Uncut Gems (Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie, 2019)

Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems

Cast: Adam Sandler, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Judd Hirsch, Keith Williams Richards, Jonathan Aranbayev, Noa Fisher, The Weeknd, Mike Francesca, Jacob Igielski, Wayne Diamond. Screenplay: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie. Cinematography: Darius Khondji. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie. Music: Daniel Lopatin.

Hyperactive, motormouthed Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is trying to make it big in the bling trade, purveying jewelry, watches, and expensive geegaws to musicians, athletes, and the nouveau riche. But he keeps getting sidetracked by his own gambling and speculative ventures, the central one in Uncut Gems being an Ethiopian uncut black opal. The film begins in fact with a severely wounded Ethiopian miner at the site of the discovery of the opal. We then peer into the depths of the large uncut gemstone, a mysterious cosmic vision that eventually segues into the interior of Howard himself as he undergoes a colonoscopy. It's a striking journey, to be sure, and one that sets the tone for a movie that teeters between comedy and social consciousness, never quite resolving itself. The movie is held together by Sandler's performance, which seems to have taken many critics by surprise, even though he's done good work before for directors like James L. Brooks (Spanglish, 2004) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love, 2002). Spiraling into a chaos of his own making, taking his family and his mistress with him, Howard lives on the brink -- and dies there. The chief problem with the film is ending it: Howard can't be allowed to triumph, although he sort of does, or any hope of satisfying the demand for even poetic justice goes out the window. But the abruptness of his anticlimactic comeuppance seems just as arbitrary as a "happy ending" would have been. Better, I think, to have let Howard hustle his way onward into an ever more chaotic future. Worth watching for yet another dark safari conducted by the Safdie brothers, and for a career redefining performance by Sandler. 

Roberta (William A. Seiter, 1935)

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Roberta

Cast: Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott, Helen Westley, Claire Dodd, Victor Varconi, Luis Alberni, Ferdinand Munier, Torben Meyer, Adrian Rosley, Bodil Rosing. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott, Glenn Tryon, based on a play by Otto A. Harbach and a novel by Alice Duer Miller. Cinematography: Edward Cronjager. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Jerome Kern, Max Steiner.

If Roberta is less well-known than most of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, it's partly because it was out of circulation for a long time after 1945, when MGM bought up the rights to the film and the Broadway musical on which it was based, planning to remake it in Technicolor as a vehicle for Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. That plan fell through, and the actual remake, Lovely to Look At (Mervyn LeRoy, 1952) with Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel, Red Skelton, and Marge and Gower Champion, is nothing special. But MGM's hold on the property meant that, unlike the other Astaire-Rogers films, it didn't show up on television until the 1970s. But it was also a kind of throwback to the first of their movies, Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933), in that they weren't the top-billed stars of Roberta, and their plot is secondary to that of the star, Irene Dunne, and her leading man, Randolph Scott. It doesn't matter much: What we remember from the film are the great Astaire-Rogers dance numbers, "I'll Be Hard to Handle," "I Won't Dance," and the reprises of "Lovely to Look At" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Scott's inability to sing resulted in the big number for his character in the Broadway version, "You're Devastating," being cut from the song score of the movie. "I Won't Dance" was brought in from another Jerome Kern musical, and Kern and Jimmy McHugh composed that fashion-show/beauty-pageant classic "Lovely to Look At," with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, for the film, earning Roberta its only Oscar nomination. Except when Astaire and Rogers are doing their magic, the film is a little draggy, and Dunne and Scott strike no sparks. Look for a blond Lucille Ball, draped in a feathery wrap, as one of the models in the fashion show.

Speedy (Ted Wilde, 1928)

Ann Christy and Harold Lloyd in Speedy

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff, Babe Ruth, Byron Douglas, Brooks Benedict. Screenplay: John Grey, Lex Neal, Howard Emmett Rogers; titles: Albert DeMond. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Carl Himm.

