Frontier Marshal (Allan Dwan, 1939)

Cesar Romero and Nancy Kelly in Frontier Marshal

Cast: Randolph Scott, Nancy Kelly, Cesar Romero, Binnie Barnes, John Carradine, Edward Norris, Eddie Foy Jr., Ward Bond, Lon Chaney Jr., Chris-Pin Martin, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay: Sam Hellman, based on a book by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke. Art direction: Lewis H. Creber, Richard Day. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin, Charles Maxwell, David Raksin, Walter Scharf.

The title Frontier Marshal sounds like a generic Western, and it doesn't lie. It's about a stranger who comes to a lawless mining town and cleans it up with his fists and his guns. The stranger, played by Randolph Scott, is Wyatt Earp, and the movie is based on Stuart N. Lake's heavily fictionalized 1931 biography of Earp that established his legend as the man who cleaned up Tombstone by fighting it out with the bad guys at the OK Corral. So yes, you've seen it all before, in later and more celebrated films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and John Sturges's Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). Allan Dwan's film (from which Ford borrowed liberally) is a more modest affair. The famous gunfight in the movie  is almost over before it starts. Nor is Scott's Earp a particularly mythic figure; he even gets seriously beat up before he's able to seize authority in the town. If there's a mythic figure in Frontier Marshal it's Doc Halliday*, played with surprising charm and finesse by Cesar Romero. The character of Earp is also overshadowed by two women: Jerry (Binnie Barnes), a tough-as-nails dance hall hostess, and Sarah (Nancy Kelly), a nurse who has followed her former lover, Doc, to Tombstone, trying to save him from himself. Refreshingly, the two women are given significant agency in the movie, beyond just battling for Doc's affections. What distinguishes Dwan as a director is that he never seems to take for granted the material he's given to work with. Yes, Frontier Marshal is generic and predictable, but Dwan doesn't condescend to it: He gives the scenes snap and vigor, and he gets performances that are in some ways better than they're written. Barnes, for example, turns Jerry into a force to be reckoned with. It took me a moment to recognize her as the same actress who played the snooty Linda Cram in Holiday (George Cukor, 1938). Kelly's Sarah isn't the pallid schoolmarm played by Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, but a woman out to get her man. And if Romero, usually a lounge lizard type, ever gave a better performance I haven't seen it. I could have done with less of Eddie Foy Jr., clownishly playing his own father, and Chris-Pin Martin's milking of the stereotypical Chicano bartender role, but they keep the film lively. Scott is less memorable than the other players, but he provides a quiet stability to the film. 

Usually spelled "Holliday," but the alternate spelling was used, reportedly because of concern about litigation from the Holliday family. 

Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)

Ron O'Neal and Sheila Frazier in Super Fly

Cast: Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Sheila Frazier, Julius Harris, Charles McGregor, Sig Shore, Polly Niles, Yvonne Delaine. Screenplay: Phillip Fenty. Cinematography: James Signorelli. Costume design: Nate Adams. Film editing: Bob Brady. Music: Curtis Mayfield. 

I know why the Criterion Channel grouped Super Fly into its "'70s Car Movies" collection, because there's nothing more evocative of the milieu than the shots of Priest's tricked-out Cadillac Eldorado nosing its sharklike way through the streets of 1970s Manhattan. But it's a movie that transcends categorization, especially the "blaxploitation" one with which it has become synonymous. It's a portrait of an American subculture at a pivotal moment in history, when Black lives were moving out of physical and cultural ghettoization and into their still problematic place in the American mainstream. Gordon Parks Jr.'s film is rough-hewn and raw, sometimes awkwardly scripted and acted, but also darkly vital. It's a near-tragic story about a man's hope to be freed from the affluence of criminality, only to be thwarted by both the whites who don't want him to be free and those of his own kind who choose to remain exploited. Curtis Mayfield's songs tell the story of Youngblood Priest (Ron O'Neal) in their own way, operatically heightening the screenplay's narrative and the camera's images. And it has to be reiterated that Super Fly has a lot in common with a film from the same year, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Youngblood Priest and Michael Corleone share the same hopes and face the same cruel forces.

Amateur (Hal Hartley, 1994)

Martin Donovan and Elina Löwensohn in Amateur

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, Damian Young, Chuck Montgomery, Dave Simonds. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor.

