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| John Turturro, Carl Capotorto, and Michael Badalucco in Mac |
Cast: John Turturro, Michael Badalucco, Katerine Borowitz, Paul Capotorto, Matthew Sussman, Ellen Barkin, Dennis Farina, Olek Krupa, John Amos. Screenplay: John Turturro, Brandon Cole. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Production design: Robin Standefer. Film editing: Michael Berenbaum. Music: Richard Termini, Vin Tese.
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| Ida Lupino, Jack Carson, and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way |
Cast: Ida Lupino, Dennis Morgan, Joan Leslie, Jack Carson, Gladys George, Faye Emerson, Paul Cavanaugh. Screenplay: Daniel Fuchs, Peter Viertel. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Tomas Pratt. Music: Heinz Roemheld.
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| Bonar Colleano and Victor Mature in Pickup Alley |
Cast: Victor Mature, Anita Ekberg, Trevor Howard, Bonar Colleano, Dorothy Allison, André Morell, Martin Benson, Eric Pohlmann, Alec Mango. Screenplay: John Paxton, A.J. Forrest. Cinematography: Ted Moore. Art direction: Paul Sheriff. Film editing: Richard Best. Music: Richard Rodney Bennett.
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| Delphine Zentout in 36 Fillette |
Cast: Delphine Zentout, Etienne Chicot, Olivier Parnière, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Berta Dominguez D., Jean-François Stévenin, Diane Bellego, Adrienne Bonnet. Screenplay: Catherine Breillat, Roger Salloch, based on a novel by Breillat. Cinematography: Laurent Dailland. Production design: Olivier Paultre. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Maxime Schmitt.
Catherine Breillat's explorations of adolescent female sexuality continue in 36 Fillette. (The title refers to a French dress size in the "Junior" range.) The protagonist, Lili (Delphine Zentout), is 14 years old and precocious both mentally and physically, but perhaps not emotionally. She's visiting Biarritz with her mother (Adrienne Bonnet) and father (Jean-François Stévenin) and her 17-year-old brother, Bertrand, (Olivier Parnière). One evening, she wheedles her self-absorbed parents into letting her accompany her brother on a nighttime excursion into the clubs at Biarritz, and they hitch a ride with a 40-something businessman named Maurice (Etienne Chicot), who has a couple of Bertrand's acquaintances in his car. Eventually, Lili and Bertrand go their separate ways, and in the course of her explorations Lili encounters a local celebrity, Boris Golovine -- an extended cameo by Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got his start in movies playing a disaffected adolescent in The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959). They strike up a conversation which provides the bulk of exposition for Lili's character. Then she re-connects with Bertrand and Etienne, and goes off with the latter for an evening of sexual and emotional exploration in which it becomes apparent that Lili is in many ways the more mature person of the two -- though perhaps not enough to justify such an exploitative relationship. In the French manner, the film is too talkative to be shocking, but Breillat is really not out to shock audiences so much as make them question their own reactions to such a pairing. Zentout, who was 16 at the time, gives an astonishing performance, though I find myself queasy at the thought of so young an actress playing such a role.
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| Evelyn Keyes and Peter Lorre in The Face Behind the Mask |
Cast: Peter Lorre, Evelyn Keyes, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, John Tyrrell, Cy Shindell, Stanley Brown, James Seay, Warren Ashe, Charles C. Wilson, George McKay. Screenplay: Allen Vincent, Paul Jarrico, Arthur Levinson, based on a radio play by Thomas Edward O'Connell. Cinematography: Franz Planer. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Charles Nelson. Music: Sidney Cutner.
A real sleeper, Robert Florey's The Face Behind the Mask performed poorly at the box office and was critically dismissed on its release, but over time it has gained admirers. Florey and cinematographer Franz Planer do what they can with the movie's scrawny budget, achieving some haunting expressionistic images and telling the story with great economy: The film runs only 69 minutes. It's a showcase for Peter Lorre, who plays Janos Szabo, a Hungarian immigrant to the United States whose naïve enthusiasm is smothered when he's horribly scarred in a fire. (We get only a brief glimpse of his scarred face, but it's enough to make what follows plausible.) Trained as a watchmaker and skilled with his hands, Janos is unable to find work. Then a chance encounter with a small-time thief (George E. Stone) sets him on the road to crime. Trying to earn money for plastic surgery, he becomes the head of a small ring of jewel thieves, using his expertise to break into safes and circumvent burglar alarms. (It's a sign of the small budget, and of Florey's narrative economy, that we never see him and his gang at work.) They make enough for Janos to have a rather creepy mask made to cover his disfigurement, but on learning that surgery can never fully repair his face he becomes despondent. Then he meets a blind woman (Evelyn Keyes) who doesn't care what he looks like, and they fall in love. It's a rather soppy twist to the story, and Keyes is never able to make her character other than a saccharine cliché, but the film takes a darker turn that undercuts the sentimentality. Lorre is terrific throughout, as Janos ranges from meek to menacing to heroic.
