Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, 1931)

Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored

Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Victor McLaglen, Warner Oland, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Lew Cody, Barry Norton. Screenplay: Josef von Sternberg, Daniel Nathan Rubin. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Costume design: Travis Banton. Film editing: Josef von Sternberg. Music: Karl Hajos, Herman Hand. 

Of the seven films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich, Dishonored is probably the weakest. Dietrich is not to blame: Photographed by Lee Garmes and dressed by Travis Banton, she looks as good as she ever did, and the movie gives her a chance to show her talent for comedy for the first time, when she pretends to be a rather bumptious girl from the country. But the story concocted by Sternberg and co-scripted with Daniel Nathan Rubin, a not particularly distinguished playwright, lacks wit and tension. Sternberg's direction allows the pace of the film to go slack, and his decision to edit the film himself doesn't help: His lap dissolves, for example, linger too long on the old scene as the new one fades in, causing visual confusion. Moreover, Dishonored features Victor McLaglen, of all actors, as the romantic lead. McLaglen was skilled as a heavy or a clumsy goof, and John Ford directed him to an Oscar for The Informer (1935), but he's out of place as the Russian spy who gets entangled with Dietrich's Austrian spy. For some reason, he spends a lot of the film flashing a rictus-like grin. Sternberg's story is based on the career of Mata Hari, about whom MGM made a competing movie starring Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro the same year. Dietrich plays a war widow who has turned prostitute to survive, and is recruited for the Austrian Secret Service by its chief (Gustav von Seyffertitz) when she proclaims, "I've had an inglorious life. It may become my good fortune to have a glorious death." Through her career as Agent X-27 she is accompanied by a cat who is so faithful -- she even carries it in the open cockpit of an airplane -- that it suggests a witch's familiar. She's also a pianist, who encodes secrets in musical notation. (Not that she's a good pianist: At one point she plays the usually quietly serene opening of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata as if it were the "Appassionata.") Dishonored is no sillier than most of the Sternberg-Dietrich movies, but it doesn't wear its silliness with style the way the best of them do. 

The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)

Cindy Hinds in The Brood

Cast: Oliver Reed, Samantha Eggar, Art Hindle, Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Cindy Hinds, Susan Hogan, Gary McKeehan, Michael Magee, Robert A. Silverman, Joseph Shaw, Larry Solway, Reiner Schwarz. Screenplay: David Cronenberg. Cinematography: Mark Irwin. Art direction: Carol Spier. Film editing: Alan Collins. Music: Howard Shore. 

Creepy children have become a staple of horror movies ever since Patty McCormack terrorized everyone as Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956). The key here is the depiction of evil lurking behind a façade of innocence. Actually, the creepy child in The Brood is not Candice Carveth (Cindy Hinds), an otherwise ordinary 5-year-old, except as a vehicle for bringing out the creepy childlike creatures that are the movie's menace. It's a good, bloody, somewhat queasy film that plays on all sorts of phobias, including our suspicions about psychiatrists, and our tolerance for bodily functions. It proved too much for some of its early critics, including Roger Ebert, who dismissed it as an exploitation film, "reprehensible trash," and a bore. It may be the first, and perhaps the second -- given that one person's trash is another person's genre classic -- but it's certainly not the last. David Cronenberg is an insidious filmmaker, who constantly plays on our nerves without resorting to cheap jump scares. He makes you back off at times: In the scene that made most people feel at least faintly nauseated, I found myself saying, "It's only corn syrup and food coloring." We may also debate whether the film is fair to the psychiatric profession and even if there's a touch of antifeminism, but that means he's left you with something to think about. To dismiss The Brood as exploitative is to overlook the satire with which it's laced. 

Nine Queens (Fabián Bielinsky, 2000)

Ricardo Darín and Gastón Pauls in Nine Queens

Cast: Ricardo Darín, Gastón Pauls, Leticia Brédice, Ignasi Abadal, Tomás Fonzi, Oscar Núñez, Celia Juárez, Elsa Berenguer, Leo Dyzen. Screenplay: Fabián Bielinsky. Cinematography: Marcelo Camorino. Production design: Daniela Passalaqua. Film editing: Sergio Zottola. Music: César Lerner.

