Def by Temptation (James Bond III, 1990)

Cynthia Bond in Def by Temptation

Cast: James Bond III, Kadeem Hardison, Cynthia Bond, Bill Nunn, Samuel L. Jackson, Minnie Gentry, Steven Van Cleef, John Canada Terrell, Melba Moore. Screenplay: James Bond III. Cinematography: Ernest R. Dickerson. Production design: David Carrington. Film editing: Brian O'Hara, Li-Shen Yu. Music: Paul Laurence. 

Def by Temptation overcomes its chief weaknesses -- a silly script and a miscast leading man -- to become good, gory fun, which shows how an ensemble working with the right director and producer can surmount even those obstacles. More to the point, the producer and director, James Bond III, overcomes his own weakness, because he's also the screenwriter and the leading man. The premise is that the devoutly religious Joel (Bond), who plans to become a "world-famous minister," puts himself in temptation's way by going to New York to see an old friend, known as "K" (Kadeem Hardison). K takes to a bar, where he falls for Temptation herself, a sultry seductress played with flair by Cynthia Bond, whom we see picking up men at the bar and bringing them to bloody ends. Realizing who and what she is, K joins forces with Dougy, a cop played by Bill Nunn, to rescue Joel, calling his grandmother (Minnie Gentry) to their aid. Hardison and Nunn bring the film to comic life, and they're aided by some very funny special effects, one of which involves a predatory television set surmounted by a caricature bust of Ronald Reagan. (Yeah, you have to see it to get it.) Unfortunately, there's also a lot of misplaced religiosity at work in Joel's battle with Temptation, and the R&B songs on the soundtrack sometimes don't work with what's on screen, so the movie goes tonally out of whack at times. It stays watchable even then, thanks to Ernest R. Dickerson's cinematography. Samuel L. Jackson has a small role in flashbacks as Joel's father, a minister in whose footsteps he hopes to follow. 

 

The River's Edge (Allan Dwan, 1957)

Debra Paget and Anthony Quinn in The River's Edge 

Cast: Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn, Debra Paget, Harry Carey Jr., Chubby Johnson, Byron Foulger, Tom McKee, Frank Gerstle. Screenplay: Harold Jacob Smith, James Leicester, based on a story by Smith. Cinematography: Harold Lipstein. Production design: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: James Leicester. Music: Louis Forbes. 

I don't know whether it says more about the movie or about me that I didn't realize until well into the story began to unfold that I had seen The River's Edge before, and then only after a couple of moments of déjà vu. At first I shook off the feeling by telling myself there was nothing original about the noirish story being told: a criminal seeking out his old girlfriend and persuading her and her husband to aid him in a new scheme. You'd think that the presence of two Oscar-winning actors and a sexy actress who was one of my boyhood crushes would have kept the movie fresher in my memory. But there's really nothing  memorable enough about the film to have made it stay with me, other than Debra Paget in shorts. Ray Milland and Anthony Quinn are predictably good in their performances, and there's some handsome scenery filmed along the California-Mexico border (sometimes not blending well with the fake outdoor sets shot in the studio). And Allan Dwan always directed as if the material were first-rate. But I have the feeling that I'll forget The River's Edge again, and maybe wind up watching it again some day. 

The Last American Hero (Lamont Johnson, 1973)

Jeff Bridges and Gary Busey in The Last American Hero

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Valerie Perrine, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Gary Busey, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ned Beatty, Art Lund, Ed Lauter, William Smith, Gregory Walcott, Tom Ligon, Ernie F. Orsatti, Erica Hagen, Jimmy Murphy, Lane Smith. Screenplay: William Roberts, based on articles by Tom Wolfe. Cinematography: George Silano. Art direction: Laurence G. Paull. Film editing: Robbie Roberts, Tom Rolf. Music: Charles Fox. 

