Columbus (Kogonada, 2017)

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus

Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin. Screenplay: Kogonada. Cinematography: Elisha Christian. Production design: Diana Rice. Film editing: Kogonada. Music: Hammock.

Kogonada's debut feature, Columbus, had a lot of critics scrounging for superlatives, one of them being a comparison to the films of the master director Yasujiro Ozu. Which is apt, considering that Kogonada is a pseudonym -- his birth name is a slyly guarded secret -- derived from that of Ozu's co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda. But the filmmaker that Columbus most reminded me of was Éric Rohmer, whose films, like Claire's Knee (1970) and My Night at Maud's (1969), typically center on a man and a woman talking. Sometimes sex is involved, but usually only as one of the things they talk about. The man in Columbus is Jin (John Cho), a Korean in early middle age who works as a translator of books in English. The woman is Cassandra, called Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), not long out of high school and working in a library until she decides on a course for her life. They meet in the small city of Columbus, Indiana, which is chiefly famous for the many buildings -- churches, banks, schools, and so on -- designed by famous architects like the Saarinens, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, and others. Jin is in Columbus because his father, an architect, went there to give a lecture but suffered a stroke and is comatose in the hospital. Casey is there because she grew up in Columbus and hasn't yet decided to leave because her mother (Michelle Forbes) is a recovering drug addict. Jin is estranged from his father but bound against his will by Korean family tradition to stay near to him. Casey would like to leave Columbus and have a career, but she fears what may happen to her mother if she does. They're both single, though Jin has a longstanding crush on his father's assistant, Eleanor (Parker Posey), who accompanied his father to Columbus and remains there after his stroke. Casey is carrying on a flirtation with Gabriel (Rory Culkin), a co-worker at the library who's more interested in her than she is in him. Jin and Casey meet, he bums a cigarette from her -- there's an awful lot of smoking in the film, a reason why the film echoes French movies for me -- and they start to talk. Over the next few days in Columbus they will talk about architecture as they wander through some of the city's landmark buildings, and they will talk about life, family, culture, and so on. In a more conventional film, the talk would lead to romance, and there is a kind of spark between Jin and Casey, but Kogonada isn't interested in making a conventional film. Instead, he leaves us to ponder the substance of the talk, the beauty and function of architecture, and the nature of relationships. Which makes Columbus sound more abstract than it is: Cho, Richardson, and the rest of the cast create people that are as real and individual as the settings through which they wander.

 

Mandalay (Michael Curtiz, 1934)

Kay Francis, Warner Oland, and Ricardo Cortez in Mandalay

 Cast: Kay Francis, Ricardo Cortez, Warner Oland, Lyle Talbot, Ruth Donnelly, Lucien Littlefield, Reginald Owen, Etienne Giardot, David Torrence, Rafaela Ottiano, Halliwell Hobbes, Bodil Rosing, Herman Bing. Screenplay: Paul Hervey Fox, Austin Parker, Charles King. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Thomas Pratt. Music: Heinz Roemheld.

You get what you might expect from a movie titled Mandalay: Orientalist hooey, with lots of gun-running and opium dealing in sleazy night clubs, with expat Europeans and Americans fleecing tourists with the aide of sinister Eurasians. (There was no other kind of Eurasian in Hollywood movies of the '30s; here they're played by Warner Oland, who made a career of the type before going straight into yellowface as Charlie Chan, and Rafaela Ottiano, who filled the bill whenever Gale Sondergaard was unavailable.) Kay Francis does what she can with a role that doesn't make a lot of sense: She's the Russian-born Tanya Borodoff, who has somehow fallen in love with Tony Evans (Ricardo Cortez), a gun-runner and all-around heel. When he dumps her, she becomes Spot White (no, I don't get the name either), the madam of the sleazy night club in Rangoon run by Nick (Oland). She doesn't want to fall that far from grace, but needs must. When she's threatened with deportation to Russia by the police commissioner (Reginald Owen), she blackmails him by reminding him that they once had a night together when he was drunk, and that she has her garter adorned with his medals to prove it. He gives her the money she needs to leave Rangoon and head for the "cool green hills" near Mandalay. Now calling herself Marjorie Lang, she boards a paddle-wheel steamer upriver, on which she meets an alcoholic doctor (Lyle Talbot) who intends to atone for accidentally killing a patient by working with black fever patients in the jungles. They hit it off and she helps him sober up, but, wouldn't you know it, Tony Evans resurfaces on the very steamer. This sounds like a lot more fun than it is, although Michael Curtiz's professionalism and Tony Gaudio's cinematography gives it some occasional finesse. Francis slinks about nicely -- a woman passenger tells her, "You certainly can wear clothes" -- but she doesn't have the spark she fires in her best roles, perhaps because Cortez and Talbot are such dull leading men. The ending is the sort of thing that would have the heads of the Production Code enforcers exploding, but even that isn't enough for me to recommend sitting through the rest of the movie.

Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)

 

Cast: Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Frieda Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Ben Kingsley (voice). Screenplay: Terrence Malick. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: A.J. Edwards, Keith Fraase, Geoffrey Richman, Mark Yoshikawa. Music: Hanan Townshend.

Two films kept coming to mind as I watched Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups: Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) and Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror (1975). Fellini's film because the journey of Malick's protagonist, Rick (Christian Bale), through the decadence of Hollywood and Las Vegas echoes that of Marcello's (Marchello Mastroianni) explorations of Rome. Tarkovsky's because Malick's exploration of Rick's life exhibits a similar steadfast refusal to adhere to a strict linear narrative. Most of us go to movies to have stories told to us. Our lives are a web of stories, told to us by history and religion and science and society, and most explicitly by art. We tend to prefer the old linear progression of storytelling: beginning, middle, end, or the familiar five-act structure of situation, complication, crisis, struggle, and resolution. But artists tend to get weary of the straightforward approach; they like to mix things up, to find new ways of storytelling. The modernist novelists like Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner eschewed linearity, and filmmakers have tried to take a similar course. They have the advantage of working with images as well as words. So Malick, like Tarkovsky and Fellini and others, experiments with editing and montage to meld images with language and gesture to probe the psychological depths of human character and experience. The problem with experimentation is that experiments fail more often than they succeed. Some think that Knight of Cups is a successful experiment, but most critics and much of the film's audience seem to disagree, to judge from, for example, a 5.6 rating on IMDb. Knight of Cups spent two years in post-production and there are four credited film editors, which suggests that Malick over-reached himself. For me, what was lost in the process of making the film was a clarity of vision. Granted, the lives of human beings are messy, loose-ended things, but what do we depend on artists to do but try to make sense of them. I think Malick lost sight of his protagonist, Rick, in trying to interpret his life and loves through the film's odd amalgamation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the Major Arcana of the tarot pack and then overlaying it with a collage of images provided by Emmanuel Lubezki's camera. We glimpse Rick through filters, grasping for moments that will resolve into something substantial about him, his problems with his family and with women. And for all the casting of fine actors like Bale and Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the production negates their attempts to create characters. In fact, their starriness works against them: Instead of being drawn into the character of Rick or Nancy or Elizabeth, we're removed from them by the familiarity of the actor playing them. I understand what admirers of the film like Matt Zoller Seitz are saying when they proclaim, "The sheer freedom of it is intoxicating if you meet the film on its own level, and accept that it's unfinished, open-ended, by design, because it's at least partly concerned with the impossibility of imposing meaningful order on experience, whether through religion, occult symbolism, mass-produced images and stories, or family lore." But I wonder if that's enough to make an experiment successful. I came away from Knight of Cups knowing nothing more about its characters than I did before I met them.

Massacre at Central High (Rene Daalder, 1976)

Derrel Maury in Massacre at Central High 

Cast: Derrel Maury, Andrew Stevens, Robert Carradine, Kimberly Beck, Ray Underwood, Steve Bond, Rex Steven Sikes, Lani O'Grady, Damon Douglas, Dennis Kort, Cheryl Smith, Jeffrey Winner, Tom Logan. Screenplay: Rene Daalder. Cinematography: Bertram van Munster. Art direction: Russell Tune. Film editing: Harry Keramidas. Music: Tommy Leonetti.