Marcos (Ricardo Darín), a seasoned con artist, spots Juan (Gastón Pauls) making what looks like a rookie mistake trying to con a cashier making change for him in a convenience store. So, being in need of a partner, he takes Juan under his wing for a day. Both men are down on their luck and in need of substantial sums of money, so when Juan proves to be adept, the two launch on a major scam: selling a sheet of forged collectible postage stamps known as the Nine Queens to a wealthy mark. That's the setup for an entertaining genre piece with attractive performances and more than a few surprise twists. Writer-director Fabián Bielinsky guides his cast through some lively scenes, many of which were shot on the streets of Buenos Aires. Lacking the budget for a full complement of extras, Bielinsky surrounded his stars with a small cadre of hired actors to act as a buffer against lookie-loos; the result has energy and veracity. (Moviemaking is often a con game itself.) Naturally, the movie hinges on who's conning whom: the sharpie Marcos, the less-experienced Juan, or their mark, the wealthy stamp collector (Ignasi Abadal), who just happens to be staying in a hotel where Marcos's sister, Valeria (Leticia Brédice) works? (There's some family tension around an inheritance that Marcos cheated Valeria out of.) The ending is a jaw-dropper that works as long as you don't ask the questions that you aren't supposed to ask. Nine Queens was remade in the United States as Criminal (Gregory Jacobs, 2004), with John C. Reilly and Diego Luna in the roles played by Darín and Pauls.  

New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara, 1998)

Asia Argento and Willem Dafoe in New Rose Hotel

Cast: Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe, Asia Argento, Annabella Sciorra, John Lurie, Kimmy Suzuki, Miou, Yoshitaka Amano, Gretchen Mol, Phil Neilson, Ken Kelsch, Ryuiki Sakamoto. Screenplay: Abel Ferrara, Christ Zois, based on a story by William Gibson. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Production design: Frank DeCurtis. Film editing: Jim Mol, Anthony Redman. Music: Schoolly D. 

Abel Ferrara's New Rose Hotel is more an exercise in style than a satisfactory movie. The plot is simple: Fox (Christopher Walken) and X (Willem Dafoe) are agents for a Japanese technology firm plot tasked with raiding a top scientist from a German company. They do so by hiring a beautiful prostitute called Sandii (Asia Argento) to seduce the scientist, whom they will set up in a laboratory in Marrakech. The plot goes awry when one of the agents falls in love with Sandii and overlooks some evidence that she may be working for the German company, putting the agents in danger. Padding this plot into a 93-minute movie means a lot of filler, including an extended opening scene set in a kinky nightclub where some lugubrious songs get sung and the necessary exposition gets spilled. Then there are some irrelevant sex scenes while the scheme is being set up, and after it fails there are extended flashbacks that add little to our understanding of what has happened. The three leads are capable and watchable, but the film leaves us with no revelations about corporate rivalry in the age of technology that we haven't seen in better movies. 

No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950)

Linda Darnell, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Widmark in No Way Out

Cast: Sidney Poitier, Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell, Stephen McNally, Mildred Joanne Smith, Harry Bellaver, Stanley Ridges, Dots Johnson, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Amanda Randolph, Maude Simmons. Screenplay: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Lesser Samuels. Cinematography: Milton R. Krasner. Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Barbara McLean. Music: Alfred Newman.

