jcappy Reviews

Two Women (1960)

Missing: Two Women

[7/10 · 7 April 2024]

"Two Women" is about a single mother shopkeeper trying to protect her teenage daughter from the ravages of war, like bombing and rape. What interest me are the three sexual forms present in De Sica's film. One revolves around seduction, another focuses on celibacy and, of course, the third is rape itself, here so utterly cruel as to deter even the most determined mother's defense. Question: is there a connection between these three sexual modes or is each distinct unto itself?

Giovanni, the coal dealer, is your handsome, good-natured, fun guy seducer--and Cesira (Sophia Loren) about to flee Rome with her daughter, says her so-longs to him inside his storehouse, only to find herself featured in his male seduction fantasy. He deliberately and provokingly turns his noon-lit space into night by locking his doors, shading his windows--and dialing up his masculine command. "You have the mind of a sewer," she tells him, adding: "I'm nobody's property." The two-faced cynic who has nothing but contempt for her ex-husband and marriage itself, says "You don't know me after all." But he's in charge of the action, and pulls Cesira's dress off her shoulder, as the camera pulls away from his peepshow. Is this simply seduction? Who's in on it? De Sica? The audience? Such objectification also occurs when a victorious American soldier, camera in hand, implores Cesira to hike up her skirt. And there other moments, coming from the village women themselves, when they joke about Mussolini's sexual prowess, or when Cesira gets turned on by a shirtless Russian soldier.

But Michele (Jean-Paul Belmondo) the college student son of a village elder in Cesira's home town, stands outside this sexual mode. He's a socialist, an intellectual, a 25 year old virgin, who seriously considered the priesthood. He wears thick glasses, reads Biblical passages that no one listens to, is assumed to be repressed, moralistic, and preachy. In other words, he's the fall guy for sex/life deprivation and the film stereotype of the inward academic. This exchange sums up Cesira's sex stance: "No smoking? No girl?" "No." "How could you ever be without a woman? A man who's NORMAL would go mad." Michele mentions "self-sacrifice." But it seems that De Sica himself may be pushing the tie between sex repression and rape. Michele's one attempt to woo the older Cesira, a timid and clumsy effort, includes a kind lunge toward her. Is this also laughable and mocking like his last name, Di Libero.? But Michele is a poor candidate for being a transmitter of repression because he can be so convincing a human, so original a character, so self-directed that another viewer might see his celibacy as an effective rejection of both seduction and rape.

Rape in "Two Women" is as stark and brutal as war itself. The Moroccan soldiers of the Allied liberation forces gang rape Cesira and her daughter, Rosetta inside a bombed out church. The gang rape is surreal, grotesque, and bestial. But not to the point of separating it from seduction, because the rape's aftermath says otherwise. Both women are not only shown to be the spoils of war, but more to the point, eroticized. Lying in victim poses, the camera lingers on the thighs of both the voluptuous mother and the willowy adolescent daughter. And then, shortly after, we have the pick up of the traumatized Rosetta by an insolent young man who keeps her out all night and buys her silk stockings. All this is certainly not related to the world of Michele's abstinent self but closely resembles Giovanni's darkened sexual mindscape.

So the story of "Two Women" is one of war, rape, and seduction, each an exclusively male setup. Cesira and Rosetta get to be the objects/victims of such aggressive, life blunting forces. When the liberators, in their power and glory, bomb and rape them with immunity, their fate in a postwar world, is pointed downward. As strong a woman that Cesira is, and no matter how ballistic her anger, she is nearly as crushed and traumatized as her daughter. And worse neither mother nor daughter has escaped the male sexual orbit, and thus remain programmed into a world of desire. Only Michele, executed by the Germans in the same moment his two female friends were raped, can ostensibly locate himself apart from war, rape, and seduction. And its his words: "You can't escape, even from yourself," that are deeply recalled by Cesira--holding onto her distraught daughter, as a plea for reality over pleasure.

Storm Warning (1950)

The Klan's Other Legacy

[7/10 · 24 March 2024]

"Storm Warning" (1950) has a good narrative, smart lines, accurate 1940s language, and dramatic moments, but this often doesn't carry over into characterization. Like the ever-changing size of the rural town of Rock Point, "Storm's" leading roles are subject to similar distortions, plot stresses, and to dramatic demands which promote uneven performances. Good actors can over-ride some of these impediments but even Ginger Rogers can't entirely save her own shifting role.

But "Storm Warning's" more egregious lack is its almost non-existent reference to blacks. How does an involved feature movie focusing on the KKK not include their primary victims? It does effectively document the exploitative racket aspect of the Klan, its local collusion, and its frontal attack on outside reporters, but the absence of black victims is left to our assumption. However, if the Klan's primary target is missing here, its violence is certainly not. There's the murder of the reporter around which "Storm's" plot is constructed and, more importantly, that lesser known feature of the KKK: it's male credo. The Klan was not only white men lynching blacks, but men beating down on women.

"SW" features typical KKK member Hank Rice (Steve Cochran) who's brutish and crude on the one hand, all so ingenuously blameless on the other. But it's his visceral sexism that exposes his cult's masculine mold. Upon meeting his wife's visiting sister, Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers), a professional model, who has just witnessed his involvement in the gang murder of the reporter, it takes this entitled Klan actor no time, and before any accusation, to sexualize her. She to him is a desirous piece, "a hunk of equipment." It's only when Marsha revs up her fearlessness that he links her to the reporter as a nosy condescending outsider. And then, stud as he is, doubles down on his sexual slings: "She's nothing but a model. Naked all the time... letting men slobber over her." Pleading further with his wife Lucy, he then goes into his wounded hunk routine, scorning the accusatory tramp, and currying his wife's favor.

When, for Lucy's sake, Marsha won't testify at the murder inquest, Hank's drunken celebration at the bowling alley spins out of control. "Assailants Unknown!" is his rallying cry. He heads home, knowing Marsha has exited his insolent display to cut out of town. Snooping at her dressing through the porch window, he intrudes: "Bet you look good in a bathing suit. They say a girl's figure is her fortune. You got your money invested in the right places." The creep can't shut up: "They say once one sister goes for you, so does the other." Marsha retaliates: "Get one thing straight: I think you're a stupid, vicious ape." She will stay and she will testify: "I'm not leaving town--and make sure you never bother Lucy ever again. She's through with you." But the white supremacist is a male supremacist and Hank assaults Marsha sexually (for a bit too long, implicating the movie itself). Saved from incestuous rape by her sister's entry, but not from his viciousness, both sisters get battered and bounced off walls until the KKK arrives at the door, not to protect, according to its claim, the Ladies at night time, but to abduct Marsha for her official tribunal at a midnight Klan rally.

For, Martha's testimony reversal has delivered her from the deadly clutches of one of the KKK's shining knights into the collective Klan's trial by torture, proving that its domination of women is as built-in as its violence, as its lynching. For Marsha has "defied the Power and Majesty of the Klan." Roped up and dragged off to the huge burning cross--and now uncharacteristically made vulnerable, Marsha is declared guilty. Her sentence begins with sadistic whippings issued slowly, at the order of the Grand Dragon, and for the arousal of the assembly of "hoodlums dressed in sheets," among which Hank Rice, from ring-side, repulsively grins after each humiliating and painful lash... until the rescuing prosecutor's sirens are heard, and Rice, knowing he's doomed, goes haywire. In trying to off Marsha, shoots his own wife. Lucy dies in Martha's arms.

Rice is then gunned down by the police, closing the book on the KKK's disastrous legacy of violence.

Fallen Angel (1945)

Dramatic Enough to Detract

[6/10 · 11 March 2024]

The major characters in "Fallen Angel" seem too typecast--or exteriorized, as if staged. The drama's heaven-bound victors, Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) and June Mills (Alice Faye) too often seem to be responding to a specific acting demand and then drawing on character parts. Which is not to say that the movie itself is artificial, but it does mean that most of its noir style must rely on convincing location scenes, of which there are plenty. But "Fallen Angel" would be better if it had real non-stagy characters like Stella (Linda Darnell), Pop (Percy Kilbride), and Judd (Charles Bickford) for leads.