The protagonists of Hal Hartley's movies invariably have a secret past. The problem with Thomas (Martin Donovan) is that he isn't in on the secret. When we first see him he is lying on the cobblestones of an alley in New York City. Is he dead? That's the conclusion reached by the young woman who peers into the alley and cautiously approaches the body, extends a foot to prod it, and then inspects more closely. Then she disappears. She is Sofia Ludens (Elina Löwensohn), a porn star who thinks she has killed Thomas. After she's gone, he will awake with a start, pick himself up, and stagger out into the streets and into a cafe, where he meets Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a former nun who writes pornographic stories for a living. He tells her he doesn't know who he is, that his past and even his name is a complete blank. So they set out together to solve the puzzle. And so goes the setup for Hartley's excursion into the tropes (not to say clichés) of the crime thriller. In addition to amnesia, there's also an international conspiracy of some sort, and even a MacGuffin: some floppy disks (which we are twice reminded, as we were so frequently in the early 1990s when they were a thing, are neither floppy nor disks) that contain shocking secrets. Thomas and Isabelle will team up with Sofia -- reluctantly on her part, since she was the one who had reason to try to kill him -- and go on the run from some hit men working for a crime boss who used to be Thomas's employer. Played straight, the story might be entertaining enough, but of course Hartley never plays anything straight. The performances are good, given that everyone has to work in Hartley's deadpan mode. Huppert slips with apparent ease into the punch-drunk milieu of his films, but she has already proved that she can play almost anything. The supporting cast is filled out with some now-familiar faces like Michael Imperioli, Parker Posey, and Tim Blake Nelson in bit parts. Amateur never transcends spoofery into significance, but why ask for that anyway?

Moss Rose (Gregory Ratoff, 1947)

Vincent Price and Ethel Barrymore in Moss Rose

Cast: Peggy Cummins, Victor Mature, Ethel Barrymore, Vincent Price, Margo Woode, George Zucco, Patricia Medina, Rhys Williams. Screenplay: Niven Busch, Jules Furthman, Tom Reed, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: Richard Day, Mark-Lee Kirk. Film editing: James B. Clark. Music: David Buttolph. 

Ethel was my favorite Barrymore, not so given to posing and scene-hogging as her brothers John and Lionel, and she's by far the best thing about Moss Rose. It's a somewhat rickety whodunit set in Victorian London, in which a pretty chorus girl  blackmails a wealthy man, but not for money. Instead, she wants to fulfill her dream of living like a fine lady. Peggy Cummins plays Belle Adair (née Rose Lynton), who sees Michael Drego (Victor Mature) coming out of the room of her friend Daisy Arrow (Margo Woode), a fellow lady of the chorus who lives in the same lodging house. When Belle enters Daisy's room, she finds her dead. But during the official inquiry, led by Police Inspector Clinner (a nice, silky performance by Vincent Price), Belle doesn't let on about seeing Drego. Instead, she seeks him out and presents him with her audacious (if improbable) demand: If he'll let her pretend to be a lady and be received in his home -- he lives in the family estate with his mother, Lady Margaret Drego (Barrymore) -- she'll keep mum about seeing him at the crime scene. The plan is complicated by the announcement of the impending marriage of Drego to the socially prominent Audrey Ashton (Patricia Medina). But somehow Drego is persuaded to go through with Belle's scheme, and he takes her home to meet his mother and, as it turns out, his fiancée. Belle drops her stage name and is introduced as Rose. Meanwhile, Clinner is still on the job of trying to find out who killed Daisy. It's a promising setup, but it's undone by questionable casting, slack direction, and confused writing. The beefy Mature is scarcely credible as an English gentleman, though his lack of an accent and his rough edges are explained by his being taken from his home as child and raised in Canada. Cummins, who was Irish, struggles with the cockney accent of Belle and the "proper" one of Rose, especially when she has to switch between the two. Gregory Ratoff, who was best known as a comic character actor, never distinguished himself as a director, despite numerous attempts. His best outing as director was the 1939 Intermezzo, which marked Ingrid Bergman's American debut and was produced by David O. Selznick, who loved directing his directors. The script for Moss Rose is marred by abrupt leaps and inconsistencies in point of view. It begins with Rose on a train, introducing the story in voiceover, and then flashes back to the events above, with her occasionally narrating what happened between scenes. But having established Rose's as the film's point of view, it sometimes breaks away to see things she couldn't have witnessed, like the scene in which Clinner questions Lady Margaret about moss roses -- a rose in a bible was left at the scene of Daisy's murder. Establishing Rose as the point of view also takes away some of the logic of the character and undermines the film's suspense: After all, if Drego is a murderer, and one so little concerned about being caught that he leaves obvious clues at the crime scene, shouldn't she be more worried about putting herself in harm's way by seeking him out and meeting him in secret?  

