Ned Rifle (Hal Hartley, 2014)

Aubrey Plaza in Ned Rifle

Cast: Liam Aiken, Aubrey Plaza, Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Thomas Jay Ryan, Martin Donovan, Karen Sillas, Robert John Burke. Melissa Bithorn, Gia Crovatin, Bill Sage, Lloyd Kaufman. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Vladimir Subotic. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Kyle Gilman. Music: Hal Hartley. 

And so ends the saga of Henry Fool that began in his eponymous film in 1997. Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) is known as usual mainly through his effect on others, primarily the Grim family but also -- in Fay Grim (2006) -- the international espionage community. He has sent two of the Grims, Fay (Parker Posey) and Simon (James Urbaniak), to prison because of their association with him. And now a third, his son, Ned (Liam Aiken), who has taken the surname Rifle, bears a grudge because of what happened to his mother, Fay, and his uncle Simon. He has reached the age of 18, having gone to live with a devoutly Christian family -- the Rev. Daniel Gardner (Martin Gardner) and his wife,  Alice (Karen Sillas) -- since his mother was sentenced to life in prison as a terrorist. (Yes, to understand that you have to watch Fay Grim.) For those who have watched his films, it seems like the gang of Hartley regulars is all here. But there's a newcomer: Aubrey Plaza, who plays Susan Weber, a young woman who seems to be obsessed with the Grims. She's a graduate student at Columbia who's helping Fay write her memoirs, and she did a thesis (which was rejected) on Simon's Nobel Prize-winning poetry. But what she really wants to do is track down Henry -- she has her reasons, which we will learn. Susan crosses paths with Ned when he goes to see his uncle, also trying to find Henry, whom he wants to kill, despite the earnest Christian faith that he has adopted. The rest is a working out of motifs drawn from previous Hartley films, and not just the first two in the trilogy. There's also an echo of Hartley's short film The Book of Life (1998) in which Donovan played Jesus and Ryan played the devil: In Ned Rifle Henry is under psychiatric care because he is pretending that he believes he's the devil. But I think Henry Fool is really a variation on Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-made man who isn't what he seems and eventually meets his end because of the charismatic spell he casts on other people. Plaza is terrific and the rest of the cast is in great form. 

Frankenhooker (Frank Henenlotter, 1990)

Patty Mullen in Frankenhooker

Cast: James Lorinz, Patty Mullen, Joanne Ritchie, Paul-Felix Montez, Joseph Gonzalez, J.J. Clark, Gregory Martin, Carissa Channing, Shirl Bernheim, Hannah York, Helmar Augustus Cooper, Heather Hunter, Louise Lasser. Screenplay: Robert Martin, Frank Henenlotter. Cinematography: Robert M. Baldwin. Production design: Charles C. Bennett. Film editing: Kevin Tent. Music: Joe Renzetti. 

Mary Shelley's monster -- by which I mean the novel, not the creature in it -- has undergone so many dismemberings and reassemblages over two centuries that I doubt she would recognize it today. I certainly don't want to speculate about what she would think of Frankenhooker, which carries the premise of reanimating the dead to its sleaziest extreme. When Jeffrey Franken's (James Lorinz) fiancée, Elizabeth Shelley (Patty Mullen), dies in an accident that leaves him only her head, he takes what he has learned in the med schools he flunked out of and the equipment he has "borrowed" from his job in an electrical power plant, and sets out to collect other body parts with a view to reconstructing and reviving her. He finds the parts he needs on the women walking the seedier streets of Manhattan. How he collects them and how the plan goes awry involves, among other things, some explosive crack cocaine and a vengeful pimp. Yes, the movie is in the worst possible taste, with something to offend almost anyone. The acting is atrocious and the special effects are, let's say, marginal. But it's also some kind of classic -- cult or camp or exploitation, you label it. I can only say that if you don't laugh out loud at least once, you may need to reanimate yourself. 

Meanwhile (Hal Hartley, 2011)

D.J. Mendel in Meanwhile

Cast: D.J. Mendel, Danielle Meyer, Chelsea Crowe, Miho Nikaido, Penelope Lagos, Lisa Hickman, James David Rich, Hoji Fortuna, Kanstance Frakes, Scott Shepherd, Christine Holt, Stephen Ellis, Soraya Soi Free. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Daniel Sharnoff. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Kyle Gilman. Music: Hal Hartley.

