What Did the Lady Forget? (Yasujiro Ozu, 1937)

Michiko Kuwano and Shuji Sano in What Did the Lady Forget?

Cast: Sumiko Kurishima, Tatsuo Saito, Michiko Kuwano, Shuji Sano, Takeshi Sakamoto, Choko Iida, Ken Uehara, Mitsuko Yosshikawa, Masao Hayama, Tomio Aoki, Mitsuko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Akira Fushimi, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta, Hideo Shigehara. Film editing: Kenkichi Hara. Music: Senji Ito.

The denouement of this early Ozu talkie is rather unfortunate: a man slaps his wife and makes her behave. It's a throwback to the marital dynamics of the era of domestic comedy when gags were milked from the relationship of a henpecked husband and a shrewish wife. Otherwise, What Did the Lady Forget? is an amusing glimpse at the conflict of tradition and modernity in pre-war Japan. A mild-mannered university professor (Tatsuo Saito) is married to a woman (Sumiko Kurishima) conscious of propriety and her station in society. When his modernized, free-thinking niece (Michiko Kuwano) comes to visit, the two women immediately are at odds, and the professor is caught in their conflict. It's a sly, sophisticated movie, influenced, as many have noted, by the films of Ernst Lubitsch, but with Ozu's own distinctive style prevailing, so much so that it's easy to forgive the retrograde element of the plot resolution. So what did the lady forget? It's not an easy question to answer, but some think it's the wife's failure to compromise with her husband's less restrictive view of his niece's behavior. 

The Boy Friend (Ken Russell, 1971)

Christopher Gable and Twiggy in The Boy Friend

Cast: Twiggy, Christopher Gable, Max Adrian, Bryan Pringle, Murray Melvin, Moyra Fraser, Georgina Hale, Sally Bryant, Vladek Sheybal, Tommy Tune, Brian Murphy, Graham Armitage, Antonia Ellis, Caryl Little, Glenda Jackson. Screenplay: Ken Russell, based on a musical play by Sandy Wilson. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Tony Walton. Costume design: Shirley Russell. Music: Peter Maxwell Davies; songs: Sandy Wilson, Nacio Herb Brown, Arthur Freed. 

Nothing succeeds like excess. That seems to have been Ken Russell's motto, well displayed in The Boy Friend. As I watched it, I thought the first parody of Busby Berkeley's kaleidoscopic production numbers for Warner Bros. musicals was brilliant. The second was entertaining. The third was ... well, maybe the law of diminishing returns had set in. The original stage musical was a campy sendup of the kind of musical comedies that P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, and Jerome Kern used to create for the Princess Theatre and later in the 1920s: tuneful light romances with silly plots. But for the movie, Russell superadds a campy sendup of the backstage movie musicals of the 1930s, borrowing plot and even dialogue from 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933), hence the Berkeley parodies. I first saw The Boy Friend around the time of its first release, and enjoyed it. But watching it again now, I found myself looking at the clock after the first hour and a half passed. The version I had seen in the theater was the one MGM had cut by 25 minutes; the restored version runs an exhausting two hours and 17 minutes. That said, there is much to enjoy about Russell's movie, especially the vividly colored production design by Tony Walton and costumes by Shirley Russell (the director's wife). The presence of the great Tommy Tune in the cast is also a plus. The Sandy Wilson songs are pleasantly hummable, and the interpolation of two songs by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed that were featured in Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) is nice. But a little camp goes a long way, and piling camp on camp can be tiresome, especially if the camp is done the way Russell does it: with a smirk rather than a wink.      

May December (Todd Haynes, 2023)

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December

Cast: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu, Gabriel Chung, Piper Curda, D.W. Moffett, Lawrence Arancio. Screenplay: Samy Burch, Alex Mechanik. Cinematography: Christopher Blauvelt. Production design: Sam Lisenco. Film editing: Affonso Gonçalves. Music: Marcelo Zarvas. 

