SINNERS
(2025)
One movie vampire can create a sexy,
creepy, ominous atmosphere and serve as a troubling metaphor for the unknown
space between life and death. Dozens of vampires in a movie are just silly,
sending me in search of the channel changer.
Up until necks began to be bitten, Ryan
Coogler’s latest film (following “Creed” and the “Black Panther” pictures),
again starring Michael B. Jordan (two of him), is a beautifully rendered
portrait of African-American life in Depression-era Mississippi Delta. Twins Smoke
and Stack (Jordan) return to their hometown after a stint working with Al
Capone in Chicago, with a bundle of cash and plans to start a juke joint.
Then a young Irish immigrant and a pair
of white locals camp out in front of the club, sending the story into “Walking
Dead” territory. I struggled to see the point as the vampires didn’t seem to
represent white racists—the local KKK has its own plans to erase the juke
joint—or serve as symbols of a society keeping Black entrepreneurs from
succeeding. It felt to me as if Coogler found himself struggling for an ending
and thought: “Hey, everyone loves a vampire/zombie story.”
What I admire about the movie is its
heartfelt tribute to blues music, and the genre’s Delta home. Just a few of the
blues greats who came from this part of the country include Charley Patton,
Robert Johnson, Son House, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon and the
last of them, Buddy Guy, who has a touching cameo in “Sinners.” Unfortunately,
the vampires also bring the blues, and not in a good way.
QUALITY
STREET (1927) and BEVERLY OF GRUSTARK (1926)
Marion Davies’ career has been both
underrated and overrated since she became a star in the early 1920s.
Her film work was dismissed for many
years because of the promotional assistance she received from the vast media
empire run by William Randolph Hearst, her constant companion for 30 years.
Hearst pulled her out of the chorus line and made her a leading lady, financing
most of her films and controlling her career with an iron fist.
As his mistress, Davies became a leading
hostess of the Hollywood community at both Hearst’s San Simeon castle and in
their Santa Monica villa (while Hearst’s wife mingled in high society in New
York). It was easy to write off her movie success—even as she became one of the
most popular stars of the 1920s—since she was the boss’s girlfriend.
And then there was the uncomplimentary
portrayal penned by screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, ironically a close friend
of Davies, who created the fictional Susan Alexander, a failed opera singer, in
his not-too-obvious attack on Hearst in “Citizen Kane.” That Davies was
anything but a failure in Hollywood—though she was an alcoholic like
Alexander—didn’t stop the comparisons.
In recent years, her work has been
rediscovered and now she’s acclaimed as one of the great comedians of the late
silents and early 1930s. As always, the pendulum has swung too far. While her acting
is better than the typical silent performance and brings a casual naturalism to
her roles, Davies was far from a great actress as some would have you think.
In truth, she was both limited by and profited
from her attachment to Hearst. Even at the height of her popularity in the late
1920s, Davies roles were handpicked by Hearst and he chose the director
assigned to her through an arrangement with Louis B. Mayer, according to
various recent biographies.
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In “Quality Street,” she plays a young French girl betrothed to the most eligible bachelor (a bland Conrad Nagel) in town, but before they can marry, he goes off to the Napoleonic Wars. When he returns, she’s a dowdy, glass-wearing (in old movies, a clear indication of age) and teaching school (could it be worse?). He loses interest but when Davies pretends to be her younger niece, spicing up her looks, his interest increases. Believing that he is fooled by her slight change of appearance takes a great leap of the imagination. Ten years later, it was remade with Katharine Hepburn in the lead.
From a play by J.M. Barrie, best known for
his “Peter Pan” books, this is a rather tiresome romance clearly influenced by
Shakespeare’s much-used identity switching, a theme that runs throughout Davies
career. (In “Little Old New York” (1922), she plays an Irish emigrant to
America who pretends to be her dead brother to claim an inheritance. It’s only
slightly more believable.)
