Night of the Hunter (1955)

The only film directed by actor Charles Laughton, Night of the Hunter (based on the novel by Davis Grub) is set amid the water front towns of the Ohio River during the Great Depression. Robert Mitchum is a traveling preacher of sorts, but really an abominable monster, a cruel and manipulative blue beard and living metaphor for spiritual abuse. In prison for stealing a car Mitchum is cell mates with a man (Peter Graves) who killed two people and stole $10,000 dollars which was never recovered. Gathering that the money was stashed secretly among the man’s family, Mitchum seeks them out after his release, ingratiates himself with the local community as ‘a man of God’ and gains a spiritual control over the mans wife (Shelly Winters). Her husband having been executed for his crime Mitchum and the widow marry, but when she figures out the real reason he married her (to get the money) the Reverend slashes her throat, ties her up to her model T, and lets it go into the river. The two children (Billy Chapin and Sally Jane Bruce are Tim Burtonish and memorable) escape from their step father on a little boat they take down the river, at this point all are aware that the $10,000 is stashed in the girls doll. The pair now travel by night, desperate to escape the unrelenting pursuit of their wicked stepfather, 'the Hunter'.

Often surreal, vaguely dream-like, this is an unusual horror story, replete with animal and biblical metaphors. Mitchum anticipates his later performance in Cape Fear and is at his terrifying best (1). The films visual style (mega-kudos to Stanley Cortez) is remarkably strong, even overwrought, and heavily influenced by silent cinema (as if to drive the latter point home Lillian Gish is cast). Stylistically this is almost the nexus of film, Muranu is here, as well Hawks, Ford and any number of lesser studio system directors, the influence on David Lynch is heavily evident throughout, and it also reminds of the rather cinematic late HBO program Carnivale. All together though a singular entry in the cannon of film, tense action plus a semesters worth of film school. Grade: A

1. Interestingly Shelly Winters role also prefigures her later performance as a desperate widow turned obsessive bride in Lolita.

Why Be Good? (2008)

Documentary examines early Hollywood sexual mores in light of their relationship to the broader American sexual culture. Film focuses mostly on a series of early sex symbols (like Clara Bow, Louise Brooks, and Joan Crawford) as well as the development of film censorship. Film more documentary then analysis but has a few interesting things to say, such as the contention that an American public just exiting the Victorian age felt a psychological need to have cinematic depictions of sexuality come from a mythic ‘outside’ in order to enjoy them. Thusly early sex symbols were often foreigners, Garbo, Valintino, and sensuality was often depicted on screen in an exotic or fantasy context. Not an exceptional presentation but fairly interesting none-the-less. grade: C

Note: Documentarys title comes from (besides the obvious) a 1929 film starting Colleen Moore.

Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)

Sequel to the 2006 film is as entertaining as the original though the two pictures are surpassingly distinct, they don’t parrot each other, which is good. The original Night at the Museum had more of a sense wonder, it reminded me, and others, strongly of the family fantasy films we grew up on in the 80's (from The Never Ending Story to Explorers, even Back to the Future), where as this Night at the Museum is more like a series of witty comics riff’s strung together in a family friendly format. Ben Stiller anchors the proceedings, and Amy Adams is fetching, but it is Hank Azaira’s performance as Kahmunrah(the chief villain) that steels the show (that voice, what combination of things was he channeling). A fair number of comic cameo appearances, notably Jonah Hill (who should have had more screen time) and Bill Hader (likewise). Grade: B

All Passion Spent (1986)

British mini-series based on the book by Vita Sackville-West. Wendy Hiller(so delightful in supporting roles in the films Separate Tables (1957) and The Elephant Man (1980), and here more then up to the task of a lead (I just made the realization that that was her in I Know Where I'm Going, so of course she is up to the lead)), is Lady Slain, the recently window spouse of a highly admired former Prime Minister and Viceroy of India. It is 1930 and Mrs. Slain, at the age of 85, is for the first time in her life free of the duties and responsibilities that defined her existence. As a youth she had wanted to be an artist, but she had married as was expected of her, and although it was to a man she dearly loved, she can’t help but feel she missed something in life. She traveled the world with her husband, watched his career sore although they never made a great deal of money, and raised five children. Now all Lady Slain desires out of what’s left of her life is to retire to a small house in the country, associate with good people her own age, and reflect on her life, though this meets with the disapproval of her three most tiresome children.