All good actors act with their eyes, but I don't know anyone who is better at acting with the lower half of their face than Jeff Bridges. Which is to the good in The Last American Hero, because a lot of the film consists of Bridges as Junior Jackson behind the wheel of a race car, his eyes covered with goggles and only the thin slit of his mouth and the determined jut of his jaw visible. But Bridges is also called on to suggest desire (mouth softened, jaw less firmly set), defiance (mouth tense, jaw forward), and defeat (mouth downturned, jaw in retreat). This is not to say that the eyes as well as the voice don't come into play. Bridges has a tour de force scene in the middle of the picture when Junior steps into a record-your-voice booth (a fixture made obsolete by, among other things, the cell phone) to compose an oral letter home to his family, each person -- his disapproving mother (Geraldine Fitzgerald), his supportive brother (Gary Busey), and his incarcerated father (Art Lund) -- receiving an appropriate message as the play of emotions is reflected on his face. There's also a lovely aw-shucks moment when Junior, the hillbilly in the flatlands, deals with the desk clerk in a hotel; Bridges never lapses into caricature in the scene. This also seems to say that Bridges dominates the film, which isn't quite true, since the ensemble consists of not only such skilled character players as Fitzgerald, Busey, and Lund, but also Valerie Perrine as Marge, the racing groupie who adds Junior to her list of racing stars she has bedded, Ned Beatty as Junior's first promoter, and Ed Lauter as the promoter who tries to milk Junior of all the cash he can earn. The film's title comes from the profile of racer Junior Johnson that Tom Wolfe wrote for Esquire in 1965, but it feels a bit misleading. There's nothing particularly heroic about Junior Jackson. (The name and many of the biographical details in Wolfe's article were changed, though Johnson himself served as a consultant and technical advisor on the film.) It's less a biopic than an entertaining dip into an American subculture, somewhat glossy in presentation and memorable mostly for its performances. 

Flirt (Hal Hartley, 1995)

Bill Sage and Martin Donovan in Flirt

Cast: Bill Sage, Dwight Ewell, Miho Nikaido, Robert John Burke, Martin Donovan, Erica Gimpel, Michael Imperioli, Holt MckCallany, Harold Perrineau, Parker Posey, Karen Sillas, Sebastian Koch, Geno Lechner, Elina Löwensohn, Hal Hartley. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor.

Every experiment is valuable, even (maybe especially) the failed ones. Thomas Edison went through any number of potential filaments for his electric light bulb before finding the one that would provide sustained illumination, but he learned something from each attempt to work with cardboard or hemp or bamboo. So to dismiss Hal Hartley's Flirt as a failed experiment, as some have done, is to miss the point. Hartley is trying to show the primacy of context, to demonstrate that where and by whom something is said and done matters even in the most mundane of instances: a relationship on the verge of ending, for example. Flirt has a precursor in a scene in Hartley's 1992 film Surviving Desire, in which a young writer reads to her professor a passage from a story she's writing. The first time she reads it, the speaker in her story is a man talking about his relationship with a woman. The professor then asks her to read it again, but to change the speaker to a woman talking about her relationship with a man. The change is revelatory. In Flirt, Hartley tries a similar experiment but on a larger scale, not only sexual but cultural. He does the same scene, a couple at a crucial moment in their relationship, with the same dialogue, and with the same follow-up scenes -- an encounter at a public phone, the introduction and firing of a gun, a session in an emergency room, and an attempt by one partner to contact the other -- but he does it first with a straight white man in New York, then with a gay Black man in Berlin, and finally with a Japanese woman in Tokyo as the central character. The results are sometimes predictable: A gun brandished in New York is bound to elicit a different reaction from one brandished in Tokyo. In New York, no one seems to take much notice, so there's a scene in which the protagonist and the gun owner sit at a table in a bar and talk while one takes the bullets out of the gun and the other puts them back in again. But passersby in Tokyo are terrified at the site of the weapon and the police are called, precipitating a kind of chase. In the relationship of protagonist and lover, the changes in sexual identity have more inward results, exposing different vulnerabilities in each partner. Flirt probably has to be called a failed experiment because nothing like sustained illumination is achieved. But experiments are also often contaminated by the observer, so we have to take into account that the observer is Hartley, a filmmaker who has a distinct and familiar way of looking at things. 