It certainly doesn't help at all that its central character, Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews), ex NYC P-R man, is routinely shifting personal traits and emotions that are apart from his con-man persona. For example, he flips from reservation, attentiveness, and kindness to a misplaced ands dismissive abruptness--as if dramatically projecting. And it doesn't help that he's a glib, cynical showman to boot, a washed up promoter of stars and politicians, and a manipulator of female dreamers. Worse, his abrasiveness and arrogance are mainly reserved for Stella and June, but he doesn't spare the men his swagger either. And despite being broke or half broke, and in multiple desperate situations, Stanton's always snappily dressed, clean shaven, loaded up with tip money, and oft seen in striking profile. Even his past losses and "raw deals" in childhood are expressed in an heroic poser's mode.

It's June Mills, daughter of the town's late Judge, who has to withstand the brunt of Stanton's duplicity, because Stella, the waitress in "Pop's Eats," can hold her own against any male operator. However, June is an independent, intelligible, and loveable woman, who does grasp and resist Stanton's ploys, advances, and pretenses--until that moment when she switches off into surrender mode. The transition from self-possession to a kind gooey romantic availability is too unconvincing. You might say that her found capacity to withstand his put downs, indifference, and superior tone exemplify her acceptance of his unreality. He says: "I live and you don't. You look down on all the things that make up life... little things." "You're afraid to step outside your tower." Even if she does have Stanton's conversion in mind as part of her love package, it's difficult to read anything more than her own self-effacement no matter the outcome. Whatever the case, her too shallow and pandering relationship with Stanton give the impression that there's no available man within 100 miles.

If June's the bookish, church organist, her strict and protective older sister Clara (Anne Revere), is the jilted old maid. She's head of town's Women's Auxiliary, and possesses the authority passed onto her by her distinguished father, the town's mayor. It's through June that the calculating Stanton undermines Clara's protective fervor, thus splitting the sisters' close connection . So the seeming intractable Clara also goes simple over Stanton, the marriage possibility for her sister suddenly erasing all her scruples about his seediness, fluent lies, & arrogance. As his culpability is washed away so too is her true affection for her younger sister. Clara soon becomes a guest in her inherited family home, as both sisters are now subsumed by Stanton's tawdry desires.

In contrast Stella, Pop, and Judd, the crew of 'Pop's Eats,' stay the coarse of their characters. Stella's the dark alluring waitress who's out for a man, a ring, and a home, but never at the cost of her own willfulness. Ask Stanton: "I'm no dope. She has the ring." "You think different, but you drive just like the rest" she counters, pegging Stanton's cheap talk in the bargain. Pop, the counter-man of his own little diner, is as convincing in this role as he is as Stella's elderly faithful admirer: "She never meant bad. Everyone liked her." "I'll never forget her." And he means it. As to Judd, if you bracket his typecast bad cop image, and take in his singular screen character, he too is more about resignation than dramatization. For two years he's been making daily stops at the diner "to drink coffee and get a look at her." "Insane perhaps" he says twice over to Stanton, but still held by Stella. Stanton and June may be going "home" and bound for paradise, but the mere mortals inhabiting 'Pop's Eats' may prefer a more earthly fate.

Widow of St. Pierre (2000)

Love vs. Fatalism

[7/10 · 28 February 2024]

"The Widow of St. Pierre" is more about love than it is about justice, if for no other reason than that the former is more strikingly original. It's rare to come across so convincing an unconditional love as that which exists between Madame La (Juliette Binoche) and the Captain (Daniel Auteuil). But this not to say that doubts, upon a closer look, don't enter into assessing how high the romance.

One unusual aspect of this rare relationship is its triangular nature. For Madame La definitely experiences some momentary temptations in Neel's (her protege prisoner) close physical presence. She fends them off but the question remains: isn't this intimacy a bit too risky? Would Neel's less studded partner in crime (disposed of early) even glimpse the light outside his prison cell? But the Captain takes these sensuous overtones in stride, even appreciating them as a widening of his wife's character and of their own love for each other. He trusts her to the end, accepts her "just the way she is," and answers his righteous critics: "I let my wife choose," "she knows what she's doing." Of course, how a career military officer can have this much perspicacity about women is another interesting question. Is his unconditional love made easier by his wife's magical lure? Is his faith in his wife real, or is it too idealized?

And then there's the question of equality. A union based on unconditional love signifies a diminishment of male social power and a lift in female independence. But the Captain is as decidedly male as Madame La is decidedly female. He gives orders, leads his soldiers, runs the barracks, is commanding even around his wife, and fends off insults and innuendos about her a little too gallantly--and provokingly. But his psychic alliance with masculinity is most telling in his fatalism. (This pivotal characteristic is shared by Neel, whose path parallels his own). It's a concept that puts him above ordinary men, and ordinary reality. But the heroic mode means a willingness to absent himself from his wife, and must impact their present relationship with a fatalistic tinge. In other words, he indicates a preference for the code of honor over a world-bound committed marriage. Sound familiar? Like Neel, he refuses the active escape route that Madame La lies out for him, preferring to accept the dictates of a tyrannical justice system. All this suggests a passivity which is more characteristic of the drama of romantic love than the real thing. Could Madame La be more the timeless muse than an actual wife?

To a lesser degree Madam La also eschews action, because she's, to a large extent, stuck in the female sphere. She's instinctual, sensuous, liberal, self-sacrificing, and solicitous for victims and the poor. Although she is childless, she's nevertheless very motherly and nurturing around children. Also, she could be publicly working for a lesser (Neel's crime=manslaughter) criminal charge--on a small island without a guillotine or an executioner, or at least referencing the life of her protege's vicitm, but she prefers to reform and educate a man sentenced to death. But as excellent a teacher as she is, there is one thing she cannot teach him and that is the flaw inherent in fatalism. Her activist attempt to free both her husband and Neel from their certain fates, constitutes her one single break with her female parameters. But she has asserted her own will, courage, and independence to no avail. A prisoner's honor, in this case, is like a soldier's honor: bigger than she is. But despite its casting a shadows over her life and marriage, and knowing that love and fatalism cannot co-exist, she has the willingness to continue, to stand with the Captain, and to prod Neel to the end. The noose, and the blaze of glory spell out romance as cinematic or story book but to Madame La these mean the loss of a close friend, a husband, and for herself, a sentence of eternal widowhood, the unreality of love in absentia, and a retreat into the essence of womanhood: elevated, disembodied, mythic.

Force of Evil (1948)

"Is there life before death?"

[7/10 · 21 February 2024]

"Is there life before death?" read a piece of wall graffiti in Belfast during the Troubles. Well, the Combine is not the occupying British Army, but in "Force of Evil" it is just as much a power broker to the underclass of northern Manhattan as Britain was to the Catholics of Northern Ireland. You might also say the Combine financiers bare a resemblance to the IMF. It bedevils the neighborhood numbers banks with sudden & unbearable losses, and then decides which ones to bail out with loans, and which to let die, as it incorporates gambling under its single winning flag.

To Leo Morse (Thomas Gomez), the older brother of Combine attorney, Joe Morse (John Garfield), the sudden loss of his neighborhood numbers business, means a jolt to his way of life, lost income and jobs for himself and his familial staff, and an inevitable clash with his younger brother, whose law education he financed. Right from the get-go, Leo, convinced of Joe's perpetrator status, smacks him down as an instigator of evil and instrumental in an immanent take over of his business. He may seem primitive but his rage hardly matches the syndicate's viciousness and pernicious threats. To him, it's class warfare and his brother is a facilitator of the Board Room crowd. He says to Joe: "I'm an honest man, not a criminal," and if you want to twist things you can do it in front of Doris, "my friend & employee: She's no stranger. You're the stranger." Leo, the contentious street guy, would rather die, as he does every day (heart problems) anyway, then cow to or be jerked around by Joe's victimizing moral monsters.

So, Joe's obfuscations and his rationalizations about worldly success over lowlife obscurity, may momentarily capture the sheltered Doris' imagination, but they mean ziltch to Leo. For the two brothers exist on two different planes: Wall Street and the slums. While one is contemplating riches, the other is trying to survive in poverty's precincts. To Joe, Leo is haunting because he's seen through him at each stage of his young life, and has no illusions at all about his motivations, manipulations, and schemes--whether in greed or in love.

