Scaramouche (Rex Ingram, 1923)

Ramon Novarro and Alice Terry in Scaramouche

Cast: Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry, Lewis Stone, Lloyd Ingraham, Julia Swayne Gordon, William Humphrey, Otto Matieson, George Siegmann, Bowditch M. Turner, James A. Marcus, Edith Allen, John George, Willard Lee Hall, Rose Dione. Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini. Cinematography: John F. Seitz. Art direction: Harold Grieve. Film editing: Grant Whytock.

A year after Ramon Novarro, as Rupert of Hentzau, threatened to steal Rex Ingram's The Count of Monte Cristo away from Lewis Stone's Count, we find the two actors in reversed roles. In Scaramouche Novarro is the dashing hero and Stone the cunning villain. Actually, Scaramouche could have used a bit more dash and cunning in both roles. Novarro isn't given much opportunity to display the impishness he brought to Rupert, even though a title card proclaims, in Rafael Sabatini's words, that Novarro's character, André-Louis Moreau, "was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." Nor does Ingram provide enough swashbuckling for Novarro to do: Most of his duels are fought off camera, and the crucial one with Stone's Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr is somewhat awkwardly staged. Ingram seems to be more interested in Harold Grieve's opulent sets, beautifully filmed by John F. Seitz, and in the menacing crowd scenes of his version of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. It's all hokum, of course, but it has its moments.

Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020)

Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in Palm Springs

Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J.K. Simmons, Peter Gallagher, Meredith Hagner, Camila Mindes, Tyler Hoechlin, Chris Pang, Jacqueline Obradors, June Squibb, Tongaya Chirisa, Dale Dickey, Conner O'Malley, Jena Friedman, Brian Duffy. Screenplay: Andy Siara. Cinematography: Quyen Tran. Production design: Jason Kisvarday. Film editing: Andrew Dickler, Matt Friedman. Music: Matthew Compton.

Maybe it was John Keats who invented the now-familiar trope of the "time loop." The figures on the Grecian urn celebrated in his ode seem to be stuck in one: The lovers "cannot fade," but will be "For ever panting, and for ever young." Of course, they don't know that; only the observer of the figures does, and the fact teases him "out of thought, / As doth eternity." And it was Shakespeare who noted that "our little life is rounded with a sleep," just as the day of the characters in Palm Springs is. The concept of the time loop, as established for most moviegoers by Harold Ramis's great 1993 movie Groundhog Day, is that it actually exists only for an observer who happens to be caught in it, as Bill Murray's character was in the film. The task of this observer is either to persuade others to recognize his plight or to find a way out of it. In the 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Cause and Effect," written by Brannon Braga, the crew of the Enterprise is caught in a time loop that ends with the destruction of the ship and the crew, but everyone on board begins to have feelings of déjà vu as the event repeats itself; they eventually figure out a way to end it. Andy Siara's screenplay for Palm Springs takes a direction more in line with Groundhog Day by having three people aware of the loop: the wedding guests Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) and the enraged Roy (J.K. Simmons), who blames Nyles for getting him caught in it. Eventually, Nyles and Roy give up and decide to seize the moment and endure an eternity of a single repeated day, but Sarah spends her time learning quantum physics to break the loop. Palm Springs doesn't break any new ground for the time loop trope, but it's engagingly conceived and entertainingly played, and it occasionally teases us out of thought about eternity, too.  

Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

Brad Pitt in Ad Astra

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, Kimberly Elise, Loren Dean, Liv Tyler, Donnie Keshawarz, Sean Blakemore, Bobby Nish, LisaGay Hamilton, John Finn, John Ortiz. Screenplay: James Gray, Ethan Gross. Cinematography: Hoyte Van Hoytema. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen. Music: Max Richter.