Ted Wilde, the director of Speedy, was nominated for an Academy Award in the very first year of what would come to be called the Oscars. But the category in which he was nominated, best director of a comedy picture, was short-lived: It vanished in the second year of the awards. The award went to Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights (1927), which isn't nearly as funny a movie as Speedy, but the fact of having a separate award for comedy movies is suggestive of the power that comic films had in the silent era. Today, more people have seen the films of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd than have seen the classics of "serious" silent film, largely because a pratfall doesn't need title cards to explain itself. Speedy was Lloyd's last silent feature. Chaplin persisted in making silent comedies up through Modern Times in 1936, but Keaton and Lloyd ventured into sound -- with unsatisfactory results. So Speedy can be seen as a valedictory to the era, and a good one. The "Harold" of the movie, Harold "Speedy" Swift, is a brasher persona than the more milquetoast characters also named Harold in Safety Last! (1923), The Freshman (1925), and The Kid Brother (1927). He already has a girl, the pretty Jane Dillon (Ann Christy), who lives with her grandfather, called Pop (Bert Woodruff). He's a little feckless -- he can't seem to hold a job -- but good at heart, and when Pop Dillon's livelihood is threatened, he gives it his all. Pop owns the last horse-drawn streetcar in New York, and the forces of progress want to buy him out, car, tracks, and all. They're willing to stop at nothing until Harold marshals the neighborhood into fighting back, if only to get the price Pop deserves. But the plot, such as it is, takes up only the latter part of the film. The rest is a series of set pieces -- Harold as a soda jerk, Harold as a cab driver, Harold and Jane go to Coney Island -- that are  excuses for a series of ever more elaborate gags. The one extraneous thing we know about Harold is that he's a huge fan of the New York Yankees, which has nothing to do with the streetcar plot, but is really a setup for him to wind up with Babe Ruth in the back seat of his cab, and for Ruth to get bounced around, and to mug hilariously, as Harold drives him pell-mell through the street of New York to get him to a Yankees game on time. Lou Gehrig also has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it walk-on cameo. I blinked, but I don't think I'd recognize Gehrig unless he looked like Gary Cooper. Though it lacks the tight structure of the plots for the earlier films, Speedy justifies its loosey-goosey narrative by becoming a tribute to the organized chaos that is New York City in 1928.

Macao (Josef von Sternberg, 1952)

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in Macao

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Thomas Gomez, Gloria Grahame, Brad Dexter, Edward Ashley, Philip Ahn, Vladimir Sokoloff, Don Zelaya. Screenplay: Bernard C. Schoenfeld, Stanley Rubin, Robert Creighton Williams. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Samuel E. Beetley, Robert Golden. Music: Anthony Collins.

Macao has the makings of a much better movie: two enormously potent and well-matched stars, a solid supporting cast, a legendary director, an exotic setting, and a twisty, noirish plot. What it doesn't have is dialogue worthy of speaking. The actors give the right twists to their lines, but too often they fall flat. "You don't want that junk," Brad Dexter's Halloran says to his mistress, Margie (Gloria Grahame), about the jewel she's flashing. "Diamonds would only cheapen you." "Yeah," she replies, "but what a way to be cheapened." At another point, Robert Mitchum's Nick Cochran tells Margie, "You know, you remind me of an old Egyptian girlfriend of mine: the Sphinx." She retorts, "Are you partial to females made of stone?" This is tin-eared repartee at best, delivered by the actors as if they were the witty work of better screenwriters like Jules Furthman or Ben Hecht. Still, the opportunity to see Mitchum paired with Jane Russell, one of the few actresses capable of putting him in his place, is irresistible. She plays Julie Benson, an itinerant night club singer who meets Cochran on board the ship on which they're making their way from Hong Kong to Macao. He's a soldier of fortune, on the lam from some sort of misdeed in New York. She picks his pocket, keeps the dough, and tosses his wallet, which contains his passport, overboard. They cross paths again in Macao, where she goes to work for club owner Halloran, who has his own problems with the police. He knows that a detective is coming to Macao to try to nab him, and when Cochran shows up to try to get his money back from Julie, Halloran mistakes him for the detective. In fact, the detective turns out to be in disguise as a traveling salesman called Lawrence C. Trumble (William Bendix), whom Julie and Cochran met earlier on the ship. What follows is much ado about a diamond necklace that Halloran left in a safe deposit box in Hong Kong which Trumble is using to try to lure Halloran across the three-mile limit outside Macao so the police can arrest him. Some double-crosses and chase scenes and a few murders ensue before Cochran and Julie can embrace in the final scene. There's enough good stuff to overcome the misfired dialogue, despite the film's reputation as a troubled shoot in which the actors fought constantly with Sternberg, then at the end of his career. Nicholas Ray completed the film after Sternberg left the shoot, which started in 1950 -- RKO owner Howard Hughes held it from release as he tried to build Russell's  career, which he had launched with hype and controversy over The Outlaw (1943). The delay also explains why Gloria Grahame feels miscast in such a small role in Macao: Her career had taken off while the film was on the shelf.

