, refreshing hold on the screen. Morning Glory itself is not much: the familiar story of the hopeful who goes out there and comes back a star. Lowell Sherman, who directed, had just appeared in a similar fable, the ur-Star Is Born movie What Price Hollywood? (Cukor, 1932), and the pattern hardened when Ruby Keeler subbed in for Bebe Daniels in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Hepburn manages to segue convincingly from the naive chatterbox trying to muscle her way onto Broadway to the mature, toughened but still insecure character at the end, though it's a little unclear why such veterans as Adolphe Menjou's producer and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s playwright would be so susceptible to the pest that Eva Lovelace makes of herself at first. Also unclear is why Eva's performances of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and Juliet's part of the balcony scene so impress the guests at the party: Hepburn rattles them off with no attention to the meaning behind the familiar words. She seems, for example, to take the line "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" as a question about his location rather than about his name. The film is pre-Code, so one thing is clear:  that Eva and the producer have slept together after she gets soused at the party. 

10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999)

Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles in 10 Things I Hate About You

Cast: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Larisa Oleynik, David Krumholtz, Andrew Keegan, Larry Miller, Susan May Pratt, Gabrielle Union, Daryl Mitchell, Allison Janney, David Leisure. Screenplay: Karen McCullah, Kirsten Smith, based on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Production design: Carol Winstead Wood. Film editing: O. Nicholas Brown. Music: Richard Gibbs.

10 Things I Hate About You is a reminder of what we lost with Heath Ledger's early death: an actor capable of elevating even a formulaic teen comedy whose obvious source makes the taming of the shrewish Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) a foregone conclusion. Ledger brings a buoyancy to the role of Patrick Verona, the film's Petruchio, that makes the clichéd role of teen-movie hunk into something fresh and engaging. But that's not to undervalue Stiles's contribution to helping the on-again, off-again role of Kate become somewhat credible. It's not clear why sometimes Kat is clearly infatuated with Patrick and the next minute keeping him at arm's length. I suspect the script underwent so many revisions that everyone lost sight of the thread it was supposed to be following. Stiles gives Kat an edge of wit and charm that is, of course, lost on her fellow high school students, as it must be to keep the story moving. But there are other pleasures to the film, too, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, making a breakthrough out of sitcom celebrity into full-fledged movie actor, and the always welcome David Krumholtz as his geeky sidekick. The adult roles are sidelined: Allison Janney is wasted as the horny guidance counselor, irritated that the kids are always interrupting her attempt to write a pornographic bodice-ripper; Daryl Mitchell's irascible English teacher makes no sense; and David Leisure's gym teacher is there mostly to get shot in the ass during archery practice and to be distracted by Kat's flashing him to help Patrick escape detention. Larry Miller does what he can with Walter Stratford, the uptight father of Kat and Bianca, but here again the script isn't helping him much. Still, 10 Things has plenty of enjoyable moments and a glimpse of some young performers with bright (if in Ledger's case shadowed) futures.