Boston Underground Film Festival 2025.03: Head Like a Hole and The Ugly Stepsister

Hey, it's Head Like a Hole director Stefan MacDonald-LaBelle with festival programmer Chris Hallock, both down from Canada but making the absolute minimum number of USA-Canada jokes given the situation here!

Mostly, SML talked about how his film was about his reaction to corporate work, and it's not exactly single once you've heard him talk but I must admit that I was getting a different vibe while watching the movie, because the movie was kind of hitting Mormon and evangelical tones with me, because the song didn't match (and maybe wasn't as discordant as intended with the basement not matching the house upstairs).

Also, I do kind of find myself scratching my head at folks who do movies like these and talk about how working in an office was so soul-sucking that they'd rather be back in the job where they occasionally had to dispose of dead animals. Maybe it doesn't speak well of me that in twenty years into a job that has of late evolved into being more abstract and the start-up I was hired by being absorbed by a huge company that I truly believe changed its name because Google auto completes to something involving a major scandal. It's not that horrifying! I'd actually like to be in the office rather than remote again!

Don't get me wrong, I benefit from the people who can't do it and make art instead, but always feel weird when I'm in an auditorium and everyone nods along with the filmmaker saying this.

Very different vibe for The Ugly Stepsister, which may be gross but has a more mainstream sensibility, and where you can hear different people being grossed out by different things!


Head Like a Hole

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)

This is probably just me, but as the grandchild of a carpenter and someone who carefully checks the meniscus when using a measuring cup, I've got to say, the measuring that is a guy's entire job in this movie is garbage. It drove me batty every time he just put the ruler next to the hole at an angle or measured from the very end. Just, like, run a chalk line vertically through the center of the hole and measure from the 1cm mark!

This is an insane rant, but it's also a good chunk of the movie, where unemployed Asher (Steve Kasan), living out of his car, takes a job (with included lodging) that involves measuring "the anomaly" - a hole in the basement wall of a bungalow whose family seems to have abandoned it - every hour from nine to five. The boss, Emerson (Jeff McDonald) is mercurial and a stickler for punctuality and specific work attire, although facility manager Sam (Eric B. Hansen) is friendly enough. It's 15mm every hour, though, and eventually, something's got to happen, right?

Is the poor measurement technique a silly thing to care about? Yes, but there's not a lot of distraction from it. The film has one of those neat high concepts that nevertheless requires a lot of effort to stretch out to 90 minutes, and the characters surrounding the protagonist Asher are by and large quirky in a way that's one-note rather than intriguing - Jeff McDonald's Emerson, in particular, is all weird affectation from the start and seems to appear and disappear entirely as it becomes necessary. The weirdness and repetition is meant to be numbing to Asher, obviously, but it's seldom able to overcome the "only location we can afford" setting to feel real, or at least satirically connected to anything that needs attacking. When it comes time for something to happen, you can feel the filmmakers giving it a big, obtrusive push.

I like Steve Kasan as Asher, though; he's grounded and awkward without being an exaggerated geek, and reacts to the weirdness around him without breaking it. The B&W coloring looks good, too, flattening things that could be distracting without ever looking self-conscious. And when it's finally time to go all-in on being a horror movie, the filmmakers get a lot out of a little; the finale is weird and underplayed in just the right way.

It's a truly underground film at the underground film festival, far from fancy and often more dull even than it means to be, but the vibe is right and it starts and ends well.


Den stygge stesøsteren (The Ugly Stepsister)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 March 2025 in the Brattle Theatre (Boston Underground Film Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

It's no dis on the rest of the cast or what's going on around her to say that this film's other stepsister, Alma (Flo Fagerli), has the inside track on being my favorite supporting character of the year. Aside from being a good counterpoint to the rest of the characters, she's someone we can all relate to in these times, as she seldom has actual lines but always looks to be on the verge of shouting "Jesus Fucking Christ, what the hell is wrong with you people?"

It opens with the title character, Elvira (Lea Myren), a young lady whose round face, constant reading from Prince Julian's book of poetry, and curls that seem to shout "so last year" make her seem the ugly duckling, in a carriage with younger sister Alma and mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), to live with new stepfather Otto (Ralph Carlsson) and stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) in the capital of their fairy-tale kingdom. Agnes is tall, worldly, and pretty, and seems initially friendly if aloof, until Otto drops dead during their first meal as a family, and all four of the ladies are appalled to discover that the other family has no money. When a ball where Julian (Isac Calmroth) will choose a bride is announced for four months hence, Rebekka sees and opportunity, sending Elvira to "Dr. Esthétique" (Adam Lundgren) and a fancy finishing school to make sure she catches the prince's eye - and if not his, that some other wealthy noble or merchant. Seeing Elvira as a rival while Rebekka spends all her time and money on this plan rather than her father's funeral makes Agnes icier, while Elvria's initial teasing by the other girls isn't exactly bringing out the best in her.

As a whole, the movie is a delightfully nasty inversion of the Cinderella story because it doesn't so much do the simple "what if the heroines were really the villains and the villains were really the heroines?" shtick but instead acknowledges that they're all teenagers, for the most part, innocent and selfish in equal measure, and with plenty of bile for those who would treat these girls as commodities. The filmmakers have a real knack for not Shrek-ifying the fairy tale setting to make it seem basically like the present but with medieval accoutrements too much but highlighting where you can see the same forces at play. It's particularly notable that Elvira gets a look at who Julian is behind the pretty poetry but seems no less determined even after being scorned; it's a sadly human reaction that requires little explanation.

What makes this inversion particularly enjoyable is the performances of the two young actresses at the center. Lea Myren never loses touch with the naive girl who is excited about new and fancy things, always letting the audience see who she was under who she's become. Thea Sofie Loch Næss does the same in a different way; Agnes is cool from the start but hardens, but she's usually just short of a villain, showing enough grief for sympathy even when bitterness overwhelms it. Ane Dahl Torp and Flo Fagerli make the devil and angel on Elvira's shoulders believable purple, with Torp's Rebekka all pragmatic ambition and Fagerli's Alma developing a questioning intelligence as she tries to see a different way.

The filmmakers are not subtle; some of the parody is very direct and writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt is going to extend a gross-out bit for as long as she possibly can, though seldom past the point where the audience is less reacting to the weirdness of the gag than being subjected her sadism. I noped out of the eye stuff pretty quick, for example, but just to put my hand in front of my eyes and peek out a bit, because it was working to make a point, whereas some in the audience clearly had not heard the whole bit with the slippers, and others seemed to murmur uncomfortably at the constant tapeworm-assisted stomach growling on the soundtrack. The film is very good at pushing pitch-black comedy right up to the point where it would be no fun anymore.

That's the film's whole deal, really. The audience knows from about five minutes in that it's going to be about using Cinderella to talk about the unhealthy pressures put on teenage girls, and the filmmakers keep finding ways to pound it home without going too far astray or beating a dead horse, right up until it's time to say they're done with this nonsense. It's mean and gross, but also funny and surprisingly sympathetic to all the girls stuck in its vicious circle.

This Week in Tickets: 30 December 2024 - 5 January 2025 (New Year, Old-Time Horror)

Place your bets, folks, at how long until I fall hopelessly behind. Last year, we didn't make it to the Oscars, but I'm feeling good about 2025!

Latest appointment book layout is vertical, like most movie tickets these days, although they're wide enough that there's going to need to be some staggering. Not sure what's up with the yellow, though, though.

I had enough vacation time I couldn't entirely roll over to have the last couple days of the year off, so I caught the Coolidge's 35mm print of Nosferatu '24 in the afternoon, really enjoying it far more than I expected, having fallen a little short of loving Robert Eggers's previous work at times. It was obviously very much influenced by the original silent version, which made a nice sort of way to roll into restarting Film Rolls, which by the nature of how my new-to-me shelf is setup will almost always start with silents, in this case The Enchanted Cottage '24 and Lights Out '23 on Monday and Tuesday evenings respectively, As you might expect from movies that were released on crowdfunded Blu-rays, they're not exactly classics, but they're interesting; you can absolutely see what the filmmakers were going for.

First film of the new year was Honey Money Phony, a New Year's Eve romantic comedy from China that gets a long way on just how crush-worthy star Jin Chen is in her role, and most of the cast around her is the kind of good company that helps this sort of movie roll even when you notice it doesn't have a lot of great, big jokes.

Thursday, I got started on the next round of Film Rolls by starting a box set, with the first film of four on tape being Five Shaolin Masters. Friday night had me hitting a new film from Korea, Harbin, which is undoubtedly a big part of Korean history but maybe doesn't quite make for a great movie, at least for those of us who aren't already have particular investment in its subjects. Saturday, it was back to Film Rolls with Shaolin Temple.

Then on Sunday, I closed the week with The Damned, a period thriller that has a lot going for it but only intermittently lands - which, truth be told, is better than the average horror movie that grabs a release on the first weekend of a new year.

As much as I always intend to keep the New Year's resolution to keep up with this, it can't hurt to follow my Letterboxd account just in case, although I'll generally at least try to have Film Rolls entries on the blog first.