Having seen this adaptation I feel a desire, much stronger then is typical for me, to read the book on which it is based. There is an awareness, a perception in the story, as well as a subtlety about human character that is masterful. It is a deceptively simple tale, on that surface, not all that much really seems to happen, but there is volumes spoken here about family relationships, expectations versus dreams, societal changes over time, love and duty. I marvel at this thing, and though it has its limitations as cinema, I expect it is a force as a novel, and might even make a good play if rendered in several parts. You may enjoy this if you watch it, but you’d probably be even better served to find the book and read it, I orderd my copy today. Grade: B+

Peeping Tom (1960)

I’ve heard that Billy Wilder felt the audacity of this picture about a disturbed young man who kills women with his camera, is what ensured no one would bother to feel offended by his little adultery comedy The Apartment, which went on to win that years best picture Oscar. Released earlier the same year as Psycho, Peeping Tom scandalized audiences, earned the almost universal condemnation of critics, and effectively ended the career of director Michael Powell. Re-discovered by a later generation of film enthusiasts, including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppala, Peeping Tom has had its reputation rehabilitated to that of a minor classic, and now has something of a cult following.

The story was the brain child of Leo Marks, once a code breaker for MI-5 and an associate of director Powell. The two had originally intended to make a film about the work of Sigmund Freud, but when it became known that John Houston was planning a similar project, the original idea was shelved. Powell reportedly took instantly to Marks rather thematically daring script idea, and having now seen the film I am forced into something of a re-examination of how I had viewed the great British director.

One should not make the mistake of circumscribing a man by his films, though I suppose its easy to do. Watching the films Powell directed during his fifteen-plus year partnership with Emrich Pressberger, one might be shocked that he would even consider such a project. The Powell/Pressberger films where noted for a certain tempered sentimentality, a companionate idealism combined with a playful sense of humor and often bold visual sense. From Peeping Tom one can see the Powell had the boldness and creativity to spare, even I dare say some of the compassion, but it was Pressberger (who was in charge of the scripts in the partnership) who held the string on his kite and allowed their films to fly with distributers and the general public. In a documentary on P & P included as a special feature on The 49th Parallel DVD, you can see Pressberger occasionally give Powell a look of ‘sometimes you go to far’. Indeed as Powell would insist that his two young sons sit in on the filming of Peeping Tom’s brief nude scene (one so briefly on screen that I didn’t even notice it the first time through), that the director was a complicated son of a gun is plain to be seen.

However I don’t find Peeping Tom to have been a mean spirted film, many of those who panned it on its first release have since acknowledged this (that its not mean spirted, not my assessment that its not, though the latter would be nice). There is much to examen and consider in the film, it’s very intricately constructed, and hints at much more then it spells out. Sexual obsession, castration complex, and camera as fetish object/substitute phallic (thematic left overs from the original Freud project) (1). An examination of British social class roles, witness were the killer lives versus where he takes his victims, as well as exposer of the wide spread presence of porn underneath the bland exterior of contemporary British life (the Miles Malleson scene). Then there’s the films examination of film: the murderer is a camera man/aspiring film director, the parody of English cinema in the films film-within-the film ‘The Walls are Closing In’,and references to Fritz Lang’s M (in Carl Boehm’s characterization of the killer), and Moira Shearer’s dancing number echoing those in the other two Micheal Powell films in which she was cast (The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman). All this and the father son dynamic, with Powell in flashback playing the murder’s psychologically tortuous father, opposite his own real life son Columba. This is a thinking mans horror picture, though rendered in the same color tones as the schlocky shock films of the time (2).

