Threads (Mick Jackson, 1984)

Cast: Karen Meagher, Reece Dinsdale, David Brierly, Rita May, Nicholas Lane, Jane Hazlegrove, Henry Moxon, June Broughton, Sylvia Stoker, Harry Beeton, Ruth Holden, Ashley Barker, Michael O'Hagan, Phil Vaughan (voice). Screenplay: Barry Hines. Cinematography: Andrew Dunn, Paul Morris. Production design: Christopher Robilliard. Film editing: Donna Bickerstaff, Jim Latham. 

Was it because it was a "made-for-TV movie," a label that was once a byword for mediocrity, that I never saw Threads before now? Or was it that I knew what it was about and didn't need to put myself through watching a film that existed to tell me something I already knew: that nuclear war would be unspeakably horrible? But knowing is one thing and seeing is another. Threads is propaganda of the best kind, designed to disseminate truth rather than opinion. Its visceral but wholly credible horrors make criticism impotent, even though as a creative work it's not immune to criticism: There is some clunky dialogue; the narrative voiceover is awkwardly inserted and sometimes sententious; the evocation of a nativity scene near the end is too obvious. But the performances of the unknown actors, the skillful editing of stock footage into vividly staged scenes, and the unrestrained depiction of human suffering and degradation add up to a punch to the gut. Threads is a movie that has to be seen, or ought to be at least by anyone who holds a political or military position and needs to be have what it's trying to tell us engraved on their consciences. And that boils down to a demonstration of something often attributed to, of all people, Nikita Khrushchev: that in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the living would envy the dead.    

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (Yasujiro Ozu, 1941)

Shin Saburi and Mieko Takamine in Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family

Cast: Mieko Takamine, Shin Saburi, Hideo Fujino, Ayako Katsuragi, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Chishu Ryu, Masao Hayama, Tatsuo Saito, Kuniko Miyake, Michiko Kuwano. Screenplay: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu. Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura. Music: Senji Ito. 

Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family is an insular work like the novels of Jane Austen, which were written during the upheavals in Europe during the Napoleonic wars. Austen created her own world of domestic conflict while ignoring the larger world's conflicts, alluding to them only with incidental characters like the soldiers who delight the younger Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice or the naval officers who appear in Persuasion. Similarly, Ozu creates a little island of family in the midst of Tokyo, and does so in the fateful year of 1941, when Japan's imperial ambitions would finally bring the United States and its allies into global war. The film focuses on family tensions following the death of the patriarch, Shintaro (Hideo Fujino), which reveals his bankruptcy and forces his widow (Ayako Katsuragi) and unmarried daughter Setsuko (Mieko Takamine) to depend on the other family members. The difficulties of living with Setsuko's siblings and in-laws form the plot of the film, until finally the two women go to live in a rundown family property by the sea. Meanwhile, the unmarried brother, Shojiro (Shin Saburi), is off running a business in the city of Tianjin, in China. When he returns for the anniversary of his father's death, Shojiro, who has always been somewhat at odds with his siblings, excoriates them for their neglect of their mother and sister, and invites the two women to come with him to China. There's a brief comic episode in which Shijoro arranges a marriage for Setsuko and she does likewise for him -- though the film ends with Shojiro shyly avoiding an encounter with the bride-to-be. What makes the insularity of Ozu's film so poignant is that Tianjin had been acquired by Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and Japan ordered troops from Great Britain to leave in 1940 and followed with an expulsion of American Marines stationed there in November 1941, just weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was clearly not a peaceful place to do business, let alone to bring one's wife and mother to. Censorship would have forbidden Ozu from acknowledging any of this, but history has a way of imposing irony where none would have been intended.  

Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980)

William Hurt in Altered States

Cast: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid, Thaao Penghlis, Miguel Godreau, Dori Brenner, Peter Brandon, Charles White-Eagle, Drew Barrymore, Megan Jeffers. Screenplay: Paddy Chayefsky, based on his novel. Cinematography: Jordan Cronenweth. Production design: Richard Macdonald. Film editing: Eric Jenkins. Music: John Corigliano. 