The high-concept way of looking at May December is to call it the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal filtered through Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966). But that's reducing the complexity of Todd Haynes's film to a formula, and there's nothing formulaic about Haynes's work, except that his films are often about the secret lives of middle-class women: the woman suffering from a mysterious illness in Safe (1995), the woman with a closeted gay husband who has an interracial affair in Far From Heaven (2002), the woman in a closeted lesbian relationship in Carol (2015). And that his films are sometimes homages to other directors, such as Douglas Sirk in Far From Heaven and Carol. But Haynes centers his work on the unknowability of his characters, who resist giving up their secrets. In May December the actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) tries to get to know everything she can about Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), the Mary Kay Letourneau analogue whom she is set to portray in a movie. She snoops into every aspect of Gracie's life, even to the extent of sleeping with Gracie's husband, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), with whom Gracie had the scandalous relationship when she was 36 and he was 13. But the truth eludes her about almost everything in Gracie's life, from how the relationship between a middle-aged woman and a teenager began to what the status of their relationship is now, 23 years later. (Haynes gives us scenes between Gracie and Joe that Elizabeth doesn't witness.) She finds that even the family gossip is unreliable. So although we get an image of Elizabeth mirroring Gracie, which evokes a similar image of the merging of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann in Persona, we find that it's only an image. At the end, we see Elizabeth playing Gracie as a scene is filmed, and not only is the Gracie she's performing not much like the one we've seen, but the scene requires multiple takes, each one different from the other. It's a subtle and intricate movie, perhaps as much Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) as it is Persona.    

Josie and the Pussycats (Harry Elfont, Deborah Kaplan, 2001)

Tara Reid, Rachael Leigh Cook, and Rosario Dawson in Josie and the Pussycats

Cast: Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid, Rosario Dawson, Gabriel Mann, Paulo Costanzo, Missi Pyle, Alan Cumming, Parker Posey, Tom Butler, Donald Faison, Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, Alexander Martin, Serena Altschul, Carson Daly, Aries Spears, Eugene Levy. Screenplay: Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont. Cinematography: Matthew Libatique. Production design: Jasna Stefanovic. Film editing: Peter Teschner. Music: John Frizzell. 

A "cult film" is any movie that didn't make it on the first theatrical release but later gained a huge following, either in theatrical re-release or TV and video. The reason usually given for the initial failure is often the mass incomprehension of film critics, but also the failure of marketing to target the right audience. In the case of Josie and the Pussycats it's a bit of both. In the case of the critics, a typical reaction might be Roger Ebert's decidedly thumbs-down comment, "The movie is a would-be comedy about prefab bands and commercial sponsorship, which may mean that the movie's own plugs for Coke, Target, Starbucks, Motorola and Evian are part of the joke." Is there a better example of seeing the point but not getting it? The central irony in the theatrical failure of Josie and the Pussycats is that it was a blatant satire of marketing that failed because of poor marketing: It was targeted to the wrong audiences. Instead of hip audiences like, say, viewers of Saturday Night Live, it was marketed to the teens and pre-teens who are the vehicle for its satire. Now, granted, I don't think it's a particularly good satire. It's silly where it should be edgy, and  a bit too loud and obvious. The comparatively novice writer-directors, Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, have allowed skilled comic actors like Alan Cumming and Parker Posey to play too far over the top. But I do endorse what it's doing in its product-placement overkill, and maybe it made a few in its audience aware of how they're being manipulated. Or as Josie (the very good Rachael Leigh Cook) puts it, "Oh my god, I'm a trend pimp!"   

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (Val Guest, 1961)

Edward Judd in The Day the Earth Caught Fire

Cast: Edward Judd, Janet Munro, Leo McKern, Michael Goodliffe, Bernard Braden, Reginald Beckwith, Gene Anderson, Renée Asherson, Arthur Christiansen. Screenplay: Wolf Mankowitz, Val Guest. Cinematography: Harry Waxman. Art direction: Anthony Masters. Film editing: Bill Lenny. Music: Stanley Black. 

