Fear Is the Key (Michael Tuchner, 1972)

Cast: Barry Newman, Suzy Kendall, John Vernon, Dolph Sweet, Ben Kingsley, Ray McAnally, Peter Marinker, Elliott Sullivan. Screenplay: Robert Carrington, based on a novel by Alistair MacLean. Cinematography: Alex Thomson. Production design: Syd Cain, Maurice Carter. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: Roy Budd. 

Fear Is the Key is a somewhat preposterous thriller that begins well with the protagonist resisting arrest and arraignment and leading law enforcement on a car chase through the Louisiana bayous and backroads. And it ends well with a scene of high suspense in a bathyscaphe under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But what comes in between is often muddled and hard to follow, with too much exposition crammed into too tight a space. Barry Newman plays John Talbot, an underwater salvage expert who winds up working for some crooks in the employ of a wealthy oil company executive, trying to retrieve a fabulous fortune from the undersea wreckage of an airplane. For much of the film, it looks like a case of bad guys vs. worse guys: Talbot as we see him is a stone-cold killer, who guns down a deputy in the courtroom where he's being arraigned, kidnaps a woman in the courtroom, and takes her along on the aforementioned high-speed chase, driving a stolen car. But then there's a twist in mid-film, one that necessitates Talbot doing a lot of gabbled explanation to the terrified hostage, Sarah Ruthven (Suzy Kendall), who turns out to be the oilman's daughter. Well, if she can believe him after he's put her life in serious danger speeding through the backwoods, why can't we? John Vernon is the chief villain, and his sinister sidekick is played by Ben Kingsley in his film debut; he looks a little confused about what he's being asked to do. This is one of those movies to ride along with and not think about much while you're doing it or afterward. 

Simple Men (Hal Hartley, 1992)

Robert John Burke and Bill Sage in Simple Men

Cast: Robert John Burke, Bill Sage, Karen Sillas, Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan, Mark Chandler Bailey, Chris Cooke, Jeffrey Howard, Holly Marie Combs, Joe Stevens, Damian Young, Marietta Marich, John MacKay. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Daniel Ouellette. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Yo La Tengo, Hal Hartley. 

When does style become mannerism? As I work my way chronologically through the Criterion Channel's Hal Hartley retrospective, I find myself beginning to ask that question. Because Simple Men seems to me to show some slight atrophy in the deadpan, off-beat style that Hartley established in his first films, a kind of predictable unpredictability, if you will. We sense that nothing in the movie will turn out quite right, that it may not even end but just stop. Granted, I'm comfortable with the eccentricity of Hartley's narrative and characters, and I laughed out loud at several points in the film. I particularly enjoyed, for example, the character of the sheriff of the small Long Island town where the protagonists, as usual in Hartley's films, wind up. Played by Damian Young, the sheriff is a kind of walking thesaurus, a cynical, irritable officer of the law who delights in parsing what's said to him into an endless string of mocking synonyms. And I enjoyed the irruption of a musical number into the story, as the players dance to Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing." But it also felt like a needed break in the slow plod of the narrative. With his earlier films I felt that Hartley was challenging us with some ideas about family and relationships. Simple Men hinges on a family situation, two brothers in search of their father, and there are budding relationships, Bill (Robert John Burke) with Kate (Karen Sillas) and Dennis (Bill Sage) with Elina (Elina Löwensohn), but they are so abstractly conceived that it's hard to get involved in them. At its worst, which is mercifully not very often, Simple Men seems to be an exercise in quirk for quirk's sake.  

Ivy (Sam Wood, 1947)

Joan Fontaine in Ivy

Cast: Joan Fontaine, Patric Knowles, Herbert Marshall, Richard Ney, Cedric Hardwicke, Lucile Watson, Sara Allgood, Henry Stephenson, Rosalind Ivan, Lilian Fontaine, Molly Lamont, Una O'Connor, Isobel Elsom, Alan Napier. Screenplay: Charles Bennett, based on a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes. Cinematography: Russell Metty. Art direction: Richard H. Riedel. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof.

