September 2021

THE CARD COUNTER (2021)

      Occasionally, if it is to remain a viable art form, movies need to make viewers uncomfortable, explore the dark side of society and introduce characters you’d rather not know.

     Paul Schrader, as both a screenwriter and director, has been doing just that since the mid-70s, when he wrote “Taxi Driver” for Martin Scorsese. In such films as “American Gigolo” (1980), “Patty Hearst” (1988), “Light Sleeper” (1992), “Affliction” (1997), “Auto Focus” (2002) and “First Reformed” (2017)—as director—and his contributions to the screenplays for “Raging Bull” (1980) and “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), he has brought characters and issues to screens that rarely show up in Hollywood pictures.

   Add “Card Counter” to his list of impressive, disturbing films, and William Tell, played with steely precision by Oscar Isaac, to the roster of memorable characters created by this unflinching observer of the human condition.   

    The film tells two stories, simultaneously. While travelling the country playing poker tournaments, having learned to count cards in prison, Tell is recruited to play for big time purses and a spot in the World Series of Poker, by a smooth talking young woman La Linda (a very cool Tiffany Haddish). Around the same time, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a young man whose father served with Tell in Iraq, tracks down Tell in hopes that he’ll assist him in a revenge plot against the man who was their commanding officer in Abu Ghraib.

      Tell’s prison stretch was for his role in what went on in that U.S. detention center, where he and others followed orders and then took the blame after the scandal was revealed in a CBS News report in 2004.

     As this mismatched, trio traverses the country, following the poker circuit, nothing much happens even as Schrader keep upping the intensity through Tell’s flashbacks to Abu Ghraib. Even watching Tell “prepare” his hotel rooms is disconcerting.

     Schrader, as usual, doesn’t ask audience to warm up to his characters, just to understand their place in the world and Isaac serves him well; convincingly an unpredictable loner with more than a little Travis Bickle in him (Tell keeps a journal like the “Taxi Driver” character.)

     Very quickly, Isaac has established himself as one of the most interesting contemporary actors with a series of chameleon-like roles. He was a mild-mannered folk singer in “Inside Llewyn Davis” (2013), a maniacal AI inventor in “Ex Machina” (2014), a 1970s trucking firm boss dealing with the mob in “A Most Violent Year” (2014), a heroic Resistance pilot in the recent “Star Wars” episodes and the 19^th Century painter Paul Gauguin in “At Eternity’s Gate” (2018).

     The weakest link in “The Card Counter” is the performance (and Schrader’s dialogue for him) of Sheridan. He never convinced me that Tell would find him interesting enough to drag him along, let alone entertain his amateurish revenge plans.

     Chilly and distant, with more poker playing scenes than most viewers need to see, yet it’s hard to turn away from this troubled man and the road Schrader sends him down.

  

THE LAST VOYAGE (1960)

      I have little patience for disaster films (including that ridiculous melodrama “Titanic”), which is probably why I had never taken the time to see this pre-CGI tale of a luxury liner sinking. Turns out, it’s a compelling, startlingly realistic movie that had me completely rivetted. (It was billed at the time as “91 minutes of the most intense suspense in motion picture history.”)

     Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone (both of whom had scored supporting Oscar nominations for “Written on the Wind”—she won) star as the Hendersons, a married couple taking a cruise across the Pacific to Japan with their young daughter. This was to be the Claridon final trip, but it turns out it was one too many. In what has become the clichéd first clue, the pressure gauges skyrocket and soon the engine room is bursting with holes in the hull.

      Jack Kruschen, Edmond O’Brien and Woody Strode are the main engine room guys trying to patch things up while warning the arrogant captain (a perfectly cast George Sanders) that the ship may not stay afloat.

     While Sanders ignores his executive officers’ suggestion to evacuate the passengers, explosions begin to decimate the liner.

     Written and directed by Andrew L. Stone, the film alternates between Cliff Henderson’s frantic attempts to save his family after their quarters are destroyed in one of the explosions and the work by O’Brien and others to save the ship. This is edge-of-your-seat suspense, nonstop action and daring-do that is all the more enthralling knowing this was made long before computers started doing the heavy lifting of special effects. Veteran FX master Augie Lohman—who worked on everything from “The Lost Continent,” a 1951 B film, to “Barbarella” (1968) and “The Cheap Detective” (1978)—earned his only Oscar nomination for “The Last Voyage.”   