The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, 1927)

Olin Francis, Leo Willis, and Harold Lloyd in The Kid Brother

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Walter James, Leo Willis, Olin Francis, Constantine Romanoff, Eddie Boland, Frank Lanning, Ralph Yearsley. Screenplay: John Grey, Ted Wilde, Thomas J. Criser, Lex Neal, Howard J. Green. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Allen McNeil.

Underdog saves the day, gets the girl. It's a familiar comic formula, but that's no reason to criticize Harold Lloyd for reworking it constantly. In The Kid Brother he's Harold Hickory, the unappreciated youngest of the family, who as the title card tells us, "was born on April Fool's Day. The stork that brought him could hardly fly for laughing." His two brawny older brothers and their brawny father, the local sheriff, mock him for his weakness and never include him in their manly business, leaving him at home to do the washing and cooking. The plot has something to do with Sheriff Hickory (Walter James) raising money to build a dam. But the money gets stolen by the unscrupulous manager (Eddie Boland) and the strongman (Constantine Romanoff) in a traveling medicine show. Also with the show is "the girl," Mary (Jobyna Ralston), whose late father owned the show and who tries in vain to deal with the crooks in the company. Eventually, the sheriff gets charged with absconding with the funds and is almost lynched before Harold, who has tracked down the thieves and captured them, arrives to set things right. There's an extended battle between Harold and the strongman that takes all of the ingenuity of which the former is capable -- it's almost as much an action film as it is a comedy. It's also a romance, with the scene in which Harold and Mary meet as one of the film's sweeter highlights, almost Chaplinesque in its conception. Harold has just rescued Mary from the attentions of the lecherous strongman, scaring him off by picking up a stick that he doesn't realize has a snake twined around it. Then the snake scares Mary into jumping into Harold's arms, sparking their romance. They must part, however, and as she walks downhill out of sight, he climbs a tree to get a look at her; he calls out to ask her name and she replies, then goes farther downhill out of sight; so he climbs still higher and asks where she lives; she tells him and walks out of sight again, so he climbs higher and waves goodbye. When she is finally out of sight, he sits on a branch and sighs, and then of course falls down past his earlier perches. It's a beautifully constructed sequence -- literally, as a tower was built next to the tree for the camera to ascend. I think The Kid Brother is less well-known than other Lloyd features like Safety Last! (1923) and The Freshman (1925), but for inventiveness and variety of tone it may be the best of the three.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril (Buichi Saito, 1972)

Tomisaburo Wakayama and Akihiro Tomikawa in Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Yoichi Hayashi, Michi Azuma, Akihiro Tomikawa, Asao Koike, Hiroshi Tanaka, Tatsuo Endo, Shin Kishida, So Yamamura. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa. Art direction: Shigenori Shimoishizaka. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hideaki Sakurai.

Like any movie-lover in these days of streaming venues, I am encumbered with choices. So I resort to a kind of enforced choice, namely, making lists. So I have queues of available films on my DVR as well as on the Criterion Channel, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and potentially others in the expanding streaming universe. I try to rotate steadily among them, usually on a first-in, first out basis -- meaning the one that has been on the list the longest gets watched next. (Yes, the rotation is occasionally broken, especially when a film I've been wanting to watch suddenly pops up.) And so I wind up watching some oddities that I probably wouldn't have chosen other than because their time on the queue had come. Like four of the six Lone Wolf and Cub films. It's not that I have any special love for Japanese samurai warrior films; I can take them or leave them. It's the result of my devotion to Turner Classic Movies and its somewhat fitful programming of foreign and silent films. Whenever one of those turns up on the schedule I put it on my queue. Hence, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril, a movie that sorely tests my tolerance of its genre. I enjoyed the first three films in the series, but Baby Cart in Peril feels a little tired. (I note here that the first three in the series were directed by Kenji Misumi, but this one by Buichi Saito, about whom I know nothing.) Once again, Ogami Itto (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is wheeling little Daigoro (Akihiro Tomikawa) along the Demon Way in Hell -- his vision of the chaotic world of feudal Japan. Once again, there is a beautiful female assassin to be dealt with, along with various representatives of his enemy, the Yagyu clan. Once again, blood is shed and spurted and sprayed. Once again, there is a rape scene. And once again, Ogami single-handedly vanquishes an entire army. The film plays a bit with the formulas: Ogami and Daigoro are separated for a while in the film, during which time the cub Daigoro proves to be a worthy successor to his lone wolf father. And the film ends on an inconclusive note, as an exhausted, wounded Ogami pushes the baby cart along its way. Will he survive into a fifth film? Of course. Will I be there to watch it if TCM programs it? Let me think about that.

