dmayo-911-597432's Reviews

Poirot: The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb (1993)

Season 5, Episode 1

8/10

Good ingredients in the hands of master chefs

26 June 2016

This is an especially enjoyable Poirot episode, owing mainly to the perennial allure of ancient Egypt and the perennial charm of Miss Lemon as played by Pauline Moran.

Miss Lemon combines calm efficiency with quick-witted gameness, and shifts between chilly eyebrow-raising and melodramatic enthusiasm. She can get out of the office and become the detective's intrepid Girl Friday, venturing into dangerous quarters to coax information out of shady characters -- and succeed without turning a hair. Or she can get deep into some personal fad like spiritualism, as she does in this episode. Please note that Miss Lemon's delightfully eccentric personality, like nearly all other delightful touches in this series of Poirot dramatizations, is entirely the work of the actor, TV writer, and director. The Miss Lemon who appears in a few of the original stories is a nearly inanimate lump of efficiency. Agatha Christie wrote of her characters becoming real people to her, but that should be set down to great powers of autosuggestion. One would say no writer had been so successful with such lifeless characters, but that no writer has been so successful with any characters.

The vulnerability to superstition that we find in Miss Lemon echoes a sad social phenomenon of the years after World War I, continuing into the 1930s. Miss Lemon turns to the planchette (an automatic-writing device that evolved into the Ouija board) in hopes of communicating with the departed spirit of her beloved cat. After the carnage of the Great War virtually wiped a generation of young men out of history, 19th-century spiritualism had a new vogue as a resort of bereft parents and lovers. Those people may have been doomed to frustration or exploitation, but Miss Lemon gains release from her much lighter grief through the kindness of her employer. Though Poirot never falters in his rationality, he is capable of compassion for the rest of us.

The plot of this episode is patterned on the sensation following the opening of King Tut's tomb, when several people connected with the expedition died unexpectedly. Romanticists attributed the deaths to a curse, while realists pointed to such factors as blood poisoning. It's hardly a spoiler to note that in Poirot's world neither curses nor blood poisoning will lie at the very bottom of things. That's the way we like it, of course, and we have to be willing to pay for our pleasure by swallowing a highly implausible plot. As with many of these stories, it's unthinkable that an intelligent person would risk the gallows for such a string of long shots. So don't think.

For that matter, "Don't think" could be the guiding principle that makes Hugh Fraser's Captain Hastings a joy to watch. Where Miss Lemon believes intensely, Hastings simply falls in with any passing stream of logic or nonsense. Watch him in the planchette scene and try to keep a straight face. Surely this character's literary cousin is not Dr. Watson, but Bertie Wooster, who once overhears his valet Jeeves describing him as "an exceedingly pleasant and amiable young gentleman, but not intelligent. By no means intelligent. Mentally he is negligible—quite negligible."

As always, you can't go wrong by watching this episode for the cast. The mummy's-tomb atmospherics are a big bonus, and the 1930s-style model shots are fun to spot.

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Sh! The Octopus (1937)

5/10

Minor but memorable

22 June 2016

Warning: Spoilers

Critics who deign to notice this movie at all have nothing good to say about it, and what they do say runs to far fewer words than you're about to read if you bear with me. Reviewing a thing like this is for people who can see a glass as half full even when it's nearly bone dry. I am such a one.

Consider that the stars are Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins. Jenkins was an iconic supporting player: the tough-sounding but easygoing, nasal-voiced, weary-eyed New York working man or minor crook. His spirit lives on in the type, even for those who have somehow missed his own performances. However, a movie in which he's a star is bound to be small beer.

The other star, Hugh Herbert, is a study in the fleeting nature of fame. Once he must have had quite a strong presence in moviegoers' minds, for his unidentified caricature appears in a Disney cartoon, "Mother Goose Goes Hollywood" (1938), along with those of the Marx Brothers, Charles Laughton, W. C. Fields, and other enduring stars (but also others like himself who have not endured). Today, it's unlikely that anything about him would ring a bell with most non-buffs. He seems to exist not only in the past, but in a parallel past of secret fame. One would like to think that this fate was visited on him as punishment for his tedious trademark: saying "woo-woo" at crucial junctures.

The opening scene of Sh! The Octopus finds Herbert and Jenkins in their star vehicle, a police car, driving along a lonely country road on a stormy night. So you see, the glass is going to appear half full if only you're in the mood. This is a burlesque of spooky-house mysteries. It goes beyond parody -- well, beneath it -- and revels in zany riffs.

The ultimate setting, which we reach after a few more minutes on the country road, is a deserted lighthouse with as many sliding panels as one finds in the better sort of ancestral mansion. The riffs are played not only on the hackneyed situations of the genre, but also on the stock characters who turn up in it. These include the vulnerable but determined young woman with a missing inventor stepfather who screams just like Fay Wray (the young woman, not the stepfather) and the suave young man who may or may not be deceiving her.

