Before the year ends, here are a few more films.

Forced Landing (1941), directed by Gordon Wiles. Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s loved aviation, and this Paramount cheapie is about an American flyer working for the Mosaque government. Mosaque? Apparently, this is a Pacific country in which the locals look like Latinos, including the revolutionary leader Andros Banshek (J. Carrol Naish). The government military leader is Colonel Jan Golas (Nils Asther) who is engaged to Johanna Van Deuren (Eva Gabor in her first film), is not a good fellow. He is out to sabotage work to build a defense system; the work is headed by Johanna’s father. The American flyer, Dan Kendal (Richard Arlen) does, of course, have eyes for Johanna, and the two of them eventually find themselves imprisoned in the jungle by Banshek. They fall in love, and this does not please Col. Golas. The film runs just over 60 minutes, and during this time we have plane crashes, shootings, intrigue, and romance. We also have monkeys. The script has its moments, and the cinematography, courtesy of John Alton, also has its moments. All in all, this is a pleasing programmer, something to while away the time on the indoor bike.

 

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), directed by Roger Corman. As the cartoon credits, filmed by Monte Hellman no less, indicate, this is a zany horror film. It has a monster made of 150 dollars worth of tennis balls, oil cloth, and steel wool. The script is in league with Little Shop of Horrors. For example, one character notes, “It was dusk. I could tell because the sun was going down.” The speaker here is the film’s narrator, agent XK150 (Robert Towne, here billed as Edward Wain), who has infiltrated gangster Renzo Capetto’s (Antony Carbone) gang in Cuba just after the revolution that has brought Castro to power. The plot has something to do with a large amount of gold smuggled out of Cuba by Capetto, along with a number of Cuban soldiers who hope to use the money to pay for their return to Cuba and the ousting of Castro. Capetto’s gang consists of a number of misfits, a manic-depressive, an animal voice impersonator, and a wicked Moll. The film is a lot of fun, and the monster is a hoot. Do not expect the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But you might delight in a zany odd ball romp. This film along with Little Shop of Horrors and Bucket of Blood form a nifty trifecta. 

 

The Lost Moment (1947), directed by Martin Gabel. This is Gabel’s only outing as a director, and his film is based, ostensibly, on Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. The film is an exercise in the Gothic, something akin to Rebecca. A young American publisher with ambition arrives in Venice where he plans to take up residence with an elderly, well an ancient, woman who was once the lover of a famous nineteenth-century poet, Jeffrey Ashton, whose portrait makes him look amazingly like Percy Bysshe Shelley. The 105-year-old woman is Juliana Borderau (an unrecognizable Agnes Moore), and she is attended by her grand-niece Tina Borderau (Susan Hayward). Tina, as it happens, suffers from lapses during which she takes on the personality of Juliana, and when the young man arrives, assuming the identity of a writer, but really in search of lost love letters sent to Juliana from the poet Ashton, she takes him as her lover Jeffrey when she is having one of her spells. The American, played by Robert Cummings, thinks he will make a sensation, and a lot of money, by publishing the lost love letters. Anyway, the story works out in a large, dark, labyrinthine house by a Venetian canal, a Venetian canal crafted on a Hollywood set. The plot holds little in the way of surprise, but the performers bring intensity to their roles. The make-up for the 105-year-old Juliana reminded me of the make-up work for Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man. The sets for the house are effective. All in all, this is an interesting exercise in the gothic, if a bit wan.

