March 2025

SCARECROW (1973)

     Since the late 1960s, five actors—Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman—have been crucial players in more than 50 films that I have included in my annual Top 10. Without these five performers I doubt I would have turned into the movie fan I became.

    Hackman, who died last month at age 95, was the least flamboyant of the five, excelled at playing both an unexceptional guy who lives outside of mainstream society and the smug insider who may or may not be corrupt. Hackman was barely a celebrity, certainly compared to those other actors, which allowed him to connect with viewers even in the most average of films. The fact that most filmgoers remember him for “The Poseidon Adventure” or “Superman” speaks to his ability to offer some class to even superficial Hollywood spectaculars while also anchoring subtle masterpieces like Francis Coppola’s “The Conversation” or Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves.”

     He found stardom later than most of his contemporaries: he was 37 when he landed his breakthrough role as Clyde Barrow’s brother Buck in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and 41 when he won the best actor Oscar for “The French Connection” (1971).

     He was only five years younger than 1950s stars Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon; three years older than Michael Caine. But beyond his chronological age, Hackman always seems more mature, more experienced in the travails of life, than anyone else in his films.

        In “Scarecrow,” a film often forgotten in both his and Pacino’s legacies, he plays Max, a drifter and dreamer just out of prison who joins up with Pacino’s Lion in this road-trip through the West. Naïve Lion just wants to get back to Detroit to see his child born after he went to sea, but with Max in charge there are many side trips, barroom fights and disputes as they thumb their way east.

     Max’s demeanor shifts from ornery to gregarious in a split second; an opinionated hobo determined to open a car wash in Pittsburgh, who sleeps with his shoe under his pillow and wears every shirt he owns (six or seven) at all times. This stands out as a rare humorous performance in a career of dramatic roles (though he delivered hilarious bits in “Young Frankenstein” and “The Birdcage”). As directed by Jerry Schatzberg (who had directed Pacino in “The Panic in Needle Park”), with a sterling script from Garry Michael White, “Scarecrow” captures the kind of down-and-out characters that roamed the country’s hinterlands for much of the 20^th Century—an American version of Vladimir and Estragon from “Waiting for Godot.” 

     Also worth checking out, from both ends of his career, is his performance as a son trying to escape the shadow of his father in “I Never Sang for My Father” (1970) and his turn as the paranoid recluse Brill in Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State” (1998). But it’s hard to find a performance by Hackman that isn’t completely believable and, most of the time, memorable.

 

THE FIRE INSIDE (2024)

      More often than not, Hollywood’s publicity machine is the biggest obstacle facing good movies finding an audience. The studios, though just high-profile releasing companies, pick winners and losers, and rarely do under-promoted pictures get seen.

    Not surprisingly, this movie about an African-American girl from a poor community, Flint, Michigan, slipped in and out of theaters virtually unnoticed.     Find it if you can (streaming on Prime Video) because it’s one of 2024’s best movies, featuring two outstanding performances and an unblinking portrait of a struggling community.

     Telling the real-life story of two-time Olympic gold medal winner Claressa Shields, director Rachel Morrison and writer Barry Jenkins, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning “Moonlight” (2016), take a cliché plotline—youth escapes troubled home life by excelling at a sport—and turn it into a multi-dimensional look at both the ups and downs of female boxer Shields, played with intense conviction by Ryan Destiny, and life in the black neighborhoods of Flint.

     The film opens with a pre-teen Claressa (Jazmin Headley) showing up at the local gym run by the affable Jason (a memorable Brian Tyree Henry), who takes her under his wing; by the time Claressa’s a teen, she’s among the top female boxers in the country and headed to the 2012 London Olympics.

     Not many films have captured the complex relationship between athlete and coach as well as “The Fire Inside,” and most of the credit has to go to these two actors. Henry, who scored a 2022 Oscar nomination for his role as the small-town mechanic who befriends Jennifer Lawrence in “Causeway,” is just as convincing here, especially in the second half of the story as he tries against typical biases to secure endorsements for Claressa.

      Destiny, who at 30 convincingly looks like a teen, has been a recording artist since she was 15, and has appeared in the TV series “Star” and “Grown-ish.” But her performance as Claressa is clearly a big step up. She captures the fierceness needed to succeed at boxing while displaying the vulnerability of a child coming from a dysfunctional home.    