     Stone is a fascinating Hollywood success story, having started in the industry during the silent era, making a few shorts and a feature, but mostly working behind the scenes. He never stopped making low-budget pictures and became known for his location shooting, especially in his crime pictures in the 1950s. “A Blueprint for Murder,” “The Night Holds Terror” and “Cry Terror!” are among his well-made noirs. He also directed the all-Black musical “Stormy Weather” in 1943.

    “The Last Voyage” should be on any list of top disaster films for its realistic effects and high-spirited performances, but also should be noted as the rare film from the era that portrays a Black man (Strode) coming to the rescue of a white family. When no other crew member will help, Strode’s Lawson goes above and beyond the call of duty to help.

 

DEATH WATCH (1980)

    I had no idea what this film was about when I started streaming it off the LA County library site; all I knew was that it starred Harvey Keitel and Harry Dean Stanton.

    Based on a 1973 novel by D.G. Compton, the film, set in the near future when humans rarely die of diseases, anticipates the reality television craze that was still more than 10 years away. In this case, an amoral TV producer (Stanton) and a doctor on his payroll convince a woman that she has a fatal illness and has but a few months to live.

     Katherine (European star Romy Schneider, in one of her last roles) seems very accepting of her fate—not even seeking out a second opinion—and, despite her disgust with the producer and his show, signs a contract to have the end of her life filmed. But just before the filming is about to start she disappears into the British countryside.

     What she doesn’t know is that Roddy (Keitel), a seemingly kindly young man she meets by chance, is actually video taping everything she does or says.  He was once blind and his eyesight was replaced by a camera in his head that sends the images he “sees” back to the studio.

     Sounds preposterous and it is for the first 30 minutes of the film, but once Katherine and Roddy are traveling together—she wants to say goodbye to her first husband (Max von Sydow) who lives off the grid—the film becomes more about what makes life worth living and the strength of human relations than its sci-fi trappings.

     Directed by the great French director Bertrand Tavernier, who also adapted the novel with David Rayfiel (“Three Days of the Condor”), “Death Watch” overcomes stilted performances by Keitel and Stanton by virtue of Schneider’s moving portrayal of a woman struggling to find meaning in the world. Just two years later, the 43-year-old Schneider, one of the biggest movie stars in France, died somewhat mysteriously, either of a heart attack or possibly from a sleeping pill overdose

     Tavernier, who died in March at age 79, started out as a film journalist and press agent before becoming an assistant to the revered French director Jean-Pierre Melville. Tavernier went on to make some of the best French films of the 1980s and 90s, including “Coup de Torchon” (1981), “A Sunday in the County” (1984), “Life and Nothing But” (1989) and “L.627” (1992). He is best known in this country for his English-language film “’Round Midnight” (1986), which earned jazz legend Dexter Gordon an Oscar nomination.

     Tavernier’s 2016 documentary “My Journey Through French Cinema” is a thoroughly entertaining survey of the topic, filled with great clips and insightful commentary by this cinematic historian.  

     Twelve years after this movie, “The Real World,” usually cited as the first of modern reality TV shows, first aired, followed by “Survivor” and “Big Brother” later in the decade.

  

THE LAST RUN (1971)

     Just when I thought I’d seen every worthwhile film from the 1970s, I caught this George C. Scott car-chase crime picture on TCM.

    In 1971, Scott was at the top of his game, having won the Oscar for his larger-than-life portrayal of “Patton” (1970) and followed it with his cynical physician in “The Hospital” (1971). On TV, he starred in productions of Arthur Miller’s “The Price” in 1971 and as Rochester in “Jane Eyre” in 1970. In the midst of these high-profile performances, “The Last Run” has mostly been forgotten, rarely mentioned as among the actor’s best work. But it is.

     The movie opens with Scott’s Harry working on his high-powered BMW sports car and then test driving it along a treacherous, Portuguese seaside road before heading to Spain. Turns out, he’s the getaway driver in a prison break, his first “driving” job in nine years.

      It’s quietly established in this superb Alan Sharp (“The Hired Hand” and “Night Moves”) script that Harry sees little to live for; his young son died and his wife has left him. He’s looking for a reason to make life worth living and he seems to find it in Rickard (Tony Musante), the escapee/gunman, and his girlfriend Claudie (Trish Van Devere) after Rickard’s former gang members turn on him.

    I’m not a big fan of long car chases—they take up a quarter of the film---but here they serve as metaphors for Harry’s determination to speed toward his doom. It’s only behind the wheel that he feels in control and finds life temporarily rewarding.