 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), directed by Don Siegal. Remade several times, this film still retains its power. What was once a 1950s McCarthy era film in which the pod people could be taken for soulless communists infiltrating small town America as a base from which to spread throughout the land, now seems prescient in its depiction of a people easily led to accept a world in which freedom and democracy are no longer worth struggling to maintain. It all begins with the farmers who have taken to growing giant seed pods that grow into replicas of human beings, taking over not only their bodies, but also their memories and minds. Siegal’s direction is efficient reminding us of lighting and angles familiar from film noir. Indeed, this is a dark picture, even darker without the prologue and epilogue demanded by the studio to temper the horrific initial ending with the Kevin McCarthy character stumbling among traffic on a highway trying desperately to convince someone to stop and take him seriously. “You’re next,” he shouts right at the camera in what was initially the end of the film. Now we have the frame in which he eventually convinces people at a hospital to believe him. The film is unrelentingly dark as young doctor Miles J. Bannell (McCarthy) arrives home from a conference to find people in his bucolic small town beginning to turn strange. This is a chilling story as we watch friends and family become the same, yet different, until the doctor and his girl, Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), find themselves on the run, fleeing what once was a safe haven and is now a den of soulless people out to gather the two of them into their way of life. Just sleep and wake to a new and better and emotionless world.

 

The Gang’s All Here (1941), directed by Jean Yarbrough. This is not the lavish musical from 1943, with Carmen Miranda; no, this is a mall budget film that teams Frankie Darro and Mantan Moreland (they made about nine films together) as two truck drivers that are hired by a trucking company that has experienced a series of accidents with some of these accidents proving fatal. So we have a mixture of comedy and serious mob activity. Mantan Moreland does his thing, and we have familiar racial stereotypes, especially in scenes that have Moreland interacting with Laurence Criner who plays bad fellow Ham Shanks! The script has its moments; for example, we have young Patsy Wallace (Marcia Mae Jones) trying to convince the fellow she fancies, Chick (Jackie Moran), that woman are important helpmates of men. She mentions Napoleon and Josephine, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Alexander the Great and Mrs. Alexander the Great. Moreland also manages some subtlety when he remarks, “When you have been beyond the pale as much as I have…” The film also has Keye Luke in a small but important role. All in all, this film, at 61 minutes, serves to while the time away as I ride the indoor bike!

 

The Treasure of Ruby Hills (1955), directed by Frank McDonald. This is a low-budget western with Zachary Scott as hero, reformed bad guy Ross Haney. Efficiently filmed, and with an amiable cast of familiar faces (e.g. Raymond Hatton, Rick Vallin, Barton McLane, Dick Foran, and Lee Van Cleef), The Treasure of Ruby Hills is quite watchable. The plot is not novel. A fellow rides into town where two rival ranchers vie for control of the valley. He positions himself between the rivals, has an eye for a local woman who is supposed to be marrying the foreman of one of the two rival ranchers. This foreman has plans of his own; he not only has designs on the young woman, Sherry Vernon (Carole Mathews), but also on the land run illegally by the two ranchers. What they do not yet know is that Ross Haney has laid claim to the area’s only water source. Does all this sound familiar? Anyway, proceedings are handled well and things roll along. We even have Splinters from the Roy Rogers movies turning up here as bad guy Jack Voyle (Gordon Jones). The film offers riding, shooting, punching, romancing, and smart talk all in just 71 minutes.

 

Spectre of the Rose (1946), directed by Ben Hecht. This is a one-of-a-kind noir that focuses on ballet dancer and schizophrenic Andre Sanine (Ivan Kirov), who supposedly murdered his first wife while he and she were dancing the ballet, Spectre of the Rose. Bohemian poet, Lionel Gans (Lionel Stander) brings detective McFarlan (Charles “Red” Marshall) to Mme La Syphe’s (Judith Anderson) dance studio to investigate, mostly because Gans fancies the young dancer, Haidi (Viola Essen), who fancies Sanine. Mme La Sylphe knits, reminding us of Mme Defarge. The film is melodramatic, over-acted, and filled with dance. The noir hero is the tormented Sanine. The script, by Hecht, has some good one-liners, e.g. “Press yourself against me so hard that you’re tattooed on to me,” and “love is a seasonal thing among artists.” This is a strange film to come from Republic Studio with its combination noir and art house pretensions. It is perhaps over-heated, a curious entry into the noir catalogue.

 A mix of movies for December.