Nosferatu 2024

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Coolidge Corner #1 (first-run, 35mm)
Where to stream it (when available)

This might become my favorite version of Dracula, even if I was kind of skeptical going in: I don't like sexy vampires, especially preferring "the walking embodiment of death and decay" for this variant in particular,, and some of the bits I do really like cause the end to leave a more sour taste in my mouth. It doesn't quite reinvent the story - indeed, by filming it as Nosferatu, Robert Eggers is more or less committed to a specific strain - but finds interesting things to do within those bounds.

There's an impressive streamlining of the story that many adaptations of Bram Stoker's epistletory novel don't always manage - Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) has a pre-existing mystical connection to Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), so it can be assumed that he somehow corrupted Knock (Simon McBurney), the employer of Ellen's wife Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), in such a way as to serve the dual purpose of disposing of the romantic rival and establishing a foothold in a new place. Eggers highlights how Ellen's stay at the home of Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin) highlights both financial precarity and questions of mental health, both assumed and real, that lurk under the couples' friendship. The decision of Ellen's physician, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), to call in mentor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) feels like both a wise move and desperation because physicians aren't really equipped to deal with contagion, whether biological or supernatural.

Some of this reorganization makes me curious how the first half or so will play on later viewings, because I think the familiarity of the story means director Robert Eggers is able to play things for laughs a bit. He doesn't crank it up to 11, but maybe 10.5, having fun pushing the whole thing as overtly stylized without having to worry too much about what folks will take literally. It also means that he can bring the nastiness of the horror down to earth later. The film is often quite funny but folks might not realize they've got permission to laugh until the second or third time they see it.

I was also kind of suspicious of him making Orlock this muscular, mustachioed warlord instead of the silent version's wraith or Bela Lugisi's elegant noble, but it really works: It lets him dig into the Eastern European origins for all manner of designs on the one hand, and it makes the death and pestilence that Orlok embodies a brutish thing that sacks the city, not just consuming the lifeblood that it needs to fend true death off but gorging itself. Bill Skarsgård may be a handsome Dracula, but his gluttony is monstrous and precludes romance or sympathy.

It's a contrast to the core of this movie which I really like, a scene with Lily-Rose Depp and Nicolas Hoult that has a strikingly modern feel as it becomes clear just how real their love is. They challenge each other and demand explanations, but in the end, they trust each other far more than the pair who said pretty words and did what was expected of people like them at the start. Eggers uses them to see the imbalance between gender roles that this sort of period piece takes for granted, reject it, and put both in position to drive for the rest of the film.

There's tons of good stuff around all this, too: Art design where the architecture is just askew enough to remind one of German Expressionist silents without being an obvious imitation. The carriage ride to the castle that recalls 2001 as much as previous versions of Dracula with its threatening bass and slow zooms of doors opening and closing on their own. Willem Defoe's Van Helsing equivalent is funny and almost always right but also mad enough that he probably should have been thrown off the university faculty. Heck, now that I think about it, I wonder if his madness doesn't lead to the bits of the finale I find unsatisfying because, as one character points out in a grieving rage, his zealous obsession with the supernatural threat blind him to the individual and aggregate humanity around him.

Darn good all around, and that comes from someone who often describes the F.W. Murnau Nosferatu as his favorite vampire movie and has often been left cold by Eggers style.


Shao Lin wu zu (Five Shaolin Masters)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon

How many Shaolin Masters is too many Shaolin Masters? The answer isn't necessarily "five, possibly fewer", especially when people seldom complain about seven samurai being excessive, but it kind of feels like the filmmakers should do a bit more to earn that number toward the start, as it introduces five pretty nondescript masters with similar costumes and haircuts, in the middle of a lot of folks with similar looks getting slaughtered, and aside from Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing, who is more comedic than the rest, they feel kind of interchangeable, especially since they all immediately go their separate ways rather than stick together and explore the contrasts between them and their fighting styles.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


Shao Lin si (Shaolin Temple)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon

Because of the way I tend to see Shaw Brothers movies - randomly, every few months or so, as they show up at various midnight movie programs or when there's an archival print at a festival - it's easy to forget, or not even realize, that Chang Cheh had a sort of "Shaolin Temple Cinematic Universe" going, reusing characters and actors so that the stories would, at least roughly, line up and form a larger saga. Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that it was kind of neat when the stars of the previous night's movie, Five Shaoline Warriors, showed up and it became clear that this movie would end more or less where the previous one started.

(More to come when I finish the Film Rolls round!)


The Damned

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 January 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

The Damned is solidly in the category of films that i would have loved to see at BUFF or Fantasia with a packed horse on a hair trigger, but where I just figure it's got some nifty pieces at a Sunday 7pm show in the AMC's smallest screen with one or two other folks in the audience who are occasionally coughing. It's a long 89 minutes, but there's at least one shot of snow covering a house built of black wood and the black volcanic mountains in the background which looks like it's a hand-printed woodcut worth 10% of my A-List membership for the month.

It takes place at a fishing station on the coast of Iceland; Eva (Odessa Young) has inherited the business from her late husband, with some question as to whether she would keep it going. The helmsman of the small boat is Ragnar (Rory McCann); his second-in-command is Daniel (Joe Cole), a longtime friend of the dead man. There are four other men on the team, plus Helga (Siobhan Finneran), the cook. It's a lean year pulling fish out of the treacherous waters, and the group is horrified when they see a large ship foundering, but seek to salvage needed supplies. Helga worries that the morbid mission will result in the drowned sailors becoming draugur, angry undead revenants, but the rest are too practical for such superstition.

I want to like the film a lot more, because it does a thing I love in this sort of period indie, pulling us into a very specific time and place and making it feel accessible rather than opaque, grounding the fantasy in procedure that may not be familiar but which is interesting to learn. All the characters tend to feel exactly like they should, but human rather than types. Even the one guy who feels a bit too 21sr Century does so in a way that says there must have been people like this in 1871 as well. It's got a really nice cast - Rory McCann and Francis Magee capture the period without being consumed by it, and filmmaker Thordur Palsson doesn't make Odessa Young protest that a woman can handle this amid the difficult decisions. She's got a nice chemistry with Joe Cole; when they're not dealing with potential monsters, it's interesting to watch them feel their way around the void left by Eva's husband as they clearly have feelings for each other.

On the other hand, while I feel like I should like the spot it hits between folklore and guilt and maybe guilt come to life, the telling of the tale is a slog. There is just not enough for these people to do while the draugur stalks them or rifts that can be exploited as the evil gets in their head and makes them turn on each other. We're constantly waiting for something to happen, but only really on edge a couple of times. There are a few striking images and scenes - I particularly like one where the perspective has the viewer not sure whether the black shape in the center of the screen is a person, a creature, or just a rocky outgrop with one's eyes playing the same tricks that the characters' are.

Get It in another environment, and I'm probably along for the ride if the rest of the audience is. Without a crowd, though, I've got way too much time to think about why I'm not as scared as I should be.

Film Rolls Season 2, Round 01: The Enchanted Cottage and Lights Out

Let's get 2025 on the blog started right, with me trying to make this thing from a couple years ago happen again, with the goal of leaving my shelves less full than when I started.

After Mookie and Bruce basically tied in Season 1, the competitors this time around are the Atari Centipede, who looks much cuter than I expected for a creature that bedeviled me in various arcades and home machines starting in the 1980s, and Dale Arden, the constant companion and true love of Flash Gordon. Look, I'm just going to say it right at the top: I don't particularly care for the movie. Deliberate camp is not my thing, even if it has Timothy Dalton in it. This series isn't going to go there.

And here is this year's "game board", which is taller than the makers of these shelving units recommend at six levels. That's twenty cubes in all, which the competitors will dash across, wrapping around to the next row at the whims of the big d20, and as films get landed on, they get pulled and watched, with the gap filled from below as much as possible. Indeed, the pile to the right of the board is what wouldn't fit into the third column, but will enter the board as space develops at the bottom. The films I haven't seen by Jean-Pierre Melville will probably enter as well, should three or four slots open at the end of a row.

The zones are:

• Column One: Western films from Kidnapped (1917) to The Stewardesses (1969)
• Column Two: Hong Kong/China/Taiwan from Lady Whirlwind & Hapkido (1972) to Streetwise (2023), with the first two of Arrow's ShawScope sets lurking at the bottom waiting to rocket someone ahead
• Column Three: Western films from Zeta One (1969) to Summer of Sam (1999)
• Column Four, Rows One to Three: Korean films from The Flower in Hell (1958) to The Moon (2023), plus directors' sections for Ringo Lam, Jon Woo, and Tsui Hark
• Column Four, Rows Four and Five: Japanese films from Warning from Space (1956) to Last Letter (2020)
Column Four, Row Six: Johnnie To, Wong Jing, and Pang Ho-Cheung

This isn't my entire collection, but just the discs I have bought in the past few years (roughly since the pandemic) of films I haven't seen before. It was out of hand when Season One started and I've only been crowdfunding silent releases, grabbing at things in Kino Lorber, Arrow, Vinegar Syndrome sales, and just otherwise grabbing physical media that might not be around tomorrow at a faster clip since. That Korean Film Archive sale one foreign store had ballooned the K-film section!

(Also, I highly encourage anyone else who has trouble choosing to buy a blind box and a die and play along on their own board and use the hashtag #FilmRolls on Blluesky or, ugh, X to share your progress.)

So, let's go!

Dale rolls first, and gets a 17, which lands her on The Enchanted Cottage, preceded by short "Where the Road Divided" (which will not count toward the scoring).