It's said that there are really only two types of sci-fi movies: space Westerns and mind-bogglers. The Star Wars canon would be the archetype of the former, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) of the latter. But James Gray seems to want to bridge the types in Ad Astra, with some exciting action sequences in the first half of the film, including a spectacular fall by the protagonist, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), from a space station near enough to the Earth for him to be affected by gravity, and an exciting chase sequence involving moon pirates. But then the film shifts into something more mythic, a father-son fable with overtones of Oedipus and Laius, Daedalus and Icarus, Orestes and Agamemnon, Abraham and Isaac, and so on. It goes from action to introspection so suddenly that it lost a lot of its audience, who may have gone in expecting something like Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) and found themselves watching something more like Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), and not just because Pitt sometimes seems to be reprising his character from the Malick film. Gray also makes nods to the Kubrick classic, with some wry twists: In 2001, for example, space flight has been commercialized, so that people travel to the moon on Pan Am (an airline that went out of business before the real 2001 rolled around). In Ad Astra, the moon flight is on Virgin, and Gray slips in a dig at today's commercial aviation when Roy requests a blanket and pillow and is told that the charge for them is $125. Earthlike crime and corruption have also infected travel in space: Not only are there pirates on the moon, the international competition for mineral rights has bred distrust. The American program has been militarized, with the usual consequences of rank-pulling and official secrecy screwing things up. Pitt carries the film as he has never carried one before, having developed a gift for revealing the internal torment carefully masked by external stoicism. I have a feeling that Ad Astra, though reckoned a bit of a box office disappointment at the time, is going to grow in stature over the years, along with Gray's reputation as a director.

Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952)

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster in Come Back, Little Sheba

Cast: Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, Terry Moore, Richard Jaeckel, Philip Ober, Edwin Max, Lisa Golm, Walter Kelley. Screenplay: Ketti Frings, based on a play by William Inge. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Henry Bumstead, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Franz Waxman.

Shirley Booth won an Oscar for her portrayal of Lola Delaney, a middle-aged frump married to an alcoholic chiropractor (Burt Lancaster) she calls "Daddy" or "Doc." We first see Lola coming downstairs in a ratty chenille robe to answer the doorbell; it's Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore), a college student answering an ad for a room Lola has for rent. Marie takes a look at the room and tells her she'll think it over. When Doc finds out that Lola has decided to take in a roomer, he's angry and forbids it. But when Marie returns to say she wants to rent the room, only Doc is home -- Lola has gone out to buy some orange juice for his breakfast -- and when he gets a look at the nubile Marie, he agrees to rent it, along with another downstairs room that Lola calls her "sewing room," though there's no evidence that Lola ever uses it for that. And so begins the film version of the first of William Inge's plays about sexual frustration. The movie would have us believe that Marie rouses a repressed desire in Doc and also makes him want to protect her, as if she were the child he and Lola lost, but as with most of the works by the closeted playwright, it has a strong gay subtext. When Marie, an art student, brings home a classmate, a young athlete named Turk (Richard Jaeckel), to pose for a poster she's creating, Doc is shocked to find the well-built Turk, in a track suit that shows off his muscles, in his living room. He immediately begins professing his concern for Marie's honor, her supposed virginity, but we can sense that he's more than a little aroused by Turk. We learn, too, that Doc was an only child, coddled by his mother and always shy around women, and that it was only because Lola was more than a little sexually forward that he got her pregnant and had to marry her. The real disappointment in the movie is the radical miscasting of Lancaster as Doc. He was 15 years younger than Booth, and no amount of gray at his temples can cover up his athletic vitality and make us believe that the two are supposed to be the same age. Still, despite the screenplay's disingenuousness about sexuality and the stagebound character of its action and dialogue, Booth's performance is worth savoring and there are moments of genuine feeling in the film.

The Animal Kingdom (Edward H. Griffith, 1932)

Ann Harding, Leslie Howard, and Myrna Loy in The Animal Kingdom

Cast: Leslie Howard, Ann Harding, Myrna Loy, William Gargan, Neil Hamilton, Ilka Chase, Henry Stephenson, Leni Stengel, Don Dillaway. Screenplay: Horace Jackson, based on a play by Philip Barry. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Daniel Mandell. Music: Max Steiner.