Although its treatment of race relations in America seems naive today, No Way Out stands up as a solid drama about an issue that in the post-war years was finally receiving the attention from Hollywood filmmakers that it had too long deserved. It also launched the career of Sidney Poitier as well as, in smaller roles, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. The plot hinges on the novelty of a Black doctor, Luther Brooks (Poitier), serving as an intern in hospital in a large city. When two brothers, Ray (Richard Widmark) and Johnny Biddle (Dick Paxton) are admitted to the prison ward of the hospital after being shot by the police during a robbery, Brooks notices that Johnny's symptoms are not just that of a leg wound; suspecting some sort of mental impairment, Brooks does a spinal tap, during which Johnny dies. Ray Biddle has already demonstrated his racist animosity toward Brooks, and claims that he killed his brother. An autopsy would confirm Brooks's suspicion that Johnny's death was caused by an undiagnosed brain tumor, but Ray won't allow it, and he's backed up by his brother George (Harry Bellaver) and initially by Johnny's ex-wife, Edie (Linda Darnell). She once had an affair with Ray, but she loathes him and has done what she can to escape the poor-white neighborhood, Beaver Canal, where she grew up and the Biddles still live. Ray spurs the rabble-rousers of Beaver Canal to start a race riot, but they are met with resistance from the Black neighborhoods. The film is a little over-plotted: The crux of the plot, the autopsy, gets resolved in a way that isn't entirely convincing, and the confrontation of Brooks and Ray Biddle arrives in what's almost a coda, as an anti-climax. Widmark is allowed to overact in the role of Ray, and Poitier has yet to acquire the confident presence that made him a star. The best performance in the film comes from a deglamorized Darnell, who gives Edie a real toughness and vulnerability, suggesting that her inclination to do the right thing is at war with her experience growing up in Beaver Canal. The film's portrayal of raw racism still has the power to shock: We rarely hear white actors use the N-word today, even when their roles as bigots might seem to require it, and I flinched when a white woman spat in the face of Poitier's character. It's weaker in the treatment of racial violence: No one on either side seems to have any guns. 

 

Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932)

Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy in Thirteen Women

Cast: Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ricardo Cortez, Jill Esmond, Mary Duncan, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, C. Henry Gordon, Peg Entwistle, Harriet Hagman, Edward Pawley, Blanche Friderici, Wally Albright. Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, Samuel Ornitz, based on a novel by Tiffany Thayer. Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Carroll Clark. Film editing: Charles L. Kimball. Music: Max Steiner. 

Myrna Loy was born Myrna Williams in Helena, Montana, but you wouldn't know it from the way Hollywood often cast her at the start of her career in the '20s and '30s. Her role in Thirteen Women is probably the purest example of her work as the stereotypical sinister Eurasian. She plays Ursula Georgi, whom the cop played by Ricardo Cortez scorns as "Half-breed type. Half Hindu, half Javanese, I don't know." (Actually, Cortez himself knew something about crossing ethnic lines: He was born Jacob Krantz in New York, but Hollywood changed his name to capitalize on the vogue for Latin lovers like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and later claimed first that he was French and later that he was born in Vienna.) Ursula seeks revenge on the women who belonged to a sorority at a girls' college and blackballed her when she sought admission. She seeks out a phony seer known as Swami Yogadachi (C. Henry Gordon), whose horoscope readings the girls sought out, and hypnotizes him into sending them poison-pen readings that predict dire events. Two of the girls, the sisters June (Mary Duncan) and May Raskob (Harriet Hagman), have become trapeze artists, and June is so unnerved by the fake reading that she lets May fall to her death during a stunt and goes mad as a consequence. As others fall prey to Ursula's schemes, some of the survivors gather at the home of Laura Stanhope (Irene Dunne), who thinks that their hysteria over the deaths is absurd. Laura is the single mother of a son, Bobby (Wally Albright), who is one of those cloyingly cute movie children -- he calls her "Mumsy." But even Laura's calm vanishes when Ursula makes Bobby her next target. In addition to being stupidly racist, the movie is sheer hokum, a cockamamie blend of revenge thriller and police procedural, and it was not much of a success at the box office, even after RKO cut 14 minutes from it after test screenings -- one of the reasons why we learn the fates of only 10 of the 13 women. One of the performances cut to only four minutes was that of Peg Entwistle, who played Hazel, the one who kills her husband and goes to prison. Entwistle was reportedly so despondent about her movie career that she climbed to the top of one of the letters on the Hollywood sign (reports vary on whether it was the H or the D) and jumped to her death. As for Loy, this was her last outing as a Eurasian vamp: The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) changed her screen image to that of the witty and soignée wife, most often of William Powell.    

