Lured (Douglas Sirk, 1947)

Lucille Ball in Lured

Cast: Lucille Ball, George Sanders, Charles Coburn, Cedric Hardwicke, Boris Karloff, Joseph Calleia, Alan Mowbray, George Zucco, Robert Coote, Alan Napier, Tanis Chandler. Screenplay: Leo Rosten, based on a screenplay by Jacques Companéez, Ernst Neuback, and Simon Gantillon. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Production design: Nicolai Remisoff. Film editing: John M. Foley. Music: Michel Michelet. 

Lured gave Lucille Ball a chance to break out of -- or at least transcend -- the wisecracking dame roles in which she had been cast. She plays Sandra Carpenter, an American dancer who came to London with a show that swiftly closed and is now forced to make ends meet by working as a taxi dancer, the profession immortalized in the Rodgers and Hart song "Ten Cents a Dance." When a chum of hers, a fellow dancer, disappears, she finds herself aiding Scotland Yard in an investigation of similar mysterious disappearances of young women: She plays bait, a role that puts her in contact with all manner of unsavory characters, including a crazed fashion designer played in a cameo role by Boris Karloff. But it also puts her in touch with Robert Fleming (George Sanders), a nightclub entrepreneur, with whom she falls in love. Eventually, Fleming himself will become a prime suspect in the case. It's a busy, semicomic crime story with few surprises for anyone who has seen this sort of thing before, made memorable by Douglas Sirk's crisp direction and Ball's smart, attractive presence -- one of the few substantial film roles she found before becoming a major star on television. William H. Daniels's cinematography helps give Ball the kind of glamour she seldom found on the big screen, somehow making her hair look orange even in black-and-white. There's not a lot of chemistry between Ball and Sanders, who is trying to transcend his own stereotype, the world-weary cad, but even in their separate ways they're always fun to watch.   

A Private Function (Malcolm Mowbray, 1984)

Maggie Smith and Michael Palin in A Private Function

Cast: Michael Palin, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, Tony Haygarth, John Northington, Bill Paterson, Liz Smith, Alison Steadman, Jim Carter, Pete Postlethwaite. Screenplay: Alan Bennett, Malcolm Mowbray. Cinematography: Tony Pierce-Roberts. Production design: Stuart Walker. Film editing: Barrie Vince. Music: John Du Prez. 

A Private Function begins with Joyce Chilvers (Maggie Smith) and her mother (Liz Smith) entering a darkened movie theater where a newsreel is playing. We watch the newsreel, about meat rationing in postwar Britain, as the two women make their way to their seats, with Joyce scolding her mum for not finding a seat of her own. Then the lights come up and the theater organ rises from the pit. Joyce is playing the organ with her mother awkwardly sharing the bench with her. It's a nifty way to introduce not only two of the movie's key characters but also the era in which the film is set and the core of the plot. The newsreel also includes footage of the preparations for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Sir Philip Mountbatten, so we know that we're in November of 1947. The setting is a town in Northern England where the local dignitaries, led by the irascible, snobbish Dr. Swaby (Denholm Elliott, are preparing for a private function, a banquet, to celebrate the marriage of the future queen and prince consort. But how do you put on a banquet when everything, especially meat, is strictly rationed, and a diligent civil servant named Wormold (Bill Paterson) is enforcing the consumption laws with an iron hand? The banquet planners have found a way: They're raising an illegal pig. Eventually, Joyce and her meek chiropodist husband, Gilbert (Michael Palin), will get involved, especially after the would-be social climbing Joyce is not only frustrated by her inability to get around the rationing laws, but is also piqued by not being invited to the banquet. The only solution, it seems, is for Gilbert to commit pignapping and to hide the purloined swine in their home. The rest is farce in the manner of the British comedies made in the late 1940s and early 1950s, e.g., Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (Charles Crichton, 1951), and The Ladykillers (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955). It's raunchier and a good deal more scatalogical than those classic films, and it's sometimes edited a little choppily -- there are jump cuts where none are needed -- but it earns the comparison on the strength of fine comic performances by Maggie Smith, Palin, Elliott, and especially Liz Smith as the endearingly dotty Mother. ("She's 74," Joyce often interjects to excuse, explain, and even praise her parent's behavior.) 