Ivy is a fair-to-middling melodrama made memorable by its production design and cinematography, which evokes Edwardian London as a place of contrasts, from the ornately affluent milieu to which Ivy (Joan Fontaine) aspires to the sparse and gloomy world which she tries to escape. Russell Metty's images are filled with shadows and Expressionist angles even when they're showing us the gilded life of the privileged classes. The nominal art director is Richard H. Riedel, but he was working for a producer better known today as a production designer, William Cameron Menzies. Ivy is stuck in a marriage to the feckless Jervis Lexton (Richard Ney) but is carrying on an affair with a doctor, Roger Gretorex (Patric Knowles), who has chosen to work among the city's poor. So when she catches the eye of the wealthy Miles Rushworth (Herbert Marshall), she sees the chance to make it big if she can escape from her current entanglements. The doctor has poisons in his lab, so the rest is obvious. But Ivy has the bad luck to run up against one of those impossibly intuitive Scotland Yard detectives (Cedric Hardwicke), who manages to riddle through the motives, means, and opportunity, and to do so at a crucial moment. Director Sam Wood isn't very skilled at building suspense, preferring to let the screenplay do it on its own, so Ivy doesn't have the tension and snap that it needs. The story comes from a novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes, who is better known as the author of The Lodger, which helped Alfred Hitchcock make his name when he filmed it as a silent in 1927 and gave Laird Cregar a memorable role in John Brahm's 1944 film. Ivy, unfortunately, isn't in the league of either of those films.

The Craft (Andrew Fleming, 1996)

Cast: Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, Rachel True, Skeet Ulrich, Cliff DeYoung, Christine Taylor, Breckin Meyer, Nathaniel Marston, Helen Shaver, Assumpta Serna. Screenplay: Peter Filardi, Andrew Fleming. Cinematography: Alexander Gruszynski. Production design: Marek Dobrowolski. Film editing: Jeff Freeman. Music: Graeme Revell.

If the makers of The Craft had had the courage and the skill to parody or transcend the teen-movie clichés and characters -- the mean girl, the horny jock, the embarrassing or absent parents, and so on -- it might have been a genre classic like Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) or Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1989). That the filmmakers even come close enough to elicit the comparison owes much to the performances of the four young actresses who play the film's mischief-working coven. Robin Tunney is Sarah, the new girl in town with untested magic powers; Fairuza Balk is Nancy, the punk-gothic misfit; Neve Campbell is Bonnie, who bears disfiguring burn scars; and Rachel True is Rochelle, the biracial girl in an apparently all-white Catholic high school. Balk got most of the attention for her amusingly over-the-top performance, but Tunney deserves credit for underplaying her role, creating an outwardly normal but deeply troubled teenage girl. Sarah once tried to kill herself -- "the right way," says Nancy approvingly, noting that the scars on Sarah's wrists are vertical, along the vein, rather than horizontal. Falling in with the other three, Sarah not only discovers her own latent powers but also helps the other girls develop their own. Bonnie erases her scars, Rochelle gets even with the racist blonde (Christine Taylor) who referred to her as "Negroid," and Sarah causes the scornful jock (Skeet Ulrich) to fall in love with her. Nancy, however, goes to the dark side, and mayhem ensues. Unfortunately, the plot gets predictable at this turn, and the ending is anticlimactic.  

High Tension (Allan Dwan, 1936)

Brian Donlevy and Glenda Farrell in High Tension

Cast: Brian Donlevy, Glenda Farrell, Norman Foster, Helen Wood, Robert McWade, Theodore von Eltz, Romaine Callender, Hattie McDaniel, Joe Sawyer, Murray Alper. Screenplay: Lou Breslau, Edward Eliscu, John Patrick, J. Robert Bren, Norman Houston. Cinematography: Barney McGill. Art direction: Duncan Cramer. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. 