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| James Duval in Nowhere |
Cast: James Duval, Rachel True, Nathan Bexton, Chiara Mastroianni, Debi Mazar, Kathleen Robertson, Joshua Gibran Mayweather, Jordan Ladd, Christina Applegate, Sarah Lassez, Guillermo Diaz, Jeremy Jordan, Alan Boyce, Jaason Simmons, Ryan Philippe, Heather Graham, Scott Caan, Thyme Lewis, Mena Suvari, Beverly D'Angelo, Charlotte Rae, Denise Richards, Teresa Hill, Kevin Light, Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty, Rose McGowan, John Ritter, Christopher Knight, Eve Plumb, Lauren Tewes, David Leisure. Screenplay: Gregg Araki. Cinematography: Arturo Smith. Production design: Patti Podesta. Film editing: Gregg Araki.
I have taken the liberty of listing more cast members than usual just because Nowhere is a crowded movie, a throng of newcomers, future stars, familiar faces, and a few one-shots. It's a mess, but an intentional one, the chaotic culminating film of Gregg Araki's Teenage Apocalypse trilogy that began with Totally F***ed Up in 1993 and continued with The Doom Generation in 1995. Araki called it "Beverly Hills 90210 on acid," and that serves as well as anything to describe this freewheeling farrago of sex and drugs, as Araki puts a lot of Gen Xers and Millennials through hell. It's eye-bombing and ear-assaulting, and it contains a rape scene as well as a murder committed with a can of Campbell's Tomato Soup. In short, don't watch it unprepared.
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| Gina Carano in Haywire |
Cast: Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Michael Angarano, Mathieu Kassovitz. Screenplay: Lem Dobbs. Cinematography: Steven Soderbergh. Production design: Howard Cummings. Film editing: Steven Soderbergh. Music: David Holmes.
Haywire could have been a solid entry in the male-dominated action genre when Steven Soderbergh cast MMA champion Gina Carano as a sexy undercover agent named Mallory Kane. But Soderbergh may have had his doubts, because he surrounded her with a solid and experienced supporting cast, letting her beat up characters played by Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender and outwit the ones played by Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor. And even before the film was released it was clear that Carano's weakness as an actress might be a problem, so some of her dialogue was dubbed by Laura San Giacomo and some of it was digitally altered to lower it in tone. And when the film was released the critics were not impressed with her debut: In the New Yorker, David Denby said she was "strong, fast, relentless [but] not much of an actress," while Time's Richard Corliss called her "all kick and no charisma." Still, the film got mostly good reviews for what it is: a solid action film. Carano seemed on track to success, winning a role in Fast and Furios 6 (Justin Lin, 2013) and in the first two seasons of Lucasfilm's Star Wars spinoff series The Mandalorian. But then she got political, criticizing the use of face masks during the Covid crisis and supporting Donald Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, thus finding her mainstream career blocked. So a star wasn't born and a genre wasn't revitalized.
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| Michael Winslow in Alphabet City |
Cast: Vincent Spano, Michael Winslow, Kate Vernon, Jami Gertz, Zohra Lampert, Raymond Serra, Kenny Marino, Danny Jordano, Tom Mardirosian. Screenplay: Gregory K. Heller, Amos Poe. Cinematography: Oliver Wood. Production design: M. Nord Haggerty. Film editing: Graham Weinbren. Music: Nile Rodgers.