       This is Morrison’s feature debut after working as a cinematographer on such high-profile pictures as “Mudbound” (2017) and “Black Panther” (2018). In her use of travelling-shots of Flint and the handling of boxing sequences, Morrison’s work in “The Fire Inside” shows her to be a director with a superb eye.

  

I’M STILL HERE (2024)

     The brutal regimes, with U.S. support, that reigned across South America in the 1970s and ‘80s, imprisoning, torturing, and killing thousands of citizens because of their politics, remains a still-healing scar in many of those countries.

    Walter Salles (“Central Station” “The Motorcycle Diaries”), Brazil’s most high-profile filmmaker, tells the horrors of his nation through the true story of Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), his wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) and their family. The picture earned unexpected Academy Award nominations for best picture, best actress and took home the Oscar for best international film.

   While the first third of the picture focuses on the happy family enjoying their Rio de Janeiro oceanside home, in the background the political situation in the country grows darker.

 

     When their good friends decide to relocate to London, the Paivas send their oldest daughter with them out of caution. A few months later, Rubens, a one-time politician who is secretly helping the underground movement, is arrested, followed by his wife and another daughter.

    The filmgoer experiences the oppressive government through the experiences of Eunice, who after she is released from prison, works to discover what happen to her husband.

     Eunice’s upbeat but determined personality as superbly portrayed by Oscar-nominated Torres dominates the film, as she balances her roles as activist and mother. If there is a flaw in the film, it’s that Eunice, facing an horrendous reality, remains so calm and deliberate in her search for justice.

      Torres, who has been a major Brazilian star for more than 30 years, winning the best actress award at Cannes in 1986 for “Love Me Forever or Never,” scored a well-deserved Oscar nomination (and should have won) for her performance in “I’m Not Here” and took home a Golden Globe. Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who earned an Oscar nod in 1998 for Salles’ “Central Station,” plays the older version of Eunice in “I’m Still Here.”

     Salles extends the film’s story to present day, which, for me, reduces the impact of the political chaos of the 1970s even as it gives a fuller picture of the Paiva family. Yet that’s a minor complaint; “I’m Still Here” is the perfect example of how to personalize a societal problem, a national tragedy.   

  

KILL OR BE KILLED (1950)

    One of my wishes for the new year is that more Hollywood directors attempt to make serious films with running times in the 90-to-100-minute range. It’s possible: their predecessors managed to do it for 80 years.

      While I’m not claiming that this low-budget Lawrence Tierney picture, directed by Max Nosseck (a B-movie director from Germany), is equal to any 2-hour-and-30-minute Oscar-nominated picture, or even very good, but it shows how much plot one can packed into 67 minutes. Here’s what happens in barely over an hour:

·         Tierney sings “Oh! Susanna” in a South American bar with the local band.

·         He demands payment for installing AC in the bar.

·         The owner, while getting Tierney’s money, is killed.

·         Tierney sees the killer run away and follows. But the cops follow Tierney, thinking he killed the bar owner.

·         Tierney escapes onto a boat, hidden away by the unhappy wife (Marissa O’Brien) of the boat’s owner (Rudolph Anders). For Tierney and O’Brien, it’s love at first sight.

·         He jumps ship and works on an island with natives clearing bush.

·         When he demands some rights for the workers, the boss (who ordered the bar killing) and his righthand man (George Coulouris of “Citizen Kane” fame) figure out that he’s the witness in the bar killing.

·         The pair enlist Tierney (he’s an engineer) to design a hospital for the workers, with no intention of building it. (The plot offers no reason why they don’t kill him immediately.)

·         During this time, Tierney and the boss’s wife pick up their romance.

·         There’s also time for the boss to wax philosophically about the dangers of the jungle and life’s fate while everyone dons a pith hat.

·         A native servant boy befriends Tierney and warns him that Coulouris is going to push him into the piranha-infested river.

·         Instead, Coulouris sleeps with the fishes and Tierney returns to battle it out with Anders.

·         During the fight, the young servant shoots the boss dead.