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), directed by Chantal Akerman. Sight and Sound Magazine has, for the past 52 years, selected the greatest film in film history. They do this every two years, and first named Bicycle Thieves (1948) as the greatest. Soon they changed the selection to Citizen Kane (1941), a selection that lasted until 2012 when they chose Vertigo (1958). In 2022, a surprise came when the magazine selected Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the greatest film ever made. This film focuses on three days in the life of the eponymous character, played by Delphine Seyrig, as she goes through her daytime routine making meals for her and her son, washing the dishes, making the beds, doing necessary shopping, looking after a neighbour’s infant for a few minutes, entertaining men each day of the week from 5:00 to 5:30, and doing all this with a stoic resolve. We watch her peeling potatoes, making breaded meatloaf, eating, and going about her activities with ritualistic sameness. She does all this in the confined space of her apartment. The camera never moves (or at least I do not recall it moving); it sits there usually at a level Ozu would understand and delivers images of Jeanne framed by walls or objects such as chairs or cupboard doors, or even a milk bottle and coffee container. Outside long streets with shops provide a frame. Her life is contained. She and her son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) spend little time together and the time they do spend together is mostly silent. Indeed, the film contains very little dialogue. As for story, we have the three days in Jeanne’s life during which we begin to see a breakdown in her meticulous routine. She neglects to do up all the buttons of her housecoat, her hair is a bit dishevelled on the second day, she forgets to turn off lights or she forgets to replace the lid of the soup tureen in which she keeps the money she receives from the men she entertains, she overboils the potatoes, she finds her coffee unpalatable, she rises early and arrives at the bank before it opens, and so on. Something is happening in Jeanne’s emotional life, and the ending comes as a brutal surprise. The film is long at 3 hours and 22 minutes, and it may seem longer because screen time can feel longer than real time; take, for example, a scene such as the one in which Jeanne sits at the kitchen table and peels potatoes, or the final shot of the film in which Jeanne simply sits at the dining room table. These shots seem interminable. As I watched the film, I saw echoes of such film makers as Godard, Warhol, and Ozu. Apparently Michael Snow also influenced Akerman. Finally, what does one say about this film? It differs strikingly from the previous films selected by Sight and Sound, all made by men. This film is clearly something different and clearly a film by and about women. Most of the film crew are women. Jeanne’s life is the life of a widow, mother, and housewife. She has no activity outside her closed world as mother and home maker. This is a remarkable film. But is it the best film ever made?

Persona (1966), directed by Ingmar Bergman. The last time I saw this film, I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, some 59 years ago. The film made a profound impression on me then. Seeing it again after all this time, I wonder just what went through my mind back then. What goes through my mind now are the echoes of films by the likes of Luis Bunuel, Kenneth Anger, and the French New Wave directors, especially Jean Luc Godard. Bergman sets out to alienate the viewer by beginning the film with artifice and a collection of images that clearly announce that what we are seeing is a film. He also teases us with the image of a young boy who, after closing the book he is reading, looks at a large and cloudy image of a woman’s face on a screen in front of him, as he, like a film viewer, like us, sits looking toward the screen and away from us. Is this the expression of an Oedipal emotion or is this just a dream image or is the boy looking at a movie screen? What is real and what is reel, the film seems to ask. The boy reaches out to touch the face. But touch is impossible. Neither he nor us can actually get in touch with the image we see. Once the story, such as it is, gets going, we find ourselves in a world not much clearer than the real/reel confusion at the beginning. Elizabet (Liv Ullman) is an actress who, while playing the part of Elecktra, suddenly decides to cease speaking. She has seen footage on television of a Buddhist monk in Vietnam setting himself on fire, and this act of self-immolation appears to have caused her to go silent, her way of rejecting a world of violence and suffering. Elizabet ends up in hospital where the young nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) is charged with caring for her. The two women go to Elizabet’s country home by the sea where we have images that suggest that either they become as close as lovers or they become estranged or they really are one person. We see the two women at times with a mirror and at times by a window, and the suggestion or question is whether cinema is a mirror or a window, something we see through or something that reflects ourselves. Persona does not clarify; rather it suggests cinema is both. The dialectic between silence and compulsive talk may also take us to cinema’s tug between the visual and the verbal, while at the same time saying something about the virtues of silence and the benefits of verbal expression. Ultimately this film will work if the viewer can delight in a series of almost hallucinatory images that take us inside the workings of film itself.