The Insult (Ziad Doueiri, 2017)

Adel Karam in The Insult

Kamel El Basha in The Insult

Cast: Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha, Camille Salameh, Diamand Bou Abboud, Rita Hayek, Talal Jurdi, Christine Choueiri, Julia Kassar, Rifaat Torbey, Carlos Chahine, Walid Abboud, Georges Daoud. Screenplay: Ziad Doueiri, Joelle Touma. Cinematography: Tommaso Fiorilli. Production design: Hussein Baydoun. Film editing: Dominique Marcombe. Music: Éric Neveux.

The pictures at the top of the post give away much of what The Insult is about: the twinned lives of the film's Lebanese and Palestinian antagonists. There's not one insult in the film, there are many, and they are flung back and forth across the gulf between Tony Hanna (Adel Karam) and Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha) throughout the film. It's a courtroom drama that seems intended to bring the entire Middle East into judgment, if only to show how intractable the tensions are, how difficult if not impossible to bring to justice. A small dispute over a drainage pipe explodes into a cause célèbre, spilling out of the courtroom into the streets. Ziad Doueiri and his co-scenarist Joelle Trouma have made a well-crafted film that won't solve the world's problems as readily as it might like to, but at least will remind us how petty at base some of them are -- and how much alike sworn enemies tend to be. There's a small moment in the film that brought this home to me the way those two photographs at the top do. In his testimony in court, Yasser, who is a construction foreman, is asked why he chose to use a more expensive crane than his contractor specified -- something the contractor earlier mentioned as a reason for taking Yasser off the project. The specified crane, Yasser explains, was made in China and was much less reliable than the one he chose, which was made in Germany. The camera at this point picks up the listening Tony, a garage mechanic who earlier in the film had complained about using shoddy Chinese auto parts instead of the superior German ones. It's moment that flickers across the screen but one that, if you've been paying attention to details, reinforces the men's similarities without hammering on them. The Insult was nominated as best foreign language feature by the Academy, and it's the kind of solid humanist filmmaking that the award frequently honors.  

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Go Kato, Yuko Hama, Isao Yamagata, Michitaro Mizushima, Ichiro Nakatana, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Yoshinobu Nishioka. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hiroshi Kamayatsu, Hideaki Sakurai.

There's no let-up to the bloodshed in the third installment of the Lone Wolf and Cub series: At the end, Ogami Itto (Tomisabuo Wakayama) stands alone in the middle of a corpse-strewn field, having vanquished an army of a couple of hundred men single-handedly -- or rather, with the help of little Daigoro and the baby cart, which is revealed to be a formidable fighting vehicle. But the most disturbing violence in the film is the rape of two women near the beginning of the film -- disturbing because it is treated realistically, rather than with the tricks of style that characterize the film's swordplay. The women are set upon by a gang of idlers, men waiting to be hired as fighters by whoever needs them. One member of the gang, however, holds himself aloof from the raping and pillaging that the others typically indulge in. He's Kanbei (Go Kato), a former samurai turned ronin, who is conscience-stricken, we learn, having been dishonored for an earlier failure to follow the orders of his lord to the letter, even though his actions saved the lord's life. This time, Kanbei remains loyal to the gang he has taken up with, and having come late to the scene of the rape, kills the two women and their servant, then has the three rapists draw straws to choose the one among them who will be killed as punishment for the rape. But just as Kanbei is killing the one who drew the short straw, Ogami comes upon the scene and kills the other two men. Kanbei challenges Ogami to a duel, but Ogami sheathes his sword and calls it a draw. What's going on here is a complex working out of the samurai code, which will resolve itself poignantly if bloodily at the end of the film when Ogami and Kanbei meet again. Which is to say that beneath the flash and dazzle of the multifarious violence of Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades, which includes an extended sequence in which Ogami is tortured to save a woman being sold into prostitution, lies a moral vision that's both alien and comprehensible. 

Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923)

Noah Young and Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis, Bill Strother, Noah Young, Westcott Clarke. Screenplay: Hal Roach, Sam Taylor, Tim Whelan; titles: H.M. Walker. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Film editing: Thomas J. Criser.

I was sure I had seen Safety Last! but as the film progressed I began to suspect that I had seen only excerpts, including the scene in which Harold Lloyd, aka The Boy, dangles from the clock, reprised countless times in compilations of great movie moments. But this great film is more than that moment, or even the extended sequence in which The Boy climbs the façade and encounters that treacherous timepiece. Getting to that moment involves byzantine, almost Rube Goldberg plotting. Because The Boy is not even supposed to be climbing the building: It's a task meant for The Pal (Bill Strother), who instead is fleeing from The Law (Noah Young), racing through the building from floor to floor inside, intending to swap places with The Boy at some perpetually receding moment. And The Pal is in trouble with The Law because of a run-in that resulted from The Boy mistaking The Law for an old buddy of his, a different cop, and involving The Pal in a prank played by mistake on The Law. And the reason The Boy is involved in climbing the building is that he wants to win The Girl (Mildred Davis), who thinks he's actually the general manager of the department store where he's actually a lowly clerk in danger of getting fired. And the reason The Girl thinks that is ... oh, hell, watch the movie yourself. The point is that Safety Last! is an intricately worked piece of art. By contrast, even the best film of Charles Chaplin or Buster Keaton, let's say The Gold Rush (1925) or The General (1926), is a comparatively simple affair, with a story line that doesn't tax the summarizer. Which may be a clue to why Lloyd is not as highly regarded or as fondly remembered as Chaplin or Keaton. He doesn't have the former's balletic gracefulness or the latter's athletic control. The delight of Lloyd's films doesn't come from watching Lloyd himself so much as from watching the situations he gets himself into, from watching him fail upward, so to speak, in Safety Last! Chaplin or Keaton would devise clever ways to climb that façade, whereas Lloyd bumbles and flounders, beset by clocks and pigeons and badminton nets, only to recover by luck and pluck. We don't think "What will he do next?" so much as "What will happen to him next?" This, mind you, is comic genius in itself, a shrewd devising of hilarious situations, but it's comedy imposed on the character, not emerging from within. Which doesn't make it less comic or less genius, of course.

Man Wanted (William Dieterle, 1932)

David Manners and Kay Francis in Man Wanted

Cast: Kay Francis, David Manners, Una Merkel, Andy Devine, Kenneth Thomson, Claire Dodd, Elizabeth Patterson, Edward Van Sloan. Screenplay: Robert Lord, Charles Kenyon. Cinematography: Gregg Toland. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: James Gibbon. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Man Wanted is an arch, sophisticated romantic comedy that needed an Ernst Lubitsch to handle its racy moments and a Howard Hawks to handle its snappy dialogue. William Dieterle was a good director, but he was neither of those men, so the movie feels slow when it should be lively, choppy when it should be speedy. The premise is this: Lois (Kay Francis) is a high-powered career woman, the editor of a magazine, married to a wealthy playboy (Kenneth Thomson) who cares more about playing polo and chasing other women than he does about their marriage. So when Tom (David Manners), a salesman for exercise equipment, pays a sales call on Lois and reveals that he knows shorthand -- from taking notes in his classes at Harvard -- he gets hired to replace the secretary she has just fired. You can fill in the rest. Francis carries a lot of the film on charm, even when the situations feel over-familiar and the dialogue doesn't sparkle the way it should. Check out her work for Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise, made the same year as this film, to see what might have been. Manners, best known today for his work in the horror movies Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932), and The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934), is a pleasantly forgettable leading man, and Andy Devine and Una Merkel are miscast as Tom's buddy and girlfriend, providing comic relief that doesn't quite relieve.