Crisis (Richard Brooks, 1950)

Ramon Novarro, Cary Grant, Paula Raymond, and Leon Ames in Crisis

Cast: Cary Grant, José Ferrer, Paula Raymond, Signe Hasso, Ramon Novarro, Gilbert Roland, Leon Ames. Screenplay: Richard Brooks, George Tabori. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

In Crisis, Cary Grant plays a brain surgeon, which led one critic to snark that he looked like he should be holding a martini glass instead of a scalpel. That only points up the problem of movie star image: We expect Grant to be suave and wisecracking and not hung up on the dilemma of whether to perform an operation on a cruel dictator (José Ferrer) who is trying to fend off a revolution. Naturally, Grant's Dr. Ferguson sticks by the Hippocratic Oath and goes through with the operation. Meantime, unbeknownst to Dr. Ferguson, his wife (Paula Raymond) has been kidnapped and the revolutionaries are threatening to kill her if the dictator lives. Ferguson is unaware of this because the dictator's wife (Signe Hasso) has intercepted the message from the revolutionaries and destroyed it. It's a pretty good thriller premise, but writer-director Richard Brooks doesn't know how to build the suspense it needs. This was Brooks's first feature film as director, so we may want to cut him some slack. After all, he does a few things well, including a demonstration of brain surgery techniques that adds a little documentary realism to the film. To my eyes, Grant's performance is perfectly fine, and Ferrer and Hasso know how to play villains. Raymond is a little bland as the wife, but there are solid supporting performances from Ramon Novarro as a colonel backing up the dictator, Gilbert Roland as a leader of the revolutionaries, and Leon Ames as an oil company executive trying to remain neutral in the political conflict in this unnamed Latin American country so he can build a pipeline. It's the film's own neutrality -- dictators are bad, but revolutionaries can be, too -- that saps a good deal out of the drama. 

Shivers (David Cronenberg, 1975)

Cast: Paul Hampton, Joe Silver, Lynn Lowry, Allan Kolman, Susan Petrie, Barbara Steele, Ronald Mlodzik, Barry Baldaro, Camil Ducharme, Hanna Poznanska. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Robert Saad. Art direction: Erla Gliserman. Film editing: Patrick Dodd. 

Shivers is a kind of zombie movie, except that the zombies aren't out for brains, they're out to get laid. And they aren't really dead, but just under the influence of a parasite that unleashes their libidos and eliminates their inhibitions. It takes place in a high-rise apartment building on an island near Montreal, where a doctor has been experimenting with parasitic organisms that could potentially eliminate the need for transplants: Instead of having, say, a kidney transplant, why not remove the diseased kidney and replace it with a parasite that, in exchange for a small amount of the patient's blood, would perform all the functions of a kidney? But the parasite he's working with has the unfortunate effect of producing the symptoms described above -- which is fine with the doctor, because he thinks human beings are too sexually repressed. It's a clever premise for a horror movie, and totally in keeping with writer-director David Cronenberg's exploration in his films of the unfettered id. Unfortunately, it was made a few years before its time, so Cronenberg has to be more discreet in his depiction of the orgies of the victims of the parasite than he might have been a few years later, and the budget for the film was obviously scanty. It's shot in a rather muddy but garish color, and the lighting is flat and harsh. There are a few familiar faces -- of the "where have I seen him/her before?" order -- among the actors, but mostly it's a cast of hard-working unknowns. One of Cronenberg's first features, it's a good sample of the better-made horrors yet to come.  

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Andrea Eckert, Hanno Pöschl, Karl Bruckschwaiger, Tex Rubinowitz, Erni Mangold, Dominik Castell, Haymon Maria Buttinger. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Florian Reichmann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Fred Frith. 