Centipede rolls next, and gets a 16, catching him (or her; no need to assume gender) to Lights Out. Because we remove discs as they're watched, that leaves them at exactly the same spot!

So, how is that start?

"Where the Road Divided"

* * (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


The description on IMDB seems to be of a much more interesting movie, a sort of Sliding Doors narrative where what happens at a fork in the road, but that's not the actual short in question, which is a pretty conventional morality play about a pretty young teenager (Louise Huff) who is seduced by a City Slicker (earl Metcalfe) looking to exploit the local mineral rights; her father being a moonshine-swilling wastrel, it's up to her schoolmaster (director Edgar Jones) and a longtime admirer (George Gowan) to stop her being taken advantage of.

The thing about this "morality play" is that the teacher is pretty clearly infatuated with her, at the very least, with early scenes talking about her not getting special treatment because of that and, ick. Like, you could probably make this a movie about a businessman saving a bright young girl from the groomers around her by removing a couple more lascivious looks and changing some intertitles. It's not that movie, to be clear, but its moral authority is undercut more than a bit, and not just because it was made 110 years ago. It leads to a finale that wants to have tragic gravitas but kind of comes out of nowhere.

Nice looking, though, and even if the details are often bad, the story feels right. The cast sketches their characters well, even if I sort of run into issues with how Louise Huff's Rose is probably supposed to be about fifteen or so, but that's mostly be - the actress was about 20 at the time, and the idea of the "teenager" was a few decades away. Anyway, it's not really good, but it's and shows its age, but it's decent enough to pl.ay before something else without sending one to the concession stand.


The Enchanted Cottage '24

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Available on DVD on Amazon (not the crowdfunded Blu-ray)

Pretty dead-simple in its intent but likably earnest, The Enchanted Cottage tells the story of an injured war veteran (Richard Barthelmess) who, after discovering that his fiancée loves another man, runs off and isolates himself in a honeymoon "cottage" where he meets a poor, plain girl (May McAvoy) to whom he semi-cynically proposes marriage to get his own family off his back and give her some stability. The spirits of the centuries of honeymooners watch over them, and one morning they wake up transformed!

At a mere 80 minutes, this still manages to feel dragged out at times - to the point where, in the end, the now-attractive Oliver and Laura themselves are wondering what is taking so long! - but that and an ending that doesn't just underline it's moral but is like someone moving their pen back and forth to really emphasize it (kind of the same thing) are the only real knock against it. There's a sincerity to both the fairy-tale elements and the more grounded issues that impresses: I love Oliver's pained decency at seeing his intended Beatrice run to the side of her true love, and how the pair's blinded neighbor privately reveals his despair toward the end after putting on a brave face for the rest of the film.

Richard Barthelmess and May McAvoy don't really look like folks who would be shunned - even a hundred years ago, you didn't want to remove too much glamor from your movie stars - but it kind of works for the film that you can see their inner beauty before Oliver straightens up and Laura gets a magic makeover; it's show-don't-tell in a way that's particularly suited to silents. Barthelmess in particular does some nice physical acting here, capturing Oliver's infirmity by the way he holds one leg and bends his neck without hamming it up, suggesting he's learned how to live with it a bit.

The visual effects look surprisingly good - the transparent spirits don't quite interact with the living, but seem to exist in the same space in the same lighting in a way that later silents an early talkies don't quite manage. It's a simple movie but works well enough.

Lights Out '23

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 December 2024 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)


I'm kind of interested to see the 1938 remake/re-adaptation Crashing Hollywood, or see the original play staged somewhere, because Lights Out seems almost there in so many places. Star Theodore von Eitz's glasses make me wonder what it would be like if you dropped Harold Lloyd in and built a big slapstick climax into the finale, while on the other hand, the first act seems like it would be much improved by having rapid-fire dialog to bring out characterization rather than big exposition dumps in the intertitles and characters trying to emote while sitting.

(I'm also not sure whether the train porters and servants are blackface or "just" Steppin Fetchit-style mugging, but that's obviously not great.)

That bit on the train from Austin to Los Angeles takes a long time to set things up: A bank in Austin has been robbed, and the police and private security detectives have their eye on Egbert Winslow (von Eltz), who insured his black valise for $50,000 before boarding the train. He hits it off with the banker's daughter Barbara (Marie Astaire), and while they sit in the observation deck, "Hairpin Annie" (Ruth Stonehouse), who picked the bank's lock but was denied her share of the loot, and her fresh-out-of-stir partner in crime "Sea Bass" (Walter McGrail) try to get at his case. He's surprisingly not upset; he's always wanted to meet real crooks and pick their brains because he's a screenwriter for Hollywood serials. Which suits Sea Bass and Annie fine; the convince him to make one that paints the real robber, "High-Shine" Joe (Ben Deeley), in an unflattering light, figuring that will bring him back from Brazil and lead them to where he's hidden the rest of the take. Of course, Barbara's father and the law note that this production seems to know details about the robbery that weren't given to the press, and figure Winslow must be in on it.

It's a genuinely terrific scenario that is great fun to watch play out once it starts moving ahead in earnest; the filmmakers do a very nice job of shuffling folks around various locations so that they just miss each other or are only privy to enough of a conversation to misunderstand. It's the sort of farce that doesn't always benefit from the way moving from stage to screen opens it up as editing can sometimes blunt the illusion of near misses and the subconscious knowledge that someone is waiting in the wings, but works well here. It helps a lot that the farce seems to be driven forward by the characters' motivations as opposed to having them twisted to move the pieces to a new spot: One can see Barbara becoming fonder of Winslow than the detective she's engaged to (Ben Hewlett), and the time jump from the train to the production of the serial's final episode lets the audience believe that Annie and Sea Bass would not only get closer but start to view Winslow as a friend instead of just a resource to exploit. Ben Deeley, meanwhile, adds spice to how good-natured all this is with a criminal mastermind whose ego is funny but also dangerous enough to feel like a threat; and he also does nice work pulling double duty as the actor playing High-Shine in the serial.

That opening segment is almost a killer, though, devoting a long stretch at the start to honeymooners looking for a bit of privacy to make out who we won't see later, like the movie needs to spend ten minutes to justify pulling a shade. It's got some strained physical comedy around Winslow either keeping the bag close or forgetting it as he flirts with Barbara and too many people circling it, including some of the tackier bits of racial humor and a person mostly seen as a hand reaching out from behind a chair that I lost track of at various points. It's a segment that could use a real slapstick pro rather than van Eltz, who just never sells the physical comedy casually or as someone believably frazzled, which is something of an issue through the movie.

Lights Out is genuinely fun once it gets going, and since the play must be in the public domain by now, it might be fun to see someone take a run at it today. For a century-old farce, it doesn't seem like it would be particularly broken by air travel, cell phones, or other bits of modern tech, which may be a part of why it still works fairly well.

So, two crowdfunded silent movie releases that maybe weren't great - there is, after all, a reason why so many of these lesser-known movies didn't stay in the public consciousness and have Kickstarter goals that would be met if 100 of us bought them - but are worth watching once. And, yes, I've already backed one new campaign in the new year. Which gives us a score of:

Dale Evans: 2 ½ stars
Centipede: 2 ½ stars

Dale may lead by a nose in points, but they're at the same position on the board, with at least one likely to move into the Hong Kong section with the next roll!

This Week in Tickets: 21 October 2024 - 27 October 2024 (No real pattern)

This Week in Tickets: 21 October 2024 - 27 October 2024 (No real pattern) It's funny, seeing other folks doing forty horror movies in October and I'm just all over the freaking place. Like, maybe Sunday's kind of Halloweeny, but...

I started the week off right with North By Northwest on 70mm film, which looked great, but like The Searchers a few weeks back kind of looks odd because the restoration process had them scanning the VistaVision film in an unusual fashion - since VV is 35mm run through camera/projector horizontally, with each frame two standard frames, they scanned two "frames" and put them together digitally, then did the restoration work, then output that to 70mm film - like it's definitely been in and out of a computer, even without the weird line right down the center of the screen in one scene.

(To be fair, movies shot in VistaVision often look kind of off to me, like they never did quite figure out how to light right for the process)

The next night was given to Goodrich, which was not another corporate origin story and not exactly the Mr. Mom redux it initially looked like, but a pleasant enough couple hours. Would have been funny if Mr. Mom had been a Meyers-Shyer thing, though.

Wednesday night was a "last evening in theaters" show of The Outrun, which is one I spent the better part of a month not quite being in the mood for but ultimately liking a lot. It had a kind of weird release - spotty times everywhere but Kendall that make me wonder if it's sort of being four-walled for Academy members or something. Pretty good, though.

After a couple days not going out and watching baseball, I hit Chinese movie High Forces Saturday afternoon, which was wobbly but had some quality minor-action-movie trailers in front of it: Werewolves just getting right out there with "One year ago, a supermoon turned millions into werewolves" with no buildup whatsoever, Elevation offering more big ravenous aliens, and Weekend in Taipei's trailer updated because it first started showing up in October with a "Coming in September" caption on it. Then, somehow, not really doing anything besides groceries and a trip to the comic shop in the afternoon, I was oddly worn down by the time Max and the Junkmen in the evening and was in and out too much to really say i watched it. Amusingly, I passed on getting it in the Kino Lorber Fall sale because I knew I'd be watching it over the weekend. Hopefully they'll still have some left for the next big sale!