The odd, arch, talky The Animal Kingdom is based on one of Philip Barry's plays about rich people yearning to be free, like his Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, film versions of which were directed by George Cukor in 1938 and 1940 respectively. And here the connection among the films gets more intricate, for the director of The Animal Kingdom, Edward H. Griffith, had directed an earlier film version of Holiday in 1930, also starring Ann Harding, with a screenplay by Horace Jackson. And Cukor was an uncredited co-director on The Animal Kingdom. Moreover, the 1932 stage version had starred Leslie Howard, as well as William Gargan and Ilka Chase. So maybe everybody concerned with filming The Animal Kingdom was a little too close to the material, because the movie is a bit of a mess. The central love triangle -- Daisy Sage (Harding) is the former mistress of Tom Collier (Howard) who plans to marry Cecelia Henry (Myrna Loy) just as Daisy comes back into his life -- is clear enough, but the movie is cluttered with secondary characters whose function in the lives of the central characters is a bit obscure, as if their backstories were more interesting than what we actually see on the screen. Tom, for example, has a butler named Regan (William Gargan) who is an ex-boxer completely unsuited to his duties as butler, which causes tensions with Cecelia. What Tom and Regan's obligations to each other are based on remains unknown. Daisy similarly has a friend named Franc (Leni Stengel), who plays the cello and speaks with a German accent, attributes that are obvious but of no significance to the plot. Still, there are some bright lines and some nice pre-Code naughtiness like a reference by Tom to a brothel he used to visit in London, not to mention the fact that the film is quite open about the relationship between Tom and Daisy: At one point she refers to herself as "a foolish virgin... Oh, foolish anyway," which is the kind of line no American movie could get away with for several decades after the 1934 Production Code went into effect. But I think I might have enjoyed The Animal Kingdom more if I didn't think it was radically miscast, that Loy should have played the somewhat free-spirited Daisy and Harding the more conventional Cecelia. In fact, this was a breakthrough role for Loy, who had been typecast as sultry, often "Oriental" women. In The Animal Kingdom, Loy comes across as sexy and Harding as bland, which is the reverse of the way it should be. Their pairing shows why Loy became a major star and Harding began to fade out of films in the mid-1930s. But both deserved better than this comedy of manners that's more mannered than comic.

Smithereens (Susan Seidelman, 1982)

Susan Berman in Smithereens

Cast: Susan Berman, Brad Rijn, Richard Hell, Nada Despotovich, Roger Jett, Kitty Summerall, Joni Ruth White, D.J. O'Neill, Joel Rooks, Pamela Speed, Tom Cherwin, Edie Schecter. Screenplay: Susan Seidelman, Ron Nyswaner, Peter Askin. Cinematography: Chirine El Kadem. Production design: Franz Harland. Film editing: Susan Seidelman. Music: Glenn Mercer, Bill Million.

Smithereens is at least a documentary of attitude, a portrait of a moment in the history of youth. It aspires to the lasting achievement of the early French New Wave, to become the punk era's Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) or The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959). If it doesn't reach those heights, it's only because Godard and Truffaut got there first, and Susan Seidelman's film can only feel like an echo of them in spirit. But it can also transcend them because its protagonist, like its director, is a woman: Susan Berman's Wren displays a gutsiness and vulnerability inaccessible to Godard's Michel Poiccard and Truffaut's Antoine Doinel. Made for chicken feed on 16mm in the crumbling Manhattan of the early 1980s, it set Seidelman on a path to the big time, though it can also be argued that she never again quite displayed the ingenuity and intensity of vision that she shows in Smithereens.