Then there's the not-so-young woman with something to hide, the straitlaced but comforting old nanny, the gentle old salt, and the jeering old salt for good measure. The usual bumbling, bickering police detectives are played by the stars.

The metropolitan police are beleaguered by a crime network called the Octopus. The lighthouse is beleaguered by a real octopus. The missing stepfather is presumably of interest to the first of these. When asked who he is, the young woman promptly replies, "He's the inventor of a radium ray so powerful that anyone who controls it controls the world."

Though it's a stormy night and the lighthouse is on an island three miles from shore, characters (including the nanny) keep arriving with no apparent difficulty. Such blithe staginess, along with the assembly of types, gives this little film the feeling of an extended revue skit. For most of its length, it's only a mind-clearing diversion. Then, when a certain performance shifts into high gear, it becomes a night to remember. To say more about that would be spoiling too much.

As silly as this film is, it leaves us with something of value: a renewed understanding of what it means to be a journeyman actor. Even though we think we're watching plays or films intelligently, a well-executed type can tempt us to believe that the actor hasn't much else to offer. There's usually nothing to pull us back from that temptation. When characters in an Agatha Christie mystery reveal hidden identities, the revelations come as nothing more than new information about the same people. But here, where no semblance of reality is required, the actors can drop their types and take on utterly different personalities. Several do so before the story ends, and one of these is granted the chance for a bravura turn. You may never get it out of your head, but that's all right. It will make your head a better, more freakish place.

The five-star rating I've given this movie does not mean I'm dissatisfied with it. I'd call that a high mark for a minor romp. As part of a double feature, it's worth half the price of a ticket.

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Boychoir (2014)

6/10

It's still the same old story

10 November 2015

You're at the starting point of a walk through many movies (particularly this one and a certain immensely popular franchise) and still more works of Young Adult fiction. It can't contain any spoilers unless you were born yesterday. In that case, it may spoil the whole genre.

This should give you the general, not to say generic, idea. A largely orphaned 11-year-old boy with one or more unsympathetic parent figures is sent to a boarding school for children with a special gift. The school is located far out in the country, in a shadowy stone edifice of medieval design. All of the pupils are gifted, but our hero/surrogate is more gifted than the rest. The squabbling faculty includes a martinet, a mentor to our hero, and a revered Master. The Master, whose eyes may or may not twinkle, will become our hero's super-mentor and ace in the hole.

The pupils learn the arcana of their art in the classroom and practice it on their own till they can accomplish amazing feats. Among them our hero finds at least one amiable buddy, at least one garden-variety tormentor, and exactly one Aryan-looking arch rival whose malice is a bit thick. He gives the arch rival a well-deserved thrashing, but they do not become best friends afterward as in Young Adult fiction of an earlier era. In fact, our hero couldn't keep out of trouble if he tried (he seldom does), but it's all right because he's the most special child on the premises.

Now we jump briefly to another genre. It's the day of the big show, and the star is suddenly out of it. Our heroine (read hero, in the case of Boychoir) must fill in. She'll be all right, they tell her, though they're sweating bullets inside. She's got it in her, she knows the routine by heart. All she has to do is follow the maestro's eyes or the bouncing ball or something. She's going out there a kid, but she's got to come back a star. Yes, she'd blow it if this were only the third reel, but it's almost the end of the movie. So.

Now back to the first genre and the denouement of our hero's story. Through superior talent and a bit of learning, he has risen to every challenge. Even if he doesn't get a letter of recommendation from the Master (you'll just have to watch and see about that), we know he has been recognized as the greatest prodigy that ever passed through Hogw--, er, Boychoir School.

And that, unfortunately, seems to be what matters above all. In Boychoir, the protagonist's worth apparently increases in his father's eyes, as in those of the Master and the Headmistress, in proportion to his achievement. I agree with another reviewer, Stream-it, who comments, "The messages here seemed to be, very loosely, only those who become 'the best' can expect to receive the love of family and acceptance within their institution of choice. Didn't work for me." (Review title: "Entirely predictable...almost.")

The six stars that I've given to this film are mainly for the choral music, which is good as far as it goes, the photography, which is tasteful, and Kevin McHale's performance as Wooly, which is transparently right. Being among the few who haven't seen him in anything else, I don't know whether he's always the same or not. The four missing stars are for the narrative magic that wasn't there.

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Marple: Endless Night (2013)

Season 6, Episode 3

8/10

Forget Miss Marple and savor a darker Christie

31 December 2014

As another reviewer has suggested, it's best to watch the productions in this series simply as pieces of television, not as adaptations of the Miss Marple stories. As soon as one makes that shift, "Endless Night" begins to reward attention.

The Wikipedia article on the original story tells us that it was a critical success and one of Christie's own favorites among her works. It adds that the Marple adaptation for television was fairly faithful to the original. The dark, unsentimental, humorless tone of the TV production seems consistent with that view, even as it dashes the expectations raised by the rest of the Marple series.