That turned out to be my last "Melville et Cie." film at the Harvard Film Archive, because Saturday offered the choice of two things on my unwatched shelf - The Bat at the Somerville with Jeff Rapsis on the organ and Army of Shadows at the Archive on 35mm film. I went with The Bat and it wound up a lot of fun. Then, in the evening, it was out to the Seaport for Magpie, which is also pretty neat.

More on my Letterboxd account as I see more, if you don't need to wait for me to actually get spelling and such right.


North by Northwest

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 21 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (A Bit of Hitch, 70mmm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere; 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD available on Amazon

Much like Psycho didn't exactly invent the modern horror movie but refined it into something sort of respectable rather than the back half of a twin bill, North by Northwest feels like the birth of the modern blockbuster: A-list talent, a sense of play in the script that lubricates a kind of silly plot that's nevertheless always moving forward, and grand action set pieces that spill into familiar locations. Not the first of its kind, for sure, but more like the James Bond films and other bits of star-driven action that followed it than the Cinemascope epics that preceded it.

(Maybe I'm overthinking it, missing something obvious, or going over well-worn territory here)

At any rate, this is one of my go-to answers when someone asks me my favorite movie and I don't want to either spend a lot of time thinking about it or let them down by saying I can't name one, but I'm not being glib; it's an exceptionally fun film with enough great moments that one will probably surprise you even if you've seen it a dozen times. In this case, it's the awkward little "excuse me" flashbulb as someone captures a picture of Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill apparently stabbing a man, and the little callbacks to it later.

There's a certain oddity to Grant as this sort of reluctant hero 65 years later, as "Cary Grant" lands in the part of the Venn diagram where "foppish" and "suave" intersect, just enough of the latter that the moments where he's suddenly pretty capable don't quite jar. The rest of the cast, though, is terrific, especially Eva Marie Saint, who makes Eve feel exactly that cool, James Mason and Leo G. Carroll as amiably aloof opposites, and a wonderfully dangerous Marin Landau. Hitch and writer Ernest Lehman move them all around quickly but not frantically, slowing down a bit for the scene when we get to see the leads actually like each other without qualification in a way that's sweet, charming, and clarifying, just before the big Mount Rushmore finale, a rougher and scrappier thing than a modern take on it would be but which maybe works better because it's trying to communicate rather than fool.the audience.

Still a ton of fun, and I'm glad that Warner is pushing 70mm prints to theaters to promote the upcoming 4K disc.


Goodrich

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

Goodrich is the sort of film writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer's parents (Nancy Meyers & Charles Shyer) used to make, which in their own ways were kind of throwbacks to earlier days of cinema: Mostly-amiable comedies set against affluent backgrounds with well-cast stars. They were meant to entertain and do so in a relatively frictionless way, and if Meyers-Shyer can't quite make that work, it can be tough to see where it's what she's doing and where it's the times.

It opens in spikier fashion that could almost be a commentary on that as Andy Goodrich (Michael Keaton) is woken up by a call from his wife saying she has checked herself into rehab, so he's in charge of their nine-year old twins Billie (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Mose (Jacob Kopera). He's not completely inept, but the nanny having a conflict means he has to call on Grace (Mila Kunis), the daughter from his first marriage (pregnant herself) while he works to save the gallery he's run for decades which has been losing money for a while now.

Whether or not Meyers-Shyer had Michael Keaton in mind for the title role, the part fits him like a glove, letting him go into cruise control a bit. That's not exactly a problem; I like Michael Keaton, and this film is basically him being the same guy he was in his 80s/90s heyday, but maybe a little more mellow if not quite as much wiser as he should be. That's kind of a "for better or worse" thing, at times; it makes for a fairly pleasant couple of hours but you can't help but wonder if maybe his title character shouldn't have been a little more prickly or selfish at points, and the film dances around the moments when his blithe, privileged optimism is burst; things are expected to just work out, eventually, because he's generally a good dude and things work out for guys like that.

This isn't that movie, though, it's resolutely nice and well-meaning and after the first ten minutes or so works very hard to avoid situations where someone gets as upset as they maybe should. It plays fair while it does that, at least, and even theVivien Lyra Blair (as the daughter who is too witty for being nine) never grates. There's a part of me that wonders if this started life as a movie about Mila Kunis's Grace, which would seem the more autobiographical route, only to have the more interesting bits of the script coalesce around Andy. Kunis has a great moment or three where Grace is allowed to confront that she loves her dad but that she sometimes feels like practice for raising her siblings There's a story in there that is not necessarily just an L.A. story as is implied in the dialogue, which would seem to be where she would start from.

Goodrich is almost certainly not all it could be, but it's easy enough to enjoy throughout and gives its star a couple hours to do the sort of thing he does well. There's worse ways to spend a couple hours.


The Outrun

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 October 2024 in Landmark Kendall Square #6 (first-run, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

Drinking and alcoholism are boring. Yes, they're incredibly impactful and cause drama, but I suspect that even those with a lot of personal experience will look at scenes of Rona drinking, fucking up her life because of it, and going through AA meetings, and have a little "ugh, this shit again" reaction as it happens. It kind of puts the like to the old trope that happy families are all the same but unhappy ones are unique and interesting.

This sounds like a complaint, but it's actually what makes The Outrun kind of engrossing: Main character Rona's narration, which wanders from her own history to topics from geology to mythology to biology, reveals her as smart, curious, and self-aware of how her childhood has left her kind of a mess, and the version of her we see when she drinks is more loud than fun and uninhibited. We kind of get it; her father's bipolar syndrome and mother's religiosity on top of growing up on a farm where the work often involves grimly delivering stillborn lambs and disposing of their carcasses is the sort of thing we can see drinking to escape. And "escape" seems to be her reaction to her alcoholism when things come to a head, insisting on the sort of rehab that locks her up and running north, not just to her home, but to progressively smaller islands. She perhaps needs the quiet to progressively get rid of the noise that leads her to drink - and to make getting a bottle more work when the compulsion comes over her anyway - but it's stark.

Rona fleeing crowds winds up leaving us with Saoirse Ronan and the desolate rocky beauty of the Orkney Islands, and it's a solid foundation to build a movie on; Ronan's taciturn but engaging performance matches the stern environment and offers hints of the occasional joy she'll be able to show later. You can see her trying at times and going through the motions at others, and how her best self is smothered under the noise of drunkenness. The film's got some big clear metaphors working - the rare bird that's hard to find, the polar-bear dips to give one a jolt - but they work pretty well, in part because Rona is smart enough to see them as something she can sort of adapt and learn from in the world rather than the filmmakers building the world to reflect their points. I especially like a moment toward the end when she's explaining how she's changing her area of study to seaweed to her religious mother in a tiny apartment; it's earnest nerdiness that the drink has covered, but it's her also engaging in the world and something important about it that makes life happen. Her mother (Sasika Reeves) doesn't necessarily get it, but this is the way her daughter understands a higher power even as she lashes out at Christianity and is pointedly silent during certain phrases at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

It's a tough sit at times - dull for some, maybe triggering for others - but the people involved recognize and work with it, winding up with something often quite lovely.


Wei Ji Hang Xian (High Forces)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 October 2024 in AMC Causeway Street #2 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA; check here for when it is

Oxide Pang is just about exactly slick enough to pull this very silly movie off. He doesn't really make it good, per se, but he keeps it moving even as the audience's eyes roll, and when the finale gets big and silly, folks are going sure, why not, rather than really laughing at it, comparing it to Hollywood productions (I'm tempted to revisit Passenger 57 to see just how much they have in common), or asking just which Chinese city, exactly, is big enough for a ring road that the largest passenger liner in the world can land on but not an airport.

Before that, we're introduced to Gao Haojun (Andy Lau Tak-wah), whose demonstration is canceled and is thus able to fly home on the new superliner; the company president, Li Hangyu (Guo Xiaodong), will also be aboard, though in a private office suite, as will ex-wife Fu Yuan (Tamia Liu Tao) and daughter Xiaojun (Wendy Zhang Zifeng). The former has reconciled with Haojun since he has shown real progress in treating the bipolar disorder that used to lead him to fits of rage; given that one caused the accident that left Xiaojun blind, she has not. Also on board, roughly a dozen terrorists whose leader Mike (Qu Xhuxiao) has a similar diagnosis and aims to ransom the plane half a billion dollars - but should the passengers be worried that they brought parachutes?

The script is dumb, and if the bad guys are ever given names rather than numbers in Chinese, they don't make the subtitles. I think this is Andy Lau's second movie in as many years which feels like it may do a real disservice to people with bipolar disorder, though I can't say myself. The "Die Hard on a plane" stuff is often weirdly choppy and frustratingly edited - you can see just enough cool action to wish you had a clearer view - even before getting into how it doesn't really take the tight quarters and sudden motions of an airplane into consideration very much. It almost makes me wonder if there had been a long negotiation worth the censor board, between the brutality of the kills and the way this new release shows 2018 every time the year shows up.