If there were any justice, Before Sunrise would have transformed the genre of romantic comedy by showing them all how it should be done. Granted, the film neatly transcends the genre, even though it starts with the hoariest of all its formulas: the meet-cute. But by the film's end, we have gotten to know Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline as we never get to know the characters in the conventional romcom. And then the film does something those conventional ones never do: It stops. There's no rush through the streets by lovers who've decided to reconcile. There are no hilarious exchanges of marriage vows. The movie doesn't tell us if Jesse and Céline ever meet again after he takes his plane to the States and she takes her train to Paris. Granted, the sequels do this, but think how tonic this first film in the trilogy was when it was first released. (And even the sequels don't behave like sequels, but that's another post entirely.) It's hard to undervalue how revelatory Before Sunrise was at the time. For one thing, it established Hawke as one of the best and smartest young actors of his day, taking him out of the "pretty boy" category into which he started to fall after his first big hit, Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989). It also established Richard Linklater as a director of intelligence, with an interest in the effects of time on personality that culminated in his masterpiece, Boyhood (2014). That the film didn't do as much for Delpy's career is probably more evidence that women don't have the same influence in movies as men. (She also revealed later that she wasn't paid as much as Hawke until the third film in the trilogy, Before Midnight, in 2013.) Delpy and Hawke also rewrote a good deal of the screenplay without credit. 

The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

Junio Valverde and Fernando Tielve in The Devil's Backbone

Cast: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Íñigo Garcés, Irene Visedo, José Manuel Lorenzo, Francisco Maestre, Junio Valverde, Berta Ojea, Adrián Lamana, Daniel Esparza, Javier Bódalo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, David Muñoz. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: César Macarrón. Film editing: Luis de la Madrid. Music: Javier Navarrete. 

It's October, which means that all the purveyors of classic movies like TCM and the Criterion Channel are rolling out their horror films and ghost stories. Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone falls more into the latter category than the former, for although it has moments of high tension and bloodshed, its focus is largely on the haunting of an isolated Spanish orphanage by a young boy who wants to get revenge on his murderer. It's set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, which gives the film an underpinning of historical reality, and it adds some realism in the portrayal of the relationships that develop among the boys who have been sent there after the deaths of their parents in the conflict. It's as much high melodrama as horror movie, with a handsome villain, Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who murdered the boy Santi (Junio Valverde) to conceal his attempts to break into the safe where the operators of the orphanage, Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), are hiding gold that is meant to support the loyalist cause. Murder will out, largely with the help of young Carlos (Fernando Tielve), the latest arrival to the orphanage, who learns to communicate with the ghost of Santi. On this simple framework, del Toro layers a good deal of Gothic oddities, including some fetuses preserved in rum, an unexploded bomb in the orphanage courtyard, a murky cistern, and Carmen's artificial leg. Atmosphere is everything in a movie of this genre, and del Toro is a master at creating it, using the contrast of the sunny Spanish landscape and the shadowy interior of the orphanage to great effect. The film is not so unrelenting a creepshow as some of del Toro's other films, like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), which are more highly regarded but which I actually like less than The Devil's Backbone.

The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (Preston Sturges, 1949)

Rudy Vallee and Betty Grable in The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend

Cast: Betty Grable, Cesar Romero, Rudy Vallee, Olga San Juan, Porter Hall, Hugh Herbert, Al Bridge, El Brendel, Sterling Holloway, Danny Jackson, Emory Parnell, Margaret Hamilton, Marie Windsor. Screenplay: Preston Sturges, Earl Felton. Cinematography: Harry Jackson. Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Robert Fritch. Music: Cyril J. Mockridge. 

There's not much reason for anyone other than hardcore Preston Sturges fans to see The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, even though it was his last American film (he made one more, Les Carnets du Major Thompson, in France in 1955) and the only one in Technicolor. It has all the slapstick anarchy of his later films, like The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943), but none of the wit of his best, among which I'd name The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), and The Palm Beach Story (1942). In those great comedies, he worked with stars like Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, and Claudette Colbert, letting them unbend in surprising and hilarious ways. In the later comedies, he stuck to purely comic actors like Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton, and there's a bumptiousness about those films that can be a little wearying, though there's still some wit in their setups, like Hutton's mysterious pregnancy in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Bracken's mistaken heroism in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). The Beautiful Blonde is all bumptiousness, getting most of its laughs from character clowns like Hugh Herbert, El Brendel, and Sterling Holloway, and from some tired gags like Porter Hall's character getting repeatedly shot in the ass. It's a Western movie spoof, with Betty Grable as the title character, a dance hall girl who's a wicked hand with a pistol and who gets mistaken for the new schoolmarm when she flees to another town after shooting the judge (Hall). Cesar Romero is the nominal romantic lead, but Sturges isn't interested in romance in this movie; all he wants to do is stage outrageous gunfights and pull off slightly risqué jokes that had the censors on edge. It was, deservedly, a flop, but also undeservedly made Sturges persona non grata in Hollywood, after the failure of the more entertaining Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which had more of the old wit and less of the late bumptiousness. 