Whore (Ken Russell, 1991)

Theresa Russell in Whore

Cast: Theresa Russell, Benjamin Mouton, Antonio Fargas, Elizabeth Morehead, Daniel Quinn, Sanjay Chandani, Jason Saucier, Michael Crabtree, John Nance, Danny Trejo, John Diehl. Screenplay: Ken Russell, Deborah Dalton, based on a play by David Hines. Cinematography: Amir Mokri. Production design: Richard B. Lewis. Film editing: Brian Tagg. Music: Michael Gibbs. 

The bluntness of its title suggests that Whore might be a serious film, a necessary corrective to the typical Hollywood treatment of prostitution, on a par with Lizzie Borden's 1986 Working Girls. And I think at some point that was its intent, especially with the hiring of a well-known actress like Theresa Russell. But in the hands of screenwriter-director Ken Russell, it turned into a bore, hammering home its message about the sordid lives of streetwalkers and their pimps, while giving it an entirely inappropriate glossy look. It also features an uncommonly bad performance by its star, who somehow can't find a way to deliver her lines that doesn't feel like a caricature of the tough girl she's supposed to be. The emotions she's meant to evoke feel fake. The screenplay, which forces her to talk directly to the camera, also undermines any sense of actuality to what she's saying. It's an 85-minute film that feels twice that length.  

The Quiet Earth (Geoff Murphy, 1985)

Alison Routledge, Bruno Lawrence, and Pete Smith in The Quiet Earth

Cast: Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge, Pete Smith, Anzac Wallace, Norman Fletcher, Tom Hyde. Screenplay: Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, Sam Pillsbury, based on a novel by Craig Harrison. Cinematography: James Bartle. Production design: Josephine Ford. Film editing: Michael Horton. Music: John Charles. 

One day a scientist, Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence), wakes up to discover that he's the last person on Earth. Apparently every living human being has vanished. Absolute freedom and solitude make Zac go a little nuts until he encounters two other survivors, and they set out to explore the world they've been left. Comparing stories, they realize that at the moment when everything else disappeared, they were dying: Suicidal about his work, Zac had taken an overdose of sleeping pills; Joanne (Alison Routledge) was being electrocuted by a faulty hair dryer; and Api (Pete Smith) was being killed in a fight. They deduce that because they were half-dead, the disappearance effect didn't take hold on them. Eventually, Zac discovers that a repeat of the effect is about to occur, which would obliterate him and his companions. He manages to forestall it, but although Joanne and Api survive, he winds up in a setting that seems to be on another planet. And there the movie has its enigmatic ending. Although The Quiet Earth does a great job of depicting Zac's breakdown when he discovers he is alone, and how he and his fellow survivors cope with the situation when they discover one another, it doesn't add up to a satisfactory movie. It fails to avoid the Questions You're Not Supposed To Ask. Like, why did people's clothes vanish with them? (Zac finds the wreckage of an airplane, but the seat belts are fastened over nothing. The passengers were presumably not naked.) The premise of mysterious mass disappearances was done better in the HBO series The Leftovers. which was inspired by the Christian eschatological belief in the Rapture, but without the theological underpinnings. There is a feint at a scientific explanation in The Quiet Earth, having to do with a global energy project, but it feels like just a plot device to set up a fable about technological overreach or something. Its aims are muddled and it feels flimsy.  

Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)

Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow in Two Lovers

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Isabella Rossellini, Moni Moshonov, Elias Koteas, Bob Ari, Julie Budd, Iain J. Bopp, David Cale. Screenplay: James Gray, Ric Menello. Cinematography: Joaquin Baca-Asay. Production design: Happy Massee. Film editing: John Axelrad. 

