Tron (Steven Lisberger, 1982)

 

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, David Warner, Cindy Morgan, Barnard Hughes, Dan Shor, Peter Jurasik. Screenplay: Steven Lisberger, Bonnie McBird, Charles S. Haas. Cinematography: Bruce Logan. Production design: Dean Edward Mitzner. Film editing: Jeff Gourson. Music: Wendy Carlos.

Epochal, visionary, pioneering, confusing, migraine-inducing, and occasionally inept. Tron is all those things and more. It would be almost 20 years before movies like The Matrix (Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, 1999) would begin to make full cinematic sense of some of Tron's key ideas about the relationship between humans and computers, and we are just now beginning to get seriously antsy about the promise and threat of artificial intelligence. At the time of its release, Tron was mostly discussed as an artifact of the Atari age: the growing popularity of computer games. Not many of us owned personal computers, and the internet was something only techies (and the military) knew anything about. So Steven Lisberger, the creative force behind the movie, has to be hailed as something of a prophet. And Disney has to be praised for a taking a risk (and suffering a loss when the film underperformed at the box office) on a movie as odd as Tron. Even Lisberger wasn't entirely sure that the visual effects he was playing with would work in a feature-length movie. Lisberger also has to be commended for not over-explaining in his film just what he's up to; instead, he plunged his audiences right into the strange world he created. That said, Tron is still sometimes a movie with one foot in chaos, and a lot of it seems to be just the filmmakers "trying stuff out." The acting is sometimes wooden, as if the performers, especially Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan, weren't sure what they were doing. The exceptions are David Warner, who could draw on a long career of playing villains on stage and screen, and Jeff Bridges, who seems incapable of giving a bad performance. As for the visuals, not everything works or even makes sense. There are moments of weird beauty, but too often what's meant to be dazzling is merely garish, and a lack of reference points sometimes makes the action incomprehensible. Boxleitner and Bridges have much the same build, so when they're suited up as Tron and Clu it's sometimes hard to tell which is which. (Lisberger originally planned to have them be distinctly different body types, but was unable to follow through in the casting.) Still, time has been kind to Tron, allowing its prophetic essence to prevail over its flaws.

One Way Passage (Tay Garnett, 1932)

Kay Francis and William Powell in One Way Passage

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Aline MacMahon, Frank McHugh, Warren Hymer, Frederick Burton, Roscoe Karns, Herbert Mundin. Screenplay: Wilson Mizner, Joseph Jackson, Robert Lord. Cinematography: Robert Kurrie. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Ralph Dawson.

One Way Passage is a small gem that won an Oscar for best story by Robert Lord, though the story is by no means the best thing about it. It is, for example, a prime demonstration of romantic movie chemistry in its teaming of Kay Francis and William Powell. She plays a woman dying of MHM (Mysterious Hollywood Malady), and he's a convicted murderer who is going to be hanged at San Quentin. They meet in a somewhat seedy bar in Hong Kong. She bumps into him and makes him spill his drink, and when they exchange glances it's love at first sight. If you ever want to know what the phrase "acting with the eyes" means, just check out that scene. When they part, they smash their glasses and leave the stems crossed on the bar -- a gesture that becomes a motif through the film, even providing a near-perfect ending for it. They meet again soon, boarding a ship bound for San Francisco, though she's accompanied by her doctor (Frederick Burton) and he by the cop (Warren Hymer) taking him to his doom. The rest is just a matter of working out ways to keep their fatal secrets from each other as their romance blossoms. And if that were all there were to it, One Way Passage really wouldn't be much of a movie. Fortunately, there's as much larceny as love on board, with the introduction of con artist Barrel House Betty (the wonderful Aline MacMahon), who is posing as the Comtesse Barilhaus and is aided by a lightfingered lush known as Skippy (Frank McHugh); they seem to have fleeced their way around the world. A romance even develops between Betty and the cop as a comic counterpart to the main one. The screenplay by Wilson Mizner (who was something of a con artist himself) and Joseph Jackson gives us some salty tough talk dialogue to offset the romantic melodrama of the main plot. (Mizner and Jackson probably deserved the Oscar at least as much as Lord, but at the time, the Academy treated story and screenplay as two discrete categories.) The Production Code would probably have forced the screenwriters to tell us more about the murder Powell's character committed, but all we get is a suggestion that the victim had it coming to him. That everything in the movie comes in at only a little over an hour -- 67 minutes -- is another reason to cherish One Way Passage.