Blanche Fury (Marc Allégret, 1948)

Valerie Hobson and Stewart Granger in Blanche Fury

Cast: Valerie Hobson, Stewart Granger, Michael Gough, Walter Fitzgerald, Maurice Denham, Sybille Bender, Allan Jeaves, Edward Lexy, Susanne Gibbs, Ernest Jay, Townsend Whitling, J.H. Roberts. Screenplay: Audrey Erskine-Lindop, Cecil McGivern, Hugh Mills, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Guy Green, Geoffrey Unsworth. Production design: John Bryan. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: Clifton Parker. 

Timidity is fatal in moviemaking, and Blanche Fury, whose very title promises turbulent emotions, is a timid movie. It failed at the box office, and its producer, Anthony Havelock-Allan, acknowledged that it didn't turn out the way he wanted, leading to his departure from the producing company, Cineguild, and its eventual collapse. It’s a story, involving as it does an ancient curse, that demands high passion and exquisite villainy, but it gets neither. The key failure is in the protagonists, Blanche Fury (Valerie Hobson) and Philip Thorn (Stewart Granger). They should be modeled on the Macbeths, the very byword for glamorous wickedness. She is an impoverished gentlewoman, née Blanche Fuller, from the wrong side of the family. He is the manager of the country estate of the Fury family, their own kin but from the wrong side of the blanket. Thorn has been scheming to be declared the legitimate heir to the estate, hiring a lawyer to track down any evidence that his father, Adam Fury, actually married his mother. Blanche comes to the estate to serve as governess to the daughter of Laurence Fury (Michael Gough), current heir to the estate and a widower. So you guessed it: Blanche is going to marry the insipid Laurence and fall in love with the virile Thorn, and the two will scheme to get their own hands on the estate. Except that in the portrayal of their schemes, the film goes out of its way to make Blanche and Thorn look better than they are, to justify their wicked ways. Blanche is shown struggling to put up with the harshness of her previous employer, an imperious dowager, and Thorn likewise suffers the abuse and indignity of becoming essentially a servant to a household he believes he should head. Blanche and Thorn should flame, or at least smolder, with passion, but Hobson and Granger strike only the feeblest of sparks, partly because the screenplay doesn't give them enough opportunity to ignite. Much of the film seems to be derived from better costume dramas; there is, for example, a death that comes straight out of Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939). There's also a lot of nonsense about marauding gypsies: The film's Roma are the stereotypical fortune tellers, trinket peddlers, and horse thieves. It has to be said that the movie is quite handsomely filmed in Technicolor by two eminent cinematographers, Guy Green, who did the interior scenes, and Geoffrey Unsworth, who shot the lovely exteriors in Staffordshire and Bedfordshire. If the story and the characters had the depth and color of its images, Blanche Fury might have been more than the routine costume drama it is. 

The Faculty (Robert Rodriguez, 1998)

Laura Harris, Shawn Hatosy, Josh Hartnett, Clea DuVall, Elijah Wood, and Jordana Brewster in The Faculty

Cast: Jordana Brewster, Clea DuVall, Laura Harris, Josh Hartnett, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, Piper Laurie, Christopher McDonald, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Patrick, Usher, Jon Stewart, Daniel von Bargen. Screenplay: Kevin Williamson, David Wechter, Bruce Kimmel. Cinematography: Enrique Chediak. Production design: Cary White. Film editing: Robert Rodriguez. Music: Marco Beltrami.

