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Reviews
Three Strangers (1946)
Another dusky Huston jewel....
It was over 20 years ago that I first encountered this small cinematic treasure, on the now-defunct indie KHJ-TV, channel 9 in Los Angeles, but it was not at all by accident. Having been enthralled by the magic that is "Casablanca" some years before, I had been seeking out other films like it made by Warner Bros. in the late 30s, 40s and early 50s. Specifically I was after more work by that classic's storied supporting cast: Paul Henried, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, S.Z. Sakall and Joy Page, among others.
"Three Strangers" gathers two of those and weaves them into a unexpectedly amoral tale of the cost of reversing fortune. Lorre plays a fallen gentleman who fallen into a bottle and thus into some dicey company, while Greenstreet plays a solicitor who's been a tad too speculative with his trust accounts. The underregarded Geraldine Fitzgerald joins them as the mysterious woman who randomly gathers the other two off a London street to see if they'll take a chance on an ancient Chinese proverb coming true.
"Three Strangers" if anything goes "Casablanca" and that other Huston/Lorre/Greenstreet classic, "The Maltese Falcon," one better in the world-weariness department, with moral ambiguities and ambivalent characters straight out of films noir made five years later. Unlike those other two films, though, there's little likability to be found in the lead characters' roguishness --- save perhaps for Lorre, who gets redeemed by a "good" woman's love at the end.
Yet that very fact makes "Three Strangers" play out like a much more modern film (like one from the early 1970s, say), rendering it an intriguing admixture of old-style character-driven plotting and contemporary moral waywardness and antiheroism.
50 First Dates (2004)
Cary Grant? Rock Hudson? William Powell? Hell no - ADAM SANDLER!
That Adam Sandler will become known as the 21st Century's king of romantic comedy by subsequent generations of filmgoers is not, I submit, cause for mass lemming-like stampedes of film buffs off the nearest palisades. Like him or not, the guy can really do this stuff in his sleep, and, if anything, "Punch-Drunk Love" and this picture showed that he might actually enjoy doing it enough to start messing around in interesting ways with the genre's ground rules. One major hurdle remains: Sandler must be able to appeal to women in a more direct, salacious (but not offensively so; Grant is the paradigm here) manner than he's presently capable of (or comfortable with). Sandler's still putting himself forward as the cute little boy who eventually evolves into a more adult partner, and his appeal needs to be a little more, well, grown-up. But only a little.... 1998's "The Wedding Singer" (which first teamed Sandler with Drew Barrymore), "Punch-Drunk Love" and this film show how confident Sandler's become as the heir to Cary. And Sandler's already got his core audience locked up and on his side. Now all he needs to do is win over a few more egghead cineastes and he'll join the immortals, whether we like it or not....
The Affairs of Cellini (1934)
One of hundreds of gems waiting to be treasured....
Stumbling across a neat little 80-minute gem like 1934's The Affairs of Cellini is reason enough to lease satellite TV (or a really good cable service, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one). Viewing it almost nearly 70 years after its premiere allows even the neophyte cineaste a neat precis of the progress (or lack of same) that film has made since then, plus primers in ace character acting and deft characterization by the writers.
The film centers on 16th-century Florence, a hotbed of wealth and intrigue run by a family you might of heard of (the Medicis), and one of its leading artisans, the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini (about whom Hector Berlioz wrote an opera and numerous poems and stories have been penned) is sort of a hybrid of Robin Hood and the Scarlet Pimpernel, with a dash of Don Juan thrown in for fun. Played by the very young, unabashedly gorgeous and surprisingly athletic Fredric March (seen many years later in such classics as Inherit the Wind, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and The Best Years of Our Lives), Cellini's a stiffnecked anti-aristocrat that the Duke of Florence (played hilariously by The Wizard of Oz himself, Frank Morgan) and his lethal-seductress wife (Fox's big star of the mid-'30s, Constance Bennett) can't seem to do without, so skilled at goldsmithing and seduction is he.
Toss in Fay Wray (the year after making Kong go ape), Fox stalwart Louis Calhern in the Basil Rathbone role and the VERY young Lucille Ball in a supporting role, oodles of classic B&W cinematography, snappy directorial pace (by Fox veteran Gregory La Cava) and quasi-operatic sets and decoration, and you've got the kind of lunchtime matinee that 24-hour classic movie channels like Turner Classic and Fox Movies (where this can be seen at least twice a month) were meant to provide.