A Jewish man who lives with his parents falls in love with a pretty blonde shiksa, despite his parents' urging him to marry the nice Jewish girl whose parents are involved in a business deal with them. Seen this one, have you? Was it an early Woody Allen movie? Or the one with Richard Benjamin and Cybill Shepherd? It was a comedy, right? With lots of ethnic jokes and some cringey scenes? No, it's a James Gray movie set in Brighton Beach. Oh, then the son is a hitman and the business deal is a shady one involving the mob? And it's bleak and unforgiving in both mood and setting? Sorry, no. It's a tender, romantic film, perhaps still a little bleak, about some damaged people who nevertheless find a resolution to their problems. Two Lovers marked a remarkable turn in Gray's filmography, not so much away from the melancholy New York streets of his first films as toward a perception that there's another side to the lives led there. Gray knows the clichés and stereotypes that his plot evokes and deftly avoids them. There's even a bar mitzvah scene that in other hands would have been fertile ground for ethnic stereotyping but just skirts it. It helps that he has actors who know how to avoid the clichés, too. Gwyneth Paltrow, who is sometimes mocked for epitomizing an aloof upper-middle-class image, finds the poignancy in her role as the kept woman of a married hotshot lawyer (Elias Koteas). Isabella Rossellini completely ignores the Jewish mother stereotype while managing somehow to remind us of it. Vinessa Shaw is terrific as the nice Jewish girl who may hear the ticking of her biological clock but doesn't show that she feels pressured by it. But mostly it's Joaquin Phoenix's film as Leonard Kraditor, a man in early middle life who has never found a place in life that wasn't prepared for him by someone else. He opens the film with what may be a suicide attempt -- he's tried it before -- from which he decides to rescue himself. He's had a breakdown before and is on medication, and he's something of a screwup in his work for his father's dry cleaning business, but he realizes that he's still loved by his somewhat bewildered parents. When he gets involved in a relationship with Paltrow's Michelle, a head case and a druggie, we fear for the worst -- which almost happens. But then it doesn't, and in a scene that might have been sentimental, except that it was created by Gray and Phoenix, one of the best director-actor relationships in film, things turn out at least provisionally okay. And we recognize that sometimes that's just the way life is.    

Working Girls (Lizzie Borden, 1986)

Louise Smith in Working Girls

Cast: Louise Smith, Ellen McElduff, Amanda Goodwin, Deborah Banks, Liz Caldwell, Marusia Zach, Boomer Tibbs, Frederick Neumann, Carla-Maria Sorey. Screenplay: Lizzie Borden, Sandra Kay. Cinematography: Judy Irola. Production design: Kurt Ossefort. Film editing: Lizzie Borden. Music: David Van Tieghem.

Working Girls puts the emphasis on the "work" in "sex work." All work is alienating in that we do it out of necessity rather than choice. Even the most enjoyable job involves the submission of self to the demands of the boss, the client, and time itself. That alienation is key to Lizzie Borden's deglamorizng of the profession of sex worker. The film's protagonist, Molly (Louise Smith) is a sensible, well-educated (if we take her at her word that she went to Yale) woman who has somehow become a prostitute in a New York City brothel, to which she commutes by bicycle through the city streets. For most of the film she is confined to a windowless apartment -- a feeling of claustrophobia develops through every scene in that setting -- where she services a series of men, feigning interest in them as well as orgasms. The men are ordinary, middle-class, mostly unthreatening business types with a few hangups and predilections. Molly collects her fees and sets aside part of the money for the madam, Lucy (Ellen McElduff), a giddy, vain, but shrewd businesswoman. Molly's downtime is spent chatting and gossiping (usually about Lucy) with the other women who work there, some of them bitter, some naive. The boredom and frustration the women express are much like the ones you'd expect from office workers, schoolteachers, retail clerks, anyone with a job routine: financial problems, relationship issues, resentment of the boss, distaste for some of the regular clients, and so on. It's hard to make a movie about boredom without being boring, but Borden succeeds, if only because of the titillation involved in a movie that focuses on sex. Smith and McElduff give good performances, but some of the other actresses deliver their lines a little woodenly. There's not much in the way of plot, but it's a solid, well-crafted film that feels a little obligatory, as if designed to make a point about sex work and the media's portrayal of it rather than just to tell a good story.  