Two premises are key to The Faculty: that adolescents see adults in authority as alien figures, and that high school is an instrument for instilling social conformity. The former has been the stuff of movies since Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). The latter is in evidence today in the efforts of states like Florida and Texas to remake education along conservative ideological lines. Unfortunately, Kevin Williamson's screenplay and Robert Rodriguez's direction don't take either premise seriously enough to make more than a raucous but routine sci-fi/horror movie out of the material. The result is exactly as the Criterion Channel describes it: "The Breakfast Club meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers." John Hughes's 1985 movie put a Jock, a Brain, a Criminal, a Princess, and a Basket Case together in detention and explored the interaction of disparate high school stereotypes. The Faculty's misfit crew is a little more complex: Stan (Shawn Hatosy), the Jock, wants to quit the team, and Zeke (Josh Hartnett) is both Brain and Criminal: He concocts his own drug (unfortunately called "scat") in his lab, selling it out of the trunk of his car, and he has an off-the-charts IQ. Elijah Wood's Casey is bullied the way Brains typically are in teen movies, and Clea DuVall's Stokely is more of a goth-punk rebel than a Basket Case. Jordana Brewster's Delilah is an overachieving Princess, both editor of the school newspaper and captain of the cheerleading squad. They are joined by a New Girl, Marybeth Louise Hutchinson (Laura Harris), a transfer from Atlanta to their Ohio high school who comes complete with a somewhat cloying Southern accent. If The Faculty had kept its focus steadily on this group as they uncover the fact that their teachers have been taken over by an extraterrestrial organism, the movie would have had more coherence and suspense. Instead, it opens with the revelation that something is clearly causing the teachers and the principal to go mad and murderous. The principal (Bebe Neuwirth) is attacked in her office by the coach (Robert Patrick), and when she tries to escape, her way is blocked by a teacher, Mrs. Olson (Piper Laurie), who suddenly turns from meek to menacing. After missing work for a day or so, the principal returns as if nothing had happened. Meanwhile, other teachers have been showing personality changes that begin to spread into the student body. It's not long before the movie begins to invoke the other half of its inspiration, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978). Williamson, whose screenplay for Scream (1996) was full of allusions to other horror films, can't resist making the source for The Faculty explicit, so when his teenagers cite the movie themselves and use it as a guide to fighting the alien, The Faculty becomes too meta for its own good. There's enough to enjoy in the movie, including good performances by most of the cast. Hartnett is particularly good in the role of a guy who's embarrassed by his own intelligence. It's fun to see Jon Stewart, who plays a science teacher, in one of the acting performances he likes to make fun of. But when it comes to making good on its key premises and developing a real satiric edge, The Faculty has to be called a missed opportunity. 

Frontier Marshal (Allan Dwan, 1939)

Cesar Romero and Nancy Kelly in Frontier Marshal

Cast: Randolph Scott, Nancy Kelly, Cesar Romero, Binnie Barnes, John Carradine, Edward Norris, Eddie Foy Jr., Ward Bond, Lon Chaney Jr., Chris-Pin Martin, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay: Sam Hellman, based on a book by Stuart N. Lake. Cinematography: Charles G. Clarke. Art direction: Lewis H. Creber, Richard Day. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Samuel Kaylin, Charles Maxwell, David Raksin, Walter Scharf.