Only when Joe's plans begin to collapse beneath his feet does he begin to grasp his brother's blunt reckonings, and tacitly acknowledge their mutual class background. For it's not only Leo who dies everyday but Joe himself, who now knows that he has been dying daily since birth, that he's alone, without family, without love and, like his brother, just another fall guy for the Combine. He understands that his tough, individualist persona, his egoist dreams of power and prestige, and his antagonism to Leo and Doris, spell out his culpability in a network of greed. So that spirit in him, noted by his boss's wife: "Sometimes you seem like a human being, like a person who worries," has suddenly arisen. His decisive, defiant actions may have come too late for his brother, but in the disastrous depths underneath the GW Bridge , "down at the bottom of the world" he not only finds his brother "like an old dirty rag" but his own dismal class: "nobody wants to end like this, like rubbish."

Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)

Artist/Patron vs. Wife/Model

[7/10 · 3 February 2024]

"Girl with a Pearl Earring," is convincing, lucid & coherent. Once the main characters are sorted out, and the artist-model theme grasped, the story behind Vermeer's mysterious painting is quite compelling. The film is restrained, detailed, visceral, and directly developed. Whether the story is true or not (unknown) is not the issue because given the age-old dyad of the artist and his model, it's plausible.

One key distinction, in this case, is that Vermeer does not stand alone as the artist identity but, in a sense, is doubled by his patron--at least in terms of his model, Griet. For Vermeer cannot proceed with his new piece without the financing of his rich patron, Van Ruijven, who wants Griet as his household maid. Vermeer, to save his projected painting and to protect Griet from his patron's predatory clutches, he promises him her portrait. But, by accommodating Van Ruijven, Vermeer becomes an unwitting accomplice in his new painting (now a portrait) which, upon completion, will be his patron's possession.

But the deal doesn't quench the patron's desire, so he soon spreads rumors of a suspect liaison between Vermeer and Griet. Is there even a hint of truth in the patron's projecting accusations? No, but there's more to the story. What does happen is a slow simmering relationship between Vermeer and his household servant Griet, who is given a great deal of close attention in her master's sacrosanct studio. He not only introduces Griet to the painting process, color schemes, light effects, but entrusts her with mixing his priceless pigments. And Griet, as his model, is at times subject to instructions involving Vermeer's subtle touches and exchanges. In the final session, for aesthetic sake, he insists on piercing her ear even against her protestations, and holding her more into the bargain.

Vermeer is as precise with these gestures as he is with his contemplative paintings. For Griet, quiet, calm, timeless, and soulful, is as much an object of contemplation as are his paintings. If to his bawdy patron she resides in the lower part of nature as sensuous object, to Vermeer, she is inspiration, youth, and innate beauty--or his own preordained model. As an image, she spells enchantment to both men, and is contained within each man's frame whether on an easel or on a wall of a palatial house. Hence, there's some credence in the patron's suggestive rumors of a two-faced artist.

What punctuates the artist's dubious relationship to his model is Vermeer's exclusion of his wife from the very studio in which Griet flourishes. Catherina is not and will never be his muse--or his model. For her devoted and subservient life is confined to child production. But, she has one defect: she's an interloper. As her husband's intimacy with Griet filters through to her--no added nasty whisperings necessary, it proves so unsettling, provocative, and humiliating that Catherina can only come out swinging --and right in his forbidden studio. She blasts his latest masterpiece as a pack of lies, asserts that she's not too stupid to see his precious work, and berates Vermeer for permitting his model to wear her own pearl earrings. Over-riding her husband's resistance, she outright demands to see the painting. Unveiled, she bursts out: "It's obscene." "Why don't you paint me?" she implores. She attacks the work and orders Vermeer out of his studio, and then commands Griet to get out of her house.

"Obscene?" Isn't this isn't an over-reaction: this isn't Picasso. Maybe, but Griet's costume, makeup, blue turban, parted sensuous lips, and pearl earring is as artist-directed as nudity. Just prior to this outburst, we witnessed the patron's attempted rape of Greit in Vermeer's yard. This is far worse than "obscene" and is hardly separable from the painting. In fact, once the masterpiece is in his sole possession, it might as well be porn. When Catherina demanded: "Show me the painting," and Vermeer responded "You will make yourself ill," he may already have grasped his painting as tainted or "obscene." Or as more than a symbolic rejection of a blighted wife for a blossoming youth. For Vermeer, despite his self-possession, discipline, artistic genius, and impressive command is also capable of acting in bad faith. When he held off his pie-cutter wielding wife from destroying his "Girl" painting, it was his patron, no doubt, who impelled him. For he knew that big time artists make paintings for men--men even bigger than themselves.

The Rockford Files: The Countess (1974) Season 1, Episode 3

"We're All Scared to Death"

[8/10 · 4 January 2024]

I think the "The Countess" episode is set apart a bit by its charged lines and characters. And I think it's very final ending, which this time is not about short-changed payments and expenses, which proves this--if nothing else does.

The most original character, apart from our man Jimbo, is Carl Brego (Dick Gautier). Carl has a way of filling the screen with his impressive physicality. I mean how many mobsters go bare-chested let alone while wearing very high-rise body pants. He kind of looks like a cross between a ballerina dancer and a west coast linebacker, or maybe like a bodybuilder version of Vince Edwards. Anyway, he puts on a good show and has great lines to boot. He says to the countess who is selling his blackmailing smarts a little short: "You keep this up, I'm just liable to plunge myself into analysis." He answers Rockford's intrusive inquiry before their beach showdown with "Have we met, sport."

Mike Ryder (Art Lund), the Countess' husband, and more than Carl's equal, exercises a similar kind of masculine presence. He's older and more mellow, in love with his wife, and serves as her faithful defender. But if he was supposed to back down in the scene in which Rockford suicidally accelerates his car, Ryder breaks the scrip--and outright shoots Rockford. Beth Davenport (Gretchen Corbett) is no pushover either. She states to Lieutenant Diel upon looking at Rocky's A. R. Report: "My name is Ms Davenport. You call me honey again and you'll hear about it from the Captain." And when Diel is later thinking plea deal, Rocky retorts: "C'mon Lieut. I didn't come down with yesterday's rain."

However, the endearing ending is the real winner in "The Countess." In the hospital where Rockford has survived and Mike not so fortunate, the Countess (Susan Strasberg) says to him: " You think everything's real but if you get close enough you see it's all made of plastic." She says that Mike is the only genuine article, but "he got hooked on a plastic countess. How do you deal with that?"

Rockford responds: "We're all scared to death. I guess that's the price we pay for living in a world where every price tag ends in.99. And they sell mortuary plots on billboards next to the freeway." He advises the Countess to see her act as one big practical joke and suggests laughter. "Is that what you do." "You bet."

The Unfaithful Wife (1969)

"I love You Like Mad"

[8/10 · 28 December 2023]

Men tend to conceptualize women's nature as either beauty or sexuality. Charles and Victor, the two male protagonists of Chabrol's "The Unfaithful Wife," adhere to this pristine practice. To Charles, his wife, Helene, is a romantic figment, up on a pedestal, sublimely apportioned, and temptation denied. To Victor, Helene is is a type of erotic object, a cinematic material dream, who he pencils in on alternate days--with the understanding that he's servicing a sensually deprived suburban wife.

The unfaithful woman in movies and literature is almost invariably married to a rich older man, or to an unimaginative bore. Charles, the husband, is spelled out as the latter: he's restrained, formal, spiritless, and timid; he's on the flabby side, and is always fully clothed. To underscore this, Helene is considerably more attractive, modern, youthful, and enticing. Their marriage is on hold, featureless, and passionless. Helene lives the insular life of a housewife, in a cultural vacuum away from Paris; she doesn't drive; her Paris time is limited to routine glamour shop appointments; she loves her 10 year old son; she's bored stiff; she displays a subtle aversion toward Charles, but adjust her persona on his behalf--and she chiefly seems to be in a state resembling a trance.

When Charles seriously suspects Helene is seeing a lover, his first and final consideration is not the stifling nature of his orthodox upper class family, nor his own part in this stalled relationship, nor is it trying to come to terms with his wife's sterile life. It's rather Helene as a sexual suspect, and his pending loss of a prized possession. Of course, his own masculine image is also much at stake. But it's his narrow and stingy perception of his wife that edges her out of the picture, and leads Charles to hiring a private eye.