If the story seems to move slowly, that's because it moves at the pace of serious drama, accumulating moral mass and developing character in a degree that Christie's light mystery puzzles lack. It does not leave us amused with murder. If anything, it leaves us thirsting for entertainment that will take away the bitter taste of a more honest response.

No attempt will be made here to summarize the plot or introduce the characters, with the exception of Miss Marple herself. Her insertion into this non-Marple story can be counted as two faults and two virtues. On the negative side, it slights the main character of the series and disturbs the mood of this particular story. On the positive side, it enabled the staff assembled for the Marple project to do the story in the first place. No Miss Marple, no production. It also has the interesting effect of casting a new light on Julia McKenzie's running performance in the series. The performance itself is consistent. But whereas McKenzie's earnest Jane Marple usually seems to represent genuine humanity among the denizens of a cartoon world, here she seems an allegorical figure coming and going in the real world: a Fury in human form or a Good Witch out of a fairy tale. The acting techniques that have always produced a refreshingly realistic effect now suggest the pat pseudo-realism of a dream. Instead of being a rock of sanity, Miss Marple becomes a rising tide of maddening truth.

However, the greatest virtue of this production is its visual quality. It achieves an unusually convincing period look and sometimes, especially in the interior shots of people interacting, recalls the plausible 1950s atmosphere of George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). At all events, it's a visual treat: comprehensively designed, directed, and photographed with superb taste. Many High Definition TV dramas, including latter-day Marple and Poirot productions, aggressively appeal to the eyes like animated coffee-table books. In contrast, "Endless Night" shuns gratuitously stunning tableaux in favor of a more deliberate, selective artistry in the use of color and tone. Yes, these images are often suitable for framing, but they function first of all as an appropriate narrative medium.

If you're willing to endure the unrelieved moral gloom of the story more than once, "Endless Night" does reward multiple viewings.

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Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971)

2/10

Watch it (if you must) for the faces

5 October 2014

This is really just a live-action cartoon with the same ultra-minimal entertainment value as the thinnest material on Cartoon Network (in case you're in a part of the world where that's available). It may help you get through a night when you have to stay up and have absolutely no other way to pass the time.

The gags are so witless and so wearily timed that when the payoff comes, you may literally think, "Is that it?" Dial your expectations 'way down -- and then double down, just to be on the safe side -- before trying to let this entertain you.

Still, barren though it is, I didn't find SYLG downright annoying (not having paid to see it, but caught it on TV). Once I realized that I was not going to be laughing, I turned my attention to the cavalcade of familiar faces. The cast is full of actors great and small (well, medium-sized and small) riding into the sunset of active careers. Here's a partial list:

Joan Blondell, whose Hollywood credits do make "medium-sized" seem slighting. The definitive wisecracking blonde of variable respectability but constantly good heart who, it seems, can never be rich or thin. Her best moment of a great many may be in Topper Returns (1941).

Marie Windsor, the definitive tough dame of film noir. Catch her in Force of Evil (1948) and The Narrow Margin (1952).

John Dehner, who played Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel on the radio and later turned up everywhere on television. His voice was so authoritative and his presence so strong that I always thought of him as a star making a cameo appearance.

Ellen Corby, who worked a corner in mousy little women -- often blighted or crusty, occasionally endearing, sometimes incomparably sinister. She has her moment in films as different as It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vertigo (1958), and through nearly five decades of American television.

Herb Vigran, the ultimate example of the ubiquitous bit player whose name you don't know. You'd recognize him, though, by the heavy eyebrows, the comfortable paunch, the non-threatening height and receding hairline, and above all the complacent nasal baritone of the guy next door (if your door be in the Midwestern US). Have a look at his credits on IMDb when you're in the mood for a LOT of scrolling.

Kathleen Freeman, hearty and apple-cheeked, often cast as Swedes or other blonde ethnics but also in many general supporting parts where her character either requires respect or fails to give it. You may remember her as the elocution teacher in Singin' in the Rain ("I cahhhhn't stand him").

Willis Bouchey, another actor with an authoritative voice who seems always to have been white-haired and recreating a real-life career as a judge, doctor, businessman, military officer, or politician. When he's not crooked, he's the soul of integrity.

Dub Taylor, who began life in Virginia and, if anything, became more Southern after that. From his Hollywood debut as an amiable Alabaman in You Can't Take It with You (1938), he was the quintessential Southerner or other rustic who is never at a loss for words, always overflowing with the rural idiom though not always with the milk of human kindness. In the age of television, he blended so naturally into the world of The Andy Griffith Show that he could turn up as various characters.

Several actors returning from the earlier Support Your Local Sheriff: Harry Morgan, Jack Elam, Henry Jones, and Walter Burke, as well as Freeman and Bouchey (above): a core of supporting players with centuries of constant work in film and television among them. Of course, there's also the star, James Garner.