Z for Zachariah (Craig Zobel, 2015)

Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chris Pine in Z for Zachariah

Cast: Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pine. Screenplay: Nissar Modi, based on a novel by Robert C. O'Brien. Cinematography: Tim Orr. Production design: Matthew Munn. Film editing: Jane Rizzo. Music: Heather McIntosh.

Z for Zachariah is based on a young adult novel, but it's a movie for grownups who know how to savor its treatment of race, religion, sex, secrets, and lies, and moreover who aren't troubled by its failure to provide solutions to all the problems it crams into a microcosm. When I say "based on" I mean that literally: I haven't read the novel on which it's based, but the Wikipedia summary suggests that screenwriter Nissar Modi took only the premise of that book -- surviving a nuclear holocaust in a kind of new Eden -- and crafted something very different, adding a third character and changing the race of one. I have the feeling that if the film had been made by an "art house" director like Kelly Reichardt, for example, or a French director like Olivier Assayas, and with actors that cause no stir at the box office, unlike the beautiful and starry Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chris Pine, it would have made more of a sensation among critics than the middling 79% "fresh" rating it gets at Rotten Tomatoes. Because it's a mostly low-key drama simmering with sexual and racial tension. Its ending leaves closure up to the viewer, as the best films do. And despite the cast seeming a little too rich for the film's blood -- they do look a little too well-groomed and well-fed for survivors of the apocalypse, as several critics noted -- the performances are top-notch.

Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)

Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, and Groucho Marx in Duck Soup

Cast: Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, Zeppo Marx, Margaret Dumont, Louis Calhern, Raquel Torres, Edgar Kennedy, Edmund Breese, Leonid Kinskey, Charles Middleton. Screenplay: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin. Cinematography: Henry Sharp. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Wiard Ihnen. Film editing: LeRoy Stone. Music: John Leipold; songs by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby.

The best of the Marx Brothers' movies, largely because it's nonstop nonsense. There are no breaks for a harp solo by Harpo or cute piano playing by Chico. There's no "real-life" romantic subplot like the ones Irving Thalberg inserted into the movies the Marxes made when they moved over to MGM. (This was the last movie they made at Paramount.) The songs are all excuses for goofy production numbers. This is the one with Harpo and Chico running a peanut stand and tormenting Edgar Kennedy as the lemonade seller. This is the one with the mirror routine involving Groucho and Harpo (and eventually Chico) in nightshirts and nightcaps. This is the one in which Groucho (aka Rufus T. Firefly) exhorts the troops with "Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did." (The temptation to quote is irresistible.) The woman in question is, of course, Margaret Dumont, sailing stately through the turbulent sea of Groucho's puns, insults, and double entendres. For once she has a match in enduring the brothers with aplomb: Louis Calhern takes everything they can dish out and keeps plowing ahead. Duck Soup was not particularly well-received at the time, but it has grown in favor since the sentimentality that weighed down later films like A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935) and A Day at the Races (Wood, 1937) has gone out of style. If I had to pick the funniest film ever made, and thank god I don't, it might be this one.

3 Faces (Jafar Panahi, 2018)

Behnaz Jafari and Jafar Panahi in 3 Faces

Cast: Behnaz Jafari, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Rezaei, Maedeh Erteghaei, Narges Delaram. Screenplay: Jafar Panahi, Nader Saeivar. Cinematography: Amin Jafari. Production design: Leila Naghdi Pari. Film editing: Mastaneh Mohajer, Panah Panahi.