Which, of course, leads to his classic encounter with Victor, Helene's lover. Charles begins by fabricating an open, tell-all marriage to cover up his shameful spying, and to account for his peculiar visit. His manner with Victor is self-deprecating, simpering, conciliatory, and defensive. Victor, for his part, the cynical misogynist, gives us both a solicited and an unsolicited picture of Helene. He tells Charles that he met her at the cinema; he was sitting close to her, and he "noted a certain... availability." Here's where the fraternizing kicks in: "Is she satisfactory?" "Not at all bad. No complications." He calls her a "good kid." Charles breaks in to remind him that they've been married for 11 years. To which Victor responds "I was married to a bit*ch." Charles complies with a snigger: "I don't doubt it." Victor continues "You know what I like about Helene is her softness. She doesn't look it, but she's very sweet & tender... unbelievable."

It's obvious that both Charles and Victor--their subject being decidedly absent, refuse to validate her as a person.

Just as Charles can't face his dissociated wife, so too is his failure to confront Victor. And his self-belittlement gets transferred onto his wife. Victor too shuts Helene out. It's true that he chides Victor for choosing Versailles over Paris, the perfect fit for Helene. But his view of Helen is patronizing: she's precious, acquiescent, and accommodating, not that much different from Charles's secretary, Brigitte, the frolicsome, eye-catching, sex bunny to him and Paul. And more importantly, Victor admits to no wrongdoing in the affair. He simply takes what's available. He does exactly what Charles, performing the modern sophisticate for Victor, pretends that he himself does. What Helene amounts to is the unfaithful wife possessed by a husband and a lover who control and circumscribe her, and who have projected her identity as an item of exchange, or that which both men have, have had, and by all expectations, will have.

But the finale of the encounter, of course, bodes otherwise. However, it makes no impact on Helene's erasure other than to boost it. Only Charles' strange and seemingly perverted (to Victor) request to tour the flat seems to be free-willed, and what it sets off is his orchestration's crash. First it's the blue sheets, then his anniversary gift lighter. Trepidation takes over as if Charles's mind is splitting, his compressed and accumulated torment exploding into a blunt murder. His blows are obviously not those of love defended but rather the bloody language of power; his insane jealousy being the proof of his failed marriage--and of the overbearing sexual politics behind his madness. Helene's closure is sealed--a similar closure to that Charles himself is about to experience in the form of dread, isolation, and mental stunting in a prison cell. "I love you like mad" are Charles' final words as he submits to arrest.

Time Out (2001)

The Sheepish Rebel

[7/10 · 21 December 2023]

Vincent, the protagonist in "Time Out," when finally fired from his abstracting, jaded job in high finance, hops in his car and hits the open road, hoping to buy time and locate better work. But we soon learn that he himself is not without his own ability to abstract, fictionalize, and compartmentalize. For, to avoid informing his family, he devises an investment scheme--the making of something out of nothing, to finance and cover his absences. In so doing, he self-imposes a new identity which is even less noble from what his miserable employment imposed on him. He still seeks money--and status; still employs savvy and ballsy manipulation; and is as cut off from the real world as his former work demanded. Thus, the impossible contradictions of his exit.

I mean hell it's cute to be out on the road, experiencing timelessness, low end adventure, having fun racing trains, practicing impersonations; but not when your depression-recovering wife is at home raising three young children, teaching school, and constantly worrying about her seemingly unhinged husband. To Muriel, his choice is a luxury, but even her queries must be followed with her apology: "I didn't mean to complain as if my life is hell." "Did you think you had lost me" she says to him provocatively as they descend from his snow-bound mountain cabin. So Vincent's liberation, meditative depth, and playful human-ness is small change to his wife. But it isn't just Muriel who suffers his unraveling persona, his absences, his suspect life, and his snaps, but also his father, his kids, and their dearest friend Jeffrey. Add on the victims of his fraudulent investment scheme, each address-book buddy selected for being easy marks. The thing is it may be okay for Vincent to be a nobody to himself, but he can't be that or less than that to his family or pals.

The most interesting question that "Time Out" seems to raise is: should a fundamental personal decision be made unconsciously? That is, is Vincent by not taking those exits to his business appointments, but driving on into the air of freedom, embracing the road and driving, absorbing life though his windshield, and alone with his thoughts, answering his demoralizing work, or is he just damn escaping it? Since he's clearly blanked out on the personal sphere, it follows that he's also split off from the public dimension. Just as his profession exists outside of the material world in an amoral, vision-less vacuum of economic abstractions, maps, graphs, glossy catalogs, in which human resources and natural resources are interchangeable, so too is his life on the road too soon becoming a mini mock-up of this. Even his pragmatic father, who has zip patience for the fake and airy market culture, not only cannot shake him, but is called a simpleton and an "old ass," by his own son for trying.

If Vincent is stalled with no place to go, Jean-Michel, trafficker in fake brand-name merchandise, and a career hoodlum, not only sizes Vincent up, and bluntly and accurately states his dilemma, but jump starts his way out of it. In recruiting him, he lays bare his new accomplice's lazy ethics, and the pretense and betrayals of his scheming. Only then do Muriel's and Jeffrey's confrontations with Vincent kick in. To her husband's insistence that she seems strange (her bolting from the dinner scene), she can only reply "I seem strange!!" as in who in god's name are you kidding! It's her confessed turning to Jeffrey for help, however, and Vincent's subsequent confrontations with both, that acts as the ultimatum. In the very end, Vincent has made no spirited move. He hasn't found answers to the inner force that drove him from his job. But he has faced his family, lifted himself out of his individuated resolve, dispelled some illusions, and perhaps taken his first step outside the corporate monolith. The only question that remains is: how will his exit from his new anonymous high rise post be any different from the old one? Indeed, alienation/globalization doles out untenable situations to all of us.

The Gunfighter (1950)

Saint Jimmy

[7/10 · 10 December 2023]

One interesting question that "The Gunfighter," a prototype for the fast-gun hero western suggests is why is it that the top gun is so much more compelling, heroic, and masculine than the pipsqueak gunslinger (or vile backstabber) who's to take his place. I suppose the answer is that the latter's mediocrity adds to the valorous dimensions of the former; or that the weak new breed isn't the man the old breed was. Or possibly it's because the western gunman's fame, like genius itself, is not imitable

In any case, Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck) is as unmistakably a western hero, as he is a bedrock male. He rides alone, he rides hard, he roughs it, and he has no entanglements. A drink, a steak, a bath suffice. Not only is he the fastest gun around; he is figured out to be stalwart--a man of honor, fairness, courage, and mastery. But what actually distinguishes Ringo is his freedom to make his own moral choices, or his ability to instinctually decipher bad resolve--often waiting for the last split second to act. And it's this reluctance to engage, or his holding back, that magnifies his stature as a man of righteous action.

And to the town of Cayenne, Jimmy Ringo is the big man. Apart for the few guys who want to put a bullet in his head or in his back, the men are in awe of him. But this is mainly a gun-tripping town of young boys, and hordes of school-skippers encircle the saloon where Ringo is holding out, gaping through the windows, chatting up his legends, and anticipating gun play. They want a piece of the fastest gun around. Ringo's son, one of the raucous boy scouts outside, is "a Wyatt Erp man," who later must be quickly put straight by his father that "the real tough ones laugh at Erp." Sons are prized in Cayenne: Jerry is ready to commit murder on behalf of his dead son. And Ringo is ultimately taken down because he very insistently (out of character), and against all odds, demands seeing his son despite the imminent death trap. Indeed, it's the boys who are jumping ahead in life through Jimmy Ringo (who needs his teacher wife), the man with the gun, the epitome of the heroic male, and their honest-to-god model.

So it is that the town of Cayenne offers Ringo the final tribute of a solemn funeral. The whole town turns out to honor the man who, on account of his celebrity, would never have outlived his image, his gun, or his drifter ways. Of course, the sadness is that the "good man" celebrated here is so individualized, and so much more the icon than the person. His old outlaw buddy, Marshal Strett lives on but only as a pale version of the Gun Man because in the end, fame always wins out over mere reputation. For Ringo may have lived the life of a doomed man, but he's now a legend and an emblem of masculinity. Let us sing together "Rock of Ages" in our unholy temple for St. Jimmy.

The Shop on Main Street (1965)

The Other Transport

[7/10 · 30 November 2023]

Central to "The Shop On Main Street" is Tono's relationships with two women: his wife and the old Jewish shopkeeper. If you step back, it's also possible to say that he's instrumental in disappearing both women in indirect and direct ways--chiefly without the help of the Nazis.

This is most obvious as regards his wife. "Shop" draws Evelyna up to be as unsympathetic as possible. She's Eve, the great archetype for women--or more accurately, Woman, cursed from the get-go. She's made out to be selfish, manipulative, and aggressive. She's the browbeating wife, the nag who pushes Tono to work, to earn, and do housework. She fusses over spilt water, and lost pennies, but at the same time has too much sexual appetite for Tono.