The fact that so many of the same actors appear in both a good comedy and a very poor attempt at comedy along the same lines serves to remind us that actors can't do much to strengthen a weak script. True, Walter Huston said, "Hell, I ain't paid to make good lines sound good. I'm paid to make bad lines sound good." But even stars can't make a whole movie sound or look much better than it is. Supporting players who specialize in types are limited to bringing those types to work and making us associate the inferior movie at hand with the better ones we've seen them in.

That, for me, was the only pleasure to be had in watching Support Your Local Gunfighter: watching experienced actors do a job with their usual competence and apparent good cheer, all digging together toward the mother lode of paychecks for everyone.

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Columbo: How to Dial a Murder (1978)

Season 7, Episode 4

9/10

A smooth surface and a turbulent undercurrent

25 June 2014

Warning: Spoilers

You'll know who the murderer is, of course, but you might rather not know much about his motivation and character in advance. Hence the spoiler alert.

"How To Dial a Murder" is one of the last entries in the original Columbo series, but it's driven by unflagging creative energy. To begin with, it's a pleasure to look at. The villain's home, which provides the main setting, is built on a wooded hillside in what must be the greatest concentration of leafy, moist-looking greenery in Southern California. The house itself shows how money in the service of good taste can produce, not mere opulence, but an opulent coziness. It seems designed as a retreat for the weary soul. As the story progresses, we learn how weary that soul must be under the cross it has to bear.

Eric Mason (Nicol Williamson), our star villain for the nonce, is a self-help guru riding the crest of that wave in 1970s California. He struts and frets his hour upon the stage of a great hall that's wired to supply him with running feedback on the responses of his listeners, which he then uses to bully them into ever greater vulnerability. They have come to him to learn self-mastery. Lesson 1, it seems, is to endure being mastered by the teacher. Mason strips them of everything but physical garments while teaching by example just how overpowering a personality can become.

The possessor of such mental muscle, you will say, was cut out to be lord and master to his wife (now deceased). Alas, no. Far from kneeling before her husband, she had taken to assuming positions no less compromising with his chief assistant. Mason, bless his prophetic soul, knew that he was a cuckold, perhaps having heard it whispered by the ghost of an overbearing father. We don't see that part. Now, at any rate, the unfaithful wife is dead, the brakes of her car having given out at an awkward moment. All that remains is the destruction of the other man, not only to satisfy Mason's hunger for vengeance, which is evidently great indeed, but also (we can assume) to silence one who knows the awful truth about him: that his career as a teacher of self-confidence has been a career of denial; his own self-confidence, a front built to conceal a painful sense of inadequacy.

Herein lies the brilliant premise of the episode. After nearly seven seasons of villains whose self-confidence is never in doubt, the makers of Columbo now take that very type as their theme and open up one specimen of it to reveal a complex inner mechanism. Here, the villain does not merely live the type, he makes his living at it. He's not just another privileged Southern Californian, but the embodiment of the privileged Southern California subculture. To the extent that his dominant persona exceeds what we've seen before in this series, the reality falls tragically short. His hobby, collecting movie memorabilia, gives this episode more than just the usual richness of texture. Nearby Hollywood, with its engines of make-believe, is the true center of gravity in Mason's life. He emulates Hollywood, both in his dazzling charlatanism and in his own dim existence behind a façade. It's in a disused movie village, a ghost of a ghost town, that he trains his two Doberman Pinschers to become murder weapons.

Unlike most episodes of Columbo, this one keeps back all but the barest intimation of the motive for a while after the crime has been committed. Then we see evidence of the adultery that has been alluded to. And then Williamson, in concert with the writer and director, takes us further into Mason's world. Scene by scene, we approach the confirmation of the anguish and fear that have eaten him hollow while hardening his exterior. This outwardly masterful man is inwardly intimidated by men and women alike. His household includes a troubled but attractive young woman, played by Kim Cattrall, who has been taken in to receive special care. The very fact that Mrs. Mason had consented to live with such an arrangement should have tipped us off at once that her husband's love life was of no consequence to her and probably of none to him. The truth comes to the surface one stormy night when a nervously sweating Mason, sitting alone with the young woman on a bed, explains his passivity toward her by saying he controls his own space. It's about the last time his professional vocabulary will serve him before he applies it admiringly to Columbo in the closing scene.

Mason continues to put up a brave front, but Williamson's performance signals that the tide has turned within this character. As the force of his self-made personality ebbs, so does the strain of maintaining it. Instead of dramatically breaking down, as such a character might have been made to do, he gradually settles down. All his charms having been overthrown, what strength he has is his own, which is a faint one. Psychological power recedes. A rump of id remains to make a desperate last stand, but then the game is up and the false master mildly submits to the true one.

The murder scheme in this episode may be a bit too audacious in conception and reckless in execution, but those faults are consistent with Mason's headlong career through a threatening world. Anyway, the scheme's not the thing, here. The play is. Character writing and character acting, images and music, surface and undercurrent -- these are the things that come together to make "How To Dial a Murder" highly satisfying.