High Tension is a lively little action comedy that comes in at 63 minutes, just right for the bottom half of a double feature. Brian Donlevy has the boisterous role of Steve Reardon, an underwater engineer for a transoceanic cable company who unwinds from his stressful job by getting drunk, telling tall tales of his undersea adventures, getting into fights, and messing around with his girlfriend, Edith McNeil (Glenda Farrell). It's a little hard to see why she puts up with Steve, let alone wants to marry him, except that she makes a good living writing pulp fiction based on those tall tales. Allan Dwan sets a nice pace for the movie, which puts Steve into a couple of knock-down, drag-out fights, one of which involves Steve and his opponent shoving a piano at each other in Edith's apartment. The more important fight, for the sake of the plot, comes when a couple of guys (one of them played by an unbilled Ward Bond) set upon him with the aim of picking his pocket. The movie's second lead, Eddie Mitchell (Norman Foster), manages to save the money that the thugs stole from Steve when he was knocked cold. Steve wakes up the next morning to find himself in bed with Eddie, who took him home for the night. It's the beginning of a beautiful friendship, with whatever homoerotic undertones you might want to find in it. Grateful for Eddie's help, and discovering that he has a degree from Caltech, Steve gets him a job with the company he works for and trains him to be his right hand man. Eventually, all this winds up with a some romantic complications, with Steve, who has broken up with Edith, putting the moves on Eddie's pretty secretary (Helen Wood), whom the shy Eddie secretly loves. And there's a big underwater rescue scene (done pretty much on the cheap) that sets everything straight again. The whole thing is quite watchable, except for the sexist and racist elements that don't go down as well today as they did in the '30s. Steve has to deal with his boss's prissy assistant, F. Willoughby Tuttle (Romaine Callender in a role probably written with Franklin Pangborn in mind), a prime example of the "pansy" stereotype that afflicted movies of the era. And Hattie McDaniel is cast as Edith's maid, unimaginatively named Hattie, a role that McDaniel plays with more sass and vigor than it deserves -- McDaniel was a true professional, and if you can overlook the stereotyping her performance is a delight. 

The Last Run (Richard Fleischer, 1971)

George C. Scott in The Last Run

Cast: George C. Scott, Tony Musante, Trish Van Devere, Colleen Dewhurst, Aldo Sambrell. Screenplay: Alan Sharp. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Art direction: José María Tapiador, Roy Walker. Film editing: Russell Lloyd. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. 

The Last Run begins with a love scene so intense it might have needed an intimacy coordinator if it weren't between a man and his car. The man is Harry Garmes (George C. Scott), a retired driver for the Chicago mob, now living in Portugal. The car is a souped-up BMW 503, and it's practically the last thing in the world Harry loves after his small son's death and his wife's disappearance. He does occasionally visit a friendly prostitute named Monique (Colleen Dewhurst) and he gets along with Miguel (Aldo Sambrell), who sails his fishing boat for him. Otherwise, there's not much to keep him from coming out of retirement to meet up with an escaped con, Paul Rickard (Tony Musante), and drive him across Spain to connect with some guys who say they're going to smuggle Rickard into France. Harry doesn't know that Rickard will make him stop along the way to pick up Claudie Scherrer (Trish Van Devere), but when Harry meets Claudie he doesn't much mind. Naturally, none of this goes exactly as planned. The Last Run was a critical flop when it was first released, partly because of stories about behind-the-scenes problems. The first director attached to it, John Boorman, disliked the script. So did the second one, John Huston, whose efforts to rewrite the screenplay led to conflicts with Scott. When Huston left the film, it was assigned to a journeyman director of no great distinction, Richard Fleischer, who mostly went back to Alan Sharp's original screenplay. Meanwhile, Scott, whose wife, Dewhurst, had taken the small role of Monique, began an affair with Van Devere; after filming ended, Dewhurst and Scott divorced and he married Van Devere. I think critics may have seen the film through a lens smudged with such gossip, because it's by no means a bad movie. Roger Ebert's review, for example, makes much of the fact that it could have been directed by Huston instead of Fleischer, whom Ebert calls a "prince of mediocrities." Huston, he says, "would have been incapable of [the] mawkishness" that occurs at a key moment in the final scene. But who knows for sure? I, for one, didn't find the moment Ebert singles out particularly mawkish, but rather an effective link to the film's opening scene. Ebert is right in criticizing the film's failures of tone and inconsistencies in characterization, and the ending is a bit of a muddle. Still, Scott is always fun to watch and the Spanish landscape, handsomely filmed by Sven Nykvist, making a 180 away from his work for Ingmar Bergman, is spectacular.

Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1992)

Martin Donovan and Mary B. Ward in Surviving Desire

Cast: Martin Donovan, Mary B. Ward, Matt Malloy, Rebecca Nelson, Julie Kessler. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: The Great Outdoors, Hal Hartley.