The Devil, Probably (Robert Bresson, 1977)

Antoine Monnier in The Devil, Probably

Cast: Antoine Monnier, Tina Irrisari, Henri de Maublanc, Laetitia Carcano, Nicolas Deguy, Régis Hanrion, Geoffroy Gaussen, Roger Honorat. Screenplay: Robert Bresson. Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis. Production design: Eric Simon. Film editing: Germaine Artus. Music: Philippe Sarde. 

I admire Robert Bresson's films. How can one not? But his next-to-last, The Devil, Probably, tried my patience. The unrelieved inexpressiveness of his characters becomes monotonous to the verge of seeming like a parody of a film about people suffering from existential depression. We are shown the causes of their malaise in footage of environmental devastation ranging from images of the victims of mercury poisoning in Minimata, Japan, to the clubbing of baby seals, to tests of nuclear bombs. But we have all seen and reacted to those images ourselves, and somehow manage not to walk around without at least the occasional smile or laugh. Does Bresson mean to suggest that we are somehow at fault in not becoming suicidal, like his protagonist, Charles (Antoine Monnier)? The film is an implied response to the familiar statement by Camus: "There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Charles can find no reason to continue living in a world that disgusts him. Intellectually, the film is a work of real brilliance, but it fails to communicate its ideas in a way that engages me dramatically and emotionally. We suspect from the beginning, when we see newspaper headlines about a young man who is first thought to have committed suicide but later to have been murdered, that they're about one of the characters in the film, and we soon realize that it's Charles. So the only dramatic tension in the film centers on the specific way in which this foreknowledge will manifest itself. And so I'm torn. The Devil, Probably is a work I can admire on an intellectual level, but despite some remarkable sections, like Charles's visit to a psychoanalyst, or a scene on a bus that not only tantalizes by what happens in it but also provides the title of the film, it seems to me to fall short as a work of cinematic art. That said, just thinking about it makes me eager to see it again.    

Body Parts (Eric Red, 1991)

Lindsay Duncan, Jeff Fahey, and Kim Delaney in Body Parts

Cast: Jeff Fahey, Lindsay Duncan, Kim Delaney, Zakes Mokae, Brad Dourif, John Walsh, Paul Ben-Victor, Peter Murnik. Screenplay: Patricia Herskovic, Joyce Taylor, Eric Red, Norman Snider, based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Cinematography: Theo van de Sande. Production design: Bill Brodie. Editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Loek Dikker. 

How can a movie with a car chase, a fight in a barroom, and an abundance of gore turn out so dull? Body Parts is based on an old trope, that of severed members taking on a life of their own. Adaptations of W.W. Jacobs's 1902 story "The Monkey's Paw" are so numerous they have a Wikipedia page of their own and Maurice Renard's 1920 novel Les Mains d'Orlac, about a concert pianist who receives the transplanted hands of a murderer, has been filmed several times, including Robert Wiene's 1924 silent The Hands of Orlac and Karl Freund's 1935 Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre. The many adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also play on the notion of reanimated body parts. But it's not that the idea behind Eric Red's movie has been done to death, so to speak, it's that Eric Red and the various screenwriters who worked on the movie find so little new and interesting to do with it. It's adapted from a 1965 novel, Choice Cuts, by the writing team known as Boileau-Narcejac, who provided the source material for some much better movies: Diabolique (aka Les Diaboliques, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958). The acting isn't bad. As Bill Chrushank, a psychiatrist who receives the arm of a murderer after losing his own in an auto accident, Jeff Fahey does a solid job of suggesting the ways the transplant brings out the worst in what may have been his own latent tendencies to violence. Lindsay Duncan plays the surgeon who does the transplant as a cold-blooded scientist with just a touch of hauteur that turns malevolent when her breakthrough technique is threatened. Brad Dourif overacts a little as the artist who receives the other arm and finds that it actually feeds his imagination and produces darkly disturbing paintings that sell. And Kim Delaney does what she can with the role of Chrushank's wife, who bears the brunt of his emotional transformation. But Red's direction never builds suspense, giving us time to anticipate the shocks we expect the material to provide. There's also a completely unearned "happy ending" that saps any lingering tension from what has gone before. 