Screenwriters Wolf Mankowitz and Val Guest (who also directed) find a way to send a message in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, whose message is all about nuclear disarmament. They let the newspapers (remember them?) do it. Much of the movie was actually filmed in the old Daily Express building on Fleet Street in London, and the real editor of the Express, Arthur Christiansen, played the fictional editor in the film. The result is that a lot of the exposition is carried by the actors playing the reporters for the newspaper as they try to figure out what the hell is going on with the planet. It seems it was knocked off its axis by two simultaneous nuclear test explosions at the poles, one by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. The immediate result is disastrous climate change, but the greater threat comes when scientists realize that the Earth's orbit has changed so that the planet is reeling closer to a fiery death by crashing into the sun. The message is not only about nuclear testing but also about the way the authorities keep secrets that they think the public is not ready to know. The protagonist, Peter Stenning (Edward Judd), is a hard-drinking newspaper columnist who uses some unethical methods to disclose the coverup. There's a romantic subplot, of course, involving Stenning's liaison with Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro), a pretty clerk in one of the government offices. And much of the swift, quippy dialogue is between Stenning and his editor, Bill Maguire (Leo McKern). These players make the most of their stereotypical characters, keeping the film lively as the tension builds over whether the world is really catching fire, and whether the proposed fix for the crisis -- a tremendous blast of nukes in Siberia to right the planet on its axis -- is going to work. The movie feels less dated than it once did, because the scenes of climate disaster evoke our current concerns about the Earth and the fear that governments are too secretive and inept to save us. It's a well-made movie whose budgetary inadequacies show but are mostly overcome by the use of camera tricks and stock news footage. The ending is ambiguous, though tilted in the direction of hope by the sound of church bells, which are said to have been introduced by the American distributor, Universal, which wanted a less somber ending. 

Roadblock (Harold Daniels, 1951)

Charles McGraw and Joan Dixon in Roadblock

Cast: Charles McGraw, Joan Dixon, Lowell Gilmore, Louis Jean Heydt, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Steve Fisher, George Bricker, Richard H. Landau, Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Robert Golden. Music: Paul Sawtell. 

You know that movie about the insurance man who commits a crime for a femme fatale? No, not Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). That one starred Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. This one stars Joan Dixon and Charles McGraw, and it's called Roadblock. It was directed by Harold Daniels, an actor who turned B-movie and later TV director. Double Indemnity is a classic and Roadblock is ... well, not too bad. McGraw plays Joe Peters, an insurance investigator who falls for an attractive woman he encounters in an airport. She's Diane Morley (Dixon), a sometime model headed for LA in hopes that she'll strike gold in some guy's wallet. He's exactly not what she's looking for, a guy who makes $350 a month, but they wind up together anyway. Eventually, he'll use his knowledge as an investigator to bring off a million-dollar mail car heist, all for love. It won't end well. McGraw is effective as a soft-hearted tough guy who falls hard for the woman he loves. Dixon's performance, however, is less successful. She starts out as a tough girl on the make and becomes mistress of a mobster (rather swishily played by Lowell Gilmore), but falls so hard in love with Joe that she's willing to live on his salary after all. I doubt that even Stanwyck could have brought off the role as written, and Dixon certainly can't. Still, the plot is nicely complex and it moves along so swiftly. There are worse ways to spend 73 minutes.

Little Odessa (James Gray, 1994)

Tim Roth and Edward Furlong in Little Odessa

Cast: Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Moira Kelly, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, Paul Guilfoyle, Natalya Andrejchenko, David Vadim. Screenplay: James Gray. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Dorian Harris. 