I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997)

Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ryan Phillippe in I Know What You Did Last Summer 

Cast; Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, Freddie Prinze Jr., Muse Watson, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras, Anne Heche, Johnny Galecki, Stuart Greer. Screenplay: Kevin Williamson, based on a novel by Lois Duncan. Cinematography: Dennis Crossan. Production design: Gary Wissner. Film editing: Steve Mirkovich. Music: John Debney. 

I Know What You Did Last Summer has enough going for it to be watchable: an attractive cast, a handsome setting in a North Carolina fishing town (sweetened by coastal shots from California), and a solid horror story premise. Four teens, just graduated from high school and looking forward to life as young adults, accidentally hit a pedestrian on a lonely back road and decide to cover up the death and swear to secrecy. (It's not a novel setup: See Paul Lynch's 1980 Prom Night for an analogous one.) But they are haunted by guilt. Top student Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt) almost flunks out of college. Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), the beauty queen who dreams of stardom, fails to make it in New York and comes home to work in the family department store. The jock, Barry (Ryan Phillippe), doesn't make it big in college athletics. The poor boy, Ray (Freddie Prinze Jr.), is stuck in the family fishing business. And then, on the anniversary of the accident, which just happens to be the Fourth of July, each of them starts getting warnings that someone knows their guilty secret. So far, so good, as suspense setups go. Unfortunately, the screenplay starts getting ragged as soon as the implied threat manifests itself, and the rest, as the body count rises, is a tangle of improbabilities and loose ends. By the ending, which is a clear setup for a sequel, I wasn't entirely certain who the killer was or even why they did it. It's a movie full of things you're not supposed to think about, like how Barry covered up the damage to his car after the accident, or how the killer can make bodies disappear so quickly after they're first discovered. Unfortunately, the screenplay doesn't give you enough to get your attention away from these questions. 

One Mile From Heaven (Allan Dwan, 1937)

Joan Carroll and Bill Robinson in One Mile From Heaven

Cast: Claire Trevor, Sally Blane, Douglas Fowley, Fredi Washington, Bill Robinson, Joan Carroll, Ralf Harolde, John Eldredge, Paul McVey, Ray Walker, Russell Hopton, Chick Chandler, Eddie Anderson, Howard HIckman. Screenplay: Robin Harris, Alfred Golden, Lou Breslow, John Patrick, based on a story by Ben B. Lindsey. Cinematography: Sidney Wagner. Art direction: Bernard Herzbrun. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin.

In One Mile From Heaven, a reporter happens upon a Black woman who is raising a white child and says that the little girl is her own daughter. The reporter immediately sees it as a hot news item. It's an odd and distasteful premise for a movie, especially if, as in this case, the child is happy, well cared-for, and loves her mother, who's entirely capable of raising her. It's the mere fact of the racial disparity that sets Lucy Warren (Claire Trevor) on the course of exposing the relationship of Flora Jackson (Fredi Washington) and her putative daughter, Sunny (Joan Carroll), leading to the discovery of Sunny's birth mother, the wealthy (and white) Barbara Harrison (Sally Blane). It winds up with what's supposed to be a happy ending. That the movie is played as a sentimental comedy laced with musical numbers supplied by a tap-dancing Black policeman (Bill Robinson) only makes it seem odder. It could, after all, have been an indictment of nosy journalism, or a story of racial injustice, but instead it's a grab-bag of movie tropes, including a press room filled with anything-for-a-scoop reporters straight out of The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931), and a thwarted prison escape that comes out of nowhere and has only a tangential relationship to the main plot. Allan Dwan handles all of this with his usual finesse, but is never quite able to make a coherent film out of it. This was Washington's last film before she retired from acting and devoted her life to civil rights activism. The movie, based on an actual case in Denver, serves as evidence why that activism was needed. 

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.