With its often clunky acting, gratuitous nudity, and marginal production values, Massacre at Central High looks like a standard exploitation flick. And knowing that writer-director Rene Daalder's mentor was the master of exploitation flicks, Russ Meyer, only goes to confirm that first impression. The film's teenagers are played by actors in their mid-20s; there is a sappy musical score with an inane song over both the opening and closing credits; the visuals* reflect the tightness of the film's budget. The setup is familiar: A new student comes to a high school where the student body is harassed by a group of bullies. When he stands up to the bullies he is seriously injured. So he decides to take revenge by offing the bullies, one by one, in imaginative ways. But murder will out, and in the end he is hoist with his own petard -- literally. And if Massacre at Central High had stuck to that formula, it could have been the conventional exploitation flick. But Daalder takes things a step further, adding some provocative and intelligent twists to the tale. The revenge plot doesn't end with the protagonist, David (Derrel Maury), taking care of the bullies. Once he's done that, the bullied students become bullies themselves, and David has to deal with that unforeseen problem. And for the better part of the film, we never see an adult authority figure, a parent, a teacher, or a school administrator. David takes their role on himself. It's an adolescent's dream world turned nightmare. Even at the end, the adults who do appear, at an improbable "Student-Alumni Prom," are ineffectual -- they seem to be the students' grandparents -- and in danger of becoming victims of David's planned massacre. The film takes an unrelentingly harsh view of human nature: It's often compared to William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies and the films made of it by Peter Brook in 1963 and Harry Hook in 1990, and considered a precursor to the movie Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989). I don't think Massacre at Central High quite measures up to that standard -- there's still a lot of cheesiness for the viewer to overcome -- but it's a kind of classic in spite of itself.

*Cinematographer Bertram van Munster is better known as the Emmy-winning creator and executive producer of the reality competition series The Amazing Race.

The Best House in London (Philip Saville, 1969)

Joanna Pettet and David Hemmings in The Best House in London 

Cast: David Hemmings, Joanna Pettet, George Sanders, Dany Robin, Warren Mitchell, John Bird, William Rushton, Bill Fraser, Maurice Denham, Wolfe Morris, Martita Hunt, Marie Rogers. Screenplay: Dennis Norden. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: Wilfred Singleton. Film editing: Peter Tanner. Music: Mischa Spoliansky.

Is there anything worse than a sex comedy that's neither sexy nor funny? Well, maybe a sex comedy predicated in part on the toxically masculine idea that sex workers choose their occupation because of the sex and not because they need work -- in short, that any woman would become a prostitute if it just meant having a lot of sex all the time. Philip Saville's The Best House in London endorses that notion. Joanna Pettet plays Josephine Pacefoot, a character based on, or rather parodying, the real-life Josephine Butler, a 19th-century English social reformer who, in addition to campaigning for women's rights, sought an end to human trafficking. In the movie, her campaign is ridiculed: The women she's trying to take off the streets and tech marketable skills are recalcitrant, constantly slipping back into prostitution as easier, more lucrative, and from the film's point of view more fun, with the result that the streets of Victorian London are crowded with hookers. This plays into the schemes of Walter Leybourne (David Hemmings), who persuades the British Home Secretary (John Bird) to allow him to establish an opulent bordello that will cater to the cream of English society and thereby ease the street traffic. The brothel is an enormous success and thereby becomes a target for Pacefoot's campaign, in which she is aided by Benjamin Oakes (also Hemmings), who is serving as a sort of publicist for her cause. The inevitable clash between the brothel and the reformer, and between the two characters played by Hemmings, forms the main plot. But that story is overlaid with subplots, one about the secret parentage of Leybourne and Oakes -- the justification for the double casting of Hemmings is that they are secretly half brothers -- and another, almost unrelated to the rest of the film, about Leybourne's assisting a pioneering aeronaut, Count Pandolfo (Warren Mitchell), in the construction of a giant dirigible. Meanwhile, the film is littered with cameo appearances of eminent Victorians: Dickens, Tennyson, Swinburne, Elizabeth Barrett, Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and fictional ones like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. (One of the few successful jokes in the film comes as invitations to the brothel opening are being sent out; when Dr. Jekyll's name comes up, someone says they'd better send him two.) The movie is cavalier about chronology: It doesn't seem to matter, for example, that Lord Alfred Douglas was born in 1870, the year that Dickens died. Still, the messiness of the plotting and insouciance about history matter less in the end than the fact that most of the comedy falls flat, the sex is of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink order, and the underlying premise of the film is distasteful.

Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)

Jessica Harper in Suspiria

Cast: Jessica Harper, Stefania Cassini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé, Barbara Magnolfi, Susanna Javicoli, Eva Axén, Rudolf Schündler, Udo Kier, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett. Screenplay: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Production design: Giuseppe Bassan. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Dario Argento, Goblin (Agostino Marangolo, Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli, Claudio Simonetti). 

I've seen movies in which the sets were more interesting than what's going on in them, but I don't think anyone would say that about Dario Argento's Suspiria. At the very least, in the competition of setting and action for the viewer's attention, it's a draw. When Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) tells a cab driver to take her to Escherstrasse, I should have been alerted to the visual phantasmagoria that is to come. It's clear that Argento means us to pick up on the allusion to the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, known for his plays on perspective and visual puzzles; Argento has the surly cabbie force Suzy to repeat the street name twice before saying it himself. But Escher's work was in black and white; Argento's, and that of his production designer, Giuseppe Bassan, and his cinematographer, Luciano Tovoli, is in color -- the most lurid Technicolor seen in a movie since the heyday of the MGM musical. Not that Suspiria has much in common with those musicals: The dominant color in Suspiria is red, and a lot of that red is blood, often artfully splattered. (One large blood splat looks like a Rorschach test.) I can't say that I was shocked by anything in the movie, although the many murders in it verge on overkill. It's too gaudy and noisy -- the background music by Goblin is the aural equivalent of the decor -- to build much tension. I could wish the dubbing of the dialogue didn't have the depthless quality, the lack of ambiance, of speech recorded in a studio -- even the English-speaking actors were post-synched in the manner of many Italian films of the era. But then the dialogue doesn't matter much: It's nonsense about witches, and the plot is only a device to hang horrors on. Still, Suspiria is a one-of-a-kind movie -- maybe we should be grateful for that -- and a landmark in its genre.  

East Side, West Side (Allan Dwan, 1927)

Holmes Herbert, June Collyer, and George O'Brien in East Side, West Side

 
Cast: George O'Brien, Virginia Valli, Holmes Herbert, J. Farrell MacDonald, Frank Allworth, June Collyer, John Miltern, Dore Davidson, Sonia Nodell, Frank Dodge, Dan Wolheim, William Frederic, Jean Armour. Screenplay: Allan Dwan, based on a novel by Felix Riesenberg. Cinematography: Theodore J. Pahle, George Webber. 

In Allan Dwan's silent East Side, West Side, big, likable George O'Brien plays big, likable John Breen, a naïf in the city. O'Brien also played a naïf in the city in his other big film of 1927, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Murnau's film is an acknowledged masterpiece and Dwan's isn't, though Sunrise is melodrama striving to be art, whereas East Side, West is unabashed melodrama, rags to riches, interrupted romances, secret parentage, self-sacrificing heroism, sneaking villainy, happy ending and so on. Somehow Dwan manages to stuff all that, plus a subway cave-in and a sinking passenger liner, into a tidy 90 minutes. It all begins with O'Brien's Breen looking at the Manhattan skyline from the barge he lives on with his mother and stepfather, and longing to be part of it all. He gets his wish, sort of, when the barge is swamped by a passing ship and his parents drown. He swims to shore and hides out in the cellar of the Lipvitch family's home. They take him in and put him to work assisting Papa Lipvitch in the tailor shop, and he begins a shy flirtation with the Lipvitch daughter, Becka (Virginia Valli). A suitor for Becka's hand, known as Flash (Frank Allworth), spots Breen's talent for fisticuffs and helps him get a start as a prizefighter. When he begins to make a name for himself, he catches the attention of the wealthy developer Gilbert Van Horn (Holmes Herbert), who soon recognizes that Breen is his long-lost son -- he was forced to annul his marriage to Breen's mother, who decided never to tell her son about his father. Uncertain whether to reveal the truth to Breen, Van Horn asks Breen what he would do if he ever met his father: "I'd kill him!" Breen replies. (The italics are in the title card.) Van Horn decides to keep the secret, but he takes Breen in and tries to fulfill his desire to become a builder in the city he loves. He also introduces him to his pretty ward, Josephine (June Collyer), setting up a rivalry with Becka. Dwan never wastes time putting all this plot into place, which proceeds as you might expect, the story flavored with evocative shots of the city. The film touches only lightly on the ethnic character of the East Side: The Irish are seen as pugnacious and clannish, and the Lipvitches are obviously meant to be Jewish. There's some stereotyping in the penny-pinching character of Papa Lipvitch (Dore Davidson), but the issue of intermarriage is never raised in the case of Becka and Breen. East Side, West Side is the only silent film in the Criterion Channel's retrospective of Allan Dwan's work, but it makes me wish there were more.

Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

 

Isobel Elsom and Ida Lupino in Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

Cast: Ida Lupino, Louis Hayward, Evelyn Keyes, Elsa Lanchester, Edith Barrett, Isobel Elsom, Emma Dunn, Queenie Leonard, Clyde Cook. Screenplay: Garrett Fort, Reginald Denham, based on a play by Denham and Edward Percy. Cinematography: George Barnes. Production design: Lionel Banks. Music: Ernst Toch.

Ladies in Retirement, a nifty little thriller included in the Criterion Channel’s “Noir by Gaslight” series, centers on a steely performance by Ida Lupino. She plays Ellen Creed, a Victorian spinster trying to make a life for herself and her two eccentric sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). The sisters have been living in London with a family that has become fed up with them, so Ellen is forced to persuade her employer to let them come live with her in a somewhat gloomy house on the edge of a marshland. The employer, whom Ellen serves as a kind of companion/housekeeper, is the imperious Leonora Fiske, a retired “actress.” (We later learn that she was only a fourth-from-the-right chorus girl, who managed to accumulate a small fortune from stage door johnnies and wealthy patrons.) Unfortunately, the sisters manage to alienate Leonora as well. Louisa is batty and hypersensitive, and Emily is brusque and a collector of things she picks up on her walks, like shells and birds’ nests and even a dead bird, which she leaves scattered around the house that Leonora bullies the maid-of-all-work, Lucy (Evelyn Keyes), to keep immaculate. Ellen knows that she can’t make a living for herself and her sisters, and she doesn’t want them sent to an asylum, so she decides to take things, which means Leonora’s neck, in her own hands. Curtain on act one. (The stage origins of the movie are apparent throughout.) Enter Albert Feather (Louis Hayward), a somewhat distant relative of the Creed women, who calls Ellen “Auntie” and charms the sisters. He also charms Lucy. Albert has been to the house before, while Ellen was in London collecting her sisters, and managed to flatter Leonora into giving him some money. But now he’s on the lam, wanted for embezzlement from the bank where he worked. When he finds that Leonora is gone – “on a trip,” as the story goes – he begins to suspect that Ellen is hiding something. And so the plot hinges on his quest to uncover Ellen’s secrets, with the aid of the infatuated Lucy. It’s a nicely paced movie, with fine performances, especially by Barrett and Lanchester as the weird sisters. Though remembered today more as a director than as an actor, Lupino, then in her early 20s, excels in a part that had been played on Broadway by the much older Flora Robson. Although Louisa and Emily are the more flamboyantly mad of the sisters, Lupino manages to hint that Ellen is the maddest of them all.

Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971)

Dennis Weaver in Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971)

 Cast: Dennis Weaver, Jacqueline Scott, Eddie Fierstone, Lou Frizzell, Gene Dynarski, Lucille Benson, Tim Herbert, Charles Seel, Shirley O'Hara, Alexander Lockwood, Amy Douglas, Cary Loftin. Screenplay: Richard Matheson. Cinematography: Jack A. Marta. Art direction: Robert A. Smith. Film editing: Frank Morriss. Music: Billy Goldenberg.