James Gray's debut film, Little Odessa, is a chilly movie about a dysfunctional family, set in wintry Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood adjacent to Coney Island. Gray uses the seasonally shut down amusement park and boardwalk as a correlative for the frozen lives of the Shapira family, for which a reviving spring will never arrive. The film won more favor from European critics, winning an award at the Venice Film Festival and praise from director Claude Chabrol, than it did from Americans, who have less taste for grimness. And Little Odessa is almost unrelievedly grim in its account of what happens when the older son, Joshua, returns to the home where his mother, Irina (Vanessa Redgrave), is dying of cancer. He hates his father, Arkady (Maximilian Schell), who is having an affair with a younger woman while tending to Irina in her final days. Joshua feels close, however, to his teenage brother, Reuben (Edward Furlong), who dutifully helps his father run a small newsstand and look after his mother, but he has secretly stopped going to school, hiding the letters to his parents from the school in his sock drawer. Joshua is a hitman for the Russian mob. He has avoided returning home, but he can't refuse an order to rub out an Iranian jeweler with a store located in Brighton Beach. There are violent consequences not only for Joshua's target but also for his own family. The Shapira family is not so poetic and articulate as the Tyrones of Long Day's Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962) but they have a similar lacerating candor that gives actors free rein to perform. And it's mostly the performances that justify spending 98 minutes with them (as compared to the nearly three hours we spend with the Tyrones in Lumet's film). Redgrave, as always, is a marvel, all fragility and grit and love for her family, and Furlong demonstrates the kind of promise as an actor that his personal problems have never allowed him to fulfill. I think Schell is somewhat miscast as the father, who gets the blame for what has happened to his sons, but he gives the role substance if not the undertones of selfishness and desperation that it needs. The real star is Roth, an undervalued actor who always performs to the mark and beyond. Gray's screenplay is a touch too melodramatic, especially in the final confrontation of Joshua and his father, but with the help of Tom Richmond's cinematography and Kevin Thompson's production design, he maintains the oppressive mood and gloomy milieu effectively.  

Guelwaar (Ousmane Sembene, 1992)

Thierno Ndiaye and Mame Ndoumbé Diop in Guelwaar

Cast: Thierno Ndiaye, Mame Ndoumbe Diop, Omar Seck, Ndiawar Diop, Marie Augustine Diatta, Moustapha Diop, Babacar Faye, Sadara Mbaye. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembene. Cinematography: Dominique Gentil. Film editing: Marie-Aimée Debril. Music: Baaba Mal. 

The protagonist of Ousmane Sembene's sharply ironic tragicomedy Guelwaar is postcolonial Africa itself, viewed with a mixture of hope and frustration like that of the Europeanized Barthelemy (Nidiawar Diop) in the film, who often utters an exasperated "Africa!" when he encounters bureaucratic and cultural roadblocks in his attempt to bury his father. Actually, Barthelemy is trying to re-bury his father, Pierre Henri Thioune (Thierno Ndiaye), a political activist called by his followers "Guelwaar" (noble one), who died following a beating by political opponents. His body was mistakenly removed from the morgue and buried in a Muslim cemetery. Although Pierre Henri was a Catholic, the heads of the Muslim community don't want the grave disturbed to verify the identity of the corpse. The expatriate Barthelemy is not the best person to handle the problem, attracting suspicion from the authorities because he has become a French citizen, but he's the only member of the family capable of taking charge: His widowed mother, Nogoy Marie (Mame Ndoumbé Diop), is prostrate with grief; his sister, Sophie (Marie Augustine Diatta), is a sex worker in Dakar, and hence something of an outcast; and his younger brother, Alois (Moustapha Diop), is handicapped, crippled after a fall from a tree. Tensions build between Catholics and Muslims, and ultimately troops are called in by the area's representative in the legislature to keep violence from breaking out. Sembene tells the story beautifully, if occasionally resorting to the kind of blatant expository dialogue and didactic commentary aimed at his audience. Pierre Henri's radical politics center on an issue that reminds us how the causes of both right and left can sometimes converge: foreign aid to developing counties. He opposes the shipments of supposedly humanitarian aid such as food to his country, seeing it a tool used by foreign governments to gain influence, a cause of corruption in the government that distributes it, and a hindrance to the growth of a self-sustaining Africa. Sembene clearly endorses that view when, at the very end of the film, the young followers of the Guelwaar tear open the bags of rice and flour and the procession of carts carrying the funeral entourage drives over the spillage in an ironic triumph. With its keen portrayal of religious tensions, corruption, bureaucracy, and economic hardship, Guelwaar is a fine satiric blend of humor and pain, one of Sembene's best films.