 

Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

Milly Shapiro, Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff in Hereditary

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Woff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Mallory Bechtel. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Grace Yun. Film editing: Lucian Johnston, Jennifer Lame. Music: Colin Stetson.

There are films that leave a depressive miasma with me for days. I'm thinking particularly of George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988, not the 1993 American remake) and Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997, not the 2007 American remake). For a time, I thought Ari Aster's Hereditary was going to have the same effect on me, and it might have, if it hadn't devolved into a mere gory supernatural thriller with an overcomplicated backstory. It begins extraordinarily and creepily well, with a pan through the miniatures created by Annie (Toni Collette) in which one of them turns into the actual room where her son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is oversleeping on the day of his grandmother's funeral. A menacing gloom remains in the film as the family, including father Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), goes to the funeral and returns home. Even when we come home, there's a sense that something is off about the family and their obvious mixed feelings about the deceased. Ari Aster, in his feature film debut, skillfully handles the atmosphere in the somewhat sinister old house (aided by Pawel Pogorzelski's dark but not too dark cinematography and Colin Stetson's ominous score). Aster manages to gradually introduce the exposition about what's eating at Annie and her family. The performances are marvelous, especially Shapiro's obviously but enigmatically disturbed 13-year-old Charlie. I was with Aster's film all the way through the appalling accident that turns the story in a new direction. Then Ann Dowd, a fine actress whose career seems to have become defined by her performance as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale, shows up to reveal the movie's indebtedness to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Unfortunately, Aster's film has neither the coherence of the former nor the wit of the latter. In the end, it has to be remembered for Collette's performance, which should have had an Oscar nomination, not just for Annie's distraught moments but also the one at the film's climax when her face turns from horror to a kind of pleased amazement.

Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932)

Kay Francis and William Powell in Jewel Robbery

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright, Alan Mowbray, André Luguet, Henry Kolker, Spencer Charters, Lee Kohlmar, Clarence Wilson. Screenplay: Erwin Gelsey, based on a play by Ladislas Fodor and a translation by Bertram Bloch. Cinematography: Robert Kurrle. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Jewel Robbery is a perfect storm of what would be taboos under the Production Code: Not only does it condone adultery and let crime go unpunished, but it also allows William Powell's jewel thief -- pardon me, robber -- to slip a cigarette laced with an uncommonly potent strain of cannabis to the jewelry store guard, thereby violating the forthcoming ban on drug references in movies. (We are assured that, after a case of the giggles, the guard will fall sound asleep to wake refreshed with no hangover but the munchies.) The adulteress is Baroness Teri (Kay Francis), a golddigger who has married the aging Baron von Horhenfels (Henry Kolker) for his money, while carrying on a liaison with the much younger cabinet member Paul (Hardie Albright). Unfortunately, as Teri tells her confidante Marianne (Helen Vinson), Paul is a bit of a bore. She makes the best of it, however, swanning around in gowns designed by Orry-Kelly that defy the law of gravity and raking in the jewels her husband provides. Which leads her to the jewelry store that is about to be robbed and to the robber himself, with whom she swiftly falls in love. The rest is a story of crime and absence of punishment that ends well for Teri and her thief -- uh, robber. Francis and Powell were never better, and there's a good deal of charm and wit to the film. It could have been directed with a lighter touch: William Dieterle is better known for the somewhat stuffy biopics The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), and he doesn't have the Viennese insouciance that the script needs. But he lets his actors provide that, with good results.

Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber, Hope Davis, Stephen Park, Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Matt Dillon, Hong Chau, Margot Robbie, Tony Revolori, Jake Ryan. Grace Edwards. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola. Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman. Production design: Adam Stockhausen. Film editing: Barney Pilling. Music: Alexandre Desplat.