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The Ladykillers (1955)

9/10

A quiet riot, every morbid step of the way

25 May 2014

The Ladykillers (1955) is among the last of the Ealing comedies, but it sparkles with the same quality of writing and acting as the earlier ones. As for ingenuity of plot construction, it rivals The Lavender Hill Mob and runs well ahead of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

A "professor" with an unctuously courtly manner and an insane gleam in his eyes (Alec Guinness) takes a room in the home of a thoroughly innocent little old lady (Katie Johnson). Soon, several other men arrive with musical instruments to join the professor in the cultivated pastime of playing classical music (the same Boccherini quintet, over and over) in his room. Unknown to the landlady, the soothing music that emanates from behind the door is coming from a record while the five men, an assortment of criminal types, lay plans for a heist. What becomes of the plans, the gang, the lady, and the money must be seen to be believed -- well, not believed, but gladly swallowed to the last drop.

All departments are in good hands, but Herbert Lom very nearly steals the show as a self-consciously "professional" crook whose dread of being given away by amateurs clashes oddly with his own display of ultra-sinister mannerisms and his stunning Gangster Chic wardrobe.

If you have an ear for dialogue and an eye for comic timing, those parts of your anatomy will not be wasted on The Ladykillers.

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Columbo: Old Fashioned Murder (1976)

Season 6, Episode 2

5/10

More nay than yea

12 May 2014

It seems that Columbo fans are pretty evenly and clearly divided in their opinions of this episode, with some ranking it among the best and others among the worst. Without taking pleasure in joining the naysayers, I really must.

It's one of those leaden-footed episodes in which the writing and acting seem to grope for the qualities that usually add up to success in a Columbo piece -- and to grope halfheartedly, at that. The bellwether is the dialog given to Falk himself, which shows a fossilized second-hand understanding of Columboese. The other actors, too, seem to be reciting generic lines and loathing themselves for it. The usual sidelights -- the highly individualized young partner, the comical misadventures in the course of the investigation, and so on -- fall flat in slow motion.

Tim O'Connor, who was a competent actor, must have been badly directed here. He speaks in a clipped half-British accent that's probably intended to suggest a refined fussbudget but only suggests the hazy notions of characterization found in amateur theatricals. It also clashes with the accents of the other members of the character's family, each of which is unique. Joyce Van Patten speaks in a whiny all-American twang (hold the culture war, folks, I'm from a whiny part of the US myself). Jeannie Berlin sounds thoroughly street-smart. Celeste Holm, who comes closest to sounding as if she might be related to O'Connor's character, nails Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Indeed, Holm's deliberately silly performance is the best thing about this inadvertently silly episode.

There is a temptation to call "Old Fashioned Murder" soap opera, with its dim atmosphere and its emotionally drowning central character (and with O'Connor in the cast), but that would be a slight to a genre that is often well done in its way. This is just a casual swing through soap opera territory.

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Ministry of Fear (1944)

7/10

Accent on thrills, not fear

20 December 2013

Ministry of Fear is fun. It's lighter and less moody than one would expect from the premise of a man just out of a mental hospital being pursued by sinister forces, or from the knowledge that it was directed by Fritz Lang and based on a novel by Graham Greene. It certainly is not film noir, though Universal marketed the VHS release under that rubric.

In both spirit and look, Ministry of Fear resembles the war-aware Sherlock Holmes series that Universal was putting out at the time. If you, like me, have a taste for that bracing brew of riddles, perils, improbabilities, and good manners, you should enjoy this. You can even look forward to seeing some familiar faces from the casts of the Holmes films.

One day after watching Ministry of Fear for the first time, I can't remember a single exterior shot that seems to have been taken outdoors. There may be some, but the impression that remains is that the film was shot entirely under shelter, just in case the Nazis brought the Blitz to California. This dim, artificial "interior world" setting works in a casual way to achieve a dream-like quality. However, we never get the deliberately nightmarish artistic effects that made Lang's reputation. Promising scenes in a séance parlor or a fortune-teller's tent are developed only enough for narrative purposes, not for atmospheric ones. The resulting narrative is always engaging, but it never becomes involving. It doesn't systematically draw us into a labyrinth of intrigue like Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent or Norman Foster's Journey into Fear, but entertains us with a string of incidents. It's as if Lang were skipping stones on a pond for our amusement instead of daring us to go in for a midnight swim.