The finale, on the other hand, is big and likably dopey. I don't really believe a minute of it, but Pang and his crew mostly manage to hit the sweet spot where you know the physics is laughable but the effects are pretty well rendered (or, as the credits show us, built), it's well-paced, and the filmmakers seem to know just how much to err on the side of larger than life as opposed to realistic. It's entertaining enough to send one out of the theater enjoying its absurdity, and somehowthat's value for the price of a ticket.


Max et les ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkmen)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 26 October 2024 in the Harvard Film Archive (Melville et Cie., 35mm)
Available to rent/purchase digitally ; Blu-ray and DVD available on Amazon

I dozed off a bit here, and I'm upset about it, because it looks like two or three really fun movies in one: A cop so desperate for a win (and maybe a deterrent) that he resorts to entrapment, a group of slackers unable to really commit to a crime, and the cop falling for an old friend's sex-worker girlfriend. It's almost built for their not to be a heist, and the filmmakers are clever in how they show the general path to the foregone conclusion and don't give it twists so much as odd terrain - to torture the metaphor further, nothing ever actually disappears behind a hill, but you can't follow a straight line.

Plus, Romy Schneider, wow.

Anyway, sticking a pin here to this movie the next time Kino Lorber has a big sale.


The Fall

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming in the USA; check here for when it is; Blu-ray and DVD available on Amazon

Beyond having a few things that clearly inspired some comic book creators a decade later, The Bat is a genuinely fun Old Dark House movie, and that's a genre where I usually like the idea a lot more than the actual execution. It moves quickly enough that one can miss that it's playing fair, near as I can tell on a single viewing, has a fairly enjoyable set of characters that mostly stay on the right side of "too broad", and doesn't wear out its welcome.

The plot is kind of all over the place- it involves a cat burglar who announces his crimes, a young lady trying to hide her boyfriend who many believe to be said "Bat" from the police, passing him off to her spinster aunt as a new gardener, and a hidden room with a safe. It's convoluted and full of a few holes - if The Bat has been at this for a while, why are the cops investigating the latest robbery like it's a one-off - but the bones are simple enough to support more.

It's also kind of noteworthy that this was a movie from 1926 based on a play from 1920 or so, which means that it antedates a lot of things that it could be seen as riffing on, whether they be Batman or Agatha Christie or Miss Marple specifically, and, heck, The Old Dark House was a few years in the future. The building blocks were sort of sloshing around, but this puts a lot of things together in ways that anticipate what will work, and looks great - it's got a fair number of folks who would have notable careers well into the talkie era behind the scenes doing the excellent work where, nearly 100 years later, one can see the seams or the lack of refinement, but the ideas and execution are nevertheless impressive. There's a nice knack for having some funny bits and larger-than-life portions while still taking things fairly seriously.

It's not perfect even before you get to the racist tropes piled so high on the Japanese butler that one might be surprised actor Sojin Kamiyama was not a white guy in yellowface; it tries to juggle enough balls long enough that it can't help but drop a few on occasion. Still, the filmmakers tend to bounce back quickly and cram a lot of movie into its 90 minutes.


Magpie

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 October 2024 in Alamo Drafthouse Seaport #4 (first-run, laser DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere

The fun thing about Magpie is that not a lot seems to happen, but it's still got three phases that potentially twist things up: Before one realizes this looks like an unreliable narrator movie, discovering that one doesn't necessarily know who the unreliable narrator is, and when it sorts itself out. It's not that tricky a mystery to solve, but it's satisfying because the red herrings work differently than usual.

As it opens, it's been about five or six years since Anette (Daisy Ridley) and Ben (Shazad Latif) moved to the countryside so that Ben could concentrate on his writing and they could raise their daughter Matilda (Hiba Ahmed), with Anette leaving her job in the publishing industry. Matilda is now a child actress, and has been cast in a period piece as the daughter of a character played by Alicia (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz), who has just had a sex tape posted online before filming. As Ben visits the set to supervise Matilda, he finds himself feeling a connection with Alicia, while being left home alone isn't doing wonders for Anette's mental health, and it is implied she had some sort of breakdown before Matilda was conceived.

In addition to playing a lead role, Daisy Ridley has a story credit here, and it sort of confirms that she's been seeking out a certain type of role since Star Wars, these wired-differently young women who can make a viewer feel like they're hard to crack. She's interesting to watch as Anette, portraying the way parenthood can overwhelm somebody while also making them feel left behind without necessarily yelling it. There's a precision to how it's directed, emphasizing strain without having to have Ridley exaggerate anything about Anette. There's also a sort of fun in watching her, Shazad Latif, and Matilda Lutz find ways to play scenes so that one isn't quite sure whether they're just a bit awkward, showing guilty conscience, or if the actors are portraying not what the characters are actually doing and how, but what someone else thinks they're doing.

It eventually heads toward a Big Reveal that includes flashbacks, but I like how director Sam Yates and Tom Bateman haven't really worked on hiding things that much, doing only the slightest bit of misdirection in hiding something so that the audience is actively engaged with what's happening later; they seem to want viewers weighing possibilities instead of passively watching and waiting to be blindsided and explained to.

It's a nicely compact film - 90 minutes, not really an ounce of fat on it, but also pretty sparse in its action. Everyone seems to know how to get a lot of its minor events, but it's seldom the sort of consciously still movie that requires the audience to elevate tiny movements to something bigger. Just efficient and tight without feeling like it's been passed down in the name of efficiency.

Fantasia Movie in a Theater This Weekend: Hundreds of Beavers

I didn't actually have to move this review up out of order because it was the next thing to come out in theaters - Hundreds of Beavers was next on my list of Fantasia reviews - but finishing the Film Rolls is taking longer than expected, so I'm just going to put this first entry in the next post up right now. Hundreds of Beavers is at the Somerville Theatre this weekend - including a midnight show in the big room on Saturday that I'm sure will be a blast if a bunch of people show up.

Anyway: I'll probably delete this and replace it with something that includes everything else I saw in Montreal on 31 July 2023 (good lord!) sometime in the next week, maybe updated a little with thoughts from a second viewing, but for now - Hundreds of Beavers is at the Somerville Theatre this weekend. It's probably the most purely hilarious movie you'll see all year. Buy tickets, and support it!


Hundreds of Beavers

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 31 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Underground, DCP)

When I saw this at Fantasia, I immediately thought that I wanted a major studio to pick this up and use it to fill some Covid/strike-related holes in their schedule with a big flashy, release, just so that every major movie critic in America would have to write a half-dozen paragraphs like this is some kind of sensible movie. Of course, it wound up going the self-distributed route, because large companie are by and large run by cowards, but no matter how you see it, it's a delightfully bonkers live-action cartoon that absolutely commits to the bit.

Said bit is the misadventures of Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), who is drinking all much as much applejack as he is serving fur-trappers in the 19th Century upper midwest, only to have everything fall apart when beavers gnawing at logs cause a snowball effect that wipes out his house, business, and everything, forcing him to get into beaver trapping himself, both for funds and revenge! Unfortunately, he is not very bright, and the beavers and other woodland creatures are likely not just smarter, but have numbers on their side.

When director Mike Cheslik and his friends set out to make a live-action cartoon, they don't mess around - the beavers, dogs, raccoons, wabbits, etc., are all folks in suits, the characters mainly communicate through pantomime and body language, and the mostly-white background of snowy, overcast Wisconsin means that they can fill it with simple props and effects that often place it right on the edge of the uncanny valley, using that unreality in a way that lets the audience now that any sort of ridiculous mayhem might happen at any second. It's clearly done on a budget, which isn't to say cheap: Cheslik has a very good idea of where things need to be perfect and where you just need to know they're crazy instead of lazy.

It's the sort of thing that could probably wear an audience out quickly, reminding them that there's a reason most cartoons run about five or ten minutes while this hits the hundred mark. It is, fortunately, able to change things up every once in a while; it may be almost 100% pure slapstick, but it occasionally takes a break from Looney Tunes to do Buster Keaton, and then for a while the gag is basically playing things out like a Super Nintendo game. It's all more or less of a piece but at least feels like it's switching gears every once in a while, rather than seeing just how much of the exact same thing different members of the audience can endure. And, thankfully, the jokes are good, from the opening musical number to the dogs playing poker to the giant gaudy bits of slapstick that had me writing things like "beaver Voltron!" in my notebook.

It somehow works, keeping the energy level up in a way the team's Lake Michigan Monster never quite managed for me, in part because it's never arch. It just goes for the best joke available every minute or so, hits far more often than not, and never forgets that doing the silly thing is almost always funnier than winking at the audience about what a silly thing they're doing. .

This Week in Tickets: 5 February 2024 - 11 February 2024 (Jean Arthur Week, Part II)

What a "living at the Brattle" week looks like, if you don't remember.

So, yes, as was the plan last week, I did that whole Jean Arthur series, and was kind of amused when I saw a review on Letterboxd for More Than a Secretary that read "Jean Arthur was gay, PERIODT!" because one looks at her biography and wonders if she wasn't somehow queer: One annulled marriage, one that produced no children, intensely private, died in the care of a female longtime friend/companion. More or less finished in Hollywood after her Columbia contract ended, though she'd work on the stage and teach.

And then there are the movies, where The Talk of the Town wasn't the only one that seemed to like a happy polycule was closer to the ideal conclusion than a couple. Obviously, you can't really tell much about an studio-period actor from the movies they're in, because they can't really choose projects, but sometimes it seems like the queer-coding and apparent comfort with it piles up - the best takes with her roommate being better than the best ones with her boyfriend, her biggest movies being the ones with unconventional chemistry.