Peeping Tom is a fascinating film of intriguing density and multiple layers of meaning. I wonder if this is what Scorsese himself will be going for in his forthcoming horror thriller Shutter Island. A reveling examination of the psychology of both its characters, and (with a pinch of salt) its makers. Grade: A

1) Notice also director Powell’s career long cinematic fetish for red-heads (Deborah Kerr, Moira Shearer), there are three, arguably four who play significant roles in this film alone.

2) Though a Dali like surrealism is also evident in the films first two shoots.

Haxan (1922)

About a year or so ago I checked out a book from the library titled something like, '1001 Movies You Should See Before You Die'. One of these movies was Haxan, a silent documentary-style examination of witchcraft by Danish director Benjamin Christensen. I remember thinking, ‘well sure, that may be one of the 1001 movies to see before you die, but how am I ever going to get a hold of a copy’. Well a short time ago, while leafing through the Criterion Collection section at a local Barns & Noble, I discovered that the film had a high quality DVD release. So, it was not long until I netflixed it. I can tell you that Haxan deserved to be on the books list, it’s unlike any film I’ve seen, and is one of the few silent films that could likely hold the attention of a decently educated modern audience.

While often described as a documentary, I think film-essay (a description Orson Wells used for his also rather unique film F for Fake) better fits. The start of the film is very much like a college lecture, with a pencil being used to point out aspects of images obviously taken from books. This is the grounding part of the film where Christensen reviews various ancient cosmologies, religious and folk beliefs that propertied the existence of devils and witches. The rest of the film is re-enactment style, consisting mostly of a dramatization of a how a witch hunt hysteria might begin in a typical mediaeval town (this is the most effective part of the film), but also other vignettes such as an outbreak of religious frenzy inspired madness at a nunnery. Christensen ties this all together with a series of psychological and medical explanations for phenomena earlier generations, and even some today (1920's, but I’m sure 2009 too) might have interpreted as ‘witch like’ or ‘demonic’, such as sleep walking or Parkinson’s disease. Clever and engaging, with a memorable and varied visual style (from text book prints to make-up jobs on some ‘devils’ that would hold up even today).Grade: A

An English language sound edition with jazz score was released by The Rank Organization in 1968, and is also available on the DVD for the completest as well as the silent film averse.

Defiance (2008)

True story about a group of Belarusian Jews (at its peak numbering 1,200) who lived out in the woods for years evading Nazi’s during World War II. The movie starts out unspectacularly, we’ve all heard the valiant Jews escape the Nazi’s stories so many time’s any consistent movie goer is in danger of becoming numbed (and to this something we really shouldn’t become numbed too). Anyway, I’d have even described this movie as bad in its first 20-30 minutes, but it steadily improves. There are the almost unavoidable clichés yes, and while the story is a true one the dynamic of brothers Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber (there falling out and reconciliation) feels like a script device. But then you do get to like this group of people, feel for them, even though there are no outstanding characterizations in the film. You get a few things you haven’t seen before, the building of the settlements in the woods, the German Shepard attacking a women on a ‘food mission’, the communal beating of a captured Nazi solder by the frustrated refuge’s, the dynamics of Jewish solders in the Red Army. In short all the forms there, but the emotional impact still felt a little short for me, and what there was dissipated kind of quickly. B-.

District 9 (2009)

Peter Jackson produced this quasi-documentary formatted, science fiction, action bloodbath come racial metaphor. In the 1980's a large alien spacecraft becomes stranded, hovering helplessly over the city of Johannesburg. A million or so alien refugees, nicknamed by the humans “Prawns” on account of there appearance and bottom feeder ways, are re-located to a ghetto like facility called District 9. Clashes with humans and a general dis-like of the ‘Newcomers’ (reference intentional), prompts the government to employ a large Haliburton-esq military contractor to forcibly re-locate the Prawns to a new facility 200 miles away. This movie is set amidst the relocation effort, and has as its protagonist that efforts poorly chosen, not particularly capable, duffus of an Afrikaner project manager Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley). The movie starts out kind of dry, heavily documentary and back story focused, then our awkward lead character bumbles himself into potential mutation into a ‘Prawn’, his employers try to kill him, and the whole thing leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. Fortunately a CG Prawn with an anglicized name (Christopher) manages to fill enough of the central void of ‘humanity’ in the film, and there-by galvanize the reluctant Wikus into something of a hero, so the picture works reasonably well enough in the second half. Neat idea, but better explored in the 1980's by both the afore-referenced Alien Nation and V. Grade: C+ The similarly adverstised Cloverfield was a better theater experience.