That all sounds negative, but it simply means that Ministry of Fear succeeds in its mission: to show us a good time if we're prepared to have one. The tone is set by the casting of Ray Milland in the lead. Milland is a personal favorite among film protagonists, an everyman who enables everyboys to believe (however vainly) that they can grow up to be big, handsome, unmistakably well-bred, and equal to any challenge without selling their boyish, fun-loving souls. Milland had a maturely magisterial look about the eyes even in his youth; and yet even in later years, when he was the archetype of the self-possessed patrician, he seemed to delight in rolling those eyes or smiling with mischievous glee. His kind of everyman is an inverted, self-made kind. He might be, say, a younger son of a baronet: fully equipped with social graces and education, but unencumbered with responsibilities, appearances, or an embarrassing amount of money. We often find him dislocated from the well-ordered world that he was apparently born to, but destined to settle back into it when his high spirits have carried him through some danger. However saturnine he may look in a publicity still, he'll probably take us on a lark when the projector starts whirring. And so he does in Ministry of Fear.

The plot? Well, it's about a man just out of a mental hospital being pursued by sinister forces. He also pursues them in return. Along the way, he meets a young woman played by Marjorie Reynolds. When she starts to speak, it may seem for a moment that she's doing an awful British accent, but it turns out to be a tolerable German one. She plays a refugee from Austria who is running a charitable organization with her brother. What becomes of her, the brother, the private detective who serves as the hero's funny sidekick, or villain Dan Duryea (who supplies the awful British accent), must remain shrouded in deepest mystery until you see the film. When you do, please remember that Fritz Lang had to eat like everybody else, and just sit back while he entertains you.

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The Juror (1996)

4/10

Essentially a fantasy with a memorable performance

22 November 2013

The protagonist of The Juror is an artist and single mother who serves on the jury in the murder trial of a mafia chieftain. Her antagonist is a man who briefly seems cut out to provide romantic interest and heroics to a conventional thriller but soon reveals himself (so soon that this can hardly be a spoiler) to be anything but a hero. This character, played by Alec Baldwin, is known to us only as The Teacher. The juror of the title is Annie Laird (Demi Moore).

It seems that The Teacher is not only a hit-man for the boss on trial but also somewhat of a power behind the throne, though we get this information more from claims made by other mafiosi than from what we see of his interaction with them. Events give the impression that he's an awe-inspiring loose cannon rather than an established mover and shaker. At any rate, he presses Laird to swing a "not guilty" verdict in the jury room and threatens to kill her son if she doesn't.

As someone has pointed out on the Message Board, it's odd that the jury is not sequestered in a trial of this kind. That's not so much a hole in the plot as a hole containing the entire plot within its confines. In reality, the story would have to center on The Teacher's ingenious way of getting at the juror; in the film, all it takes is a little stalking and then a pass.

This film needs to be seen (if seen at all) as a kind of fantasy: an extreme parable of predatory male behavior in which the male combines almost superhuman powers of attraction and domination with downright inhuman aims and impulses. Even when Laird knows the worst about The Teacher and intends to destroy him, we see that she has to struggle against the effect of his caress the way Professor Van Helsing struggles against the vampire's gaze in Dracula.

There are two distinctly satisfying things about The Juror. One is a well-judged final sequence that distills the mood of the film by transposing the action to a setting full of symbolic imagery, unaccustomed color, and deepened contrasts of light and shadow. The other is Baldwin's performance. His Teacher exemplifies the paradoxical psychotic -- youthful, athletically handsome, suggestive of intelligence and sociability; agelessly evil, grotesque, savagely cunning, disliked in his own circle. This is no mere anti-hero or rogue, but a repellent loser who nevertheless draws all the other characters, the story, and the viewer into a vortex centered on himself. It's a noteworthy acting accomplishment in an unusual category: the star villain.

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Cinema Paradiso (1988)

6/10

Charming details don't add up to a great film

14 September 2013

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It would be best to see this film without knowing how warmly it was welcomed by critics and viewers at the time, or how many people still take it to their hearts. It does hold many charms in its details, but when it tries to give us a story of Life and Love it becomes banal and contrived. It also takes an oddly careless approach to the aging of its characters.

Nuovo Cinema Paradiso opens with a framing story in which a middle-aged man hears that someone named Alfredo has died in his hometown and begins recalling his childhood. In the flashbacks that form the main body of the film, the setting is a town in Sicily in the decade following World War II. A small boy is irresistibly drawn to the local cinema, a world of enchantment, and to its projection booth, the heart of that world. He befriends the projectionist, Alfredo. Alfredo discourages the boy, Toto, from following in his footsteps as a projectionist and eventually encourages him to pursue his love of movies on a grander scale. We're soon prepared to learn that the grown Toto who is recollecting these things has become a famous director.

In the first phase of the flashbacks, we follow little Toto in his childish peccadilloes while following the community in its avid response to movie magic (a funny exception being the gritty social realism of post-war Italian cinema, which proves as impenetrable to Sicilians as to much of the world beyond). This phase ends with the cinema destroyed by fire and Alfredo rescued by Toto but blinded for life.

The Toto of the second phase is apparently in his late teens, perhaps twenty by the end of the flashback. Childish peccadilloes have given way to amateur film-making, running the projector at the rebuilt cinema, and love at first sight with a girl whose social position poses an obstacle -- in effect, a princess. As always, the life of the community and that of the film are centered on the shared joys of escape in a darkened cinema. Toto's personal life is disrupted by a period of military training, after which he finds that he can't pick up where he left off. He loses touch with Elena, his love, who has moved away. Finally, he takes Alfredo's advice and leaves town himself to make his way in the world.