To accentuate the evil of Eve, is Tono's portrayed innocence. He's good-natured, uncalculating, pleasantly weak, generous, apolitical (perfect for the USA audience), male, and remarkably sympathetic. He doesn't take his wife too seriously. But in his new position as shop manager, he's only too willing to take refuge from her domineering presence. Less dependent, he can now begin to sense his hidden heroic (or anti-heroic) dimension. For the Nazis are on stage, and via his Aryan appointment, he is both in charge of and humble partner to the old Jewish woman proprietor, Rozalia Lautmanova. Like Kuchar, who is the most human and most convincing character in "Shop," he features himself a white Jew. But in doing so, he raises his life's stakes beyond his own capacity.

It's not his new position that drives this risk, but Mrs. Lautmanova herself who he can neither ignore nor appease, and who, unlike Eve, doesn't fear him. So, if he found Eve too dominant, he hasn't quite fully grasped his new mentor; for he may be her physical and mental superior, and hold her as a mother, but underestimates her passion, and her command. For he's soon bound to learn that the shop is not only still hers, but that it's her home, her life, and her very being. She may shift in awareness or consciousness--thanks to an often realism-bereft script, and seem outright dotty and deaf, but when the showdown arrives, it's her uncompromising spirit that dominates.

It's in the last gut-wrenching, doom-ridden set of interlocked scenes, that Tono manages to banish both Rozalia. & his Evelyna. Yes, Tono desperately wants to save his Jewish partner from transportation, but his inability to dissociate from the Nazis means irresolution, dislocation--and drunkenness, in the very nerve-shattering, accelerated, emotion-packed hour of the Nazi roundup. So, in his panicked state, rather than securing concealment for Rozalia, whose name was missed in the Nazi roll call, he hustles her into a closet, where she soon expires. Remorseful, he immediately takes his own life.

Thus his dual abdication of wife/love and of the resistance (Kuchar, Rozalia's true guardian, has already been executed), has resulted in the end of his marriage bond and the death of the vulnerable old shop keeper. Evelyna will now be a penniless widow, childless, perhaps even more shunned than by her ineffectual husband. But, of course, given "Shop's" valorization of Tono and Rozalia in the final heavenly dance sequence, one has to count on objectivity over perception--or fantasy, to draw these conclusions. Perhaps, if anyone should be dancing with Rozalia and achieving of this immortality, it's Kuchar, but his character must be too realistic for such a crowning. He would be the only one too, apart from Rozalia, who would grasp the connection between the Holocaust and the Great Witch-hunt.

Panic (2000)

Macy & Ullman Not Quite Enough

[5/10 · 22 November 2023]

"Panic" seems like arranged pieces--some cut short, some a little longer, some missing, some black comedy, some drama, few of which cohere. It thus seems sketchy, flipping, and un-directed. And so predictable in its movements--as in a TV movie. What does make it absorbing--to a point, however, is the acting, the bit of originality (by Hollywood standards), and its brevity (except for the sluggish ending). What it boils down to is this: whenever William Macy (Alex) is on the screen, it scores, and the same can be said for Tracy Ullman (Martha, his wife ) who know what to do with this often gauzy material. It's their unpretentiousness, introspection, warmth, subtlety, and restraint that comes across. For example, you rarely see a movie father-figure show anything resembling convincing affection for a wife and son--and in this case, even on the verge of a marriage breakup.

But neither Macy or Ullman can counter Hollywood's interfering dictates. For even when you're led to believe that this captivated hit man will not only willingly accept a "no" from his potential mistress--and be won over by her conviction, you are proven, in the end, to be dead wrong. Because just before the closing scenes, is a startling tacked-on segment in which Neve Campbell (Sarah), his young love interest, suddenly feels shaken by her own refusals, and collapses into a heap of tears and crushing sorrow--from which her chivalrous older adulterer, still within hearing range, promptly lifts his liberated prey up from her knees into her bed where good loving (also called sex) can ensue prior to his showdown exit from the world of his father's contract killer business.

An equally titillating Hollywood stricture is signaled by those oft-appearing handcuffs which are supposed to be emblematic of lesbianism. The point is that Sarah's s-m sexual relationship with her partner is being pushed as both hip and commercial while utilizing it to associate lesbianism with masculinity and violence. It panders to a 90s hip urban lesbian flirtation with gay male s-m, while stamping it as the prevalent normal in a decadent gay world. In other words, the stereotype not only sells tickets, but mirrors a view of gays that both Hollywood and the pop culture can hang their hat on. 'We accept you, we support you, but your life style...'

When "Panic" came out, it was said to be "quirky" and "original." Yeah.

Whirlpool (1950)

Ann's Deeper Secret

[8/10 · 14 November 2023]

"Whirlpool" protagonist, Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney), has a deep secret, but it's not the one that David Korvo (Jose Ferrer) is promising to cure her of, nor is it the one she is keeping from her husband. Her secret is less singular, less ostensible--and more threatening. In fact, not even her father, husband, or hypnotist want to hear it.

Ann's secret, because it causes her misery, bitterness, pain, and confusion, is even kept from herself. And yet she's as convinced of it as she is her own reality. So, why does she hide it? Because it's not at her bidding. It's an age old fear: the fear of exposing those whose authority seems as embedded as a rock. Thus her refusal to disappoint both as the convincing wife of a prestigious psychiatrist, and the patient of a classic womanizer hypnotist. She must obey their commands just as she does those of her internal voices which demand obedience, guilt, passivity.

But Ann's slate is not blank. She may suppress her rage and defiance but she's no sleepwalker and no wifely appendage. Despite her lack of caution around Korvo, she suspects and distrusts him from the get-go, and resists his verbal aggression, menacing physical proximity, contempt for marriage, especially her own, and his reptilian insinuations. The fact that Korso has a predatory relationship with rich women, and rips off, batters, and soon murders his whistleblower benefactor, Mrs. Randolf, is by no means lost on Ann, despite the blackmailing psychic's controlling trances.

Dr. Sutton (Richard Cone), on the other hand, whose authority over his wife rests on the tradition of patriarchy, sees Ann as more of a classification called "wife." Her passivity, beauty, social talent, and nervous instability are certified by his conventions. But despite his inattention and denials, he's not entirely self-deluded, and thus is shaken--and awakened, by his wife's arrest. When, at the police station, she lashes out at him for trying to pin her mental derangement on Korvo, her deep secret starts to hit home. He soon admit that after eight years of marriage, he doesn't know his wife "I went off attacking a woman who never did one wrong thing," he tells Lt. Colton (Charles Bickford). And Ann enlightens him further: "He treated me like my father did. So it came back." The "it" broadens from a single truth, theft, to a her secret, a recognizable pattern of the male authority equally apportioned between Korvo and her husband. It's only with the grasping of this reality that Dr. Sutton, with the help of the gruffy but intuitive Lt. Colton, a man who limits his own authority to policing, who implicitly understands Ann's secret through his loving marriage, and who becomes instrumental in freeing her both from murder and from her hidden self, that he fully comprehends that male authority itself has driven his wife to brink of madness and made her a shadow of herself.

(Phew.. need to come up for air after that final sentence... and oh a stupendous acting job by Jose Ferrer).

Les Biches (1968)

Another Cat-Fight?

[7/10 · 8 November 2023]

Chabrol's "Les Biches" doesn't exactly have meanings. It seems to be a mix of visual style, romance, and existentialism. There's not what you would call "characters" but rather types or suspended lives upon which sparse words are attached. If there is such a thing as "empty depth," this film has it in the sense that it carries psychological suspense and weight which, however, is headed nowhere except, perhaps, toward personal obsession.

However, there is the question of domination, both in the sexual and class sense. "Les Biches" begins with a materialized pick-up fantasy. The object is a young woman street artist; the subject is Frederique, a woman who's much superior in terms of class, income, prestige, and sophistication. She literally buys off the artist's resistance by suggesting to her something more than poverty and loneliness. Their initial sensual encounter, based on objectification and selection, is a prelude to Frederique's subsequent controlling relationship of her new protege, which chiefly takes place at her villa on the Riviera.