Of course the protagonist of Steven Spielberg’s Duel is named David Mann. David vs. Goliath, man vs. machine, get it? This entertaining mashup of a road rage fable with a monster movie launched one of the greatest careers in movie history, and it began in that once-maligned medium, the TV movie. After its modest success as an ABC Movie of the Week – it was only 18th in the rankings of TV movies for 1971, but got good reviews and, more importantly, attracted industry notice – it was expanded into a theatrical feature that played internationally and had a limited release in the United States. Spielberg added the opening sequence of the car leaving the garage and hitting the road, wittily filmed from the point of view of the car, establishing it as much a character in the film as its driver (Dennis Weaver). Mann’s phone call home to his wife (Jacqueline Scott) was added, their unresolved quarrel making his nervousness and irritability more credible. Adding the sequence with the stalled school bus gave Spielberg a chance to heighten the suspense by showing the tanker truck as a malevolent, lurking monster with a single-minded focus on Mann – after he escapes, the truck gives the bus the push it needed. But even in the original version, the scenes at the gas station and in the diner are enough to establish Mann’s isolation and helplessness. Spielberg’s insistence on location shooting in rural Los Angeles County and along the Sierra Highway – the producers wanted to control the budget by faking a lot of the movie in the studio – adds immeasurably to the sense of Mann’s solitary plight. Spielberg often has trouble ending his movies – viz., the cemetery coda to Saving Private Ryan (1998) and the extended epilogue to Schindler’s List (1993), both of which have stirred critical debate – but he found the right one for Duel, with his victorious David tossing pebbles into the wreckage of the vanquished Goliath.

The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)

 

Adrienne Shelly in The Unbelievable Truth (Hal Hartley, 1989)

Cast: Adrienne Shelly, Robert John Burke, Chris Cooke, Julia McNeal, Katherine Mayfield, Gary Sauer, Mark Chandler Bailey, David Healy, Matt Malloy, Edie Falco. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Carla Gerona. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: Jim Coleman.

In his debut feature, Hal Hartley adroitly mixes the old “stranger comes to town” story trope into a romantic comedy. The result has the DNA of Jim Jarmusch and Preston Sturges in it, but it’s all Hartley’s own, and it’s lovely. The film begins with a hitchhiker who finally gets a ride after repairing a broken-down car whose driver had earlier passed him up. Because the hitchhiker is dressed all in black, driver asks him if he’s a priest. (Not the last time someone will ask him that.) No, he says, but when he says that he’s been in prison, we see the car come to an abrupt stop and the man and his bag get tossed out of the car. It’s a harbinger of the numerous times in the film when the man in black, whose name is Joshua Hutton (Robert John Burke), will have to confront his past. When he finally arrives at his destination, his old home town, the first person he meets is a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who faints dead away at the sight of him. We learn that Joshua was sent to prison after he killed Pearl’s sister and her father. So he’s not really a stranger come to town, but he might as well be, since most of the town can’t quite remember what he was accused of – the gossips inflate it into some kind of mass murder. Eventually, we will find out the not-so-unbelievable truth of what Joshua did, but not before he falls in love with Audry Hugo (Adrienne Shelly), who helps him get a job in her father’s auto repair shop. It’s a droll romance, complicated by the fact that Audry walks around in a gloomy funk, convinced that the world is about to end in a nuclear holocaust. Burke and Shelly play their roles with a kind of deadpan that serves as a foil to the emotional volatility that surrounds them. There’s Audry’s father, Vic (Chris Cooke), whose hilarious exasperation with her is reminiscent of William Demarest’s outbursts in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944). There’s her ex-boyfriend, Mike (Mark Chandler Bailey), who is so infuriated at being dumped by her that he gets into shoving matches with almost every man he suspects of being a rival. But the film would be nothing without Hartley’s ability to skew every turn in the plot or action of his characters in a direction just a few degrees off what we expect. It’s a sly, loopy gem of a movie.