Powwow Highway (Jonathan Wacks, 1988)

A Martinez and Gary Farmer in Powwow Highway

Cast: A Martinez, Gary Farmer, Amanda Wyss, Joanelle Romero, Geoff Rivas, Roscoe Born, Wayne Waterman, Margo Kane, Sam Vlahos, John Trudell, Wes Studi, Graham Greene. Screenplay: David Seals, Janet Heaney, Jean Stawarz, based on a novel by Seals. Cinematography: Toyomichi Kurita. Production design: Cynthia Sowder. Film editing: Jim Stewart. Music: Barry Goldberg. 

If you like the series Reservation Dogs, you ought to like Powwow Highway. To my mind (white, male, aged) these comic works get closer to capturing the Native American experience than do more earnest movies like Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1994) and Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023), which rely too heavily on the white man's point of view. As the title suggests, it's a road movie, and as with any good road movie, the travelers are an odd couple. Buddy Red Bow (A Martinez) is a hot-tempered activist, trying to stymie the latest corporate takeover of land on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Philbert Bono (Gary Farmer) is a corpulent, easy-going eccentric, enthralled by Native American myths and legends. When Buddy's sister is arrested on trumped-up charges in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he persuades Philbert to drive him there to get her released. Philbert has recently acquired (via a trade for some marijuana) an ancient wreck of a car that he refers to as his "pony" and calls Protector. Despite Buddy's insistence on going straight to Santa Fe, he can't keep Philbert from getting sidetracked onto locations associated with Native American history. The result is an engaging blend of farce and travelogue, with a provocative, sometimes bittersweet point of view. Farmer's creation of the endearing Philbert, a fine blend of sweet and stubborn, of naive and canny, is a remarkable performance. Martinez has just the right hair-trigger quality as Buddy, and the supporting cast, which includes bit parts for the then-unknown Wes Studi and Graham Greene (particularly good as an aphasic Vietnam veteran), is wonderful. The "happy ending" is by-the-book, but well-deserved nevertheless. 

The Yards (James Gray, 2000)

Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in The Yards

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron, James Caan, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, Steve Lawrence, Andy Davoli, Tony Musante, Victor Argo, Tomas Milian, Robert Montano. Screenplay: James Gray, Matt Reeves. Cinematography: Harris Savides. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Jeffrey Ford. Music: Howard Shore. 

With its powerhouse cast acting glum, The Yards is a slow downer of a movie. But it repays attention, immersing us in an almost too-familiar milieu, the Mean Streets of New York City. It's more elegiac than the visions of the milieu given us by Scorsese, Coppola, Lumet and many others, portraying a city almost beyond hope and reform, in which the well-meaning can be dragged down by circumstance. Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) is certainly well-meaning: Just out of prison for a crime for which he took the fall for his friends, he would like to stay straight if only to help his ailing mother (Ellen Burstyn), but the corruption that is eating his friends and family, particularly his friend Willie Gutierrez (Joaquin Phoenix) and his uncle Frank (James Caan), is bound to swallow him up, too. Eventually, meaning well is not enough, and Leo finds himself taking the fall again. In the end, it turns out that the only way to fight the kind of corruption that ensnares Leo is with corruption itself, a truly vicious cycle. James Gray's steady, slow direction probably tested audiences too much, for the film was a box office loser. But it boasts superb ensemble work, with standout performances from Phoenix and Caan and particularly from Charlize Theron as Erica, Leo's cousin and Willie's girfriend. Howard Shore's music underscores Gray's melancholy vision. 