On the Netflix series Heartstopper, a teenage boy works up the courage to ask a girl he likes (and who secretly likes him) to go on their first date. He takes her to a movie that he likes and she doesn't, and the date is a disaster. The key fact here is that the movie is Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012). In my day, a comparable move would have been to take a date to see Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). Like Demy, Anderson makes movies that display an uncompromising sense of style. The only question is whether that style works for you or not, whether you think it betrays a lack of substance or opens vistas of meaning. In Anderson's case it's certainly a consistent style: an absence of closeups, long takes with characters artfully placed, actors who deliver their lines deadpan facing front, tricks like switching the screen from standard Academy ratio to widescreen and from monochrome to color. Sometimes Anderson's style works for me and sometimes it doesn't -- I love The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), but I could barely sit through The French Dispatch (2021). In the case of Asteroid City, I still haven't made up my mind completely, but I'm leaning toward the favorable view. I think it captures something essential about the brutal innocence of 1950's America -- the film is set in 1955 -- and does it without clichés. There's an acidity of tone to the film that keeps it from becoming twee -- an adjective frequently applied to Anderson's movies. The performances of its all-star cast are often delightful: I particularly liked Bryan Cranston's performance as the TV host who serves as the narrator in the frame story. Cranston somehow manages to walk a line between Rod Serling and Walter Cronkite in his delivery. Scarlett Johansson and a bearded, pipe-smoking Jason Schwartzman manage to transcend the limitations of deadpan delivery as the film's romantic leads. Jeffrey Wright doesn't overplay the role of the pompous General Gibson, and there's a brief starry cameo by Margot Robbie. Asteroid City may be one of those films it's more rewarding to think about after you watch it, but watching it is fairly painless.

Black Sheep (Allan Dwan, 1935)

Claire Trevor and Edmund Lowe in Black Sheep

Cast: Edmund Lowe, Claire Trevor, Tom Brown, Eugene Pallette, Adrienne Ames, Herbert Mundin, Ford Sterling, Jed Prouty, Billy Bevan, David Torrence. Screenplay: Allen Rivkin, Allan Dwan. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Alex Troffey. Music: Oscar Levant. 

Is it because it stars Edmund Lowe and Claire Trevor, and not, say, William Powell and Carole Lombard, that I had never seen Black Sheep before? Because Lowe, a second-string leading man at best, is perfectly fine as the suave but penniless gambler trying to recoup his fortunes on a ship sailing back to the States. And Trevor is delightful as the similarly broke actress going home after failing to make it big on the stage in Europe. Trevor, in fact, is something of a revelation: She's now best known for playing hard-bitten dames like Dallas, who was run out of town by the respectable ladies and put onto the titular vehicle of Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939). And she won an Oscar as the gangster's moll Gaye Dawn in Key Largo (John Huston, 1948). Who knew she had the gift for comedy that she shows in Black Sheep? And it's mostly a comedy, with a melodramatic twist provided by Allan Dwan, who wrote the story for which Allen Rivkin provided some lively dialogue. Lowe's John Francis Dugan and Trevor's Janette Foster team up to save the naïve young Fred Curtis (Tom Brown) from being fleeced by the card sharps Belcher (Eugene Pallette) and Schmelling (Jed Prouty) and by the slinky Millicent Bath (Adrienne Ames). Young Curtis, from a proper Bostonian family, owes Mrs. Bath a large sum, which she uses to blackmail him into helping her smuggle into the States a valuable pearl necklace that she has stolen. It's the usual shipboard intrigue plot we've seen before, played for comedy. But Dwan gives it a turn toward melodrama when Dugan discovers that the young man he's protecting is his own son. (Dwan seems to have borrowed this device from his own movie, East Side, West Side (1927), which likewise involves a father being separated from his son by a snooty family.) But it's mostly a comedy with some sharp repartee and a gallery of supporting actors like Pallette and Prouty, Herbert Mundin as a man in top hat and tails who's so drunk he doesn't know where he is or even who he is, and Ford Sterling as Mather, the shipboard detective who's Dugan's nemesis. There's also a sappy song, "In Other Words, I'm in Love," with lyrics by Sidney Clare and music by Oscar Levant, sung sappily by Dick Webster, which doesn't bear mentioning except that Levant's Gershwinesque music also serves as the film's score. 

Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990)

Adrienne Shelly and Martin Donovan in Trust

Cast: Adrienne Shelly, Martin Donovan, Rebecca Nelson, John MacKay, Edie Falco, Karen Sillas, Matt Malloy, Suzanne Costollos, Jeff Howard, Tom Thon. Screeplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Daniel Ouellette. Film editing: Nick Gomez. Music: The Great Outdoors, Philip Reed. 

Hal Hartley's second feature begins like his first, with a teenage girl played by Adrienne Shelly having a fight with her father and storming out. But unlike The Unbelievable Truth (1989), this time the girl is pregnant and, the moment she leaves, the father drops dead. As Tolstoy informed us, each unhappy family is different from the others. And as if to prove that point, on the other side of town a thirtyish man (Martin Donovan) is fighting with his father (John MacKay), but this time the father doesn't drop dead, he makes his son go clean the bathroom. Again. (It's the most spotless bathroom I've ever seen.) And the son, whose name is Matthew Slaughter, doesn't storm out then, instead he goes to work, fights with his boss, and quits his job. Eventually, the girl, whose name is Maria Coughlin, and the man have to meet and have to work out the problematic attraction that develops between them. If that reminds you of The Unbelievable Truth, in which a teenage girl and an older man fall in love, I should add that Matthew Slaughter, like Joshua Hutton in the earlier film, has a shadowed past: He hasn't been to prison like Joshua but we learn that he has a record and spent time in reform school. He's also so volatile that he carries around with him a hand grenade. (We might call it a Chekhov's grenade.) The similarities between Hartley's first two films extend to the deadpan performances and eccentric twists on conventional situations, which troubled some critics: Roger Ebert, for example, referred to the "soap opera idiom" of the story and "the arbitrary nature of his plots," but couldn't quite see where Hartley was going with the film. I wasn't sure where Hartley was going either, but I was happy to accompany him on the trip. In the second film he seemed to have learned more about making a movie: The performances are more consistently good, the pacing is more steady, and his unique voice and vision more securely articulated. 

Le Mans (Lee H. Katzin, 1971)

Cast: Steve McQueen, Siegfried Rauch, Elga Andersen, Ronald Leigh-Hunt, Fred Haltiner, Luc Merenda, Christopher Waite, Louise Edlund. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner. Cinematography: René Guissart Jr., Robert B. Hauser. Production design: Phil Abramson. Film editing: Ferris Webster Ghislaine Desjonquères, Donald W. Ernst, John Woodcock. Music: Michel Legrand. 

The real antagonists of Le Mans are Porsche and Ferrari, not Michael Delaney (Steve McQueen) and Erich Stahler (Siegfried Rauch). And the real directors of the film are not Lee H. Katzin and John Sturges (who quit or was fired from the film, depending on whose story you believe) so much as the cameramen who shot the actual 24 Hours of Le Mans in June 1970 -- one of whom, David Piper, who seriously injured during the shoot -- and the editors who put together their footage. Which is to say that the movie is as much about technology as it is about human beings. Granted, the docudrama tries to dramatize the human element more than it documents the actual race. You don't cast an actor like Steve McQueen unless you want to bring out something of human toughness in the face of the perils of a race like Le Mans and to soften it with a romantic element. Delaney has previously been involved in a crash that killed his opponent, and wouldn't you know it, the beautiful widow, Lisa (Elga Andersen), shows up at Le Mans, giving McQueen a chance to show Delaney's guilt and to deal with the attraction that blossoms between him and Lisa -- lots of poignant gazes. There's also a subplot about a driver who tells his wife he's going to give up racing and settle down, which only signals to the savvy moviegoer that he's about to get in a crash. But the thing that lingers with the viewer after the film is over is the cars, zooming around turns, skidding on rain slicks, and coming apart spectacularly and sometimes pyrotechnically when they crash. The substance of the drama is really the rivalry of two corporations and their designers, engineers, and pit crew mechanics. The drivers are skilled, of course, but they're at the mercy of their machines and those who create and maintain them. The rivalry even took place behind the scenes of the film. Enzo Ferrari refused to supply cars for the film when he learned that Porsche was going to be depicted as the winner, so the producers had to borrow them from a Belgian distributor. Le Mans is an exciting film, but I'm tempted to ask Lisa's question, "What is so important about driving faster than anyone else?" And to find my answer in Delaney's description of racing as "a professional blood sport."   