But Why, as her "name" implies is more than just an interesting challenge to her unequal lover. At a party, when she decides to give in to the architect's flirtations, she raises the ante a little too high for her noble patron, whose equanimity, generous spirit, and playfulness with others, is too strongly tested by Why. So, Fredy, in turn, raises her even higher--even to the point of taking on the architect herself as her lover. And so the game is played out initially in a somewhat friendly spirit, but when Fredy becomes more neglectful, more betraying, and demands more and more subservience, Why experiences a sense of fatality. Having lost both of her lovers, outcast and out-classed, and incapable of confronting them, she defiantly appropriates Frederique's body/mind. But even before the final twist, she plaintively begs Fredy to embrace her offer in a three-sided relationship.

Although "les biches" has several meanings in French, its suggested English meaning might, in the end, be the most telling. For it's as if the two women have been subjected to a deadly, rhapsodic cat fight in which each antagonist gets her "just" comeuppance.

Laundry (2002)

Realism Discarded for Fantasy

[6/10 · 27 September 2023]

For the most part, "Laundry" is more convincing, realistic, real, human, and specific in the first half, and more romanticized, symbolic, magical, and transcendent in the second half. I much preferred the former.

I think the key to the breach is the reliance on a romance to move the narrative. The couple are not a real fit except perhaps in a fairy-tale. Even though Teru is a cute, cuddly guy with expressive smiles and pure intents, Mizue is clearly a step above in terms of stature and beauty. She is too much the stuff of male dreaming, especially for a coin laundry custodian. He's like a neighborhood guy who hangs out at the laundry, is burdened by a brain injury, and she is someone who seems to be moving forward in life, depressed or not. It seems like he best belongs with his typical laundry crowd , rather than with its most special customer.

In fact, I think it's his fantasy about her that puts pressure on her. It's not that he's cornering her, but that she has deep personal problems and, as such, is vulnerable to impressions. She has no real center from which to accept or deny him. And no real direction in her life to pursue on her own. And most importantly, she's under the sway of a guilt complex as an addicted and apprehended kleptomaniac. So, it's not surprising that she's often self-deprecating, too dependent, or that she regularly ties Teru's shoes for him.

The pigeon trainer, who initially belongs to the movie's compelling early realism which is so apparent in the hitchhiker scenes, becomes much less human in his home and work scenes. He not only repeats the very particular expressions from his earlier road encounter with Teru which detracts from their meanings, but he too seems now to be more a fantasy figure, signing over his middle class house and professional work to the couple, and then alighting from Japan in search of true love.

Meanwhile, the gray suburban landscape with all its burgeoning gas tanks and poverty also gets the fantasy distraction. Leaping over puddles, flying airy balloons, white ceremonial pigeons, and romantic love, do not answer to the laundry or the tanks. The fuzziness is also apparent in the seemingly several endings-- 'is this the real ending or will there be one more.'

King of New York (1990)

Walken's Belated Arrival

[7/10 · 25 September 2023]

If most modern Hollywood movies fail for me at the end, "The King of New York" fails me in its middle, while excelling briefly out of the shoot and then remarkably accelerating in its slowly unfolding ending. There's no doubt that its Christopher Walken's (Frank White) anarchic persona/performance that determines this. When he's central, the movie soars. Despite the stature of the good detective who White's gang has finally driven to despair and personal revenge, it is White, in the end, who draws our sympathy in his showdown with his only compelling adversary. And it is here that he seems to truly transcend gangster movie references. It's all in his face, in the deep complexity of his facial expressions as his life closes in on him.

But when Walken is absorbed into his romanticized gang, "The King of New York" degenerates into murder mayhem, sexism, racism, machismo, drugs, and cynicism all presumably disguised by the cinematic--and Style. The only exceptions seem to be in White's ordering the taking out of rival mobsters on the basis of their slum-lording and pimping, and his mission of saving a local hospital. However, White is just as caught up in maelstrom of murder and masculinity as his gang is, and it is this that brings down the movie's mid-section, and ultimately himself into the bargain.

Whether its justice or perverse nihilism, most everyone is dead in the end. Most are non-white men. The women, satellites of the guys, are mostly spared, because they have long since been discarded.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

A Foiled Heroine

[6/10 · 31 August 2023]

"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" seems to be more about undermining women's liberation than endorsing it. A movie about a remarkable, adventuring woman improving on a deadbeat marriage by arriving at a more ideal one is not exactly earth shaking. In fact, it seems far less about bravado than it dos about settling for less, both in terms of marriage (itself) and career.

Doubts about Scorsese's Alice occur from the get-go. The most striking thing to me is the hip vs square dynamic inside her working class family. The husband is a coca-cola truck driver, a moody handsome hunk, with rather torturing moods. Yet, given the alliance between his spirited wife and their precocious son, who regularly conspire against him barely veiled private exchanges, he might pass as an outsider in his own family. Yeah, they're too classy for the likes of him, but it's only his dangerous job that gives Alice the out she seems incapable of initiating on her own. So a smashed red truck in a tunnel soon means the open road for Alice and son. And they set off for Monterey, with Alice's singing career on the horizon, freedom and adventure in the mix, and with marriage object lesson #1 hopefully in tow.

For Alice is more than typically attractive to men. In Phoenix, to help fund her trip, Alice latches on to a singing job in a rather low end night club. Soon a young dude (Ben) spies her as a challenging catch, and marks her off for sex. She resists but mistakenly cites her older age as a deterrent, the perfect opening for this predator. The fling ensues, and only ends when his discarded wife shows up at Alice's to haplessly plead her case. The brute enters and assaults his oft-battered wife. He then flips the switch on his rioting machismo to sweet talk Alice as if he were breaking down a call girl. Object lesson #2 about marriage and the violent, two-faced nature of males. Then enters Scorsese to signal to his shocked heroine to cut out of town without nary a thought for the fate of macho Ben's stricken wife.

In Tucson, Alice, too exhausted to seek another singing job, settles for waitressing in Mel & Ruby's Cafe. Suddenly the misery and darkness associated with Phoenix goes bright and shiny inside the diner as a zany display of button-pushing, brashy comedy and melodrama take over. Alice and the her wait staff sisters now get to perform these antics and a gamut of female emotions--including true love, both for the TV-audience-type patrons, and for us movie goers who are assumed to have liberal reflexes. The somewhat off-camera star (a misfit in this diner) is Alice's new admirer, a wealthy rancher, who is fairly hip, sincere, sparkly-eyed and light in his pursuit. So, before Alice has any thoughts of her own, she is not only caught up in the celebrity waiter whirl but also in her new, more promising love routine, in which her adolescent son has as much or more to say about than she. Soon her expectations shrink from world to home, and Alice loses interest in singing for herself. Well, you can put a bow on the rest and present it in the grand finale to the cheering gratified audience in Mel & Ruby's. Needless to say, the marriage object lessons have ceased.

Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise (2006 TV Movie)

Jessie/Billie

[7/10 · 11 July 2023]

"Death in Paradise," though not without gun play, is fairly subdued. Chief Stone is perhaps more pensive than usual--and certainly more soulful. Jesse seems depressed and saddened by a wider culture that diminishes and sexualizes young girls, by a father who turns away his own daughters, and by a wife batterer--all in his little town of Paradise. To compound this, his own losses seem to come to the fore, making felt visits to the gruff, thought-provoking Dr. Dix mandatory.

Perhaps, these are what underpin Jesse's unusual dreams, visions, and personal incidentals that seem to put him in direct contact with the local murder victim, Billie Bishop, an upper-income youth who suddenly switches from brilliant student to drugs, indiscriminate sex, and dropout status. Hers is the tragic story of so many runaway girls. And Jesse has another connection to Billie: they arrived in Paradise, a very unlikely place for both, at about the same time, and both were over-qualified and undoubtedly viewed somewhat suspiciously by the locals.

So the childless, wife-less, career-less, college-less, mother-less Chief Stone will not rest until Billie's murderer/user is apprehended. That this man turns out to be two separate men, one a pederast and the other a cold killer, means not only that Stone's perfect cop-ly intuition is, in part, mistaken, but that his justice work for Billie is suddenly jeopardized. But wedded to his sympathetic stand with Billie, a solution must out. And in short order, the confounding knot from the crime scene turns out to be the knot that ties up his murder case. His case closed, Jesse is shown attending Billie Bishop's solitary grave, as he had done the same for his close woman friend, Abigail Taylor, in an opening scene. And at the fade out, Jesse is at the bedside of his comatose sidekick Luther (who has been shot by the wife batterer in the sub-plot) reading to him the bio of their baseball hero, Suitcase Simpson. A bluesy installment indeed, this "Death in Paradise."