The title Frontier Marshal sounds like a generic Western, and it doesn't lie. It's about a stranger who comes to a lawless mining town and cleans it up with his fists and his guns. The stranger, played by Randolph Scott, is Wyatt Earp, and the movie is based on Stuart N. Lake's heavily fictionalized 1931 biography of Earp that established his legend as the man who cleaned up Tombstone by fighting it out with the bad guys at the OK Corral. So yes, you've seen it all before, in later and more celebrated films like John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946) and John Sturges's Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). Allan Dwan's film (from which Ford borrowed liberally) is a more modest affair. The famous gunfight in the movie  is almost over before it starts. Nor is Scott's Earp a particularly mythic figure; he even gets seriously beat up before he's able to seize authority in the town. If there's a mythic figure in Frontier Marshal it's Doc Halliday*, played with surprising charm and finesse by Cesar Romero. The character of Earp is also overshadowed by two women: Jerry (Binnie Barnes), a tough-as-nails dance hall hostess, and Sarah (Nancy Kelly), a nurse who has followed her former lover, Doc, to Tombstone, trying to save him from himself. Refreshingly, the two women are given significant agency in the movie, beyond just battling for Doc's affections. What distinguishes Dwan as a director is that he never seems to take for granted the material he's given to work with. Yes, Frontier Marshal is generic and predictable, but Dwan doesn't condescend to it: He gives the scenes snap and vigor, and he gets performances that are in some ways better than they're written. Barnes, for example, turns Jerry into a force to be reckoned with. It took me a moment to recognize her as the same actress who played the snooty Linda Cram in Holiday (George Cukor, 1938). Kelly's Sarah isn't the pallid schoolmarm played by Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, but a woman out to get her man. And if Romero, usually a lounge lizard type, ever gave a better performance I haven't seen it. I could have done with less of Eddie Foy Jr., clownishly playing his own father, and Chris-Pin Martin's milking of the stereotypical Chicano bartender role, but they keep the film lively. Scott is less memorable than the other players, but he provides a quiet stability to the film. 

Usually spelled "Holliday," but the alternate spelling was used, reportedly because of concern about litigation from the Holliday family. 

Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)

Ron O'Neal and Sheila Frazier in Super Fly

Cast: Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Sheila Frazier, Julius Harris, Charles McGregor, Sig Shore, Polly Niles, Yvonne Delaine. Screenplay: Phillip Fenty. Cinematography: James Signorelli. Costume design: Nate Adams. Film editing: Bob Brady. Music: Curtis Mayfield. 

I know why the Criterion Channel grouped Super Fly into its "'70s Car Movies" collection, because there's nothing more evocative of the milieu than the shots of Priest's tricked-out Cadillac Eldorado nosing its sharklike way through the streets of 1970s Manhattan. But it's a movie that transcends categorization, especially the "blaxploitation" one with which it has become synonymous. It's a portrait of an American subculture at a pivotal moment in history, when Black lives were moving out of physical and cultural ghettoization and into their still problematic place in the American mainstream. Gordon Parks Jr.'s film is rough-hewn and raw, sometimes awkwardly scripted and acted, but also darkly vital. It's a near-tragic story about a man's hope to be freed from the affluence of criminality, only to be thwarted by both the whites who don't want him to be free and those of his own kind who choose to remain exploited. Curtis Mayfield's songs tell the story of Youngblood Priest (Ron O'Neal) in their own way, operatically heightening the screenplay's narrative and the camera's images. And it has to be reiterated that Super Fly has a lot in common with a film from the same year, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Youngblood Priest and Michael Corleone share the same hopes and face the same cruel forces.

Amateur (Hal Hartley, 1994)

Martin Donovan and Elina Löwensohn in Amateur

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, Damian Young, Chuck Montgomery, Dave Simonds. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley, Jeffrey Taylor.

The protagonists of Hal Hartley's movies invariably have a secret past. The problem with Thomas (Martin Donovan) is that he isn't in on the secret. When we first see him he is lying on the cobblestones of an alley in New York City. Is he dead? That's the conclusion reached by the young woman who peers into the alley and cautiously approaches the body, extends a foot to prod it, and then inspects more closely. Then she disappears. She is Sofia Ludens (Elina Löwensohn), a porn star who thinks she has killed Thomas. After she's gone, he will awake with a start, pick himself up, and stagger out into the streets and into a cafe, where he meets Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), a former nun who writes pornographic stories for a living. He tells her he doesn't know who he is, that his past and even his name is a complete blank. So they set out together to solve the puzzle. And so goes the setup for Hartley's excursion into the tropes (not to say clichés) of the crime thriller. In addition to amnesia, there's also an international conspiracy of some sort, and even a MacGuffin: some floppy disks (which we are twice reminded, as we were so frequently in the early 1990s when they were a thing, are neither floppy nor disks) that contain shocking secrets. Thomas and Isabelle will team up with Sofia -- reluctantly on her part, since she was the one who had reason to try to kill him -- and go on the run from some hit men working for a crime boss who used to be Thomas's employer. Played straight, the story might be entertaining enough, but of course Hartley never plays anything straight. The performances are good, given that everyone has to work in Hartley's deadpan mode. Huppert slips with apparent ease into the punch-drunk milieu of his films, but she has already proved that she can play almost anything. The supporting cast is filled out with some now-familiar faces like Michael Imperioli, Parker Posey, and Tim Blake Nelson in bit parts. Amateur never transcends spoofery into significance, but why ask for that anyway?