     “The Last Run” could easily have been a B-movie from the 1950s, thus who better to direct than Richard Fleischer, who made two film noir masterpieces, “Armored Car Robbery” (1950) and “The Narrow Margin” (1952). While Fleischer’s later career was filled with some of the worst films ever made—“Che” (1969), “Mandingo” (1975), “The Jazz Singer” (1980) and “Conan the Destroyer” (1984)—his work here shows that given the right material he remained a talented filmmaker. (And it doesn’t hurt that Sven Nykvist serves as the film’s cinematographer.)

     Musante nails the smart-ass tough guy who seems, at first, to be nothing more than a gunsel, but he knows how to keep the upper hand on Harry. (The actor later starred as a detective in the 1973 TV series “Toma”).

    This also may be the only film in which an actor starred with two of his wives. Colleen Dewhurst, who plays a sympathetic prostitute Harry relies on, was married to Scott from 1961 to 1965 and then again from 1967 to 1972. Seven months after their second divorce, Scott married van Devere, whose career from this film forward was almost always as co-star or under the direction (on TV, Broadway and in movies) of Scott. She was married to him for 26 years until his death in 1999.

    Scott’s world-weary, gravelly voice, his thoughtful cadence and seemingly eternally squinting eyes brings Sharp’s fascinating character study alive, turning a straight-forward crime picture (originally a John Huston project) into something much more substantial.

 

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF DON JUAN (1934)

    Few on-screen performers are more important to the early development of the American cinema than Douglas Fairbanks. Though his star faded with the coming of sound, the influence of Fairbanks and his wife Mary Pickford as the first couple of Hollywood cannot be underestimated.

     Along with Charlie Chaplin, Fairbanks defined movie stardom with his oversized personality and athleticism, turning heroes like D’Artagnan, Zorro, Robin Hood and the Thief of Bagdad into versions of himself.

     His last starring role was in this biting satire about the aging Spanish playboy, Don Juan. Trying to avoid a reunion with his wife (the film is filled with jokes about marriage), the still beloved Don Juan slips out of Seville after a young doppelganger is killed in a swordfight by a jealous husband.

    The picture’s centerpiece is the funeral of Don Juan, observed with amusement by Don Juan and his friend. Attended by dozens of women, most who never meet the famous Lothario, they are all inconsolable at his demise.

     Like an actor without a hit film, Don Juan, under an assumed name, leaves town, but doesn’t much like being an undistinguished middle-age man (Fairbanks was 51 and quite thick around the middle). When he returns to Seville, expecting to be hailed as a returning hero, no one can believe it is him. No, say all the women, Don Juan was younger, taller and more handsome. 

    This British-made film, by legendary director-producer Alexander Korda (he produced almost every important UK film from the 1930s and ‘40s), is based on the French play, “L’Homme a la Rose.”

    No doubt, Fairbanks saw the dual joke, on the legend of Don Juan and the legend of Doug Fairbanks, but plays the role to the hilt, unafraid to play the fool.

    It turned out to be a worthy final turn—his only other appearance was as himself in “Ali Baba Goes to Town” (1936)—as he died after a heart attack in 1939 at age 56.    

  

A MAN CALLED ADAM (1966)

   The history of jazz is littered with brilliant musicians whose addiction ruined both their careers and personal lives. This independent picture offers an uncompromising profile of fictional coronet player Adam Johnson (Sammy Davis Jr. at his most anguished), whose drinking, coupled with his anger over the daily racism he encounters, wreaks havoc on his relationships on and off the stage.

    The opening sequence in this Leo Penn-directed film (Sean’s father) immediately defines the temperamental performer: While on a nightclub stage with his band, he loses his cool with a heckler and then walks out on the gig. Then, returning to his apartment (apparently after being on the road for awhile) he flips out because an old man is staying there (Louis Armstrong, playing a legendary trumpeter) along with the man’s granddaughter (a 42-year-old Cicely Tyson still playing a “young lady”).

    It’s a bit confusing as to why they are there, but there’s nothing unclear about Adam’s character. He’s an angry, unpleasant drunk who treats others like they’re fools and practically sexually assaults Tyson’s Claudia. Turns out, Armstrong’s Willie Ferguson is an old friend and mentor to Adams, which he remembers the next morning.

     We are used to seeing Davis, one of the most acclaimed entertainers of the 20^th Century, as a sycophant in Frank Sinatra films or as a slick hipster along side buddy Peter Lawford (who plays an arrogant business manager in this film.) Playing the hard to like, hot-tempered Adam, who manages to hurt everyone he comes in contact with, is a stretch for the singer, but, overall, he creates a convincing character, whose tragic past defines him.