The knock on Hal Hartley's Meanwhile from, for example, the commenters on IMDb, is that it's just a guy wandering around talking to people. Which could, I suppose, be said of James Joyce's Ulysses. Not that Meanwhile, with its slightly less than an hour run time, bears extended comparison with Joyce's mock-epic tour of Dublin. But it does have something of that novel's semi-affectionate take on a city, in Hartley's case New York. Joseph (D.J. Mendel) is an ordinary Joe in the way that Leopold Bloom was an ordinary man, which means that you wouldn't take a second look at him in a crowd but if you took time to observe him you'd discover multiple ways in which he's unique. Hartley intercuts Joseph's peregrinations with apparently irrelevant scenes in which a worker in his own office at his production company, Possible Films, picks up an advance copy of a novel titled Meanwhile, a big fat book that she takes home and apparently reads. But what we have here isn't a novel; it's a New Yorker short story. Nothing is concluded but everything is potential. For me that was enough to savor and appreciate. 

Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932)

Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Sidney Fox, Leon Ames, Bert Roach, Betty Ross Clarke, Brandon Hurst, D'Arcy Corrigan, Noble Johnson, Arlene Francis. Screenplay: Robert Florey, Tom Reed, Dale Van Every, John Huston, based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Milton Carruth. 

Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue Morgue looks great, thanks to Karl Freund's cinematography and Charles D. Hall's atmospheric sets, which were designed in collaboration with an uncredited Herman Rosse. Freund in particular brought his experience as cinematographer on such classics of German expressionism as F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to the task of re-creating the seamy side of Paris in 1845. Unfortunately, Florey was a comparative novice as a director, and the pacing of the movie is all wrong, static when it should be dynamic, with performances stuck in that peculiarly halting way of early talkies. There are supposedly comic scenes that fall flat: the byplay between the hero, a medical student called Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames) and his friend Paul (Bert Roach), and a routine involving three witnesses to a murder, a German, an Italian, and a Dane, each adhering to an ethnic stereotype. Only Bela Lugosi, as the sinister (what else?) Dr. Mirakle, gives his character any life. Dr. Mirakle is a carnival showman whose act centers on a gorilla called Erik (sometimes played by a chimpanzee and sometimes by the actor Charles Gamora in an ape suit). The doctor believes he can talk with Erik and wants to breed him with a human woman, so with the aid of his assistant Janos (Noble Johnson) he kidnaps streetwalkers, one of whom is played in her film debut by Arlene Francis, now mostly remembered as a panelist in the old game show What's My Line? After failing to find a compatible blood-type (and killing the women in the process) he finds his perfect subject: the pretty Camille (Sidney Fox), whom he spots in the audience at his show with her boyfriend, Pierre. You can guess the rest. Murders in the Rue Morgue has the makings of the best Universal horror classics, but it failed on its initial run. Critics panned the performances, with the exception of Lugosi's. Censors objected to the violence, the depiction of prostitution, and some belly-dancers in the sideshow, and some even to the endorsement of the theory of evolution. It was trimmed from its reported release time of 75 minutes to just over an hour. But it retains some exceptionally creepy moments, and its exciting end sequence anticipates and perhaps even influenced King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933).   

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, 2006)

Parker Posey in Fay Grim

Cast: Parker Posey, James Urbaniak, Liam Aiken, Jeff Goldblum, Chuck Montgomery, Leo Fitzpatrick, Saffron Burrows, Jasmine Tabatabai, Elina Löwensohn, Thomas Jay Ryan, Anatole Taubman. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Sarah Cawley. Production design: Richard Sylvarnes. Film editing: Hal Hartley. Music: Hal Hartley.  