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Henry King, 1952)

Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Cast: Gregory Peck, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, Hildegard Knef, Leo G. Carroll, Torin Thatcher, Ava Norring, Helene Stanley, Marcel Dalio, Vicente Gómez, Richard Allan. Screenplay: Casey Robinson, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Leon Shamroy. John DeCuir, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Barbara McLean. Music: Bernard Herrmann.

The film version of The Snows of Kilimanjaro is handsome and dull, just like its protagonist, Harry Street, who lies waiting for death on the plains below the mountain as his life flashes past his eyes. Harry is a writer who has spent his life doing all the things he thinks a writer should, which amounts to a men's magazine version of masculinity: hunting big game, going to bullfights and to war, and sleeping with beautiful women. The actor who plays Harry, Gregory Peck, is handsome, too. And if he's also a little dull it's because Peck is miscast: The part needs an actor with a lived-in face, someone like Humphrey Bogart, who was considered for the role. At 36, Peck was about ten years too young for the role. (The 52-year-old Bogart might have been a shade too old.) Still, Peck does what he can, and it's credible that women like Ava Gardner, Susan Hayward, and Hildegard Knef would have fallen hard for him. But the screenplay by Casey Robinson is a rambling muddle that turns Hemingway's spare prose into melodrama, partly by crafting Gardner's role out of nothing -- or borrowing hints of it from other Hemingway works like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Henry King, one of those studio directors who were handed big projects because they wouldn't mess them up, brings no particular vision or style to the film. The handsomeness of the movie is mostly in its casting, and in the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Leon Shamroy. Bernard Herrmann's score helps, too.  

The Munekata Sisters (Yasujiro Ozu, 1950)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Hideko Takamine in The Munekata Sisters

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Ken Uehara, So Yamamura, Sanae Takasugi, Chishu Ryu, Yuji Hori, Tatsuo Saito. Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu, based on a story by Jiro Osaragi. Cinematography: Joji Ohara. Production design: Seiya Kajima. Film editing: Toshiro Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Some very non-Ozu things happen in Yasujiro Ozu's The Munekata Sisters. For example, the camera actually moves in one scene. Granted, it's only a brief pan across the setting at the end of the scene, but it was enough to startle anyone used to Ozu's locked-in low-angle points of view. But more unusually, there is actual physical violence in the film: A man slaps his wife repeatedly, and a few scenes later drops dead on the floor. The most contemplative of filmmakers, Ozu rarely deals directly with violence, preferring to show us the emotional consequences of disturbing events. The man, Ryosuke Mimura (So Yamamura), is unemployed. During his desultory search for a job, he is supported by his wife, Setsuko (Kinyuo Tanaka), who runs a small bar with the help of her much younger sister, Mariko (Hideko Takamine). The two sisters are very different: Setsuko, brought up before the war, is quiet and reserved and dresses in traditional Japanese style. Mariko reflects postwar attitudes in dress and manner: She's outspoken, with a spunky carefree manner, and sharply critical of her brother-in-law, whom she sees as an idler and a drunk. Then an old flame of Setsuko's, Hiroshi Tashiro (Ken Uehara), returns to town. Setsuko might have married him, but he decided to go to France before the war, so she married Mimura instead. Hiroshi is handsome and successful, and Mariko immediately sets her sights on reuniting him with her sister. Ozu develops all four characters with great finesse. Mimura is something of a dead-end case, and his outburst of jealous rage at Mimura's seeing Hiroshi again is frightening, but he has a softer side that he shows with the clowder of cats that he apparently fosters. There is something of the too-detached sophisticate about Mimura that shows in his scenes with Mariko, who falls in love with him while she's trying to reunite him with her sister. As a whole, The Munekata Sisters is more melodramatic than Ozu's films usually are, including the ending, which involves one of those renunciations that movies typically rely on as a plot resolution. But it's beautifully acted, especially by Tanaka and Takamine.