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

Michael Fassbender in The Killer

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Tilda Swinton, Charles Parnell, Arliss Howard, Kerry O'Malley, Sophie Charlotte, Emiliana Pernia, Gabriel Polanco, Sala Baker, Monique Ganderton, Daran Norris, Jack Kesy. Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker, based on a graphic novel series by Alexis Nolent and Luc Jacamon. Cinematography: Erik Messerschmidt. Production design: Donald Graham Burt. Film editing: Kirk Baxter. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. 

In essence, The Killer is a routine thriller about a hit man who screws up and then has to undo the consequences of his screwup. But director David Fincher, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, and actor Michael Fassbender make it seem fresh and novel, not by departing from formula but by creating characters and giving them something fresh to say. Fassbender is The Killer (most of the dramatis personae are given labels rather than names), a lean, mean killing machine who rises above that cliché by a variety of quirks, including an addiction to maxims and mottoes that we hear from constantly in voiceover: "Stick to your plan. Anticipate, don't improvise. Trust no one. Never yield to an advantage. Fight only the battle you're paid to fight." Even by itself that constant voiceover could be annoying, except that Fassbender makes it amusing by intoning it in a flat American accent, and by occasionally failing to follow his own advice. Fincher spends a long time on the setup to the first kill, which makes it even more startling when the suspense is broken by the Killer's mistake. There's some swift action as he gets rid of the equipment used in the shoot, then boards a plane (using one of his many passports and credit cards, all carrying fake names borrowed from TV characters) for his home in the Dominican Republic, where he finds that he still has to keep running, eliminating not only those pursuing him, but also everybody else who knows his true identity. These incidents introduce us to a variety of characters, wittily played by, among others, Charles Parnell (The Lawyer, aka Hodges, who is a middle man between The Killer and his targets), Tilda Swinton (The Expert, a fellow assassin who knows his identity), and Arliss Howard (The Client, one of the few people The Killer manages to intimidate but not kill). All of this nonsense -- which is praise, not criticism -- is set to a variety of songs, mostly by the Smiths, whose dark humor perfectly complements the style of the movie. I could quibble about this being one of those films in which the big fight scene takes place in the dark, so you're never quite sure who's beating whom, but then moral ambiguity is the whole point of the movie. 

The Great Sinner (Robert Siodmak, 1949)

Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in The Great Sinner

Cast: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Ethel Barrymore, Frank Morgan, Agnes Moorehead. Screenplay: Ladislas Fodor, Christopher Isherwood, René Fülöp-Miller, based on a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Hans Peters, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Harold F Kress. Music: Bronislau Kaper. 

Gregory Peck's handsomeness and charisma made him a movie star, and served him well in films like Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) and To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), but he never achieved the gravitas and vulnerability that would have made him a great actor. Unfortunately, both of those characteristics are what was needed to play the Dostoevskyan protagonist of The Great Sinner, loosely based on the novella The Gambler, with borrowings from Crime and Punishment and the author's own life, including his epilepsy and his addiction to gambling. The handsomely mounted production was a prestige project for MGM, but it ran into problems with the script and director Robert Siodmak's reluctance to film it as written. After the first cut, Siodmak was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy, with instructions to make more of the romance between the characters played by Peck and Ava Gardner. The cuts made in the film may explain why the roles played by Agnes Moorehead and Ethel Barrymore seem to be cast more generously than they deserve, considering the time they spend on screen. The "sin" of the title is gambling, of course, but the topic of gambling addiction is perfunctory at best. There are some good lines in the screenplay, such as the casino employee's observation that it's hard to detect patrons who are suicidal: "They smile right before they pull the trigger." And Ava Gardner is, as Peck's character calls her, "irritatingly beautiful." There's no excuse, however, for the swooningly pious climax of the film and the unconvincing happy ending. Best to skip The Great Sinner and watch a better movie about glamorous addicted gamblers, Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963).