·         Tierney and Maria kiss and all is well in the jungle.

I can only hope that a few of the movies I’ll see in 2025 will have that much going on.

 

THE PIANO LESSON (2024)

      While not as memorable as the 1995 television production of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, this film, filled with fine performances, continues Denzel Washington’s ambitious plan to bring all of Wilson’s works to the big screen.

     It began with “Fences” (2016), giving Washington one of his best roles as Troy Maxson, a frustrated middle-aged father and husband. The actor served as producer for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (2020)—the play lumped into the “Pittsburgh Cycle” but set in Chicago—and this new film.

     But he turns “The Piano Lesson” into a family affair: son Malcolm makes his directing debut (and co-wrote the script with Virgil Willliams) and John David plays the key role of Boy Willie.

     Most of the action, set in Depression Era Pittsburgh, takes place in the home of Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson) where his niece, Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) keeps the prized heirloom, a piano handed down from slavery days. Her brother Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to buy some land back home in Mississippi. That conflict spurs most of the discussions, along with the occasional appearance of the ghost of a man Boy Willie might have killed.

     All three principals are superb; Jackson won a Tony for this performance in the stage revival of the play in 2023 and Deadwyler, outstanding as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” (2022), should have been a contender for a supporting actress Oscar.

        Unlike “Fences,” this film doesn’t utilize its Pittsburgh setting, which was disappointing. In addition, writer-director Washington needed to take a red pen to Wilson’s play, which goes off on tangents that lose their impact amidst all the talk.

  

LEE (2024)

      One of the most interesting women of the 20^th Century, Lee Miller was a high-profile fashion model, an avant-garde photographer, a figure in the Paris-based surrealism art movement of the 1920s and an admired war photographer during World War II who famously posed in Hitler’s bath tub the day he killed himself.

     But the best thing about this bio-pic of Miller, directed by Ellen Kuras, a top Hollywood cinematographer (“Summer of Sam,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), making her first feature, is the performance of Kate Winslet, who brings this fearless, bohemian woman alive. Otherwise, the movie plays like a coffee-table photo book of Miller’s life, including clunky narration by way of by end-of-life interview scenes interspersed through the first half of the film. 

      While there are glimpses of her life among the surrealists—she was photographer Man Ray’s mistress for a time—the film is mostly interested in her work during the British blitz and as she followed the Allied troops as they liberate Europe with photographer partner Davy Scherman (Andy Samberg). The most interesting drama depicted in the film are the fights she has with her employers, London Vogue editors, over her pictures. Andrea Riseborough, Oscar nominated in 2022 for “To Leslie,” is especially memorable as sympathetic editor Audrey Withers.  

     Since “Sense and Sensibility” (1995), when she was just 20, Winslet has been among the cinema’s finest actresses, yet she’s found few good roles in the last 10 years. Her best work in that period is probably as a rural detective in the 2021 HBO series “Mare of Easttown.” I had hopes “Lee” would be the big-screen return she needed, but it isn’t worthy of her talents or Miller’s.     

 

MANHANDLED (1924)

     Long before she played the delusional Norma Desmond, Gloria Swanson was among Hollywood’s most popular movie stars, beginning in the late 1910s. Still a teenager, she arrived on the West Coast from Chicago and almost immediately became a star of Mack Sennett’s Keystone comedies along with her husband Wallace Beery. (They divorced after about two years.)

      Moving to Lasky’s Famous Players (later Paramount), she started working in features, starting with Frank Borzage’s “Society for Sale” (1918) and then making a half dozen for director Cecil B. DeMille and ten for director Sam Wood. Allan Dwan, another of the great silent filmmakers, was her director of choice when she made “Manhandled,” a romantic comedy that displays Swanson’s comic skills.

     In the opening sequence, shopgirl Tessie becomes lodged between two tall men (Swanson was not quite 5-feet tall) as she rides home on the crowded subway. In a plot typical of the era, she’s allured by wealthy suitors as she nearly forgets about her longtime beau (Tom Moore). Frank Morgan (“The Wizard of Oz”) plays the owner of a dress shop and tea room who hires Tessie to serve as hostess, imitating a Russian exile. It makes little sense, but it gives Swanson plenty of chances to roll her distinctive eyes and show what a feisty woman does in the face of aggressive behavior of men.  