There's a brilliant moment in the middle of Hal Hartley's short film Surviving Desire when Sofie (Mary B. Ward). who is on the cusp of an affair with her professor, Jude (Martin Donovan), reads to him from a story she's been writing. It recounts the thoughts of a man articulating his feelings about the relationship he is in with a woman. When she finishes, Jude asks her to read it again, but to change the voice in the story from a man's to a woman's. When she does, the effect of the same words, with only the pronouns changed from "he" to "she," is subtly and poignantly different. Unfortunately, any insight the change might have made in the relationship between Jude and Sofie doesn't persist. This little film, just under an hour, is a case study in postmodernism and its sometimes paralyzing irony. I can imagine D.H. Lawrence, for example, might run screaming from the room if he could have been shown Surviving Desire. It's an object lesson in what he most disliked about modern life: the disjunction from the instinctual and the immediate -- what he referred to as "sex in the head." Henry James might have marveled at the exquisite self-consciousness of Hartley's characters, and E.M. Forster, who chose as epigraph for Howards End the phrase "only connect," would have nodded in sorrow at the failed connections in the film. But I think the presiding influence on Hartley's movie is Jean-Luc Godard, whose men and women talk their way through relationships just as Jude and Sofie do, but who are also capable of bursting into moments of irrational play, like the dance number Jude segues into after falling in love with Sofie. It's a steal from the Madison scene in Godard's Bande à Part (1964). Hartley's movie is a bittersweet comedy. It opens with Jude reading from The Brothers Karamazov, trying to get his students to comprehend Dostoevsky. They don't: Someone literally throws the book at him and others walk out. We come to realize that perhaps Jude doesn't comprehend Dostoevsky either: When he recounts the writer's tortured life to the class, it's easy to see that Jude has never experienced anything of that order, that the intellectual content of the novel eclipses for him the emotional content that comes from Dostoevsky's life. The film ends with Sofie, working in a bookstore, repeating the works "Can I help anyone?" to the customers who mill around her, her tone of voice suggesting that she hopes no one will answer. Hartley's characters are beyond help, stuck in their own minds. A bartender in the movie says that "Americans ... want a tragedy with a happy ending." What Hartley gives them is a comedy with an ending that's neither tragic nor comic but rather that special postmodern blend of both.

Dragonwyck (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946)

Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in Dragonwyck

Cast: Gene Tierney, Vincent Price, Walter Huston, Glenn Langan, Anne Revere, Spring Byington, Connie Marshall, Harry Morgan, Jessica Tandy. Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on a novel by Anya Seton. Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller. Art direction: J. Russell Spencer, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Dorothy Spencer. Music: Alfred Newman. 

Dragonwyck both courts and suffers from comparison to those other paradigmatic gloomy old house movies of the 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1941) and Robert Stevenson's Jane Eyre (1943). As the imperious master of the titular gloomy old house, Vincent Price can hardly compete with Laurence Olivier in the former or Orson Welles in the latter. Price had an aura of camp, present not only today after his many horror movies, but apparent even then, after playing Shelby Carpenter in Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944). Gene Tierney, on the other hand, holds up well in a comparison with Joan Fontaine, the heroine of both of the other two movies. There's also some distinguished supporting work from first-rate actors like Walter Huston, Anne Revere, and Jessica Tandy, and solid contributions by familiar character actors Spring Byington and Harry Morgan. So Dragonwyck isn't a total loss. Where it falls apart is in adapting Any Seton's hefty novel, which concentrates as much on history as on gothic romance. The historical element in both novel and film centers on the overthrow of the semi-feudal patroon system that was established in the Hudson River Valley by the Dutch in the 17th century and persisted through the mid-1840s. In adapting the novel, even the gifted screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz can't do much to stuff the history into the confines of his movie, which was also his debut as a director. But I got the feeling that he was stymied by the demands of the characters as well: We get only an outline of the backstory of his heroine, Miranda Wells (Tierney), in an opening scene with her stern, puritanical father (Huston) and her more understanding mother (Revere), before she is carried off to Dragonwyck to serve as governess to Katrine Van Ryn (Connie Marshall) and companion to the invalid Mrs.Van Ryn (Vivienne Osborne). The mystery of how and why Miranda's distant cousin-by-marriage, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price), decided to hire Miranda is never explained. The faithful Van Ryn housekeeper (Byington) shows her the house and tells her its creepy history, and then warns her, "One day you'll wish with all your heart you'd never come to Dragonwyck." But there's also a handsome young doctor (the forgettable Glenn Langan) to suggest alternative possibilities. The spook factor consists of a portrait of an ill-fated ancestor and her harpsichord, whose ghost can be heard singing and playing at ominous moments, such as the death of Mrs. Van Ryn. Mankiewicz has some trouble putting all of these pieces into play: For example, little Katrine disappear from the story entirely in mid-film, even after Miranda nominally becomes Katrine's stepmother. The best way to watch a movie like Dragonwyck is to disengage all expectations of logical character development and plot structure and just go with the mood supplied by the sets and Arthur C. Miller's cinematography.  