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1979)

Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu the Vampyre

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz, Roland Topor, Walter Ladengast, Dan van Husen, Jan Groth, Carsten Bodinus, Martje Grohmann. Screenplay: Werner Herzog, based on a novel by Bram Stoker and a film by F.W. Murnau. Cinematography: Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein. Production design: Henning von Gierke. Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus. Music: Florian Fricke, Popol Vuh. 

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu gets a little choppy in its efforts to blend both Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and F.W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu. The latter was an "unofficial" version of the novel, which the producers neglected to obtain the rights to film, and it was almost suppressed. But the potency of Max Schreck's embodiment of Dracula (called "Count Orlok" in the Murnau film) remained, and it informs Klaus Kinski's makeup and manner in Herzog's version. Herzog did a lot of tinkering with the Stoker version -- Jonathan Harker's wife is Lucy, not Mina as in the novel, and Dr. Von Helsing is not the vampirologist of the book but rather an elderly scientific skeptic -- but he stayed generally faithful to it almost to the end, when he switched to the denouement of the Murnau film and then added his own shocker twist. The homage to Murnau is apparent not only in Kinski's imitation of Schreck, but also in Isabelle Adjani's performance as Lucy, which is built on silent-movie mannerisms, including effective use of her great haunted eyes. Even though it's full of images designed to shock and disgust, including a plethora of rats, Herzog's film is often quite beautiful, especially in the scenes set in the Carpathian Mountains (actually filmed in Slovakia and the Bavarian Alps) and the views of the quaint town called Wismar in the film, but actually shot in the town of Delft and several other villages in the Netherlands. The performances are all that they should be, including Bruno Ganz's determined Harker, whose character twist at the film's end seems organic to the performance, and Roland Topor's giggly Renfield, which often seems to parody Peter Lorre. Dracula is so familiar and fertile a source for movies that it probably will never receive a definitive version, but Herzog's makes a good bid for it.  

Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi, 2019)

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi, and Scarlett Johansson in Jojo Rabbit

Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Alfie Allen, Stephen Merchant, Archie Yates. Screenplay: Taika Waititi, based on a novel by Christine Leunens. Cinematography: Mihai Malaimare Jr. Production design: Ra Vincent. Film editing: Tom Eagles. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

Taika Waititi's brilliant, queasy comedy Jojo Rabbit might be seen as a parody of the feel-good movie -- the ability to tack a happy ending on even a story about Nazism. Not that the end of Jojo Rabbit is, objectively regarded, happy. We're left with Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) as street orphans in a defeated Germany. But they're dancing, which is what Elsa wanted to do when the war ended, and that kind of makes everything right. Fortunately, our awareness that the film is a fantasia on dark themes, belonging in that category of movies like Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) that fuse fairy tale elements and a childlike vision with real world horrors, is set early on, when we discover that Jojo has an imaginary friend, none other than Adolf Hitler (Waititi). And that the brutality of Nazis is being caricatured by actors like Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson. Jojo is a naïf in a hard and horrible world, which we see through his innocent eyes, just as we see Wonderland (a place of lunacy and cruelty) through the innocent eyes of Alice. It takes nothing away from the fine performances of young Davis and McKenzie, or from the darkly hilarious ones of Waititi, Rockwell, and Wilson, to say that the heart of the film, giving a performance that took my breath away, was Scarlett Johansson, who made beautiful sense of a role that shouldn't have worked at all: Jojo's mother, the secret resistance worker who tolerates her son's adulation of the Nazis while at the same time hiding a young Jewish girl in the walls of their house. We see her through three distinct points of view: Jojo's, Elsa's, and another that gradually becomes our own, and the outcome of her story, when these points of view finally merge, is heartbreaking even in the midst of the caricature of the real world that the film presents. The audacity of Waititi's movie has been likened to that of Life Is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1999), a movie I hated, so I can understand the critics who thought Jojo Rabbit went too far, that it didn't cohere, but I can't entirely agree.  

Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)

Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Chris Cooper, Louis Garrel, Jayne Houdyshell. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

I didn't read Little Women as a child: Boys didn't read "girls' books" back then. And when I finally read it -- out loud, to my daughter -- I found it a little stiff and starchy. But it has made for some very good movies, particularly the 1933 Katharine Hepburn version directed by George Cukor and the 1994 Winona Ryder version directed by Gillian Armstrong. Somehow, I don't think we'll be calling this 2019 film the Soirse Ronan version, but rather the Greta Gerwig version. As writer and director, Gerwig has developed a complete and insightful view of the Louisa May Alcott novel, one that takes into account what was always present in the novel but brings it into the light of the 21st century: the changes in the roles and attitudes of women. By rearranging the chronology of the novel and structuring it around the development of Jo March (Ronan) as a writer, Gerwig has accomplished two things: She has allowed the other March sisters to share the spotlight that Jo hogged when she was played by Hepburn and Ryder. She has also revealed the rather sentimental endings of the other films as what they were: contrivances designed to please moviegoers, as they did readers, more than to reflect actual life. By establishing in the film that Jo is accommodating the desire of her publisher (Tracy Letts) that the heroine of her Little Women not remain a spinster, Gerwig is able to go a little bit over the top in the film, bringing back Prof. Bhaer (Louis Garrel), with whom Jo broke off over his criticisms of her writing, for a giddy reunion and wedding to Jo. This is all staged with the kind of unabashed sentimentality, including a glimpse of Jo's very improbable school, in which all the sisters and their husbands are the instructors and the curriculum includes fencing, that can't be taken with a straight face. We are meant to sense that the real Jo March might well have remained a spinster rather than capitulate to, as she puts it in the movie, "people saying that love is just all that women are fit for." It's also an ending that wouldn't have worked if Gerwig and her performers hadn't created characters that have a little more body than the source gives them: Timothée Chalamet's Laurie isn't just the slightly odd young man he is in the book (and in the performances of Douglass Montgomery and Christian Bale in the earlier versions), but rather spoiled, dilettantish, and probably alcoholic. Florence Pugh deserved the Oscar nomination she got for bringing more than just flightiness to the character of Amy. Even Beth (Eliza Scanlen) in this version is more than just the saintly innocent who dies young, and we have Gerwig's script and direction for allowing them to blossom rather than being overwhelmed by Jo, good as Ronan's performance is. I can't quite subscribe to Anthony Lane's comment that her Little Women "may just be the best film yet made by an American woman," which hardly seems fair to the work of directors from Dorothy Arzner to Ida Lupino to Kathryn Bigelow and Kelly Reichardt, but it's certainly a provocative and sometimes audacious triumph. 

Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011)

Malonn Lévana and Zoé Héran in Tomboy

Cast: Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson, Sophie Cattani, Mathieu Demy, Ryan Boubekri, Yohan Vero, Noah Vero, Cheyenne Lainé, Christel Baras, Valérie Roucher. Screenplay: Céline Sciamma. Cinematography: Chrystel Fournier. Production design: Thomas Grézaud. Film editing: Julien Lacheray. Music: Jean-Baptiste de Laubier, Jerôme Echenoz. 