Again playing a version of the Bard’s
Rosalind, she is “Beverly of Graustark,” one of her best silents. In the
kingdom of Graustark (invented countries were all the rage in the early days of
cinema), Davies’ Beverly steps in for her cousin the prince when he’s
incapacitated after a skiing accident, dressing as a man and handling his royal
duties. Of course, she falls in love with his military aide, which opens up a
Freudian can of worms. With uninspired support from the men around her, Davies
carries the daffy screwball comedy.
Both “Beverly of Graustark” and “Quality
Street” were directed by Sidney Franklin, who in the sound era became MGM’s
house director for Norma Shearer. He earned an Oscar nomination for “The Good
Earth” (1937).
The actresses best remembered silents are
two 1928 films directed by King Vidor, “The Patsy” and “Show People.” But
unlike many performers, Davies made a smooth transition to sound film,
continuing her career until 1937, highlighted by “It’s a Wise Child” (1931), in
which she fakes a pregnancy.
In her final picture, “Ever Since Eve”
(1937), she again disguises herself, this time remaking herself into an
“unattractive” woman, with wire-rim glasses, baggy clothes and a page-boy
haircut to avoid the sexual harassment she encounters everywhere she works.
Then, of course, she falls for her latest
employer, a dilettante writer (Robert Montgomery), spurring her to switch back
and forth between cute and plain.
She was just 40 when she retired to care
for Hearst, who suffered through various ailments before his death in 1951.
Davies lived another ten years.
WARFARE
(2025)
Director Alex Garland, who last year
imagined a domestic warfare in “Civil War,” partnered with Navy SEAL veteran
and film producer Ray Mendoza to re-enact an intense skirmish during the Iraqi
War.
The film, which plays out in virtual
real-time, has the feel of a documentary with its wrenching realistic depiction
of the horrors of war and a cast of mostly unfamiliar faces. It’s based on the
recollections of the survivors of an actual assault by Iraqi forces on a squad
of SEALs who had taken over a house to observe the neighborhood.
The very business-like approach of the
story—the nonstop military lingo will go over the head of most viewers but adds
to the film’s verisimilitude—doesn’t allow much character development before
the action gets hot. Not much happens until about halfway through when a rocket
blows up the squad’s attempts to exit the area. From that point on, “Warfare”
is as visually nerve-racking as any battlefield movie I’ve seen since “Black
Hawk Down” (2001).
Many scenes are difficult to watch (I
looked away more than once) as Garland doesn’t shy away from showing bloody
battle wounds after the attack. Showing realistic death and traumatic injury
doesn’t necessarily elevate a war film; plenty of great battlefield war pictures
were made before censors allowed blood to be depicted---“The Red Badge of
Courage,” “The Steel Helmet,” “Men at War,” “Paths of Glory” and “War and
Peace” (see below), just to name a few. But considering the destruction of the
human body that is shown in contemporary horror films, it’s commendable that
Garland and Mendoza do not hold back in showing the casualties of war.
As with most war films, viewers can come
away from the experience with different impressions: patriotic pride, the
admiration of men doing their duty and/or wondering what the point of it all
is. In the 21st Century, must young men sacrifice their lives over
disputes between nations as if we are still living in the Middle Ages?
THE
FIREBIRD (1934)
Maybe if I knew beforehand where this story
was headed, I would have been less impressed, but its sudden turn about 30
minutes in when one of the main characters is murdered makes it one of the more
interesting pictures of the early 1930s.
Based on a play of the same name by
acclaimed Hungarian writer Lajos Zilahy, the script by B-movie scribes Charles
Kenyon and Jeffrey Dell not only is a tightly constructed murder-mystery but,
with little fanfare, examines the changing morals and attitudes of the first
generation of the 20th Century. Director William Dieterle, just
before his box-office hit bio-pics “The Story of Louis Pasteur” and “The Life
of Emile Zola,” smoothly mixes a familiar tale of offbeat characters living in
an apartment complex (in Vienna) including popular actor Herman Brandt (Ricardo
Cortez) and a family of royal blood, the Pointers.