In 1984, a cop show called Miami Vice revolutionized its genre with hip music and lots of style, transforming the city where it was set into a place where even wickedness looked good. In the same year, director Amos Poe tried to do something similar for the gangster movie in New York's Lower East Side with a movie called Alphabet City. He cast a 20-something actor, Vincent Spano, as Johnny, a 19-year-old sharp-dressing factotum for the mob, and sent him cruising the city streets in a limited edition Pontiac Trans Am to the music of Nile Rodgers. The movie's streets are hosed-down and shiny and the city lights are haloed by a fog filter. Johnny has a wife/partner/companion named Angie (Kate Vernon), who does abstract expressionist paintings and tends to their infant daughter in the loft where they live. He cruises about, collecting from drug dealers like Lippy (Michael Winslow) and club owners who pay the mob protection. But then the mob boss wants Johnny to torch an apartment building, which is a problem because Johnny's sister, Sophia (Jami Gertz), and his mother (Zohra Lampert) live there. We learn that Sophia is a party girl and Mama spends her time ironing while her latest boyfriend snoozes on the sofa before the TV, and Johnny has some trouble persuading them to vacate. So he decides to quit the mob and tries to persuade Angie that they should take the baby and run. Naturally, the mob sends out hit men and Johnny has to deal with them. And that's pretty much it. Spano has real presence, and Winslow creates an amusingly quirky character for Lippy, but the clichés are as pervasive as the lens-created fog that blurs the streetlights. Alphabet City is worth watching only as an example of the high '80s style that MTV made ubiquitous, but if you want to see that the reruns of Miami Vice are more worth watching.
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| Tom Berenger in Fear City |
Cast: Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia, Melanie Griffith, Rossano Brazzi, Rae Dawn Chong, Joe Santos, Michael V. Gazzo, Jan Murray, Janet Julian, Daniel Faraldo, Maria Conchita Alonso, Ola Ray, John Foster. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: James Lemmo. Production design: Vincent Joseph Cresciman. Film editing: Jack W. Holmes, Anthony Redman. Music: Dick Halligan.
Abel Ferrara's style and ability to create an atmosphere almost manage to redeem the tawdry Fear City, but there's really no getting over the leaden familiarity of the story. Someone is mutilating and killing the dancers who work in New York City's strip clubs and the police, club owners, and managers of the women are unable to stop the carnage. Eventually, it falls to Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger), the co-owner of a talent agency that supplies the dancers, to search out the killer and deal with him. Rossi is a damaged man: an ex-boxer who killed a man in the ring and is tormented with guilt, but when the target becomes his ex-girlfriend Loretta (Melanie Griffith), he feels compelled to act. You can see from the start where the plot is going -- toward a showdown in a dark alley. It doesn't help that Rossi is at odds with the police officer in charge of the investigation, Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), who hates Italians: "There's nothing I hate more than guineas in Cadillacs," Wheeler says, watching Rossi get in his car. Ferrara can sometimes be thuddingly obvious in exposition: We know from flashbacks what the cause of Rossi's guilt and depression is, but just in case we don't get it Ferrara needlessly inserts a scene in which we see newspaper clippings about the opponent's coma and death. More time might have been spent developing the character of the killer, who is just a figure out of a nightmare. The acting in Fear City is mediocre and there's more exploitative nudity than necessary in the dance club scenes, but the movie undeniably holds your attention.
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| Ben Dickey and Alia Shawkat in Blaze |
Cast: Ben Dickey, Alia Shawkat, Charlie Sexton, Josh Hamilton, Lloyd Teddy Johnson Jr., Wyatt Russell, Jenn Lyon, Ritchie Montgomery, David Kallaway, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Jean Carlot, Alynda Segarra, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn, Sam Rockwell, Martin Bats Bradford. Screenplay: Ethan Hawke, Sybil Rosen, based on a book by Rosen. Cinematography: Steve Cosens. Production design: Thomas Hayek. Film editing: Jason Gourson.
You probably have to be deeper into outlaw country music than I am to fully appreciate Blaze. It's a familiar story: a promising musician whose life comes undone because of substance abuse and failure to manage their career wisely. This one is informed by the woman in the musician's life: The film is based on the memoir of Blaze Foley's sometime companion, Sybil Rosen, who co-wrote the screenplay with the director, Ethan Hawke. It's a solid biopic that stars an unknown actor, Ben Dickey, in the title role, with Alia Shawkat as Sybil. Foley was the kind of intensely personal songwriter whose music lends itself to a biopic -- almost shapes it, in fact -- and Hawke takes full advantage of it by presenting most of Foley's songs in performance scenes that blend into dramatic sequences. Dickey and Shawkat get good support from Charlie Sexton as Townes Van Zandt. There are also some cameo performances, including Kris Kristofferson in his final screen appearance as Foley's father, and an amusing turn by director Richard Linklater and actors Steve Zahn and Sam Rockwell as some oil millionaires who decide to get into the record business -- not really to Foley's benefit. Blaze is slowly paced and the narrative sometimes gets oblique, and the 129 minute run time betrays the slackness that often afflicts independent film, but on the whole it's a success and another landmark in Hawke's increasingly impressive career.