       Though she married six times, Swanson’s most famous relationship was with Joseph P. Kennedy, who saved her financially in the late 1920s and became her paramour. Her extravagant lifestyle had left her virtually broke despite being one of the highest paid actresses in the business.  Most memorably, their partnership resulted in one of the most legendary films of the silent era, “Queen Kelly.”

      They hired the difficult, obsessive Erich von Stroheim (“Greed” “The Merry Widow”) to direct and he lived up to his reputation. Disputes, financial and artistic, resulted in the film never being finished by von Stroheim, instead it was cobbled together by Swanson and director Richard Boleslawski and released, with sound scenes added, in 1932. It all but ended von Stroheim’s career.

      The intended version was reconstructed and released 50 years later. It features one of Swanson’s best performances as a convent girl abducted by a prince, caught up in royal intrigue and eventually being shipped off to Africa to run a brothel. (Clips of the film are shown in “Sunset Blvd.”)

     Like most silent stars, Swanson struggled to find her footing with the coming of sound, though she was only in her early 30s. After 1931, the actress could be heard regularly on radio programs but appeared in just four films before Billy Wilder rejected Mary Pickford and Mae West and cast her in the role of a lifetime for “Sunset Blvd.” (1950).

     While her performance remains one of the most iconic in film history (along with the irony of von Stroheim being cast as her driver), it didn’t do much for her movie career, spending the rest of her working life mostly in television and on stage (“Twentieth Century” in the 1950s, “Butterflies Are Free” in the 1970s). She had memorable guest roles playing herself on “The Beverly Hillbillies” and later in the film “Airport 1975.”

      Because both Swanson and Norma Desmond were silent actresses who were no longer stars, it’s easy to equate them. Yet unlike Wilder’s character, Swanson was hardly forgotten in 1950 and was anything but a bitter recluse.

     It’s also bad history to regard the silent era as just a prelude to talkies. Silent pictures were an art form, with its own gallery of stars and filmmakers, its own style and techniques, that abruptly ended in 1927, leaving most of the players behind or diminished. Swanson was one of the lucky ones, delivering one last great performance.

 

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (2024)

     Pedro Almodóvar’s latest picture, his first in English, displays the difficulties often faced by writer-directors working in a language not their own. His hyper-reality, soapy Spanish pictures have established him as one of the best filmmakers of the past 40 years, but this heavy-handed metaphor for the death of the planet due to climate change lands like a young filmmaker’s sincere first effort.

      Adding to the impression that the film was made by a grad student are the endless references to literary heroes, including James Joyce (quotations from “The Dead”), Faulkner, Hemingway, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf along with filmmakers Rossellini, Bergman and Max Ophüls. I appreciate the director giving props to those who inspired him (as Woody Allen has done in a few of his films), but most of the references seem forced into the plot.

    Martha (a perfectly cast Tilda Swinton), suffering from cancer, has decided to end her life and persuades Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a friend she hasn’t seen in years, to be there when she does it, literally in the room next door. They spend the last few weeks—while Martha ponders when to take her life—at a high-end cabin in upstate New York.

     On paper—it’s based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez—the movie seems like a perfect setup for heartfelt, intellectual conversations delivered by two world-class actresses. But the dialogue is blunt and simplistic, lacking any sense of nuance that you would expect from two well-educated women (Ingrid is a novelist, Martha a foreign correspondent). The clunky dialogue sucks the life out of the story.

     Even more didactic are the discussions between Ingrid and her on-again, off-again boyfriend (John Turturro), who lectures on the ravages of climate charge. Nothing in this film is left to the imagination.

       Swinton comes off best, looking emaciated (more than usual) and worn out she rises above the script to give a striking performance. 

 

PHOTOS:

Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in “Scarecrow.”  (Warner Bros.)

Fernanda Torres in “I’m Not Here.”  (Sony Pictures Classics)

Danielle Deadwyler and John David Washington in “The Piano Lesson.”  (Netflix)

Gloria Swanson puts off another suitor in “Manhandled.” (Paramount Pictures)