     Armstrong, in addition to being, arguably, America’s greatest musician, had a lengthy career in film, mostly playing himself and usually getting a chance to display his trumpet virtuosity. But he’s done well in straight-acting roles, including with longtime pal Bing Crosby in “Pennies from Heaven” (1936) and as Ralph Meeker’s buddy in “Glory Alley” (1952). Here, he has a couple of poignant scenes as he tries to point Adam on the straight-and-narrow.

      The cast also includes Ossie Davis, a friend who tries to smooth things out after Adam’s inevitable outbursts; Frank Sinatra Jr. as a young trumpeter who Adam takes under his wing; and musicians Mel Torme and Kai Winding as themselves. Needless to say, the score is filled with superb jazz; the great Nat Adderley (brother of Cannonball Adderley) plays Davis’ cornet parts.

       Made in an era when Hollywood rarely examined the lives of African Americans with anything resembling reality (even Sidney Poitier films were typically set in a very white setting), “A Man Called Adam” stands out as presenting both the racist barriers even a successful Black man faced and a lead character with a litany of problems. Lester and Tina Pine penned the edgy script; he went on to write the screenplay for “Claudine” (1974), which earned Diahann Carroll an Oscar nomination.

       Penn, who only made one more feature in his long career—“Judgment in Berlin” (1988)—directed episodes of virtually every important TV series from the mid-1960s to the 1990s (“Dr. Kildare,” “I Spy,” “Bonanza,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.” “Kojak,” “Columbo,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Matlock,” to name a few.)

  

FLAG DAY (2021)

    As a director, Sean Penn is clearly Leo’s son. Despite bigger budgets, his films have all the characteristics of B-movie indies, focused on those on the fringe, struggling to find their place in an often-unwelcoming world.

     At his best, in “The Pledge” (2001) with Jack Nicholson, and “Into the Wild” (2007), about the young man who found a home in the Alaskan wilderness, Penn is a strong director of actors who pushes his performers to dig deep into the emotions of relationships.

     That’s his intention in his newest film, but there just isn’t enough substance to sustain interest in the story of these characters. Too much of the film plays like a two-person acting class exercise.

     Penn plays John Vogel, a failed conman, bank robber, drug addict and wannabe entrepreneur who tries to maintain a relationship with his equally rebellious daughter Jennifer (played by his real-life daughter Dylan). In some ways, the movie could be seen as a father’s vanity project to promote his daughter’s acting career (the 30-year-old has had just a few indie roles). 

    This true story, based on the Jennifer Vogel’s book, keeps repeating the same cycle: Jennifer reaches out to her father, who disappoints her again after they both remember better times. It grows especially tiresome when the director keeps going back to the same car trip when the daughter and (mostly ignored) son were young. The same hazy shots of nostalgia are reused at least four times.

    Jennifer eventually overcomes her horrible childhood (the mother is equally irresponsible and, of course, there’s a sleazy step-father) to become a working journalist. But I had a problem believing that she could gain admission to the University of Minnesota after dropping out of high school and then lying about it on her application. Maybe that was possible in the 90s; today she’d need a 4.0 and tons of extra-curriculars.

     Both Penns give good performances (the cast also includes son Hopper playing his son), but except for close friends of the family, I can’t imagine anyone caring about this predictable, slow-moving story. 

PHOTOS: 

Oscar Isaac in "The Card Counter."

Douglas Fairbanks, with Merle Oberon, in "The Private Life of Don Juan."

Sammy Davis Jr. and Cicely Tyson in "A Man Called Adam."

    

 

July-August 2021

 

RESPECT (2021)

     In recent years, Hollywood has fallen in love with musical biopics—"Rocketman,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Straight Outta Compton,” “Jersey Boys,” “Judy” and “Get on Up,” to name a few. It’s hard to go wrong when portraying a popular performer; as long as there are plenty of songs and the usual quotient of tragedy, filmgoers don’t seem concerned if the filmmakers fudge on the details of the musician’s life.

     The latest in this genre, “Respect,” chronicles the life of Aretha Franklin, whose stunning voice earned her the title of “The Queen of Soul” even before she hit her prime in the late 1960s.

    The key relationship of the film is between Franklin (Jennifer Hudson, whose terrific singing makes up for her limited acting skills) and her preacher father C.L. Franklin (the always excellent Forest Whitaker), who controls his daughter’s career and life well into her twenties. The film spends an inordinate amount of screen time focused on these early years, as she goes from singing protégé to a failed pop star after signing with CBS and legendary producer John Hammond in 1960.