Eli Stone: Season 1 (2008)

Quirky dramady from ABC has San Francisco lawyer Stone (Jonny Lee Miller) experiencing elaborate musical numbers in visions that que him to charitable under-dog court cases that either his subconscience, or God, or both, want him to take. All this steams from a hereditary aneurism recently discovered by Stone's doctor brother Nate, and which our hero’s acupuncturist/spiritual guide believes makes him a prophet. Likable, very good hearted show could have been episodic, but instead follows a surprisingly well developed arc. George Michael songs and the aechingly cute Julie Gonzalo abound. To bad this series was canceled after season 2, I’d have liked to see it grow into a real institution of a program. Grade: B+

The 49th Parallel (1941)

This Michael Powell film was widely seen as a propaganda effort to encourage America to become involved in the war by appealing to a cultural and democratic kinship with Canada. The film concerns six survivors of a German U-boat that had been torpedoing shipping out of the Gulf ot St. Lawrence. Stranded in Canada, the Nazi’s attempted to make their way west to Vancouver and a rendevous with a Japanese submarine, along the way they are gradually picked off and encounter various upright Canadian citizens, played by such name stars of the UK and Commonwealth as Laurence Olivier, Anton Walbrook, Leslie Howard, and Raymond Massey. Feels like a kind of inverted version of Hitchcock’s Saboteur, though that wasn’t released untill the following year. This film is made by its ‘guest stars’, who represent a cross section of diverse Canadian types, meant in turn to be symbolically representative of a diverse United States. Eskimo, French Canadian, Germanic emigre, and American Indian, all show a decency that the ideologically blinded Lt. Hirth (Eric Portman gives a committed performance in this effective Nazi villain role) can’t even understand, while some of his cohorts are allowed more human emotions, one even tries to defect. This could have been merely a gimmicky piece of propaganda, which I admit it technically is, but its so well done and has such a good spirit about it, probably the best patriotic movie ever about Canada, though I can’t rightly think of a single other one. Grade: A-

Funny People (2009)

Director Judd Apatow’s latest serio-comedy is the most serio-one yet. Apatow has a gift for balancing the humorous with the poinet, but this film is constructed to lay more emphasis on the latter then any of his previous work excepting Freaks & Geeks. The Dramatist in Apatow is on full display here, and he elicits strong performances form his cast, including Seth Rogan’s subtlest and Adam Sandler’s most reveling since Punch Drunk Love. Apatows real-life wife Leslie Mann gets a chance to shine on screen (as well as their two daughters) and one is reminded how stunning and under used this women really is. The occasional crudity will drive some off (though its tame by the standards of the directors previous two films) but its got to be on the most reflect movies so far this year, and that’s even more of an accomplishment for a big summer release. Lets hope its appreciated. Grade: B+

Angels and Demons (2009)

While superior to its predecessor 2006's The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons has the ludicrous plot of ‘the Illumaniti’ planning to blow up the Vatican with an anti-matter bomb during a papal conclave as revenge for 17th century Church persecution of scientists. This talky and at times obtuse adventure flick is better executed and more engaging story-wise then the first of Ron Howard’s adaptations of Dan Brown novels, and has at lest one generally memorable moment. Hanks is good but not stretching himself, and the best things about this series continue to be its villains and the lovely dark haired European girls who assist our ‘symbiologist’ hero. The film does have some generally intriguing things to say about the manufacture of religious myth, which I think are much more relevant then those made in The Da Vinci Code. Grade: C+ Look for director Howard’s father Rance as one of the Cardinals.