In theory, choosing Ken Russell to direct Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay based on his novel, an updating of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the psychedelic era, had some potential. Russell is known for his flamboyant visuals and Chayefsky for his talky screenplays like the Oscar-winning Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955), The Hospital (Arthur Hiller, 1971), and Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976). Perhaps the visuals would moderate the verbosity, or vice versa. Unfortunately, Altered States wound up something of a mess -- a watchable mess, but still not a satisfying film. Chayefsky was so upset with the movie he took his name off the credits and substituted a pseudonym, Sidney Aaron. But the problem is inherent in the premise: that a potion can alter not only the mental state of the person who takes it but also the physical state -- that matter itself, the human body, can be changed by drinking a mixture of blood and hallucinogenic mushrooms. It's the stuff of fairy tales, not science. So when Dr. Jessup (William Hurt in his film debut), a respected physician researching the causes of schizophrenia, drinks the concoction, he reverts to his primordial self: a small, aggressive carnivorous simian. Good enough for a horror-movie setup, but not quite what Chayefsky had in mind when he wrote lines like these: "It is the Self, the individual mind, that contains immortality and ultimate truth....  Ever since we dispensed with God we've got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life." Chayefsky's existential conundrums go missing in a welter of special effects. And ultimately, the film collapses in bathos, with a plot resolution in which love conquers all after Jessup's experiments go calamitously awry. Hurt and Blair Brown as Jessup's wife do what they can with the material, giving controlled performances, but Russell, that connoisseur of excess, lets Charles Haid overplay his role as Dr. Parrish, the supposed skeptic about Jessup's research who seems like a nutcase himself.   

Personal Velocity: Three Portraits (Rebecca Miller, 2002)

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The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968)

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janet Langford, Janice Rule, Joan Rivers, Tony Bickley, Marge Champion, Kim Hunter, Bill Fiore, Rose Gregorio, Charles Drake, House Jameson, Nancy Cushman, Bernie Hamilton. Screenplay: Eleanor Perry, based on a short story by John Cheever. Cinematography: David L. Quaid. Art direction: Peter Dohanos. Film editing: Sidney Katz, Carl Lerner, Pat Somerset. Music: Marvin Hamlisch.

The Swimmer evokes that common anxiety dream in which you're naked or in your underwear in a familiar place like work or school. The people around you don't seem to notice, but you suspect that they're secretly laughing at you. The dream is produced, of course, by something that you don't want other people to know about you. Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) isn't naked, but he's exposed, wearing swim trunks and barefoot, when we first see him walking through the woods. He comes upon a group of his neighbors gathered around their swimming pool. They greet him heartily, commenting on how long it's been since they got together, serving drinks and making small talk. Ned suddenly has an idea: All of his neighbors have pools. Why couldn't he swim his way home, moving from pool to pool until he reaches his destination? The group cheers him on. Ned is an athletic middle-aged man (Lancaster was in his mid-50s when the film was made, but looked perhaps ten years younger), and the day is sunny and warm. But as he continues his pool-hopping, he injures himself slightly and the day gets darker and chillier, and so does the reception of the pool-owners he encounters. We begin to discover that Ned is in financial trouble and that the marriage he initially portrayed as happy has fallen apart. The John Cheever story on which the film is based is often read as a fable about suburban hypocrisy and male anxiety, and the movie supports those and other interpretations. Lancaster is perfect casting, not only because of his physical fitness but also because of the signs of aging that the camera inevitably reveals -- camera angles, for example, sometimes show the thinning of the hair at the crown of his head. But the film version lacks the Everyman quality of Cheever's story, missing some of the shock of recognition by the reader, an inevitability in its translation to a visual medium. It also ran into some trouble with producer Sam Spiegel, who had many scenes recast and reshot, firing director Frank Perry and replacing him with Sydney Pollack. It was not a success at the box office, being a little too oblique for audiences and some critics, but it has gained stature with time. 

Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Tantoo Cardinal, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Cara Jade Myers, Jenae Collins, Jillian Dion, Jason Isbell, William Belleau, Louis Cancelmi, Scott Shepherd, Everett Waller, Talee Redcorn, Yancey Red Corn, Tatanka Means. Screenplay: Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, based on a book by David Gran. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Jack Fisk. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker. Music: Robbie Robertson.