Fay Grim (Parker Posey) is having a bad day: Her husband is missing, her brother is in prison, and her son is about to be kicked out of school. Soon this will look like one of the better days. Fay Grim is another of Hal Hartley's ventures into subverting a genre, particularly the espionage thriller. But it's also filtered through another genre, one you might call "the Sandra Bullock movie." At least I call it that because it brought to mind the last Sandra Bullock movie I saw, The Last City (Adam Nee, Aaron Nee, 2022), in which she plays a woman who gets swept up into an unexpected adventure. Bullock is not the only actress who lands in that kind of film, but she's been the prototypical heroine of them since her breakthrough movie, Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994). In Fay Grim Posey fits the part as well as or even better than Bullock. It's nominally a sequel to Henry Fool (1997), in which Hal Hartley introduced us to Fay, her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), and the enigmatic Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan). All you need to know from that film is that Fay and Henry had a son, Ned (Liam Aiken), and that Simon went to prison because he helped Henry flee the country to avoid a murder rap. Now, an Agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) from the CIA is suddenly in touch with Fay to see if she knows the whereabouts of the notebooks Henry kept. He claimed to be writing a sort of confessional novel that publishers had told him was unpublishable. Henry is dead, Fulbright tells her, but the notebooks may have significance no one has previously suspected. And so begins an elaborate chase that takes Fay to Paris and Istanbul, and involves Simon (whom she gets sprung from prison) and Ned (who receives a mysterious clue in the mail), as well as a lot of intelligence agents and terrorists from all over Europe and the Middle East. Fay Grim becomes as intrepid as Jason Bourne or James Bond in the process. Posey's performance holds it all together and makes me wonder why she's not as big a star as Bullock. It's fun to see some of these characters again, but by wading so deeply into spy spoof territory Hartley has lost the control that made Henry Fool such a fresh new start for his career, and some of his recently acquired mannerisms -- like the tilted camera, the so-called "Dutch angle" -- are tiresome.  

Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945)

Linda Darnell, Bruce Cabot, Dana Andrews, and Charles Bickford in Fallen Angel

Cast: Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, Bruce Cabot, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, based on a novel by Marty Holland. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Art direction: Leland Fuller, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Harry Reynolds. Music: David Raksin. 

Stuck with the inexpressive Alice Faye as his leading lady, Otto Preminger does wonders with the stranger-comes-to-town noir Fallen Angel. He plays it with only the slightest hint of a tongue in his cheek, taking its otherwise improbable turns of the plot with a straight face. It helps that he has a wicked counterpoint to Faye's blankness: Linda Darnell, as Stella, a waitress in a diner called -- what else? -- Pop's. It helps, too, that the stranger who comes to town is played by Dana Andrews with just enough charm and just enough sleaze to keep you guessing about what his character, Eric Stanton, will do next as the plot unfolds. Stanton arrives in a small coastal California town with not much more than a nickel for a cup of coffee at Pop's, and begins to plot how to con his way into some money. It just so happens that he hits town at the same time as another con man, Professor Madley (John Carradine), a spiritualist-seer. The Professor wants to put on one of his shows but has run into interference from the influential Clara Mills (Anne Revere), the spinster daughter of the late mayor of the town. Stanton wagers that he can win over Clara, which he does by wooing her pretty younger sister, June (Faye). (We have to take it on faith that he succeeds with June because Faye's expression is much the same after he wins her as it was before.) The upshot is that the Professor's show goes on, and Stanton makes enough from the deal to leave town. But he doesn't quite yet, because meanwhile he has hit it off for real with Stella. (Andrews and Darnell have genuine chemistry, which makes the lack of it in his scenes with Faye even more apparent.) And there's also the temptation presented by the fact that June has money and Stella doesn't, so he thinks up a scheme to got his hands on it and then leave town with Stella. No, it doesn't go as planned. In addition to Darnell and Andrews, there's a good performance from Charles Bickford as a retired cop who hangs out at Pop's and takes a key role in the plot when Stanton's scheme doesn't quite work out. Preminger gets fine support from cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who had just won an Oscar for his work on Preminger's Laura (1944), which had also starred Andrews. Fallen Angel is no Laura, for sure, but it's better than it probably has any right to be.   

So Long at the Fair (Antony Darnborough, Terence Fisher, 1950)

Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde in So Long at the Fair

Cast: Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson, Honor Blackman, Felix Aylmer, Cathleen Nesbitt, Betty Warren, Marcel Poncin, Austin Trevor, André Morell, Zena Marshall, Eugene Deckers. Screenplay: Hugh Mills, Anthony Thorne, based on a novel by Thorne. Cinematography: Reginald H. Wyer. Art direction: Cedric Dawe, George Provis. Film editing: Gordon Hales. Music: Benjamin Frankel. 