No way to know, obviously, since if this was the case, she maintained her privacy very well during her life. More likely than not, she just lived a private life, wasn't nearly as romance-focused as the characters she played, and had a roommate when she was older. She definitely made some good movies during her time at Columbia, though, and the post-weekend portion of the Brattle's program got to some of the more offbeat ones: If You Could Only Cook, The Whole Town's Talking, More Than a Secretary, Too Many Husbands, You Can't Take It with You, The More the Merrier, and Adventure in Manhattan.

(Somewhere in there, there was a re-watch of Piranha for Film Rolls, but we'll just maybe link to that when that post is ready actually.)

After that came the Lunar New Year weekend, which is kind of a weird one here because it's big mainstream movies, but few have ever had a trailer, some of them come out day-of and some get picked up by North American distributors and wind up coming out months later, and some just disappear because the Chinese distributor doesn't figure there's enough audience in the USA to care. This year, it's backed up right up against Valentine's Day, too. Some years they take over the Imax screen with something huge like The Wandering Earth, other years, not so much I liked both Table for Six 2 (Friday) and The Movie Emperor (Sunday), but they're not "hey, they've got blockbusters in China too!" things.

(It looks we're missing two big ones - YOLO, from the director of Hi, Mom, and Zhang Yimou's Article 20, which will probably show up later.)

Also on Sunday: The first "Silents, Please!" of the year, the 1924 Peter Pan, which was quite fun. Given the mention of the next one tying to MGM's and Columbia's 100th anniversaries, I wonder if 1924 is going to be the theme for the year. The pandemic really screwed over what could potentially have been a good long celebration of silent centennials!

Sorry this showed up kind of late, but it's kind of a beast, and the next Film Rolls is looking like a beast too. My Letterboxd account continues to update if this is too long between missives.


If You Could Only Cook

* * * (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Available to purchase on DVD on Amazon; not steaming elsewhere at this moment

So here's the thing about If You Could Only Cook, in which a self-made millionaire (Herbert Marshall), having given an unemployed woman he meets (Jean Arthur) the impression that he, too, is out of work (rather than taking a week off before his wedding to a woman from a respected family he doesn't particularly love), agrees to pose as her husband so that they can take jobs as a butler & cook, only to discover that they were hired by a gangster: It seldom has the absolute best joke possible in a given situation, and it's got a bunch of set-ups it barely mines, but it rarely stumbles, while also packing everything into 74 minutes and fading to black at the very moment its business is done. This is how comedy B-movies are done. Solid as heck work all around.

Indeed, the filmmakers are often content to run off little more than the chemistry between Jean Arthur and Herbert Marshall for long stretches, letting them be pleasant company so that you needn't have reservations about pairing them up despite the deception at the center, while a bunch of nutty folks around them escalate things. Arthur and Marshall play off each other so well that it's pretty easy to believe that Jim and Joan go out on limbs for each other. Meanwhile, we see just enough of Jim's best man cuddling with the bride-to-be to casually dispose of that as an issue, while Leo Carrillo and Lionel Stander are mobsters divorced enough from violent crime to be entertaining goofs.

There's a kind of temptation to let things get completely crazy, as they do during an entertaining final chase, but it's not that movie; as frantic and full of screwball misunderstandings as it is, it's pretty gentle. In some ways, it means that this is a comedy B movie that maybe could have been an A picture with 10 more minutes spent running down all the other things going on, and I'd kind of like to see the movie where they knock down everything they set up.

On the other hand, it works pretty darn well at this scale, and can you imagine remaking it? So much is positively quaint today that you'd have to spend time explaining couples' jobs and the like.

(Fun if surprising fact: F. Hugh Herbert, credited with the story, was not a one-off alias that one might use during the Great Depression! His career spanned 30-plus years!)


The Whole Town's Talking

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 5 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime or elsewhere, and to purchase on Blu-ray at Amazon

The first character we meet in this movie is named Seaver, and he survives to the end despite being kidnapped. Five stars.

Well, not quite, but it is tremendous fun to watch Edward G. Robinson not only spend a lot of the movie playing a sweet little nebbish but, as the word gets out that there is an escaped convict who looks just like him, seemingly have difficulty contorting his face into that of the gangster he sees in the paper. I'm not sure of the extent to which he'd really established his gangster persona at this early point, but it's a kick when the Robinson we know and love does show up. Joan Arthur is a fun foil, giving Miss Clark aggressive but honest-seeming charm that quickly wipes away how she initially comes off as a bullying opportunist.

John Ford directs, and it makes for a snappier movie than the ones with Frank Capra that started this Jean Arthur series, even as he's marshaling scenes that play big or tossing both the gags and the bits that move the story ahead around quickly. The parts with Robinson playing off himself work well, too, especially a couple that must be done with rear protection or quality matte work because the smoke from Killer Mannion's cigar wafts behind Arthur Jones rather than disappearing as it passes a central line.

i do, eventually, get a sense of what's kind of too much at points; the chaotic first half doesn't make a whole lot more sense than the second, when Mannion is setting things in motion, but it's quick and lots of fun.


More Than a Secretary

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Not currently streaming; available to purchase on DVD at Amazon.

It's the old, old story - the co-owner of a secretarial school (Jean Arthur) tries to give the demanding client (George Brent) who has fired a number of girls placed at his magazine a piece of her mind, but is mistaken mistaken for the new hire. He's handsome and charismatic, though, so she takes the job, even as she and her partner have lamented the extent to which their students see their training as a path to matrimony rather than independence.

There is some darn good screwball in here, especially as Arthur's Carol is initially thrown by just how peculiar Fred's healthy lifestyle and the workings of the magazine he uses to spread the gospel thereof are, with Lionel Stander especially fun as Fred's trainer and best buddy (he was also a scene-stealer in If You Could Only Cook and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, just a terrific character actor). The film loses a bit of momentum when the health-magazine goofiness starts to fall by the wayside, because Carol finding the whole thing weird is generally more entertaining than her being part of it. I do want to know what percentage of Dorothea Kent's lines as Maizie are double entendres that just aren't so well known 90 years later; she's a hussy and given that so many of her lines are clear come-ons or ones where you can see where she's going, I suspect the rest are just the same.

It's a slight movie, for sure, and at times feels like it's been cut to the bone to get down to its trim 77-minute running time: If the fact that Jean Arthur's character was actually the owner of the school was supposed to be something she was hiding, it's never brought up, and if the best friends are pairing off, it's just out of sight, a fuzzy piece of the background. But it's cute.


Too Many Husbands

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Not currently streaming; available to purchase on DVD at Amazon.

I wonder what the original stage play of this is like, because it certainly feels like the filmmakers took a look at the premise, saw the jokes, and decided that any attempt to make it go anywhere or say anything with even the slightest bit of weight would be working against their purposes, so they tossed it out. This is actually more than fine; it's 80 minutes of flustered absurdity as Jean Arthur's Vicky tries to figure out what to do now that her missing-presumed-dead first husband Bill (Fred MacMurray) has been rescued from a deserted island and found her married to his best friend and business partner Henry (Melvyn Douglas).

There's maybe the hint of something weightier here in Bill's realization that he took Vicky for granted or Henry's inferiority complex, but then something clicks with Vicky, and the look on Jean Arthur's face she realizes that she can make this work for her is delightful. Her glee at realizing that these two men will fight over her, and not because they see her as a prize but because she's obviously the best thing in their lives - kind of important, that! - seems like a chance for the movie to go in on how these two men have neglected her in different ways, but it's having way too much fun with the banter and bouncing around the apartment to slow down and talk about that.

Screenwriter Claude Binyon could maybe do with making a stronger argument for Melvyn Douglas's Henry; the film is almost all ping-ponging and banter, and while Douglas fills this sort of slot quite well, Fred MacMurray is really good at that sort of comedy, and I suspect that the guy who is quick on the draw is going to do better with audiences on top of the girl. MacMurray seems a lot like Arthur in that he was in a classic or two but didn't have iconic pairings or a body of work that became where he was the best thing in legendary pictures. But even if they didn't achieve places in the canon of their own, you can see why they're stars in movies like this as MacMurray in particular is giving you reason to enjoy it at even the silliest moments.


You Can't Take It with You

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 7 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Artthur, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime and elsewhere, or to purchase on Blu-ray at Amazon

Can you imagine if the internet had been around in Frank Capra's day? The level of snark at his seemingly facile earnestness, the immediate "let people like things" backlash, the attempt to parse whether he was actually kind of great at directing actors or if he was lucky to have James Stewart in parts calibrated to his strengths? The truth of it is probably somewhere in the middle, but you can picture the shouting over it, right, especially in a movie like this which doesn't always hit.

In it, banker Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) is trying to acquire a group of properties in New York on which he'll build a factory that corners the munitions business; the holdout, "Grandpa" Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) barely recognizes the attempt; he and his family and other oddballs he's collected have a sort of creative commune. Unbeknownst to either, Kirby's idler son Tony (Stewart), a do-nothing Vice President has Grandpa's granddaughter Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur) for a secretary and girlfriend, and she would like their families to meet.