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The movie seems as if it’s just another lightweight romantic comedy, with complaining neighbors, a bothersome dog-walker and Brandt’s ex-wife fighting him for alimony payments, until Brandt corners Carola Pointer (Verree Teasdale, best known as Adolphe Menjou’s wife) on the staircase and confesses that he’s been in love with her for years though they’ve never spoken. He tells her to visit his apartment at midnight, which she dismisses out of hand and, in fact, decides to move the family when the landlord is unable to evict the actor.
A few days later he’s found dead in his
apartment of a gunshot to the head, which brings police detective Muller,
played by the great character actor C. Aubrey Smith in one of his best roles.
(Also giving a subtle, convincing performances is Lionel Atwill, a regular in
horror pictures in the 1930s and ‘40s, as high-minded John Pointer.)
Other than a few scenes on the street in
front of the apartment building and in the theater where Brandt is performing,
the story unfolds inside the rooms of the building. Muller calmly but
decisively untangles the truth about the actor’s character, not made clear in
the film when he was alive, that led to his murder.
The title comes from the famous 1910
ballet music by modernist Igor Stravinsky, who, after this film was released,
sued Warner Bros. over its use of his composition. In the movie, it’s used as a
symbol of society’s break with the values of the 19th Century.
Nowhere were those changes displayed more prominently than in Hollywood’s
Pre-Code movies, of which “The Firebird” is among the most literate.
QUEEN
OF THE DESERT (2017)
Bad reviews and abysmal box office sunk
this Werner Herzog chronicle of the astonishing life of Gertrude Bell, whose
travels in the early part of the 20th Century made her one of the
leading Western experts on the Arab world, before and after World War I.
Born to an upper-class British family,
Bell (Nicole Kidman, giving another fine performances) refused to lead the life
she was raised to follow, persuading her father to arrange for a position in
Tehran with the British embassy. After a short, but doomed romance with a
fellow embassy employee (an uninspired James Franco), she dedicates her life to
exploring the Middle East, learning about the many tribes of the desert, and
meeting their emirs.
A contemporary of T.E. Lawrence (played
without much energy by Robert Pattinson), with whom she worked with in the
British foreign office, Bell was influential in drawing the post-war map that
created the modern countries of the region, offering a rare voice from the West
sympathetic to the Arab people.
The German-born Herzog, who in recent
years is best known for his striking documentaries (“Grizzly Man,” “Encounters
at the End of the World,” “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”), directed his first
feature in 1968. His fictional film about a 16th Century explorer
seeking the gold of the mythical South American city of El Dorado, “Aguirre,
the Wrath of God” (1972), put the filmmaker on the map. It’s one of the best
films of the 1970s. Known for his willingness to venture into difficult
locations and push his cast to the brink, Herzog has since made a handful of
memorable features, including “Fitzcarraldo” (1982) and “Rescue Dawn” (2007).
While the script of “Queen of the Desert,”
is clunky and didactic at points, the presence of Kidman elevates the film
along with Herzog’s focus on the desert landscape. Morocco stands in for the
Middle East, stunningly captured by cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, who has
shot many of Herzog’s films in the last 30 years.
The film might not make a list of
important Herzog pictures (I stumbled upon it on the free streaming service
Tubi), but it serves as a very watchable introduction to a fascinating and
daring woman who was unafraid to go where few Westerners had ever ventured.
WAR
AND PEACE (1968)
This acclaimed Soviet movie adaptation of
Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth novel, and one of the longest films ever made at seven
hours and 11 minutes (you can watch it in four installments on YouTube), lives
up to its reputation, featuring some of the most vivid battlefront scenes
stunningly contrasting with shimmering ballroom sequences in gorgeous Russian
palaces.
Director Sergey Bondarchuk, a loyal
nationalist, went on to become one of the Soviet Union’s finest filmmakers, following
“War and Peace” with “They Fought for Their Country” (1975), a World War II
epic, and “Boris Godunov” (1986), from the Pushkin play about the 17th
Century tsar. In 1968, a trimmed version of “War and Peace” was released in the
U.S., becoming the first Soviet film to be nominated for, and win, the best
foreign film Oscar.
