Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019)

Nell Williams, Viveik Kaira, and Aaron Phagura in Blinded by the Light

Cast: Viveik Kaira, Kulvider Ghir, Meera Ganatra, Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura, Dean-Charles Chapman, Hayley Atwell, Nikita Mehta, Tara Divina, David Hayman, Rob Brydon, Sally Phillips, Marcus Brigstocke, Olivia Poulet, Frankie Fox. Screenplay: Sarfraz Manzoor, Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges, based on a book by Manzoor. Cinematography: Ben Smithard. Production design: Nick Ellis. Film editing: Justin Krish. Music: A.R. Rahman.

Blinded by the Light is old-fashioned in several ways. For one, it's a feel-good movie in times that expect a little more edge to movies than it possesses. For another, it's devoted to a kind of idolatry of Bruce Springsteen's music that even in the year it depicts, 1987, was beginning to be a little old-hat. It's awash with nostalgia, especially when it tries to portray the triumph of innocence in the face of the economic hardship and unchecked racism of the Thatcher-Reagan era. The protagonist, Javed Khan (Viveik Kaira), is a British-Pakistani teenager whose father (Kulvider Ghir) gets laid off from his factory job and wants his only son to better the family's fortunes by upward mobility, which he defines as becoming a lawyer or an accountant or an estate agent. But Javed wants to write, and when he's introduced to the songs of Springsteen, he blossoms, leading to the eventual showdown with the old man. In the end, everything is resolved somewhat tritely by a Big Speech scene, in which Javed expresses both his respect for his father and his determination to be himself -- although being himself consists largely of trying to become a Pakistani Springsteen. Writer-director Gurinder Chadha has made this movie before, when it was called Bend It Like Beckham (2002). Like that film, Blinded by the Light is hard to resist, especially if you enjoy the early songs of Springsteen, which helped me endure the Reagan years the way they smooth out the Thatcher years for Javed. But resist it we should, if we want our movies to be more truthful and less candy-coated, which I think Springsteen himself would prefer.

Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954)

Dan O'Herlihy in Robinson Crusoe

Cast: Dan O'Herlihy, Jaime Fernández, Felipe de Alba, Chel López, José Chávez, Emilio Garabay. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Luis Buñuel, based on a novel by Daniel Defoe. Cinematography: Alex Phillips. Art direction: Edward Fitzgerald. Film editing: Carlos Savage, Alberto Valenzuela. Music: Anthony Collins.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those books I feel like I've read even when I haven't. Its myth, of the solitary man tormented by solitude but inwardly driven to survive, is among the more potent ones. But in a social context, it's also a fable about colonialism. Crusoe, at least in Luis Buñuel's version, is a man carrying the white man's burden, needing to master the environment and its other inhabitants. The ship that carries him to his destiny is involved in the slave trade, and one of the moments in the film that shocked me the most was when Crusoe decides to put Friday in leg shackles, which are among the items that, for some reason, he salvaged from the wreck of his ship. Even after the agony of his long solitude, when he longs to hear another human voice, his first thought when he encounters Friday is not that he has found a companion but that he's found a servant. Presuming to give Friday a name instead of learning the one we assume he must already have, Crusoe also introduces himself as "Master." Both of them must be identified by their relationship. Eventually, Crusoe recognizes Friday as friend as much as servant, admiring the skills he brings to their existence on the island, but it's also Crusoe's "civilization" to which the two men journey at the film's end, rather than remain in the world they have created for themselves. And the relinquishing of the island to the band of mutineers as punishment for their mutiny is filled with irony: Crusoe has founded a penal colony like Australia. Buñuel is acutely aware of these ironies, of course, laying them on without preachiness, just as he slyly undercuts Crusoe's religiosity by having Friday ask Crusoe an unanswerable question about the relationship between God and the devil. Dan O'Herlihy makes a fine Crusoe, in a performance that got him an Oscar nomination, and Jaime Fernández, who learned English for the part, is an excellent foil as Friday. It was Buñuel's first color film, though the print shown on the Criterion Channel suggests that it may be in need of some cleaning and restoration.

Double Harness (John Cromwell, 1933)

Ann Harding and William Powell in Double Harness

Cast: Ann Harding, William Powell, Lucile Browne, Henry Stephenson, Lilian Bond, George Meeker, Reginald Owen, Kay Hammond, Leigh Allen, Hugh Huntley, Wallis Clark, Fred Santley. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, based on a play by Edward Poor Montgomery. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: George Nichols Jr.

Double Harness is a rather brittle comedy of manners that might be better known if it hadn't vanished for years, owing to a dispute between producer Merian C. Cooper and RKO. Because it was withheld from release until Turner Classic Movies obtained the rights to it in 2007, we had one less opportunity to see Ann Harding, once expected to become a major Hollywood star on the strength of her looks and her stage-trained voice, the latter a great asset in the early years of talking pictures. Harding gives a good performance in Double Harness, but she lacked the vivid personality of actresses of the period who became bigger stars, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck, so her career never quite took off. She plays Joan Colby, member of a well-to-do family that finds itself on the skids in the depression, so that she and her giddy sister, Valerie (Lucile Browne), need to marry well in order to regain status. Valerie does marry, but her spendthrift ways keep her on the hunt for money to pay the debts she hides from her husband. Joan is taken with John Fletcher (William Powell), heir to a successful shipping company but more interested in playing polo than in running the business -- or in getting married. Joan overcomes the latter obstacle by a trick: She arranges for her father (Henry Stephenson) to discover her in Fletcher's apartment, which she has more or less moved into, one night. Fletcher does the right thing and marries her, unaware that he's been tricked, but he and Joan also come to an agreement that they will divorce after a suitable period of time elapses. Naturally, they begin to fall more deeply in love, as Fletcher begins to realize that Joan has not only made life more pleasant for him, she has also begun to take a hand in his shipping business. But then Valerie spills the beans about how Joan had tricked Fletcher into marrying her, and an old flame of his, Monica Page (Lilian Bond), takes advantage of his anger and tries to snare him for herself. And so on to the anticipated outcome. Double Harness is a little too arch and stagey for its own good, and the idea that a man might have to marry a young woman because she's found in his apartment at night was a little old-fashioned even at the time, but Harding and Powell do what they can with the material.

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.