There was a time, when I was younger, when I would have described the clan of eccentrics in this movie as worse than the banking family, although these days I'd mark the former as just annoying and inconsiderate while the bankers looking to build a monopoly on munitions manufacture are closer to evil. Progress, but, man, do I still get annoyed by all these guys working so hard to be zany. Capra fetishizes his misfits as much as he loves them, so the avalanche of screwiness seems a bit forced.

Some of the situations are pretty entertaining, at least, well-executed free-floating gags. Alice is a perfect fit for Jean Arthur, who throughout this series has been shown as good at being charming and elegant and then peeling that back to show something more brash and playful not far underneath, and that's often the center of her character here. Jimmy Stewart's do-nothing rich kind doesn't deserve her, really, and Stewart is at his best when he's letting the audience see how empty his rebellion is for most of the movie. There's a lot of charm to most of the cast, though, especially Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold: Barrymore runs a sort of brute-force assault to get the audience to see him as sincere, while Arnold convincingly lets his decency get dragged out.

85 years later, I must admit that a big part of what sours it for me is Grandpa's little rant against paying his taxes and how ready he is to abandon the neighborhood he'd told not to worry about selling as soon as things get a bit uncomfortable for him. You don't have to make these movies "balanced", but you should perhaps reckon with Grandpa's happy life coming from a place of privilege, even before getting to the Black servants who keep this little commune fed!


The More the Merrier

* * * (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, DCP)
Available to rent/purchase digitally on Prime and elsewhere, or to purchase on DVD at Amazon

I wonder how many more movies like The More the Merrier got made quickly at some point and then sank into relative obscurity because they were so of the moment or local that their inspiration would seem alien just a few years later. Here, that's Washington DC as America enters World War II, beset by a housing crunch where Connie Milligan (Jean Arthur) opts to rent out her spare bedroom out of patriotism, not planning on winding up with Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), who arrived a couple days before his hotel room was free, and who subsequently sub-sublets half of his bedroom to Joe Carter (Joel McCrea), with the intention of playing matchmaker.

It's a kind of unnerving little premise that requires one find Dingle whimsical and charming rather than, say, dangerously presumptuous about invading a young woman's space, and it's on Arthur and Coburn, and later McCrea, to sell that they can size one another up quickly and see more than irritants, enough so that they can go through bunch of clockwork physical comedy and being flustered because of how they've defaulted to farce rules where something is a secret to be kept rather than something to broach right away, with director George Stevens orchestrating things nicely.

Things really come alive when, after a few tossed-off comments about DC having eight women for every man, what with the draft and all the clerical work, the movie makes a sharp shift from cute to horny, like they shot the scene of everybody sunbathing on the roof and decided that was what the film was missing up to that point. The film is certainly at its most fun during that period, with Connie suddenly tiring of the milquetoast fiancé that one might be forgiven for thinking was a lie and rooms full of women eying JOe appreciatively. Admittedly, Joe needs to be pushed out of the way to really let the movie achieve its ready-to-go potential, but it doesn't really need him at that point any more.

It's kind of screwy for the rest of the time, but cute, with Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea a very nice potential pair. They're something of an "inevitable, because they're the young and single characters we see the most" match, but filled with enough charm to make one believe it. Throw in Coburn, and the group has nice screwball energy even as they stop just short of frantic.

The whole thing can make you scratch your head a bit - I'm not sure I've seen this sort of movie so specifically built around so narrow a certain time and place before - but it's certainly genial enough for most of the time to be a charmer.


Adventure in Manhattan

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (Jean Arthur, 35mm)
Available to purchase on DVD at Amazon

Adventure in Manhattan is just about complete nonsense as a mystery, really, the sort that either completely misses that a big part of what makes master detectives and criminals fun is the audience getting to see how the machinery in their brains works or realizes that there is absolutely no way for it to make sense and just pushes through anyway. The film all too often just asserts that these guys are brilliant and has them make random leaps, which keeps the movie moving but doesn't make the hero and villain much more than insufferable.

(The story involves a paper hiring "criminologist" writer George Melville (Joel McCrea) to investigate a series of daring robberies which he believes are the work of a presumed-dead European thief (Reginald Owen), while at the same time he crosses paths with unemployed waif Claire Peyton (Jean Arthur), who turns out to be an actress his fellow reporters have hired to prank him because he's obnoxious as hell and needs to be taken down a peg)

Of course, you don't necessarily need much more than that in a 72-minute movie, especially with Joel McCrea as the too-brilliant sleuth and Jean Arthur as the smitten sidekick. They bring sheer movie-star power to the very silly script and make the time passing pleasant. You might like and want more - a really clever heist, or brilliant detective work that falls into place as Melville explains it - but for movies as disposable as this was intended to be, sometimes you've just got to be satisfied with the vibe, and the vibe from McCrea and Arthur is pretty good.


Peter Pan (1924)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Silents Please!, 35mm with accompaniment)
Available to stream/rent digitally, or to purchase on Blu-ray at Amazon

This is the first official/authorized/known film version (although I wouldn't be shocked if someone had made one earlier), made with the direct input/control from J.M. Barrie, and it turns out to be really darn solid. Betty Bronsan & Mary Brian make a genuinely appealing Peter & Wendy, with Bronsan giving Peter the right sort of chaotic energy and Brian capturing Wendy being on the verge of growing up in a way that makes the end, where Peter can't join her, just the right amount of sad. Ernest Torrence really seems to set the standard for Captain Hook over the next century. Anna May Wong shows up, but, um, let's not get into that too much.

The set designers, art directors, and the like (or whatever they were called in those days) seem to have a field day as well, creating a great-looking Never Never Land that sometimes plays like a really spiffy stage production but also never feels bound by that medium; there's room to do special effects or zoom in to show Virginia Browne Faire's Tinker Bell interacting with oversized props. The pantomime animals have a perfect level of unreality considering this, too, in that their acknowledged artifice allows the audience to accept them rather than look for the flaws, with George Ali performing Nana the dog (and possibly the Croc). It's his only film credit, per IMDB, but he's listed first, making me wonder if he was a well-known specialist in this sort of role.

If it trips up at all, it's near the end, although (given Barrie's insistence that few liberties be taken), maybe that's inherent to the material, with things moving fast enough that you wonder how the implication that it's been some time works. It's also a bit of a shame that the only surviving print was a localized-to-America one, but all in all, this is a whole lot better than one might have expected.

This Week in Tickets: 29 January 2024 - 4 February 2024 (Jean Arthur Week, Part I)

Been doing this over a decade and still feel kind of weird about splitting Brattle rep series up like this. It's one thing when they're vertical, or something occasional like with the HFA/Coolidge/Alamo, but my desire to make a big post is often what gets things derailed.

So, last week was one of those weeks where showtimes just didn't work - temperature's low enough that I'm not hanging around anywhere before the movie, but there's not enough time to do anything at home before setting out, which is why there are two things seen at 8pm or so She Is Conann on Tuesday, which I quite liked, a bit more than I expected from the directors' previous films, and Poor Things on Friday, which left me about as cold as I expected from the directors' previous films.

After that, it was Joan Arthur time, as the Brattle started off their year-long celebration of Columbia Pictures's centennial with a tribute to one of the studio's biggest stars of the 1930s and 1940s.

Arthur is an interesting one; a friend mentioned being surprised to find that she was born in 1900, because it means that in her 1935-1944 heyday, she was making romantic comedies at an age when a lot of actresses were playing mothers and housewives. You would absolutely believe the sources that placed her birth in 1905 or even 1908, especially since her going blonde after leaving Paramount makes it easier to memory-hole her silent-movie years.

It's kind of interesting that she's not considered iconic in the way that others of her era are, maybe in part because her career doesn't extend much past 1944 - just two films afterward, some television, stage, and teaching - so she didn't pick up that second generation of folks who appreciated her work. She also didn't have the associations with other legends that would keep later generations coming back to her - though there are three films she did with Frank Capra in this series, she turned down It's a Wonderful Life, and she never worked with, say, Humphrey Bogart or Alfred Hitchcock. It made her legacy someone you'd occasionally come across when investigating some other group of films, but only rarely someone you know.

Which is fine; time filters the canon. But, gosh, she's fun, and I'm glad she's getting this spotlight. Anyway, the for films that played over the weekend were some of her better known ones, with major directors and two-hour runtimes: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Talk of the Town, and Only Angels Have Wings.

More to come, most of which are shorter, fluffier comedies, more typical of the period. They're already showing up on my Letterboxd account, of course, but they'll be here next week.


Poor Things

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2024 in Somerville Theatre #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream when it's available to stream

It's kind of funny to me that I'm composing this in the same space where Beau Is Afraid led off last week because, while I'm sure that there are a few of these every year, it sure seems like 2023 had more films than average that have relatively little interest to say but are sure given free reign to say it in very elaborate fashion. There's nothing terribly clever or insightful beyond the very ordinary here, but even that is muddled by the fact that director Yorgos Lanthimos has a tendency to abstract and exaggerate to the point where it's hard to recognize his characters as human. It's great-looking and there's bits of good in it, but there's also a lot of extravagance that perhaps suggests profundity more than actually containing it.

Victorian medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youseef) is our way in, taking a job with Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter (Willem Dafoe) to monitor Bella (Emma Stone), whom he eventually discovers is a chimera, the body of a young suicide with the brain of her unborn child transplanted into her skull. Bella is learning at an accelerated rate, and is soon ready to run off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), the rakish lawyer whom Godwin intended to prepare a marriage contract between Max and Bella.

