SEPTEMBER MOVIES


JULES DASSIN FILM FESTIVAL

+ NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950) – Director Jules Dassin fled to England with the blacklist cold on his trail and he got to make this classic along the way. Richard Widmark is quite effective as the nightclub tout, petty crook, big dreamer hoping to make his fortune one way or the other. Gene Tierney is underutilized as his girlfriend. The rest of the cast is mostly British and therefore above average. There is nothing like the time period when men are chasing each other through allies wearing suits, ties and hard sole shoes. The DVD features a comparison of the British and American versions which ran different lengths and had different musical scores. The DVD also has Jules Dassin explaining the circumstances of making the film saying that he didn’t know he was making a film noir and didn’t even know the term until years later when he was making films in France. Dassin comes off as gentle old man and his explanation of the blacklist leaves out the part where he was an actual communist.

+ RIFIFI (1955) – Jules Dassin hops over to France for this heist film that Dassin insists wasn’t influenced by THE ASPHALT JUNGLE. Jean Servais (So that old Cubs catcher was French) stars as Tony Stephanos a thief just released from jail and isn’t ready to return. But then some dame lets him down and he says what the hell, let’s try one more caper. Joined by 3 companions, Stephanos comes up with a brilliant plan to knock over a jeweler in the middle of night. Everything goes well, but. . . This is a well done film that moves so well you forget the subtitles and focus on action. The theft itself is intricate and mostly silent. Dassin plays one of the thieves and does an apt job of direction.

NEVER ON SUNDAY (1960) – Jules Dassin makes it as far as Greece this time just barely evading the blacklist cops. The title is reference to a Greek prostitute, Illia (Melina Mercouri) that only dates men she likes and never on Sunday. Now the Sunday ban isn’t to worship God or even Joseph Stalin, but a way for her to have a party and invite all of her “friends” without the work thing getting in the way. Mercouri is quite vivacious and sexy, though a little fun-house scary in the face, but despite that or maybe because of it she was nominated for an academy award. Dassin casts himself as an American named “Homer” because his father loved everything about the Greek culture. Dassin comes off as a sitcomy Everett Sloan without the range. He speaks in English while much of the cast speaks in their native Greek. Illia speaks according to who she is talking to. Homer is excited to learn that Illia loves Greek tragedy, but horrified that she sees her own happy ending in each play. Therefore, Homer decides to become her teacher to suppress the carnal and develop her mind. It’s a decent enough idea on the Pygmalion premise, but it has none of the flair of Dassin’s film noir work.

TOPKAPI (1964) – Dassin had four years and only made it as far as Turkey, but he has American financing this time what with Joe McCarthy dead and Lyndon Johnson creating the Great Society. Shamefully, Dassin was much better on the run. This is considered some sort of parody of Riffifi with another caper planned this time for comedic effect. I seem to remember Hoffman and Beatty trying a spoof that worked about as well as this one in the late 80s. Since it’s so chic to be blacklisted and many never got the opportunity, Dassin is able to assemble a great cast of vicarious protestors, Maxmillian Schell, Peter Ustinov, and Robert Morley in addition to Melina Mercouri who had the decency to marry Dassin two years later. Now I thought smoking took its toll on Gene Tierney and Lana Turner, but Mercouri in four short years looks like she’d be better cast in front of a crystal ball telling Tony Nelson and Jeannie their future. Here she plays the closest thing the movie has to a romantic lead.

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OTHER STUFF


NAME OF THE ROSE (1986) – Based on the Umberto Eco novel I wanted to read, but not before seeing the film. Sean Connery stars as the medieval sleuth monk William of Baskerville and Christian Slater his young novice. I suppose the Baskerville reference is supposed to make Connery a dark-age version of Sherlock Holmes. F Murray Abraham shows up in the last quarter as an inquisitor that’s tangled with Connery in the past. The mystery centers on Aristotle’s lost section of his Poetics dealing with Comedy that history knows as forgotten, but may just exist in this particular monastery. That plot alone would have been enough for a film, and therefore the Abraham character is more of a distraction because he becomes an added element rather than a solution to the mystery. I’m sure the novel was able to develop him a great deal, but here he seems extraneous.

PARIS, TEXAS (1983) Wim Wenders film written by Sam Shepherd about loss and redemption. Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell play brothers who’ve been apart since Stanton disappeared 4 years prior. The movie opens with Stanton found by a Texas doctor and Stockwell leaving L.A. to re-connect. Stockwell and his European wife (Aurore Clement) have been raising the son of Stanton and Natasja Kinski, who aptly plays southern rather than her natural European. It was the Ry Cooder score that brought my attention to the film and its accolades (It won the Palm d’Or), but at 2 ½ hours the first two hours seem to be a long prologue to the last 30 minutes which is quite compelling. Plenty of vistas of Texas early on that add to length. It makes a big deal about the tension between Stockwell and wife and the potential of losing their adopted son though it receives neither resolution nor comment by the end. The acting is good, but the unconventional non-Hollywood ending probably has as much to do with its praise as anything else.

BEYOND THE SEA (2004) – Very few straight-forward biopics these days. Much like Kevin Kline Cole Porter film, Da Lovely, Beyond the Sea stresses gimmick as much as life happenings. It’s nothing for Spacey to have conversation with the actor playing the younger version of himself. Spacey is interesting as Darin and Bosworth is appealing as Sandra Dee, but their relationship continues in the film past the historical fact which must have been a surprise to Darin’s next wife. It’s a movie that can be missed without any heartache.