They might have called it The Gentleman Vanishes. Jean Simmons and David Tomlinson play Vicky and Johnny Barton, sister and brother, whose travels around Europe take them to Paris for the 1889 Paris Exposition, the event that saw the opening of the Eiffel Tower. After seeing a bit of the city on their first night there, Vicky retires to her hotel room while Johnny, feeling tired, stays downstairs to have a nightcap. In the morning, Johnny has vanished. Not only that, the room where he was staying has vanished too. The hotel staff denies that he was ever there, and moreover asserts that the room where he was staying, No. 19, has never existed: The only room 19 is a bathroom. The manager of the hotel, Mme. Hervé (Cathleen Nesbitt), whom we saw check the Bartons in the night before, insists that only Vicky checked in and shows her the registry that only she signed. And so begins Vicky's harrowing attempt not only to find her brother but also to prove that she's not insane. So Long at the Fair is a mostly engaging variation on the gaslighting theme that evokes the similar, though less complex, disappearance of Miss Froy in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 The Lady Vanishes, though it's not in the same league as Hitchcock's classic. This version is a little too complicated for its own good: It's hard to ignore the many implausibilities of the scheme that's revealed at the end, and the accidental death of a witness who might have prematurely exposed the scheme feels like a contrivance to keep the plot going. But there's still enough fun in trying to figure things out, and the performances are good. Simmons gives full expression to both Vicky's bewilderment and her determination as she deals with uncomprehending authorities, and Dirk Bogarde is handsomely dashing as the expatriate artist who comes to her aid. 

Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)

Jennifer Salt in Sisters

Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning, William Finley, Lisle Wilson, Barnard Hughes, Mary Davenport, Dolph Sweet. Screenplay: Brian De Palma, Louisa Rose. Cinematography: Gregory Sandor. Production design: Gary Weist. Film editing: Paul Hirsch. Music: Bernard Herrmann. 

You can get caught up playing Spot the Steal while watching Brian De Palma's Sisters as he steals from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), borrows from Psycho (1960), or pays homage to Rope (1948), as many critics have noted. He also called out of retirement the composer most associated with Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, to compose the score. But the central borrowing is of Hitchcock's most prevalent theme: voyeurism. In the opening scene, Danielle (Margot Kidder) and Phillip (Lisle Wilson) appear on a parody of a reality game show that has a voyeuristic premise: He's a man changing in a locker room when she enters on the other side of a partition that has some missing panels. When he realizes that she's blind and she starts to change clothes, what should he do? The contestants on the show have to predict his action: Will he watch? Will he tell her he can see her? Will he turn away? After the show, Phillip learns that Danielle is not really blind, and they go out to dinner and then back to her apartment where he spends the night with her. But he encounters some complications: He learns that she has a jealous ex-husband (William Finley) and that she has a twin sister named Dominique who is staying overnight in her bedroom because it's the twins' birthday. What happens next is partly witnessed by another voyeur: Grace (Jennifer Salt), a journalist (she writes a column for a Staten Island newspaper but dreams of better things) who witnesses some of what happens in Danielle's apartment from her own across a courtyard. But when she calls the police to tell them what she saw, at first they don't believe her (she has written articles criticizing the cops), and then when they go to Danielle's apartment there's no evidence that what she saw has happened there. We know the truth, so the suspense in the rest of the film comes from Grace's attempt, with the help of a private detective (Charles Durning), to uncover both the crime and the cleanup. It's a nicely plotted variation on the Hitchcockian theme. The film suffers because Grace is written and overplayed as a nervous wreck, plagued by an interfering mother (Mary Davenport), another Hitchcockian trope. And the revelation that Danielle and Dominique were conjoined twins who were separated introduces some not too convincing psychology. But the suspense and the ironic ending are nicely handled. Watch for Olympia Dukakis in a bit part as a woman behind the counter of a bakery.

Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014)

Shelley Hennig in Unfriended

Cast: Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olsted, Will Peltz, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson, Heather Sossaman. Screenplay: Nelson Greaves. Cinematography: Adam Sidman. Production design: Heidi Koleto. Film editing: Parker Laramie, Andrew Wesman. 