It's probable that, because of my superficial acquaintance with Iranian film, I kept comparing Jafar Panahi's 3 Faces to films by Abbas Kiarostami. Like Kiarostami's And Life Goes On (1992), it concerns a journey from Tehran into the remote villages of the country, and like that film and his Through the Olive Trees (1994), it ends with a virtually wordless scene shot from a long distance. But from what I know from reading about Panahi and his work, this may be more hommage than mimicry: Panahi, who is forbidden from making films in Iran and nevertheless has made four since he was imprisoned and sanctioned, is keen to make statements about life and art in his country, and allusions to its most celebrated director are certainly in order. 3 Faces follows the actress Behnaz Jafari and Panahi, playing themselves, as they journey into northwestern Iran to try to find Marziyeh, a young woman who wants to attend the conservatory in Tehran and become an actress. In a desperate attempt to elicit their help, Marziyeh has made a video on her phone in which she appears to commit suicide. She sent the video to Jafari, who is so shocked by it that she drops out of the film she's making and enlists Panahi in trying to track down the young woman. What follows has been called a "road movie," in which actress and director drive an SUV along dirt roads deep into the hills to find out if Marziyeh really committed suicide or if she faked it to get attention. The bulk of the film is made up of some oddball encounters along the way and a struggle with the villagers who detest Marziyeh for her nonconformity, as well as with the woman's family, which is at odds over her ambitions. Marziyeh turns up alive, having taken shelter with Shahrzad, a former actress whose career ended with the Iranian revolution, and who lives a hermit-like life in this remote village, regarded with suspicion by the locals. "Shahrzad" is one of several spellings of "Scheherazade," the legendary storyteller of the One Thousand and One Nights.  We never see the film's Shahrzad, but she's central to the film's themes; for one thing, the name means "world-freer."  The family member most opposed to Marziyeh's pursuit of a career is her brother, who is so angry about his sister's flouting of tradition that he has to be restrained and shut in his room when Jafari and Panahi arrive at the family home. At the end, when Marziyeh's father is asked for permission to let her go to Tehran with the actress and the director, we see Panahi waiting outside -- Jafari has told him that it's best to let the women handle it -- as the furious brother emerges. The men keep their distance; Panahi gets out of the car and looks through a wire fence as we see the brother pick up a stone; then we hear the sound of a car alarm. The film cuts to an interior of the SUV as it drives along the familiar winding road, heading back to Tehran. There's a large cracked spot on the windshield. The beautiful understatement of scenes like this only heightens our sense of the injustice done by politics to art.

The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953)

Mary Murphy and Marlon Brando in The Wild One

Cast: Marlon Brando, Mary Murphy, Robert Keith, Lee Marvin, Jay C. Flippen, Peggy Maley, Hugh Sanders, Ray Teal, John Brown, Will Wright, Robert Osterloh, William Vedder, Yvonne Doughty. Screenplay: John Paxton, based on a story by Frank Rooney. Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Al Clark. Music: Leith Stevens.

The best performance in The Wild One isn't Marlon Brando's, it's Lee Marvin as Chino, the head of a rival motorcycle gang. Marvin brings a looseness and wit to the role that is lacking in Brando's performance, though the role itself calls on Brando to do little but act sullen. He also looks a little porky in his jeans and leather jacket, and his somewhat high-pitched voice gives an epicene quality to Johnny Strabler, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. Brando does, however, get the film's most familiar line: When Johnny is asked what he's rebelling against, he's drumming to the beat of the music on the jukebox and retorts, "What've you got?" But it's a measure of the general mediocrity of The Wild One that this exchange is immediately reprised by someone telling others about Johnny's retort, essentially stepping on the line. There are a few good moments in the film, mostly contributed by Marvin and by some effective choreography of the motorcycle riders, as in the scene in which good girl Kathie Bleeker (Mary Murphy) is menaced by the gang and then rescued by Johnny. But censorship sapped the life out of the film: The motorcycle gangs are scarcely more intimidating than fraternity boys on a spree. There's an attempt to spice things up with a scene between Johnny and Britches (Yvonne Doughty), a female hanger-on with the rival gang, suggesting that they once had something going on, but the bit goes nowhere and seems mainly designed to allow the actress to display her perky breasts in a tight sweater. As with any of the countless biker movies that capitalized on the box office success of The Wild One, there's a queer subtext to be explicated in all this male bonding, but it doesn't add much to a movie that now seems as dated as the flaming youth films of the 1920s.