Very well, but it's unbelievable that he then absolutely neglects his mother for thirty years, even to the point of not returning her phone calls, although they were on good terms when he left. The only reason seems to be that the film requires a complete break with home so that the middle-aged Toto can feel he's stepping into a past world when he returns for Alfredo's funeral. Still more unbelievable is the casting of characters at different ages. The twentyish Toto is distinctly short, but the fiftyish Toto towers over everyone else in the funeral procession. Conversely, his mother changes from a tall young woman to a tiny old one. Then there is the aging of characters who are played by the same actors throughout. Alfredo's wife, who was middle-aged in the first place, only turns gray-haired and gray-faced while the transformation (by casting) of Toto's younger mother rivals that of the queen in Snow White. Indeed, slapping gray paint on actors -- while removing an obvious hairpiece from one -- is all the movie magic Tornatore offers in the framing story. Is he trying to tell us that he has decided to wash his hands of film-making as a labor of love?

The many delightful moments in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso are really just so many vignettes strung together in the abrupt, sometimes bewildering manner of the 1980s. To the extent that these moments achieve a unified effect, they suggest the benign human comedy of Rene Clair. Yet they are mixed with stink-bombs of bad taste that would have puzzled Clair as to this director's intent. That, too, is a mark of the 1980s.

It may be best to look for the appeal of this film in the ways in which it differs from most other films of the 1980s and many since. It does come down on the side of benign human comedy. It does cherish the magic of Golden Age film-making, even as that magic slips through its fingers. It does become an oasis of entertainment if you come upon it in a personal desert of dissatisfaction with films generally. The trouble is that if you have had the good fortune to drink from the springs of Rene Clair and other masters, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso turns out to be a mirage.

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Frequency (2000)

8/10

Superior time-warp story

6 April 2013

This addition to the long list of time-warp fantasies is better than most in two ways:

First, it stays focused on its preternatural premise. Instead of waiting for the viewer to raise the inevitable questions about such a premise, it proceeds to raise them and supply its own answers in an accelerating whirl of complications until most of us have no choice but to suspend disbelief and follow the filmmakers' lead. In this devotion to the theme of revealed fate, it somewhat resembles Rene Clair's "It Happened Tomorrow."

Second, it differs from most fantasies of this kind in quickly eliminating the chance that reality will be restored to its original state in the end. It's not telling too much to mention that there is no power of time travel here, no way of looping back and resetting events. Events can only move forward. Knowing this, we watch all the more raptly to see how the characters will manage. There's no need to become a believer in time-warp theory. The narrative maze is all that really matters.

Unlike "It Happened Tomorrow," "Frequency" is not a comedy. It may have structural elements of farce, but the substance is a combination of grim suspense and touching personal drama. Again unlike "It Happened Tomorrow," this is not a classic. It's ultimately banal entertainment with a common problem: confusion about the place it will occupy on the movie-viewer's menu. It ought to fit neatly into the category of civilized family-oriented melodrama, but parents who remember how things look to a small child will probably want theirs to be spared seeing the uglier moments in this film. Those moments are not many or extreme, but they're enough to compromise the position of "Frequency" as fare for absolutely the whole family. Still, think of it as appealing to young adults, however you may construe that term, and you won't be far wrong.

"Frequency" is worth seeing once in any case, and more than once if you really must understand how the plot ticks.

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Somewhere in Time (1980)

6/10

A nice starting point for lovers of romance

16 December 2012

This movie is amiable and civilized. I've watched it twice and will watch it again. Still, this movie is devoid of cinematic merit. It's an example of the creative and technical doldrums that Hollywood was in around 1980.

It's also highly derivative, which is one of the fun things about it. We can enjoy catching faint echoes of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Red Shoes, It Happened Tomorrow, and other films -- if we've seen them. If we haven't, we're the more likely to join the throng who find this one to be their favorite.

Many of the minor performances and directorial touches here hint at the happily farcical spirit of Rene Clair's It Happened Tomorrow, but they don't set the tone of the movie. John Barry's music hints at Bernard Herrmann's ravishing score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, but it doesn't double and treble the effectiveness of the movie as that score did. Christopher Plummer's role as a possessive manager/impresario hints at the central tension of The Red Shoes, but in this movie tension doesn't stand a chance.

Ironically, the weakest aspect of Somewhere in Time is the one that seems, after the love story itself, to be the most satisfactory to its devoted fans: the creation of an enchanted period atmosphere. One big problem is that the interior lighting is too even and generally too bright, as in many films of the time. Another is the color process. Hollywood had abandoned dye-transfer Technicolor but had not yet found satisfactorily rich alternatives, and the result was a lot of beige pictures. In this one, the filmmakers have made matters worse by choosing shades of brown or yellow for nearly everything but the rubber ball. On top of all that, the big set-piece idyll on the lawn where the lovers stroll along in a golden haze (a hint of Elvira Madigan) is shot through a filter so golden and so hazy that the scene looks like a washed-out photograph. Yet it doesn't look like an old one.