If physical space can be haunted, it stands to reason -- or at least the kind of reason one can bring to such things -- that cyberspace can be too. That's the premise cleverly articulated in Unfriended, a teen horror movie that takes place entirely on a computer screen. The computer belongs to Blaire (Shelley Hennig), a teenager who uses it to communicate via Skype sessions with her boyfriend, Mitch (Moses Storm). We see her first online with Mitch in a makeout session in which they vow to wait until prom night to go all the way. Then they're joined by other friends: Jess (Renee Olsted), Adam (Will Peltz), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson). They exchange the usual taunts and gossip and dirty jokes until they notice that the avatar of another person has appeared on their screens. Who is this lurker and what do they want? To cut to the chase, it turns out to be Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide a year ago to the day. Anniversaries of deaths, as we know from other horror movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), are not to be ignored. Laura is back for revenge on those who posted the videos of her getting drunk and soiling herself that drove her to take her life. And so she wreaks her revenge, not only eliciting the guilty secrets of the others on the computer screen -- Blaire, for example, who has just promised to give her virginity to Mitch, has already lost it to Adam -- but also killing them one by one as the rest watch. The technique of telling the story is interesting, and the actors are up to the challenge of going crazy with terror. But the characters elicit no sympathy and the pacing lags enough that you can't help asking why they don't just shut down their computers and go for help instead of, for example, Googling for solutions. It's also a movie that works better on one's own computer screen than on either a TV or theater screen where the various windows and text boxes opening and closing are hard to read and follow. A sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco, 2018), was a flop. 

Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983)

Christopher Walken in Brainstorm

Cast: Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson, Jordan Christopher, Donald Hotton, Alan Fudge, Joe Dorsey, Bill Morey, Jason Lively, Georgianne Walken. Screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin, Robert Stitzel, Philip Frank Messina. Cinematography: Richard Yuricich. Production design: John Vallone. Film editing: Freeman A. Davies, Edward Warschilka. Music: James Horner. 

Brainstorm is a sci-tech thriller based on a premise familiar to the genre: Brilliant scientists come up with a breakthrough and face the threat that it will be misused by nefarious forces. In older films, the nefarious forces tended to be foreign ones, Nazis or Commies. Today, however, they usually come from our own corporate-military-industrial complex. Working together, Dr. Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) and Dr. Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) have created a way to transmit the brainwaves of one person to another, stimulating not only the visual and audible sensations but also the bodily ones -- respiratory, muscular, etc. The transmissions can also be recorded and stored. It's virtual reality gone whole hog, especially after Brace's wife, Karen (Natalie Wood), an industrial designer, comes up with a snazzy little headset. Brace and Reynolds are hopeful for all sorts of peaceful uses of the technology, but to get funding for it, they have to agree with the head of the corporation for which they work, Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson), that it can be shown to investors. And you know who has the money to fund such a project. The inventors are dismayed at the prospect of misuse, but they put up with it until the real dangers of the invention show up. A researcher records himself having an orgasm and gives it to another man who plays it on a loop, sending himself into a coma from the experience. And then Reynolds herself, a chain smoker, has a heart attack and dies, but not before hauling herself to the device and recording the experience. Brace discovers the tape and almost dies playing it before he's able to disconnect. Finding that the company has kept the tape and has actually killed someone with it and is experimenting with other malign uses for the technology, Brace and Karen team up to find ways to stop it. It's a worthy premise, but Trumbull, a noted special effects director making his first (and only) feature in the director's chair, encountered a perfect storm of difficulties, the chief of which was Natalie Wood's death in 1981. Wood's major scenes in Brainstorm had already been filmed, but MGM, which was in financial difficulties, pulled the plug on the project. Fortunately, the production was insured by Lloyd's of London, which stepped in and allowed Trumbull to complete the movie. Wood's sister, Lana, doubled for her in the remaining scenes. Still, Brainstorm was not a critical or commercial success. There's a funny sequence in which Brace causes the robots on the assembly line to go haywire, and Fletcher's performance is great. Wood is fine, but Walken, a specialist in offbeat characters, seems miscast. The subplot, which involves the Braces using the technology to communicate their feelings to each other and repair their fraying marriage, is tedious and sentimental. And the concluding sequence, in which we find out what Reynolds saw when she was dying, is almost inevitably a letdown.