Obviously “War and Peace” is meant to be seen on the widest possible screen—the filmmaker moves the camera (in collaboration with a team of cinematographers) across the sets like few filmmakers of the era dared attempt—which I appreciated even on my 26-inch computer screen. The print available on YouTube is excellent, retaining its vibrant colors.
Bondarchuk also plays the tale’s lead
actor Pierre, whose feelings about the Napoleonic wars, the place of royalty in
Russia and his oft-confusing love life serve as the connecting thread of
Tolstoy’s narrative. His romance with the Countess Natasha (Lyudmila Saveleva),
who goes from girl to woman in the course of the story, is one of the most
famous in literary history.
This incredibly complex production, cited at
the time as the most expensive movie ever made, was filmed between 1962 and
1967 and shown in four parts to Russian audiences starting in March 1966 and finishing
in November 1967. Reportedly, the 1956 Hollywood version of the film, starring
Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn, inspired the Soviet leadership to launch the
project.
In America, the Soviet original was
trimmed by an hour and, of course, dubbed. A few years later, in 1972, it was
shown on ABC over four evenings.
Not surprisingly for a seven-hour picture,
it drags at points as it depicts a 19th Century world that moved at
a much slower pace. The epic’s most impressive performance is given by
Vyacheslav Tikhonov (among the stars of another Oscar-winning Soviet film,
“Burnt by the Sun”) who plays Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, a tightly wound soldier
whose family is central to the story.
In this era of lengthy streaming series, “War
and Peace” doesn’t seem so epic today, but contemporary writing rarely matches
Tolstoy’s insight into the decisions made by individuals and societies that
shape the world. It’s a powerful cinematic experience, one I never thought I
would have the opportunity to enjoy.
THE
HIDDEN ROOM (1950)
Edward Dmytryk, who went from being an
admired martyr as one of the Hollywood Ten, serving time in prison for his
connection to the Communist Party, to a pariah who named names in front of
Congress, somehow managed to forge a productive career as a filmmaker.
Born in Canada to Ukrainian parents, he
grew up in Los Angeles, starting his movie career as a messenger for Famous
Players-Lasky while still in high school. After years of working as an editor
and then director of B-movies, he broke through with “Crossfire” (1947), an
acclaimed picture about antisemitism starring Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan, which
scored was Oscar nominations for best picture and best director.
That same year Dmytryk rejected HUAC’s
request to testify against others who were former members of the Communist
Party and was blacklisted by Hollywood. Moving to England, he directed one of
his best films, “The Hidden Room” (released in the U.K. in 1949 as “Obsession”),
a deceptively low-key tale of a psychiatrist taking revenge against the latest
suitor of his wife.
A very proper Robert Newton (“Odd Man
Out” and, as Bill Sykes in David Lean’s “Oliver Twist”), plays Dr. Clive
Riordan who has run out of patience with his unfaithful wife Storm (Sally
Gray), forcing her and her date, an American, Bill Kronin (Phil Brown) to
confess at the barrel of a gun. The doctor eventually ushers Kronin into the
night, one assumes to kill him, but instead locks him up in what seems to be an
abandoned bomb shelter.
It’s not surprising that the movie’s
screenwriter Alec Coppel was one of the writers contributing to Alfred
Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), the ultimate picture about an obsession.
As Scotland Yard gets involved (Naunton
Wayne is entertaining as Supt. Finsbury) when the family dog goes missing,
Riordan sticks to his devious plan.
His work was recognized at Cannes as a
finalist for best director, but soon after he return to America to serve his
prison term and then went before the committee to name many fellow filmmakers
who had been in the party.
Like Elia Kazan, another director who
testified, Dmytryk flourished in the wake of his turncoat actions, highlighted
by “The Caine Mutiny” (1954) with Humphrey Bogart, “Raintree County” (1957)
starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift and “The Young Lions” (1958)
starring Marlon Brando, Clift and Dean Martin.
His career continued into the 1970s.
PHOTOS:
A battlefield scene from “War and Peace.” (Janus Films)
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