Station West (Sidney Lanfield, 1948)

Dick Powell and Jane Greer in Station West

Cast: Dick Powell, Jane Greer, Agnes Moorehead, Tom Powers, Gordon Oliver, Steve Brodie, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Raymond Burr, Regis Toomey, Burl Ives. Screenplay: Frank Fenton, Winston Miller, based on a novel by Luke Short. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Feild M. Gray. Film editing: Frederic Knudtson. Music: Heinz Roemheld. 

Station West is an odd duck of a Western. Oh, there's the usual stagecoach and saloon stuff, some gunplay, and a big fistfight. But it also has the kind of snappy dialogue you associate with film noir, and nobody is exactly what they seem. It's also threaded through with songs performed by an uncredited Burl Ives, who plays a hotel owner who's also a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the action with his ballads. One of the refrains of his songs, "A man can't grow old where there's women and gold," is sung often enough that we get the point. The women are played by Jane Greer and Agnes Moorehead, and they give no quarter. Greer is Charlene, known as Charlie, and she owns most of the business in the town, but not the gold mine, which belongs to Mrs. Caslon, played by Moorehead. And then a stranger named Haven (Dick Powell) comes to town. He's really an undercover agent from military intelligence investigating the deaths of two soldiers who were guarding a shipment of gold from Mrs. Caslon's mine that got hijacked. Powell's character is a boots-and-sixguns variation on his Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), quick with a quip, catnip to the women, able to take a licking and keep on sleuthing. Somehow this mash-up of film noir and horse opera works. There's nice camera work, too, from Harry J. Wild, who knows how to use shadows effectively.    

Arrebato (Iván Zulueta, 1979)

Will More in Arrebato

Cast: Eusebio Poncela, Cecilia Roth, Will More, Marta Fernández Muro, Helena Fernán-Gómez, Carmen Giralt, Max Madera. Screenplay: Iván Zulueta. Cinematography: Ángel Luis Fernández. Film editing: José Luis Peláez. Music: Negativo. 

Pedro Almodóvar became the face of post-Franco Spanish filmmaking in the United States, where we often overlook the powerful influences on his work by other Spanish directors. He was, for example, a great admirer of Iván Zulueta's Arrebato, for which he dubbed the voice for Helena Fernán-Gómez's character, Gloria, and he later cast its lead actor, Eusebio Poncela, in his films Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (1987). Certainly it's possible to see how the uncompromising work of Zulueta in Arrebato, his second and last feature-length movie, may have liberated the imaginations of Almodóvar and his fellow Spanish filmmakers after the death of Franco in 1975. It's a movie about the intoxication of making movies, and about intoxication and its consequences. Zulueta, who was a heroin addict, gives us a film about a similarly addicted filmmaker, José Sirgado (Poncela), who just after finishing the production of a horror movie receives a package in the mail from Pedro (Will More), a man he has met only twice before. It contains an audio tape, a reel of Super 8 film, and a key to Pedro's apartment. And so begins a complex tale in which José becomes entwined in Pedro's very odd life and obsessions, at the end of which José becomes obsessed himself, absorbed into the strange experiences that Pedro has documented on film. Arrebato (which means "rapture") is an often muddled and maddening film, but muddle and madness are what it's about. It flopped commercially, but gathered a following at midnight movie screenings in Madrid, which eventually led to its video release and a wider audience.