The Verdict (1982)

NewMan?

[6/10 · 6 June 2023]

After his great recovery and amazing court victory in "The Verdict," Frank Galvin (Paul Newman), the despairing alcoholic, hearse-chasing lawyer has now become the new man. Or is his transformation more surface than substance? Despite all of Galvin's prolonged scenes of inner angst, pondering, and expressive moods, the question of character, I think, exists as markedly in the end, as it did in the beginning. .

The proof is in his fist. The fist he explodes into Laura's face. A woman's deception. A woman's false pretences. A woman in the pay of the defense team. This cannot stand--not to a man of such high morality. And yet, is there any witness to Galvin's triumphant life in "The Verdict" who didn't see that Laura's job was increasingly despicable to her? And that Galvin had quite possibly fooled her with his heroics far more effectively than she fooled him with her spying After all she was the one who got doubly screwed, both prone and standing, while her limited (by intent) informing had no real impact on the case at all.

And of all the characters in "The Verdict" who bolstered Galvin's confidence and high self-opinion, it was Laura who led that chorus. It was she who rescued him from his self-pity, his aimlessness, his sheer passivity. She was his muse, his motivator, and his lover. She empowered his image by her youth (22 years younger); spiced up his comeback, helped cover up his bungling, and challenged him when he folded under pressure.

In exchange for this, she receives the victorious lawyer's contempt. She is too small for his consideration, too shallow, too weak. The champion of the underdog, the slayer of the establishment, the arch-diocese, and the stacked court, has only his evil eye to cast at her. So that she is reduced to seeing her life in his terms as a lying whore.

Yes, Galvin's problem is less addiction than self-absorption. What we learn, in the end, is that he's back into his old games. His distortion and dismissal of Laura isn't that of a drunken lout but of an arrogant egotist, who exercises his male lawyer's imperatives to exact judgment and vengeance. His moral consciousness evoked at the bedside of the comatose mother doesn't extend to the bloodied Laura. While his intention is kept pure, hers is demonized. Laura is erased and, as the curtain closing scene encapsulates, is literally silenced by our mythic hero.

The Verdict (1946)

Hush

[7/10 · 26 May 2023]

Ah, to return to an era when screens and devices were so utterly absent from daily life as to not even occupy a single predictive brain cell. It must have been so much more comfortable, human, and conversational. And so it was if "The Verdict," which should rest next to the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies on your shelf, is any indication.

This is a world of Victorian flats, intimate streets, bachelors and landladies, gaslit interiors, broad hallways, staircases, and large non-fashionable rooms, which evoke ease, conversation, study, and casual social life. Most of the characters are moored to the same neighborhood, congenial professional buddies, who are on regular speaking terms. All belong to the foggy night (and foggy dawns). All seem to have comfy beds, and all seem to fall asleep (if only momentarily) head cradled in pillows. Some have night-caps, and some wear night-caps. And the landlady falls off to sleep each night with her chummy, owl-like cat.

The plot is secondary to the mystery, but it's a pretty good one, if a bit on the sad side. The melancholy seems built into both the narrative and the knowledge of many viewers that this is the last pairing of the splendid, expansive Sydney Greenstreet and the insouciant, heavy-lidded Peter Lorre. The story begins with the unjust firing and forced retirement of the long respected Inspector George Grodman (Greenstreet) but somehow continues in the slightly ominous undercurrents occupying the friendship between Grodman and illustrator and man-about-the-night Victor Emmric (Lorre). The old intimacy somehow seems a bit disturbed--around the edges, as if under the tension and doubts arising from the the murder mystery itself.

Anyway, enough of this small comment. Get out your hot cocoa or hot toddy, sit back, listen to the patter of the night rain, and quietly absorb this perfect-crime drams tied to the wonderfully fictional setting of old London town.

The Killers (1964)

killers/kissers

[7/10 · 24 May 2023]

When you begin with Hemingway, you can expect killers and kissers to be inextricably bound. There are two killers and two kissers in "The Killers." All the other characters are neither killers nor kissers. Browning (Ronald Reagan) who is anti-killing, but pro larceny, is, however, obviously not opposed to hiring killers. (sound familiar)

But he is not one of the killers, because the killers and the kissers are both exclusionary and extreme. The former (Lee Marvin & Clu Gulager as Charlie and Lee) are contract killers for whom doing a job is like getting a haircut. They are very masculine men who take risks, court danger, and are as attached to the guns/tools they wield as they are to sadism. The kissers (John Cassavetes & Angie Dickinson as Johnnie North and Sheila Farr) who engage in many long slow, screen-filling kisses, are also risk takers who court danger; she, as a femme fatale, and he as a very masculine high stakes race-car driver who loves fast cars and a challenging, perilous woman. The kissers perform kissing with combustion but like that between a sports car engine and a mannequin.

Yes, Hemingway's stamp is all over "The Killers." The killers are at war when they kill, the kissers are at war when they kiss. This is about warbiz and death. About aggression, conquest, proving oneself, and puffed-up power. Hoorah for the hero. And about money: money to go out in glory, and the class money adhering to a desirable woman. Jack Browning, the android with the big bucks, is the mediator of the doomed killers and kissers. Avoiding the shellfire to the bitter end, he knows that the brash killers and the brash kissers have or will have been peppered with bullets, no matter his own fate.

"The Killers" is definitely a male story, with a male cast, told by men--its femme fatal only accentuating the point. It sizzles because men are exciting people who play the game of life to win. It rocks because it's got Lee Marvin's male charisma--despite his beat down of a blind woman. It jangles because it's entangled in the noisy drama of self-magnification. And it orgasms because it's all about the phallic domain--of killers and kissers.

Mrs Dalloway (1997)

Not Within the Novel's Reach

[7/10 · 13 May 2023]

I doubt that any film version of "Mrs Dalloway" can convey the breadth, depth, complexity, and radical vision of Virginia Woolf's novel. Although Gorris's version of it does seem to surpass typical expectations--and can stand on its own right as a rare adult character study movie, it still lacks Woolf's punch when it comes to dealing with her raw reality, her human presences, and her attacks on the bloodless psychiatric profession. Gorris is mainstream saddled, but more critically, she's limited by images that cannot take the measure of either the experimental content or more committed thoughts which only written forms can account for. For instance, there are more generics in the movie version, more single note characters and situations. And while Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith are the exclusive possessors of embodied consciousness and memory in the movie, this is hardly the case with the book.

I guess to comprehend what's going on (not easy because the movie's past--a simultaneous time period, seems a bit arbitrary, and character physical mismatches are not helpful) it's important to know that Woolf herself led something of a double life. Socially, she tended to hover on the surface as more of a performer or entertainer--and thus the "snob" epithet that is oft hurled her way; but privately she was, of course, the deeply conscious writer and thinker plagued with recurring mental illness, attempted suicides, and marriage upheavals which were so critical to the self she understood to be both real and dark.

Woolf wrote "Mrs Dalloway" as perhaps both an escape from her more tormented self and from the fashion of post-war disillusionment. Indeed, Mrs. Dalloway, the vibrant, party-loving social mediator, who Woolf herself, if not for certain life turns, could have become, initially stood alone in Woolf's novel. But this sunny version could not be tolerated. For Woolf, the writer, knew and understood too much of reality, too much of the war's devastation, too much of the underclass, and too much of the ice cold world of psychiatry, to let the party woman Clarissa's vibrancy take hold. Septimus Warren Smith was introduced to the novel not only as her counter figure, but also as a crucial part of Mrs Dalloway's consciousness without which she would be too glib, too shallow, too lacking in a sense of self.

One telling example of how the movie cannot handle the novel's radicalism is its take on Septimus Warren Smith's guilt. Gorris offers Smith's hallucinogenic encounters with Evans, which are both gripping and melodramatic, as the obvious causation (shell-shock) of his mental breakdown. But in Woolf's text what's more at stake for Smith is his emotional abandonment of his Italian wife, Rezia. Septimus, his war traumas not withstanding, exerts his own form of trauma onto his wife. It's this act of dehumanization, more personal than war, in which he shuts down communication with and discards his only ally, that drives his guilt. This is not a false self-blame, but a true self -blame, and a true guilt. But that such disengagement is socially acceptable and thus totally outside the narrow scope of his acquisitive, neurosis-classifiers psychiatrists, who deny any bitter complexities, only compounds his madness. So, Septimus' productive guilt, which should be most amenable to treatment, gets stifled by a power-based professional elite. And who understood this perverse, anti-human corps of experts better than Virginia Woolf, the writer, and author of the novel "Mrs. Dalloway," who was also thought to be lacking in proportion, and unable to adjust.