Nothing looks old. Nothing seems to belong to another time, even when that time was current. The portrait photo of Elise doesn't begin to look like a picture taken in 1912, either in original quality or in state of preservation. When Richard gazes at it, there's no sense of yearning across time. Little things like the peanut machine look as if they had been whipped up to give a general impression of the real thing, like props for a school play. And everything is spanking-new. It seems that all objects in the world of 1912 were freshly minted in 1912; nothing had been around awhile. That would be all right in a farce like It Happened Tomorrow. Here, it's one more impediment to achieving the poetic texture or the sense of having been swept through time which the romantic story demands.

But, yes, Somewhere in Time is amiable and civilized. It's a nice starting point for collecting favorite movies. If you feel that it's the greatest romance ever made or the best movie you've ever seen, you may have some pleasant discoveries in store for you. Please do enjoy watching this again, as I will. But please also go back in time before 1980 -- back and back -- and see what else there is to see.

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Poirot (1989–2013)

10/10

Better than Dame Agatha deserves

29 May 2012

Those who would like to judge whether Agatha Christie is really the greatest of mystery writers should not rely on these television adaptations. They are indeed great. The problem is that many of the stories have been heavily reworked and thereby improved. Just a few examples are "The Million Dollar Bond Robbery," "The Kidnapped Prime Minister," "The Adventure of the Western Star," and "The Adventure of the Cheap Flat." In that last, the London dive and its delightfully degenerate manager are among several elements created out of whole cloth for the television audience. What is more important, Christie's plots often need work before they can be plausibly presented on the screen in a real-world setting.

Also, please bear in mind that even the most two-dimensional characters in fiction gain a definite materiality when embodied by actors. Christie's characters are notoriously flat. Hercule Poirot is a bundle of quirks without a trace of personality -- a far cry from the Poirot we love to watch in the person of David Suchet. The other characters, too, are brilliantly created by the cast, not by Christie.

On the TV screen, these stories and the Granada productions of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett are about equally satisfying. Some people find the Poirot series more enjoyable. Please remember, though, that most of the Holmes entries (not all) are very faithful to the original stories. To be as good as they are, they did not need to be "punched up" by the TV people. Nor do those actors who have played Holmes and Watson over the years need to inspire them with a semblance of reality; they need to interpret characters so real that many people have mistaken them for historical personages.

Finally, one of the great pleasures of watching the Poirot productions is the enjoyment of period style -- the furnishings, the clothes, the architecture. Unfortunately, Christie gives us neither style nor mood in the original stories. She sets forth her puzzle in prose that is usually unappealing and sometimes downright clumsy. She deploys a large number of hypothetical people like the tokens in a board game and sprinkles clues, motives, secrets of birth, feats of impersonation, and irrelevant crimes more thickly than they could ever exist outside of a comic-book world. At last she decrees the solution to the puzzle and collects her pay as the Queen of Crime. Looking back over what we've read, we realize that storytelling was not part of the bargain. It was left to this TV cast and production staff to give us a richly satisfying experience, and they have succeeded wonderfully.

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Son of Dracula (1943)

8/10

Great fun on its own terms

4 May 2012

This entry in the Dracula canon benefits from good photography and from solid though modest production values. That very modesty makes for just the cozy kind of world where we can join the characters in taking the vampire nonsense seriously: a dream world with the basic trappings and manners of reality, or a kid's world where reality and dreams are tentatively on the same footing. Imagine a supernatural Our Town, remembering that Frank Craven (the story-linking doctor, here) made his mark as the Stage Manager in that play. Or imagine The Andy Griffith Show with Gothic horror in place of comedy but the same sense of community. In fact, there are shots in which Robert Paige bears a striking resemblance to Jim Nabors.

I think the idea of transposing the Dracula legend to the American South was an inspired one. As a native of the region myself (but Andy Griffith's North Carolina, not Louisiana), I can't help feeling that it makes a good destination for a decadent aristocrat who has to flee his own land but still needs an environment of shadows and superstition and the freedom of action that comes with social remoteness.

Finally, Son of Dracula gains a touch of dreamlike incongruity from the expressionist casting practices of Hollywood in the Golden Age. Characters are matched with actors according to notions of type that sweep all other considerations aside, so that you get, for example, an urban Irish-American police-chief type as the sheriff here. Indeed the weirdest thing about Son of Dracula is that, although it's set in the Deep South, the only character apart from the servants who sounds remotely like a Southerner is the Transylvanian count! It's a strong cast, though -- on its own terms.

And it's on the movie's own terms that I enjoy losing myself in it again and again.

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