Experiment Perilous (Jacques Tourneur, 1944)

George Brent, Paul Lukas, and Hedy Lamarr in Experiment Perilous

 Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Brent, Paul Lukas, Albert Dekker, Carl Esmond, Olive Blakeney, George N. Neise, Margaret Wycherly. Screenplay: Warren Duff, based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Jack Okey. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Roy Webb. 

Cary Grant was the original choice to play the male lead in Experiment Perilous and Gregory Peck was the second. If the role had gone to either of them, the film might be remembered as more than just the other gaslighting movie of 1944, but it has been eclipsed by George Cukor's Gaslight. The part of the psychiatrist Huntington Bailey went to the stolid old reliable George Brent. Dr. Bailey gets caught up in the drama of the Bederaux family when he has a chance encounter on a train with the slightly dotty Clarissa (Cissie) Bederaux (Olive Blakeney), who tells him she's writing the biography of her brother Nick (Paul Lukas), who has a beautiful wife named Allida (Hedy Lamarr). Bailey is intrigued, but not much more, until a mixup in luggage puts him in possession of one of Clarissa's bags. That, and the enthusiasm of his artist friends Clag (Albert Dekker) and Maitland (Carl Esmond) for Allida's beauty, draws him into the Bederaux circle and arouses his suspicions that Allida is not the mentally fragile woman that her husband and others say she is. When he learns that Cissie has died of a heart attack, he opens her valise and finds the manuscript of her biography and her diary, confirming his suspicion -- and putting him in jeopardy. This is solid melodrama stuff, and director Jacques Tourneur, who directed the Val Lewton romantic horror movies Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), knows just what to do with it. He's hindered a little by an over-complicated screenplay based on a novel by Margaret Carpenter, which necessitates a lot of flashbacks and switches in point of view, so the film doesn't proceed as smoothly as it might. But he maintains the right atmosphere as the plot moves to its resolution, which involves literally lighting gas as well as gaslighting. There's a goopy happy-ending coda to the main story that strikes the wrong note for the film, but Experiment Perilous deserves to be known as more than an also-ran.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Cast: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charles Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, based on a play by Aladar Laszlo. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Music: W. Franke Harling. Costume design: Travis Banton.

If you want a good example of the damage done to American movies by the enforcement of the Production Code, look no further than Trouble in Paradise. Ernst Lubitsch's comic masterpiece could not have been made two years later, when the Code went into effect. It could not even be re-released or shown commercially until the death of the Code in the late 1960s. The loss to the art of cinema is incalculable, even though filmmakers including Lubitsch went on to find other ways of being witty and sexy. On the face of it, Trouble in Paradise sounds trivial: Con artists Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) fall in love when each tries to filch the other's belongings: a wallet, a brooch, a watch, a garter. So they team up and go off to Paris where their target becomes the wealthy and beautiful Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), owner of a leading parfumerie. What will happen to Lily when Gaston falls in love with Mariette? What makes it work is Lubitsch's unflagging wit: A film that will soon be wafting the scent of Mme. Colet's perfume opens with a Venetian garbage man dumping the contents of a can into a loaded garbage scow and punting off into a canal singing "O Sole Mio." It's only the first of the many Lubitsch touches. But perhaps the greatest touch of all is the casting: Hopkins was never funnier or sexier and Francis never more radiant. I have to admit that on my first viewing I was initially put off by the casting of Marshall: a sad-eyed, somewhat slumped middle-aged man with a wooden leg. (The scenes in which Gaston sprints up and down Mariette's staircase are probably the work of a body double.) But Marshall turns out to be perfectly charming in the role, credibly wooing both leading ladies. A heartthrob like Cary Grant would have wrecked the chemistry, becoming the apex of what needs to be an equilateral triangle. William Powell would have been too vivid in the part, echoing his previous teamings with Francis. Fredric March had a touch too much of the ham -- Marshall succeeds by underplaying the role. There are some other nice surprises: Those peerless character actors Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton were usually used as comic relief, but Trouble in Paradise is a comedy that needs no relieving; Ruggles and Horton are there to do their own thing and they do it well. The ending, which flouts a key commandment of the Code, is suitably bittersweet, but paradise needs a little trouble to make you appreciate it the more.