The Weather Man (2005)

Paternal or Societal Constraints?

[7/10 · 15 April 2023]

"The Weather Man" reminds me of those good French character study movies. Its first striking feature is its calm: not the calm before the hype, or before the excess, but a trustworthy calm, one outside of frenetic Hollywood. In other words, this is an adult drama comedy with more drama than comedy. Add in its singular lack of pretense, its superb acting, and its no-concessions ending, it further makes its mark.

There are some deductions which, for the most part, may or may not, be that dismissing. A few references to gays and females don't bode that well. And, to a lesser extent, the usual f-word language is hardly absent, but is somehow absorbed by the movie's placidity.

David Spritz (Cage) the weather man, and his father Robert (Caine), an acclaimed novelist, are the two pivotal characters. On the surface, and a little beneath it, they are set up as contrasting. Robert is the paternal authority, successful, literary, firm, stoical, self-directed, and liberally kind. Having won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, he occupies the higher strata of both the professional and arts world. He is very subtle man with an almost Greek demeanor, which makes it that much harder to tell, when and if, he is being condescending toward his son.

Son David, in contrast, has become a fixture in the world of pop culture. He is a Chicago TV weather man. Successful, by all rights, in his own way, and certainly popular, he is nevertheless no more than a performer, smiling engagingly as he reads the weather reports from a teleprompter--or when he makes appearances at patriotic, promotional, or sponsor events. He's otherwise a convincing failure in his life's endeavors from marriage and children to slyly writing his own novel. And, of course, is often reminded of his ridiculously failed life, not only because of his coming up short of Robert's august heights, but by the bombardments of his disgruntled "fans," as they hurl their fast food garbage at him from their speedy cars.

And yet Robert and David are, in key ways, not so dissimilar. Both appear to be living default lives in an increasingly stifling American culture, represented here by the mass media, the incoherence of TV land, celebrity status, mass marketing, superficial entertainment, and irrationality. Robert, as part of the old breed, his classic literary world obviously waning into obsolescence as the conglomerate publishers replace him with their shelves of self help and best seller books, must cope with the new by adhering closely to that upright appearance of a man of letters: formal, graceful, and meticulous in his bearing. And his son David, from the terrible novel he has written, to his general lack of form, further serves as a daily reminder of his own irrelevance. But David too, as part of the swarmed upon new breed, rattled as much by his pseudo environment as by family pressures, also learns to cope by attempting fathering, and re-marriage, and then by more fully accepting the fame and money that goes with being big time network weather man. But while the latter may prove he no longer has to justify his life to his father, there is still that pernicious disapproval of self.

Both are lost souls: just as Robert is an attendant at his own living funeral, so David becomes an even more deeply isolated celebrity in NYC. In the end, their differences may be a matter of family, but their shared depressiveness and demoralization can be attributed to a debilitating American society.

Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Conspiracy Fantasy

[6/10 · 5 April 2023]

Interesting isn't it, how this culture respects science fiction, but trivializes or trashes conspiracy theories. I guess all the more reason why "Conspiracy Theory" would do much better if it leaned toward realism and away from those favorite youth market fantasies of video game action and tacked on romance.

It's not that it would take drastic changes: the characters, the serious (if muddled) plot, and the humor (not comedy) are already present, and so are the main actors. What's missing is the ground under Jerry Fletcher's feet. Yeah, he's a pretty convincing NYC taxi driver; he's an investigator of his tortured/terrorized self; he edits a news report which documents his MK-Ultra findings; and his Justice Dept. Woman sidekick is initially exactly that. But what undermines his reality are things like his sprawling apt. With thousands of locks and keys which label him a paranoid conspiracy theorist; all the extreme CGI antics that surround his moves as in thousands of destroyed police cars/cabs/cars and blocks set ablaze; super-hero gymnastics; the swath of psychic gyrations and emotional close-ups; and, of course, the musical style romance for which even the word "sugar-coated" is too subtle.

I guess the point of this juggling act, brought to you, as usual, by interchangeable special defects, is to provide a cover for what the CIA is up to by explicitly marking the movie as "entertainment," and the ostensible subject of "Conspiracy Theory" as more fiction than fact. In other words, "Conspiracy Theory" creates a void in which most political and human content is superceded by darting rays and missiles that blow reality to bits, so that nothing of content is left.

But if Jerry Fletcher's mind and body have been cracked to pieces by the MK-Ultra program, doesn't his problem belong to all of us? Shouldn't "Conspiracy Theory" be more than a emotional catharsis? Is this mind control "program" still around under another title? What are the facts? What needs to be depicted on the big screen are MK-Ultra itself, the fetish of torture, sociopathic doctors and psychiatrists who underwrite bio-tech social engineering, and the bloodless technocrats who seem more programmed than their subjects. But in "Conspiracy Theory' we get something much closer to a house of mirrors or a FUN HOUSE.

The Gift (2000)

The Dimmed Witch

[6/10 · 14 March 2023]

Cate Blanchett's Annie is the great catalyst of "The Gift." But, in the end, her ability to take charge, communicate and expand is so hampered by the murder mystery/horror plot and all the spurious situations that she can only carry "The Gift" so far. And most of the major roles are too flawed, too typecast, too subject to the southern grotesque, and too obstructive of her role. This is more than just impinging on her actor's chance to excel, it is altogether undermining of her character's initial striking independence.

Let's start with a lesser character, Valerie Barksdale (Hilary Swank). She's a victim of serial wife-battery. She turns to Annie as her only source of trust. When Annie listens her into finally removing her dark glasses, the most powerful scene in the movie erupts. Annie totally transcends her psychic/reader abilities, and goes into a potent rage over the husband's violence and destructive control over her "client." This is not therapy, nor is it spirituality. This is outright sexual politics, and both women seem bound to an alliance. But, no. No, because the plot conception sentences Valerie to banishment. From this scene on, she will only peep up when her conjurors call for it--and then only as a prop.

Buddy Cole (Giovanni Ribisi), like Valerie, counts Annie as the only person in town worthy of his trust. He believes she's the heart of the community. Given his child sex abuse history (father), he might well be a second ally for Annie and Valerie, but Buddy is just as often outright menacing in Annie's presence as he is a cooing dove, putting her stress levels through the roof by his very demanding presence. For what gets emphasized over his victim status, is an ominous presence, an extreme southern madness. Thus, he is reduced to more of a plot instrument than a victim who can act on his own or another's behalf--except, of course, in spirit form.

Donnie Barksdale (Keanu Reeves) is the movies' extreme version of the compulsively cruel, brutal, wife batterer, his acts representative of his kind, but he's too typecast to be believable. He's the angry young man who cannot help himself. He is violence run amok, but has a monster's sly innocence. No matter how many women he pounds--and he beats on Annie and Jessica (the murder victim) too, it's they, his "owned" women, who make him go off. Annie, thus, is the demonic Witch, the independent woman he can't stomach, and who's diabolically in league with his wife. Barksdale is an outright criminal who terrorizes Annie and her children, and who deserves lengthy imprisonment even before his murder rap. That Annie, who has the courage to testify against him and suffer his bullying lawyer, must end up saving him from himself, and securing his release, at the risk of her own life, is not irony, but pure sap, her self-effacement and subordination all but sealed, and her threatening Witch diminished and then absorbed into the male plot.

Jessica King (Katie Holmes) is another bad faith role in "The Gift." She's a hallowed out object of fantasy, not encountered but used and discarded. She's the sexually lethal murder victim who is too perilous to men to be aware of her own peril. She's that upper class female to be taken down by the phallic wonders around her. All the porn peeps that help sell "The Gift" get attributed to her. Annie alone is non-judgmental of her, and acts directly on her behalf. Jessica herself does nothing to inhibit Annie, but Jessica's assigned role is one more diminishment of Annie, of her world, and of women in the "Gift." It also carries over into Annie's vulnerability in many of her alone-at-night scenes, in which she cannot walk upright like a Witch, but rather more like an alien to the night, always ready to jump and recoil from the same dangers that Jessica King could not escape.