You can see Emma Stone's Bella mature, because she stops using baby talk, but it plays as something that just happens as if it's automatic, not one thing leading to another, except in the most obvious cases. And yet, everything's drawn out, like somewhere between Lanthimos, screenwriter Tony McNamara, and novelist Alasdir Gray, they found each step of Bella's journey fascinating but didn't much care to dig particularly deep, and it often feels like she's growing without being challenged or engaged.

It looks gorgeous, though, and the work Emma Stone does is impressive as heck, especially toward the start where it's all face and body language; it's kind of amazing just how expressive she is. It's a shame she spends so much of the movie paired with Mark Ruffalo, who just isn't good here; his performance is smirkingly charmless, relying on other people to say that others find him amusing and charismatic, rather than being a deadpan version of it the way everybody else' is.

I don't suppose I'm ever going to like Yorgos Lanthimos; I think it was The Killing of a Sacred Deer that felt like he a movie about robots imitating human behavior where he didn't mention they were robots, and while this isn't that inhuman, it's just weird enough that I don't connect to it in any real way.


Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon, or elsewhere

What an odd way to build a movie - Mr. Deeds Goes to Town starts out with a fun concept - small-town man Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) unexpectedly inherits a fortune and travels to New York City to start managing it, with reporter Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur) insinuating herself by his side for the benefit of her readers - and a bunch of potentially good subplots: The lawyers are hiding malfeasance! There's a ne'er-do-well alternate heir! He's a commercial poet now expected to fund the opera and juxtaposed with the literati! Most of these are cast away because Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur being cute together is really all you need, but then the movie stops dead for a real clunker of an ending. It really feels like you could just ditch the whole last act for one more scene with Copper and Arthur after Deeds has discovered "Mary" has been deceiving him, except that Capra or someone felt weird making a movie about sudden wealth during the Depression.

That end picks up some of the pieces that were raised and dropped early on, but there's also something about the last act that doesn't sit right in how it sort of concentrates a sort of "it's not good to be mean to people unless you're doing it back attitude. Deeds also punches a lot of people in the nose, and that's okay (in retrospect, this probably makes for a better candidate for an Adam Sandler remake than we thought at the time). It also renders the sharp, active Babe to a wailing woman clutching her editor's shoulder when we've spent the whole movie seeing that this isn't her.

Of course, I wonder a bit of how I'd see this movie if it weren't playing as part of a Jean Arthur series, making me view it as her movie. She's great, shifting in and out of fast-talking lady newspaper reporter and fake working class gal modes in a way you can feel but not necessarily watch happen; there's no click as she code-shifts and it makes it easier to buy that Deeds is drawing something out of her. She's a sensible counter to Cooper's odd title character (honestly, he may be the manic depressive they try to smear him as being), though Cooper is a nice center, putting just a little bit of rural smugness into the sweetness of the character to keep him from becoming saccharine.

The center of the movie where it's mostly the two of them is pretty great - the first sign in the series that Arthur is really good at playing off a guy without subordinating herself to him in a scene - and makes her becoming a better person what the movie is about And, hey, that may make a finale of Deeds skewering others feel like the wrong ending, but at least the movie doesn't lose steam during it.

Plus, you can come out wondering, wait, it's this really the first time most people heard the word "doodling"?


Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon, or elsewhere

Wait - we're supposed to root for a filibuster here? Spewing constant nonsense because the Senate is lined up behind someone else's pork-barrel project? Obviously, that's an unfair description of the finale, but it's a different world today from when you could more easily make a movie where the problem in Washington is generalized corruption, although we often still tend to think in those terms.

Get past that, though, and it's kind of amazing that this movie balances its earnest seeming naivete and its cynical satire as well as it does, because it openly invites you to scoff at literal Boy Scout Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), appointed to fill out a dead Senator's term because he's well-liked but unlikely to learn the ropes well enough to actually do anything, but never really makes you feel bad about it so much as angry. The things being aligned against him in the back half, specifically the media consolidation and ruthlessness of those behind it, are pretty relevant today, and James Stewart's despair in the last act is exceptional.

And in a lot of ways, he's not the hero of the movie so much as Jean Arthur's aide and the rest of the folks who are deep inside the system but maybe can see a chance to be the people they were. Harry Carey's president of the Senate is a little delight as he sees exactly what Smith & Saunders are doing and clearly approves,and Claude Rains is really terrific as the mentor questioning just how far he's gone right up until the end. It creates a more believable connection between outright corruption, passivity, and certainty that sophistication means compromising one's values that can sneak in underneath the earnest crusading.

It's also a pretty terrific-looking film at times - the Senate chamber, for example, feels bigger than most sets in films that aren't specifically meant to be epic, and the lighting is allowed to accentuate the emotion even when there's not necessarily an on-screen reason. Cinematographer Joseph Walker and his crew get to work the darker shades of black-and-white here in a way that allows images to be very striking.


The Talk of the Town

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on DVD on Amazon, or elsewhere

Among the delightful bits of this silly-but-earnest movie in which escaped prisoner Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant), Supreme Court-bound scholar Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), and schoolteacher Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur), I particularly love the little moment of Arthur doing a "hey, I look kind of cute in these" thing in the mirror right after the audience starts thinking she looks cute in her borrowed pajamas. I'm not sure filmmakers really know how to leverage that sort of movie-star charisma quite so well any more, especially in comparison to something like this, which has so much that you hope the characters can end up in a nice happy polycule.

It's kind of goofy on the way to that, admittedly - it opens with one of the longer spinning-newspaper montages you'll see to some genuinely ridiculous amateur sleuthing. In between, though, there's some great single-location farce, with the first half of the film where Nora has just stuck Leopold in the attic and is trying to find reasons to deal with both him and Michael while other people tramp through good enough to make one hope the whole film takes place in this one location over the course of a day or something. It's good door-slamming stuff, occasionally in a literal sense, although it does open up nicely for a while when it becomes difficult to move the story forward within those walls.

And, as mentioned, it's got a fun trio at the center, with a good part of the fun being that Cary Grant and Ronald Colman have as much chemistry with each other as either does with Arthur, perhaps more (if this isn't cited in The Celluloid Closet, especially considering the closeups of Rex Ingram as Lightcap's long-time assistant tearing up at the potential loss of their shred monastic life, someone made a major oversight). There's a sense of fun to all of that which makes the whole thing seem up to grabs despite one corner of the triangle being Cary Grant, and just enough screwiness to its screwball that the randomness of the plot fits right in.

The downside, perhaps, is that the chemistry between Grant & Colman undercuts the expected pairing a bit too much - the film does a fair job convincing the audience that Nora would trust and respect Dilg, and having her gripe about how she resents the attempts to foist her off on Lightcap, but romance is mostly in corners like his calling her the prettiest girl in town and her doting over him more than Lightcap in a spot where she has the chance. That's fine, but it doesn't entirely push the film into standard romantic comedy territory, even as it makes the effort.


Only Angels Have Wings

* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 February 2024 in the Brattle Theatre (first-run,DCP)
Available to stream/purchase digitally on Prime and to purchase on Blu-ray on Amazon, or elsewhere

I watch Jean Arthur and Rita Hayworth in this movie and think of Fay Wray brought along for "love interest" in King Kong: Not really much reason for them to be there but you're glad they are anyway, even if it's kind of silly. It takes a bit of the macho idiot edge off, makes one contemplate the danger a bit more.

It uses Arthur's Bonnie Lee to get the audience into the film's world, as she arrives on a ship bound for Panama from somewhere else in South America, meets a couple of nice young pilots, and through them Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), the one partnered with local businessman Dutchy (Sig Ruman) to establish a mail route between their coastal town and the mines in the country's interior, over the mountains. He seems harsh, but charismatic, and she winds up waiting a week for the next boat. Meanwhile, the new pilot, MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess), turns out to be using a false name and to have history with Carter - as does his wife Judy (Hayworth), though MacPherson doesn't know that.

It's good soap set against the backdrop of a new, modern frontier - not quite an updated Western, but not that far off - whose main fault is that it doesn't really have a spot for Bonnie; there's a stretch where she's listening at a keyhole seemingly just to remind the audience that she's there, although it doesn't exactly go better when she's directly participating in the plot later (one could, I suppose, contrast the bravery of a woman traveling alone with that of the pilots, but movies didn't necessarily like to be so explicit about those dangers); it's also got a scene or two where one can't help but notice how explicitly the filmmakers are prioritizing MacPherson's guilty feelings over the question of whether or not Judy can trust him to look out for her. "Love interest" stuff, I guess, which is a shame, because there's good drama about physical and emotional courage here, and it plays across Grant's face wonderfully.

And, on top of that, there's thrills aplenty here, including a sequence built around landing a single-engine plane on top of a mesa and taking off again that reminds a viewer of just how real stunts in old movies can be. There's miniatures and matte work as well as impressive flying, but it's put together in a way that puts the more real stuff in context, augmenting it, crazy good and effective effects work for 1939. 85 years later, the surrounding performances are good enough that the aerial sequences don't have to rely on being something audiences rarely see, and the drama is straightforward enough to keep the movie going for a couple hours.