Prom Night (Paul Lynch, 1980)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Stevens in Prom Night

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Stevens, Anne-Marie Martin, Michael Tough, Mary Beth Rubens, Joy Thompson, Antoinette Bower, Robert A. Silverman, Pita Oliver, David Mucci, George Touliatos, Sheldon Rybowski, Debbie Greenfield, Brock Simpson, Leslie Scott, Dean Bosacki, Joyce Kite, Karen Forbes. Screenplay: William Gray, Robert Guza Jr. Cinematography: Robert C. New. Art direction: Reuben Freed. Film editing: Brian Ravok. Music: Paul Zaza, Carl Zittrer. 

High school prom is scary enough without letting a killer loose at one: It's a nexus of adolescent anxieties about sex, style, and status. But of course that makes it a natural locus for the overkill of a horror movie like the classic Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976). It would be nice to say that Paul Lynch's Prom Night is a classic of that order, but I really can't. It has a promising setup: A group of grade-school kids terrifies another kid into a fatal fall from the window of a spooky old building and, led by the snottiest girl in the group, cover up the fact that they witnessed and partly caused the accident. Six years later, they become the target for threatening phone calls, threats planted in their school lockers, and eventual murders at the prom. The identity of the murderer is slyly withheld until the very end -- although if you've seen enough of these movies you know how to eliminate the obvious suspects and maybe to catch the clues to whodunit. There are a couple of well-staged and suspenseful scenes as the victims get offed. But the film is loaded with too many dance-floor scenes that remind one of how nobody mourned when disco died. The top billing for the film goes to Leslie Nielsen, who plays the principal of the school and the father of the little girl who died, as well as her siblings Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Alex (Michael Tough). But Nielsen has only a few scenes in the movie, and the role is a kind of valedictory to his career in "serious" parts: Airplane! (David Zucker, Jerry Zucker) came out the same year as Prom Night and launched him into the most memorable part of his career, as a deadpan comic actor. Though it was a big success in its day, Prom Night is more artifact than art, valuable mostly as a picture of its era. 

Ladies' Man (Lothar Mendes, 1931)

Kay Francis and William Powell in Ladies' Man

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Carole Lombard, Olive Tell, Gilbert Emery, Martin Burton, John Holland, Frank Atkinson, Maude Turner Gordon. Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on a novel by Rupert Hughes. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Costume design: Travis Banton. Music: Karl Hajos, Herman Hand, John Leipold.

With his receding hairline, big nose, and dubious chin, William Powell has always seemed to me an unlikely leading man, but he made quite a go of it teaming with actresses like Myrna Loy, Kay Francis, and Carole Lombard. But even Powell felt he was miscast as Jamie Darricott, the handsome gigolo of Ladies' Man who dines and wines the society matron Mrs. Fendley (Olive Tell), taking her, fashionably late, to the opera -- she muses that she's always wondered if Tosca really has a first act. He's performing a necessary service: Her banker husband, Horace (Gilbert Emery), is more devoted to making money than to being married, so even he tolerates Darricott's services -- at least for a while. Trouble starts when Rachel Fendley (Lombard), their daughter, takes a fancy to Darricott. Up to that point, Ladies' Man has been a passable sophisticated comedy of manners, but then Darricott meets Norma Page (Francis) and they fall in love. For a while the film turns into a romantic comedy tinged with farce, as Rachel tries to get Darricott away from Norma. And then it gets serious: Horace Fendley decides that he can't tolerate Darricott's involvement with both his wife and his daughter, and he threatens Darricott's life. This muddle of tones and genres is only made messier by miscasting, which extends beyond Powell's unsuitability for the role. Lombard tries at first to be suave and icy, affecting that hoity-toity mid-Atlantic accent actors used to resort to when playing uppercrust roles. Fortunately, she's allowed to loosen up in a scene when she gets drunk and confronts Norma and Darricott at a nightclub. It's not a good drunk scene, but at least it's closer to the free and funny Lombard we cherish. Francis comes across better in a thankless role: She has to pretend to be put off by Darricott's being a gigolo, but then be swept off her feet by him overnight. In short, it's a movie that a lot of top talent, including screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz's, isn't strong enough to save.