Blitz (2024), directed by Steve McQueen. As we expect from Steve McQueen, this film offers excellent visual recreation of war-torn London in 1940 during the intense bombing known as the blitzkrieg. The story follows the adventures of nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan) who is separated from his mother Rita (Saorise Ronan) and grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller). George is a mixed-race child whose father was cruelly deported before George was born. Anyway, the film has something of a picaresque feel to it, taking on perhaps too much to deal with adequately. First there is the blitz itself and the devastation brought on the city and the disruption in the lives of the citizens. Then there is the stuff about the factories and women workers. Then there is George, his family and its background and then his travels as he jumps from the train evacuating him and many other children to the countryside. Then we have the bits that foreground the racism apparent in the city. Then there is the focus on the failure of authorities to adequately prepare for the safety of the citizens, mostly working and middle-class people who demand shelter in the underground. And then we have the bit that echoes Dickens’s Oliver Twist with the Fagin-like Albert (Stephen Graham) with its ghoulish scene in a bombed night club. Perhaps because of the wide brush strokes here, characters remain sketchy. In short, this is an ambitious film that is uneven in its presentation of a time in history that might resonate more than it does. We have the shots of London in rubble that might remind us of places today in the Ukraine, in Gaza, in Beirut, and so on. The end of the film reminds us just how  tragic war is, while at the same time giving us something of a “happy ending.” Tragedy should, I think, overshadow all else.

 

The Chase (1966), directed by Arthur Penn. Not well received when it came out, The Chase nevertheless is a searing indictment of violence in America, racism, and small town shenanigans. It takes place in Texas where most citizens have guns, many have two guns, and they are prepared to use them. The story is a complicated combination of melodrama, social comment, family romance, and frontier mentality festering long after the frontier has gone. Sheriff Calder (Marlon Brando) appears to be in the pocket of local rich man and oil magnate Val Rogers (E. G. Marshall). When local bad boy Bubba Reeves (Robert Redford) escapes from prison with another inmate and that other inmate murders a man for the man’s car, Bubba finds himself on the run, hoping to get to Mexico. Things go wrong as they always do in these films and the local community finds itself in a snit over the actions of Sheriff Calder and the failure of the law to locate and incarcerate young Bubba. Calder receives the requisite beating (Brando often took a beating in films), Bubba receives injustice, and the town receives nothing more than ugliness from its people. The cast is impressive with the likes of Robert Duvall, Edward Fox, Jane Fonda, Martha Hyer, Miriam Hopkins, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, and Henry Hull. The party scenes suggest that the adults of this town are no more mature than the teenagers of this town. Both party with abandon and show little or no respect for decency, courtesy, and civility. The film is cluttered, but effective. This is the film Penn made just before he made his most famous film.

All Screwed Up (1974), directed by Lina Wertmuller. Perhaps not always coherent, this film nevertheless captures life in bustling overcrowded Milan. Too much is going on, but then too much goes on in the modern city. We have workers protests, chaotic working conditions, poor people trying to survive, police brutality, political injustice, rape, gender disparity, female cleverness, culture clashes. Ostensibly, the film follows two young lads from the south arriving in Milan and then trying to make a living and find relationships. The two lads are Gigi (Luigi Diberti) and Carletto (Nino Bignamini). The two young men find themselves living in an abandoned apartment building with a commune full of people. The place is organized by a woman. The people who live here will do almost anything for a lire. Take Sante (Renato Rotondo), for example. Sante meets a young woman. The two become a couple, and she has twins, then another five all at once – quintuplets! Before the film ends, she is once again pregnant. Poor Sante will do anything to provide for his family, including trying to be a male prostitute. The film is crowded with events, with people, with sounds, with ongoing chaos. This is a well-meaning film that tries to touch on just about all the ills of modern urban life under capitalism. The characters are likeable enough, if under-developed – there are just too many of them. Scenes in the pizzeria kitchen with the cacophony of goings on typify both the film and modernity.