The Edge of the World (1937)

Probably the only movie ever filmed and set in the Shetland Islands. Director Michael Powell’s highly personal early film was shot on a limited budget, it was essentially an independent production which probably only ever got made because it was needed to fill the quota of domestically produced films British movie houses were required to screen at the time (part of a government effort to keep the Anglo film industry going despite heavy and generally better financed American competition). Inspired by a true story Powell had read in a newspaper back in 1930, The Edge of the World is the story of the death of an island community. The hard Shetlander life style was becoming increasingly untenable as more and more of the island young people left for the greater opportunity to be found in Scotland and elsewhere, and as economic and technical changes made the modest fishing, wool and farming economy of the islands obsolete. Though many tradition bound natives clung to their old ways and fought ‘progress’ as best as they could, in the end it was a losing battle and many of the Shetland islands would become abandoned by man, left to wild birds and the occasional flock of sheep left tended alone for months at a time by the chains famed small Collies (full disclosure: I had one of those wonderful Shelties growing up).

The movies actual story is relatively light, and there mostly as a metaphor for what was happening in the island society at that time. In other words the plot is a skeleton, a necessary excuse upon which to graft a near documentary real portrait of a dying way of life. Powell is a visual director, and his extraordinary eye captures all the stark beauty of the subject island and its inhabitants. The black and white images suit this story better then color ever cold, they reflect the beauty and sadness, and simplicity and isolation of these northern colonies. The film is almost entirely a reflective piece (two cliff climbing scenes and a storm sequence constituting the pictures only real physical action), and has even been described as a visual poem, which is probably the best summation you could give to it. A lovely little piece of obscure British film making. Grade: B

Gran Torino (2008)

It is fitting that Clint Eastwood has announced that this will be the last film in which he will appear (though if we’re lucky his directing career still has many years ahead of it), as it seems a perfect summation to the Eastwoodian ethos and the actors near mythic quality. Here is Harry Calihan in old age, inhabiting a contemporary Unforgiven tale. Korean war vet and ex- auto-assemble worker Walt Kowalski has just lost his wife (the classic Eastwood character is always spouse less) and feels largely alienated from the world around him. His long-time neighborhood has become largely populated with members of the south Asian ethnic group known as Hmong, and since Walt is a racist of an easily provoked (though not mean spirited) sort, and because he still nurses ghosts from his actions in Korea, he is withdrawn from his neighbors. Of course he is withdrawn from his family to, a distance whose cultivation grows from those same wounds of 50 years ago, and which is only exacerbated by the generation gap and how spoiled and superficial his children and grandchildren are (some think this is over played in the film, which it is, but its not hard to understand the point Eastwood is trying to make). Circumstances collide, in a typically well handled way, to provide for a variant redemption tale, a character sketch come emotional journey of self discovery, the pathos of this silent generation Archie Bunker. In some ways Eastwood’s performance and character arc is not unreminiscent of Rod Steiger’s in In the Heat of the Night (1967); of course we couldn’t have had Stieger’s journey without the imposition of Sydney Poiter, whose figurative role and story purpose is divided between two young Hmong performers (Bee Vang and Ahney Her) who each have a respectable screen presence and bring unique and vital elements to the proceedings. The film is tonely right for all that is has to do and say, and is a fulfilling and satisfactorily deep benediction to its stars acting career. Grade: A

Homicide: The Movie (2000)

As a friend of mine said, “I’m so glade they made this movie.” The true ending to the series this follow-up tele-pic wraps up many of the unresolved story lines, and boasts appearances by every series regular. There was something just wonderful about seeing all of the characters intermix, including some that never had before because they were on during different seasons. The story takes some interesting turns and continued the Homicide tradition of pushing the envelope, who’d have ever thought the whole thing would end the way it did. Audacious, thought provoking. If you’ve never seen the series before you’d probably have trouble making heads or tails of the thing, but if you’re a devoted fan it will be a significant eighty-nine minutes. My grade: A.

Homicide: Season 7 (1998-1999)

Final season of the series good, but just not the same without Pembleton. I liked Mike Giardello and his arc, and they did some interesting with Gerety, and all of the characters really. I liked the bookend quality of the ending with Bayliss. Anyway this is a great series, and it feels very satisfying to have been able to finish it. The Series: Grade A+. Season 7: Grade B.