In Tomboy, Céline Sciamma tells a simple story straightforwardly, which is in itself no small achievement. Laure (Zoé Héran), is a 10-year-old girl who moves with her family to a new neighborhood where, in search of kids to play with, she meets Lisa (Jeanne Disson), who seems to be the only girl her age in the neighborhood, since she runs around with a gang of boys. When Lisa asks her name, Laure, whose hair is cut short and who wears tank tops and shorts, impulsively introduces herself as Mikael. And from then on she's* just one of the boys, playing a good game of soccer and mimicking the boys' habits like spitting. There are some uneasy moments, of course. When she can't urinate alongside the boys, she sneaks off into the woods where she's startled by a boy and wets her pants. Invited to go swimming, she cuts the top off of her swimsuit and makes a penis out of modeling clay to stuff in the bottom. And most fraught of all, Lisa develops a crush on Mikael and kisses him. At home, Laure continues to be a girl in the eyes of her mother (Sophie Cattani), who is in the late stages of a difficult pregnancy that means she must rest as much as possible, and her father (Mathieu Demy), who works long hours in the computer business. But she has a confidante in her 6-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), who keeps quiet about the deception and aids in it. The crisis comes when Laure takes Jeanne out to play with the gang and one of the boys, Rayan (Rayan Boubekri), shoves Jeanne for annoying him. Laure/Mikael retorts by beating him up, which brings Rayan's angry mother to their house to complain to Laure's mother that Rayan was beaten by her son. Painful disclosures follow. The directness with which Sciamma tells the story is the film's great strength. It doesn't devolve into "Afterschool Special" sentimentality, melodrama, or message-peddling. It understands Laure, but doesn't dabble in causalities: We see, for example, that she's much closer to her father, who lets her sit on his lap and steer their automobile, and who takes a more tolerant air toward the situation than does Laure's mother, but the film doesn't project any psychological "insight" into their relationship. Zoé Héran is extraordinary, superbly androgynous as Laure/Mikael, but all of the very young cast give the film its sturdy underpinning of truth.   

*Yes, there's a pronoun problem. I've mostly stuck with feminine pronouns for Laure because it's not entirely clear that she will continue the transition from female to male in later life. 

Two-Faced Woman (George Cukor, 1941)

Constance Bennett, Melvyn Douglas, Greta Garbo, and Robert Sterling in Two-Faced Woman

Cast: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Ruth Gordon, Robert Sterling, Frances Carson. Screenplay: S.N. Behrman, Salka Viertel, George Oppenheimer, based on a play by Ludwig Fulda. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart. Film editing: George Boemler. Music: Bronislau Kaper. 

Two-Faced Woman is famous for only one thing: It was Greta Garbo's last film. Otherwise, it's a confused attempt at a screwball comedy, meant in part to revamp Garbo's image, which had largely been created in costume dramas like Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933), Anna Karenina (Clarence Brown, 1935), and her greatest triumph, Camille (George Cukor, 1936). Her most recent hit, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), had been hyped with the tagline "Garbo Laughs," and MGM thought giving Garbo a looser, more contemporary image might be profitable. So in Two-Faced Woman, she not only laughs, she skis, swims, and even dances. She's also reunited with her Ninotchka co-star, Melvyn Douglas, who plays Larry Blake, a New York magazine editor-publisher who falls (quite literally, down a mountainside) for Garbo's outdoorsy ski instructor. They marry in haste, and you know what that means. Garbo's character, Karin, doesn't want to live in the city, but when Larry spends more and more time there, she gets fed up and pursues him. Eventually, through a variety of plot contrivances, she pretends to be her own twin sister, Katherine, a vamp who drinks and smokes and dances -- all things that Karin doesn't do. At some point, the censors intervened and made the script indicate that Larry sees through this imposture, so that when he falls for the vivacious Katherine instead of the virtuous Karin, we know that he's just pretending. It's a familiar trope in sitcoms and screwball comedy, but the screenplay botches it badly. There are some bright moments contributed by Constance Bennett as the "other woman" in Larry's life and Ruth Gordon as his secretary, but for the most part it's confused and unfunny -- even the usually reliably brilliant Roland Young feels off his game, and Cukor, who had often demonstrated such a sure hand with this kind of material, doesn't seem to have his heart in it. That it was a critical and box office flop is often cited as the reason Garbo never made another movie; she asked to be let out of her MGM contract after it was made, but there's plenty of evidence that she toyed with returning to the screen over the remaining almost 50 years of her life.