Like everyone who knows anything about movies, I admire Martin Scorsese. He's an acknowledged master storyteller, able to elicit fine performances and to find just the way to place and move the camera. But why does Killers of the Flower Moon, like so many of his films, leave me cold? The treatment of the indigenous people of this country will always be an urgent American subject, and Scorsese has found a story with vivid characters, both about the exploited and the exploiters. The film has sweep and texture, which is exactly what it needs. But the moment Leonardo DiCaprio appeared on screen, looking puffy and thick-headed in contrast to his usual bright, handsome persona, turning his mouth down at the corners so he looks a little like Robert De Niro, who plays his uncle, I felt something was off. He gives a good performance as the somewhat slow Ernest Burkhart, who is roped by his uncle William Hale into a scheme to defraud the newly oil-rich members of the Osage tribe of their money. But that's what it is: a performance. And when Jesse Plemons comes on screen as the federal agent investigating the scheme, I knew what was wrong: DiCaprio was originally slated to play the fed, which would have been consistent with his acting persona, but he asked Scorsese if he could play Burkhart instead, knowing that it was the more complex role. Scorsese yielded to the star who has been the lead in six of his films, starting with Gangs of New York (2002). So instead of feeling the urgency of the story, I felt I was watching an actor try out something new. Would Killers of the Flower Moon have been a better movie if, say, DiCaprio took the intended role and let Plemons play Burkhart, casting that would have been a better fit? I don't know, because the other thing about the movie that bothers me is more fundamental: It's a story told from the white man's point of view. All of the bad guys in the film are fully characterized, but of the Osage characters, only Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whose marriage to Burkhart sets the plot in motion, comes alive as a real person, thanks in large part to Gladstone's fine performance but also to Scorsese for giving the role substance. I kept wanting the Osages to break out of movie stereotypes of Native Americans -- the way, for example, the characters in the great TV series Reservoir Dogs did. Instead we get the usual victimization and swoony nature mysticism that afflict even well-meaning films dealing with indigenous people. Killers of the Flower Moon is often a very good movie, but something is lacking at its core.      

Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961)

Allen Baron in Blast of Silence 

Cast: Allen Baron, Mollie McCarthy, Larry Tucker, Peter Clune, Danny Meehan, Howard Mann, Lionel Stander (voice). Screenplay: Allen Baron, Waldo Salt (voiceover narration). Cinematography: Merrill S. Brody. Art direction: Charles Rosen. Film editing: Merrill S. Brody, Peggy Lawson. Music: Meyer Kupferman. 

A very late film noir, Blast of Silence strips the genre to its bleak essence. A hitman (Allen Baron) comes to New York at Christmastime to whack a guy, falls in love, carries out his job, and pays the consequences for his decision that this would be his last hit. Made on a shoestring with equipment that had been smuggled out of Cuba after Baron appeared in Errol Flynn's last movie, Cuban Rebel Girls (Barry Mahon, 1959), it's a tightly assembled sleeper of a movie that wonderfully milks its New York location and ends with a memorable scene shot on Long Island during Hurricane Donna. Baron had wanted his friend Peter Falk to play the melancholy gunman, but took over the role himself when Falk was unavailable. It's a great one-off of a performance: Baron has no other acting credits besides this one and the Flynn movie, and his directing credits were mostly in TV on shows ranging from Surfside 6 to The Love Boat. The atmosphere of New York in the late 1950s and early '60s is wonderfully captured: That beatnik-era accoutrement the bongo drum makes its appearance at a party and again as the accompaniment to some mopey ballads with titles like "Dressed in Black" and "Torrid Town," sung by Dean Sheldon at the Village Gate nightclub. A voiceover narrative, written by Waldo Salt under his nom de blacklist "Mel Davenport" and read by uncredited fellow blacklistee Lionel Stander, was added after the film was assembled to cover some expository gaps. It's more effective than most voiceovers are at setting the mood and tone of the film, although I find it occasionally too portentous.  

How to Get Ahead in Advertising (Bruce Robinson, 1989)

Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising

Cast: Richard E. Grant, Rachel Ward, Richard Wilson, Jacqueline Tong, John Shrapnel, Susan Wooldridge. Screenplay: Bruce Robinson. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Michael Pickwoad. Film editing: Alan Strachan. Music: David Dundas, Rick Wentworth. 

The satire in How to Get Ahead in Advertising is as obvious as the pun in its title. Denis Bagley (Richard E. Grant), a Type A advertising executive, has a breakdown under the stress of coming up with a campaign for an acne medicine. He suddenly realizes the venality of his profession: trying to sell things to people that they don't need and which probably don't work. He quits his job and in a fit of manic behavior almost destroys his house. What's more, he develops a boil on his neck, and in a few days the boil comes to a head -- quite literally -- and begins to talk to him, muttering the advertising slogans and clichés he is determined to put behind him. His distressed wife, Julia (Rachel Ward), tries to help him and sends him to a psychiatrist (John Shrapnel), but things only get worse when a medical accident turns the second head into the primary one. Borrowing from "body horror" movies, Bruce Robinson's screenplay sets up a promising situation, but doesn't have a way of resolving it successfully. Only Grant's terrifically frantic performance, as both Denis and his pustular alter ego, keeps the film going, but the hilarity feels a bit strained toward the end.  

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.