Moss Rose (Gregory Ratoff, 1947)

Vincent Price and Ethel Barrymore in Moss Rose

Cast: Peggy Cummins, Victor Mature, Ethel Barrymore, Vincent Price, Margo Woode, George Zucco, Patricia Medina, Rhys Williams. Screenplay: Niven Busch, Jules Furthman, Tom Reed, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: Richard Day, Mark-Lee Kirk. Film editing: James B. Clark. Music: David Buttolph. 

Ethel was my favorite Barrymore, not so given to posing and scene-hogging as her brothers John and Lionel, and she's by far the best thing about Moss Rose. It's a somewhat rickety whodunit set in Victorian London, in which a pretty chorus girl  blackmails a wealthy man, but not for money. Instead, she wants to fulfill her dream of living like a fine lady. Peggy Cummins plays Belle Adair (née Rose Lynton), who sees Michael Drego (Victor Mature) coming out of the room of her friend Daisy Arrow (Margo Woode), a fellow lady of the chorus who lives in the same lodging house. When Belle enters Daisy's room, she finds her dead. But during the official inquiry, led by Police Inspector Clinner (a nice, silky performance by Vincent Price), Belle doesn't let on about seeing Drego. Instead, she seeks him out and presents him with her audacious (if improbable) demand: If he'll let her pretend to be a lady and be received in his home -- he lives in the family estate with his mother, Lady Margaret Drego (Barrymore) -- she'll keep mum about seeing him at the crime scene. The plan is complicated by the announcement of the impending marriage of Drego to the socially prominent Audrey Ashton (Patricia Medina). But somehow Drego is persuaded to go through with Belle's scheme, and he takes her home to meet his mother and, as it turns out, his fiancée. Belle drops her stage name and is introduced as Rose. Meanwhile, Clinner is still on the job of trying to find out who killed Daisy. It's a promising setup, but it's undone by questionable casting, slack direction, and confused writing. The beefy Mature is scarcely credible as an English gentleman, though his lack of an accent and his rough edges are explained by his being taken from his home as child and raised in Canada. Cummins, who was Irish, struggles with the cockney accent of Belle and the "proper" one of Rose, especially when she has to switch between the two. Gregory Ratoff, who was best known as a comic character actor, never distinguished himself as a director, despite numerous attempts. His best outing as director was the 1939 Intermezzo, which marked Ingrid Bergman's American debut and was produced by David O. Selznick, who loved directing his directors. The script for Moss Rose is marred by abrupt leaps and inconsistencies in point of view. It begins with Rose on a train, introducing the story in voiceover, and then flashes back to the events above, with her occasionally narrating what happened between scenes. But having established Rose's as the film's point of view, it sometimes breaks away to see things she couldn't have witnessed, like the scene in which Clinner questions Lady Margaret about moss roses -- a rose in a bible was left at the scene of Daisy's murder. Establishing Rose as the point of view also takes away some of the logic of the character and undermines the film's suspense: After all, if Drego is a murderer, and one so little concerned about being caught that he leaves obvious clues at the crime scene, shouldn't she be more worried about putting herself in harm's way by seeking him out and meeting him in secret?