Solid as heck couple days here:
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Korean Film Archive Blu-ray)
Yeah, I'm very glad I bought a bunch of Korean Film Archive discs sight unseen when they were on sale a couple years back. Jagko is a terrific little drama with just enough thriller in it to keep it interesting and probably a whole ton of extra layers for people in 1980 Korea.
It starts by introducing the audience to Song Gi-yeol (Choi Yun-Seok), once a cop but now an alcoholic vagrant, being picked up and sent to a "rehab center" that doesn't offer much in the way of services or chance to leave - if its residents had family they hadn't alienated, they wouldn't be there - only to discover with shock that one of the other residents (Kim Hui-ra) appears to be Baek Gong-san aka "Jagko", the communist guerilla whose capture soon after the war was going to seal Song's reputation as a fast-rising star, but whose embarrassing escape left Song looking incompetent at best and complicit at worst. He's been chasing this white whale for decades, and does not intend to stop just because the guy at the other end of the bunkhouse says he's never even heard of this Jagko guy.
Writer Song Kil-han and director Im Kwon-taek don't leave the audience in suspense very long; it's hard to have parallel flashbacks if Jagko is not around, somewhere, to do the flashing back. Happily, Im and company do good work revealing what is the case to the audience while still making Song's certainty be more the result of his obsession than any evidence that "Kim" is actually the man he is looking for. It sets up a tight game of cat-and-mouse, as both parties try to recruit their fellow inmates to help them thwart the other, the stakes objectively small and petty but also all that both of them have got. Heck, at times they're all that the other people in this dormitory have; none of them really have any investment in Song's obsession or special fondness for Kim beyond the anti-communist background noise the ROK has been putting out their entire lives (that the institution keeping them off the streets is pretty socialist barely even registers as irony), but it's a little exciting and something to do, although most would prefer not to rock the boat. This isn't a case where the feud is going to spill out and metastasize into some larger cancer, but where it might be remembered as a weird thing that happened this one time.
The flashbacks fill it out, establishing why the stakes are so high for the pair of them. Im jumps back and forth and from one to the other, building a sense of tragedy as it's not always clear whether either could have stepped back and lived a normal life: For all that Song is clearly making self-destructive decisions which wind up dooming both himself and his quarry, the suggested magnitude of Jagko's crimes and the stigma associated with communism during these years may have been worse, such that Jagko could never fully open up to any of his lovers and Song maybe never could live down even the suspicion that he let the other man escape on purpose. There's still a litany of lives ended or ruined in their wake, and each episode feels substantial as it asks the question of whether things would turn out different if Song just stopped here without taking the audience away from the present for too long.
Choi Yun-seok and Kim Hui-ra both impress as Song and Jagko, respectively; though the audience never gets to see either at their peak, but we do get a sense of their decay, and how, even in this state, Song's got this vestigial arrogance and Jagko a certain charisma that probably made him a successful revolutionary back in the day, whether never going long without a girlfriend, even living off the grid, or convincing folks that Song might pose a threat to them as well. The film is populated by a number of entertaining minor characters, and the filmmakers have a knack for giving each marginal environment they find themselves in have a distinct feel and be a notable step down.
It wavers a bit toward the end, when the pair must explicitly confront that they are, ultimately, the only constants in each other's lives, and that the world has in many ways moved on from their conflict. I gather Im was a workhorse director cranking out genre films, and even if he was playing with grander ideas here, there's still an odd directness in the last act and curtness at the very end that's not really unlike what came before at all, but isn't quite what it could be. Jagko is sort of a grindhouse film with ambitions, ones it lives up to more along the way versus at the conclusion.
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Kino Lorber Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the DVD at Amazon (wait, is my BD really out of print?)
The bulk of Beggars of Life can't measure up to its opening scenes, which can shock a modern audience with just how frank and sophisticated a silent movie can be. When most of what one sees from the era is slapstick comedy or grand epics, the grim tableau an amiable train-hopper finds and the double-exposed flashback where he gets an explanation are a heck of an eye-opener.
That hobo is Jim (Richard Arlen) - "The Boy" - who pokes his head into a farmhouse and sees what initially seems to be an abandoned meal, although on closer examination, the farmer is at the table, dead. His stepdaughter Nancy (Louise Brooks) admits to killing him, but it's pretty clear that he had it coming after years of abuse. Though Jim is reluctant to get mixed up in this, he eventually lets her tag along, disguised as a boy, as he makes his way to Canada, where a relative supposedly has a job waiting for him. Eventually, though, the body will be discovered and a reward posted, word of which makes it to a hobo camp led by The Arkansaw Snake (Robert Perry), possibly leaving Nancy's fate in the hands of the eccentric Oklahoma Red (Wallace Beery).
The billing of the stars is interesting, almost a hundred years later - most today will think of this as a Louise Brooks film, and she's pretty great; Brooks establishes Nancy as someone just strong enough to be able to move forward but still kind of reeling from what she's had to do to get to this point; Nancy's a haunted heroine who never quite comes off as a damsel in distress but also clearly can use the support Jim offers. Richard Arlen (second-billed) is pleasant enough as Jim, who is maybe more of a match for Brook's Nancy that a complement, someone who has seen his own sort of hard times but still has a good core, and as the film goes on one gets the impression that what's awaiting him in Canada is not nearly as sure as he claims, but he's trying to will it into being for Nancy's sake. Arlen is one of a large number of matinee idols who run together now, handsome and capable enough to have had notable roles in a number of films for decades, but never quite had the combination that made him an icon remembered the way his co-stars were. Both are billed below Wallace Beery, who makes hobo "Oklahoma Red" memorable but an oddity to a later audience, like we're supposed to enjoy the familiarity of his shtick as much as its content. He'd become an icon of sorts, and he's pretty good here, enough that one can see why he's positioned as the central character despite not showing up until relatively late; he grabs the audience's attention and there's at least a genuine arc and question about whether he will ultimately defend or betray the young pair.
The opening is the best part, though, direct and filled with genuine horror without much in the way of euphemism or equivocation on whether or not Nancy is in the right; director William A. Wellman jumps from Jim's stark discovery to Nancy's somewhat dazed telling without skipping a beat. It's a tough bar to clear, but if the film never has another sequence that good, it at least lets those scenes hang over the rest of the movie: What could have been a bit of ill-advised comedy becomes something more sinister, and every further threat of violence reflects what specific horrors might await Nancy. When the film attempts to impress in other ways - for instance, a runaway train that makes for a nifty climax without making this the sort of thrill picture one associates with Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton - it's generally done very well.
I'm tempted to give this another watch relatively soon, rather than wait another decade for it to reclassify itself in my head as primarily one of Louise Brooks's iconic roles, just to see how it hits when expecting all three stars to have the same sort of weight.
Well, that's a push.
Dale Evans: 37¼ stars
Centipede: 37½ stars
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