SECRET HONOR (1984) – Phillip Baker Hall, the actor named like a dormitory stars as Dick Nixon in this one-character film. It was probably more poignant coming a decade after Watergate when recent history was still remembered. Hall is good, although he neither resembles nor sounds like Nixon. The script is a bit rambling as most one-character pieces are. Still it’s not an altogether bad 90 minutes. Robert Altman gets credit for trying to make films that others wouldn’t bother with.

ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1939) – This is only one of two Rathbone as Sherlock movies actually set in Victorian Times. They made 11 or so other films set in the 1940s. I liked the movies as a kid and tried it again here, but have since found the superiority of the Jeremy Brett BBC TV series. Ida Lupino shows up as the ingénue before smoking gave her that harsh voice and look.

ZERO EFFECT (1998) Bill Pullman stars as bizarre private eye with sidekick Ben Stiller as his legman. It’s another off-beat choice that I should have skipped. I was hooked by the private eye angle although Pullman is usually annoying. Pullman is annoying as expected. Stiller isn’t all that funny. I can hardly even remember the point looking back at it.

HOOP DREAMS (1994) – New to DVD and my first viewing since the theatre more than 10 years ago. With all of the straight to the air reality programs this is interesting because they shot it 4 years of footage before editing began. The commentary track is worthwhile because they explain how the picture came to be and how the circumstances on the characters lives changed their original plans. It began as 30-minute idea they hoped to land on PBS and became a 3 hour film. The shame of this transfer is that is was shot on video and then blown up to 35mm for the big screen. Why didn’t they just release the actual video on the DVD. The 35mm transfer back to video doesn’t look like film, but a muddy transfer.

MEDIUM COOL (1969) – Robert Forrester stars as a film cameraman for one of the local Chicago news stations during the summer of 1968. The Robert Kennedy assassination is dealt with as is the eventual notorious Democrat Convention that happened that year in Chicago. Haskell Wexler shot scenes of his movie during actual Vietnam protests so we get to see real National Guardsmen club the occasional hippy. The movie is quirky like many 60s films. Wexler tends toward the documentary approach with handheld camera and talking heads early on before it becomes more like a regular movie. It has an ad-libbed feel throughout and not much happens so there really is no way to end it easily. He decided on the full circle approach by mimicking the opening scene.

MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT (1956) – I read the novel last year and though it seems a bit predictable, it was an influential book in the 1950s when men were struggling with self-doubt during the post-war period. Though there is a tendency to always say that the book is better, this is a faithful and strong adaptation of the material leaving in all the main characters and many of the minor ones. The only real difference is how the movie reveals information in a slightly different order and how the wife reacts to the husband’s confession. Gregory Peck plays former Army captain struggling with the Manhattan rat race. Jennifer Jones plays the wife that doesn’t understand what the war did to her husband. Though tame by today’s standards, the subject matter of this film must have been courageous in its time. It didn’t need to be 150 minutes, but I suppose the war didn’t need to be four years. Where's my bomb, Oppenheimer?

KING CREOLE (1958) – Elvis is in his pre-Army rebellious era here and it ranks with his best performances although the plot is a bit preposterous. Elvis is denied graduation from high school for being late on the last day of class. With his father out-of-work, it’s up to the future king to go and make a living and since he can sing a little, he might just become a New Orleans nightclub sensation. The cast is first rate. Walter Mathau plays the owner of a rival club and the feared crime boss of the city. The other club owner is played by Paul Stewart from Citizen Kane. He also gets to romance the Elvis sister. Dean Jagger plays the father in such a old movie gee shucks way that you can't believe he co-exists in the same universe as hip Elvis. Young Vic Morrow plays the street hood that leads Elvis astray. In a convoluted plot that makes little sense when you scratch your head later, Mathau tries to blackmail Elvis to going to work for him. Elvis also gets a love triangle, an element where he’s somewhat responsible for an attack on his father, and redemption in the most unbelievable fashion. Directed by Michael Curtiz of Casablanca fame, this is considered by some to be the best Elvis movie ever made. I tend to like the underrated Loving You or Jailhouse Rock better.

IN GOOD COMPANY (2005) - The reliably good Dennis Quaid is demoted at work after a corporate takeover. His new boss is the winning Topher Grace, a decent guy who struggles because he isn’t cutthroat enough for his ambition. Scarlett Johanssen, a better than average flavor of the year, plays Quaid’s daughter who winds up in a secret romance with Grace. That crazy Phillip Baker Hall has a small role as a potential client of Quaid’s. Despite the deus ex machina, it’s a level above the sort of thing we usually expect from this kind of material.

THE MISSING (2003) – I give Ron Howard the benefit of the doubt even when I don’t like the trailer or plot outline for a film. He usually brings something extra to the table, but even he cannot save this PC statement masquerading as a film. Cate Blanchett plays a frontier “medicine woman” with a couple of illegitimate kids and a horny ranch hand that she refuses to marry. Up comes her father Tommy Lee Jones with his usual scowl dressed like an Indian because you see he left the family years ago, broke the mother’s heart, and settled with the red man and his ways. A good thing that Jones returns because the older daughter is kidnapped by a pack of outlaws and Indians that intend to sell their catch south of the border into some sort of slavery prostitution. Of course, Blanchett doesn’t forgive Jones at all and tells him so much right before the kidnapping, so that she has to eat those words when it turns out that he is the only other man on the frontier that can track the scoundrels that did this. The movie begins with heavy doses of Blanchett’s anachronistic Murphy Brown style feminism, but after the kidnapping, that’s mostly relegated to memory so that we can learn the Indian ways which include some blarney about Blanchett losing her hairbrush on the hunt and the bad Indians finding it so that they can put a curse on her. The curse is a wicked one, giving her a horrendous fever, but she is luckily saved by Tommy Lee Jones and his talisman cure. As usual the movie comes down to one of those showdowns where the invincible villains are beaten by the short stack.