Ikarie XB 1 (1963), directed by Jindrich Polak. Stanley Kubrik must have seen this Czech film. 2001: A Space Odyssey has echoes of this film in its designs. Anyway, what we have is an account of a 28-day mission to Alpha Centauri (15 years back on earth) a couple of centuries from now. The mission is to search for life forms. What the crew find is an old earth spaceship with the dead bodies of decadent westerners who had used this spaceship as a casino. It is the Cold War, and this floating casino also contains several nuclear bombs. The couple of crewmen who visit the abandoned ship get blown up. Back on Ikarie XB 1 (the name of the spaceship on a mission to discover life forms), some deadly virus or germ emanating from a black star begins to make life on Ikarie XB 1 difficult. After a lengthy sleep, the crew wake and one of them goes rather wild and crazy. Before this happens, we have a vision if life aboard the spaceship. The ship boasts a huge gym where crew members can exercise, a dancehall where the crew can dance away to their hearts’ content, large screens on which they can see and talk to loved ones back on earth, and a dining area that serves up vindaloo for the asking. The sets are minimal and geometric; they remind me of what we see on the Starship Enterprise. All this is impressive and thought-provoking. Oh, and there is also a robot, Patrick, who may remind you of Robbie, the Robot.

Mississippi Burning (1988), directed by Alan Parker. This film was made in 1988 and it focuses on an FBI investigation into three missing Civil Rights activists in Mississippi in 1964. Whether it is 1964, 1988, or 2024 the racial anger, bigotry, and violence remain with us. This film has not aged. Parker gives us the inferno that is race hatred with burning churches, crosses, and homes. The two principal figures are Agents Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman) and Alan Ward (Willem Dafoe), and both are excellent. The rest of the cast, both of known and unknown actors, are also excellent. The locations serve to fill in the living conditions of both Black people and White people at the time of the action. The film combines melodrama, documentary realism, and police procedural in a scathing recreation of actual events. The anger on all sides is palpable. The warping of the judicial system should serve as a warning. The world here may be nominally a democracy, but certain people are denied the vote through various impediments set up by the dominant members of the community. This is a harrowing film that has not lost its power over the years. 

Wonder Boys (2000), directed by Curtis Hanson. People are crazy, times are strange, I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range, I used to care, but – things have changed. People in this film are perhaps crazy, but in a pleasant sort of way. And they have Bob Dylan and a few others singing in the background. This adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel about a creative-writing professor’s adventures over an auspicious weekend not only won Bob Dylan an Oscar, but it also happens to be quite a joyous look at life’s vicissitudes. What’s not to like about a film that follows an English professor about as he transports his editor, a transvestite, the transvestite’s tuba, the editor’s pharmacopeia in a suitcase, and a dead dog from a party at his university’s Chancellor’s house? Then we have the troubled, but brilliant student, the student who fancies the professor, the actual owner of the professor’s car, the cleaning man, the bag of ganja, the successful novelist, a cast of misfits with success stories and stories of failure. Michael Douglas is the professor, Tobey Maguire is the troubled student, Frances McDormand is the Chancellor, Rip Torn the novelist, Robert Downey, Jr. the editor, Katie Holmes the student who makes eyes at the professor, and Michael Cavadias the transvestite. The location is Pittsburgh where it seems to have snow on the ground and torrents of rain falling from the sky. Rain and snow and Marilyn Monroe’s jacket. This is a film with affection for the human condition. It is also a film in which a person can see the 2000 plus pages of his next novel in manuscript blow away in the wind and feel liberated. Pretty much everything about this film works for me.