      The film comes to life along with Franklin’s career when she is signed by Ahmet Ertegun’s Atlantic Records (neither are mentioned in the film, I assume for legal reasons) and paired with visionary record maker Jerry Wexler, played by an excellent Marc Maron, the podcaster and sometimes actor.    

      Wexler records her at the Muscle Shoals, Alabama studio Fame; finally, the movie shows Aretha’s musicianship as she interacts with studio musicians who understand R&B. At Atlantic, she became a pop superstar with a string of hits, including "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)," "Respect," "(You Makes Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," "Chain of Fools" and "Think."

    While the film does a pretty good job of portraying her career arc (though I wasn't pleased that the film left the impression that Franklin wrote her signature hit "Respect," when in fact it was a cover of an Otis Redding song), it fails to elevate Franklin above the cliché of talented victim. Her father and then boyfriends/husbands (most notably Ted White, played by Marlon Wayans) control her as if she's a child. It's frustrating to see her stand up for herself in one scene and then go back to becoming a victim in the next. Maybe that reflects reality, but it didn't ring true to me.

The emotional complexity of the film's Aretha is in the script--written by Tracey Scott Wilson and veteran screenwriter Callie Khouri--but Hudson struggles to find the character. Too often she plays important scenes with a blank face, failing to communicate what is going on with the film's central character. Theatrical director Liesl Tommy, making her feature debut, fails to give the film a consistent tone.

 Astonishingly, for a two- and a half-hour film, the story ends in 1972, with the filming of her return to her gospel roots for a documentary and live album in the church of her mentor, the Rev. Dr. James Cleveland (a nice turn by Tituss Burgess). She lived another 46 years, dying in 2018 at age 76, but never had the recording success again, instead taking on legendary status. 

Even with its faults, "Respect" is better than most biopics and benefits from the great music. Though it does make the too common mistake of showing the real performer at the end of the film. Seeing Franklin perform "A Natural Woman" at Carole King's Kennedy Center tribute (King wrote the song) in 2015 is so powerful that it nearly erases everything you've just experienced in the film.

   

MANDALAY (1934)

   This obscure picture of exotic romanticism was the 60th film of director Michael Curtiz I’ve seen. Yet that’s only a bit over half of his Hollywood movies.

      The Warner Bros. stalwart helmed about 100 films between 1926, when the Hungarian moved to Hollywood, and his final movie, “The Comancheros,” in 1961. Too easily dismissed by critics and historians because he was so prolific—despite directing such classics as “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Angels With Dirty Faces,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Casablanca,” “Mildred Pierce” and “White Christmas”—Curtiz was a master of camera movement and placement, managing crowd scenes and getting the most out of every performer. By all reports, he was a dictator on the set, but the results are hard to argue with.

     Born in 1886 in Budapest, he began his directing career in 1912, using the name Kertész Mihály, and then later Michael Kertész, making over 60 films before heading to America. By 1930, the director, now Michael Curtiz, was given such high-profile assignments as “Noah’s Ark” with Dolores Costello and, in 1931, “The Mad Genius” with John Barrymore. One of his early hit films was “Mystery at the Wax Museum” (1933), with Fay Wray.

    While “Mandalay” is hardly among his best pictures, it features one of the era’s biggest stars, Kay Francis playing a woman living in Rangoon, Burma. She is sold to a sleazy nightclub owner (Warner Oland) by her boyfriend (Ricardo Cortez) to cover his debts. She becomes Spot White, the singer/hostess at the club who ends up being forced to leave the city. During the trip upriver, headed to Mandalay, she meets an alcoholic doctor (Lyle Talbot), bonding with him as they both try to forget their pasts.

     The studio-styled exotic surroundings and the pre-code sexually charged storyline are supplemented by Curtiz’s flashy direction. Various scenes find his camera shooting from above a ceiling fan, behind curtains as the actors enter a room and travelling shots not often seen in early talkies. The scenes inside the nightclub foreshadow the director’s superb direction inside Rick’s in “Casablanca.”

       Curtiz’s most famous collaboration was with action star Errol Flynn; the pair worked together 12 times, creating such first-rate entertainments as “Captain Blood” (1935), “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938), “The Private Life of Elizabeth and Essex” (1939) and “The Sea Hawk” (1940).

      By the 1950s, his films lost the energy of his earlier works, getting stuck with dreary material that resulted in “The Jazz Singer,” “The Egyptian,” “The Vagabond King” and “The Helen Morgan Story.” But he made three terrific pictures that were released in 1950.

    “Bright Leaf,” the story of the American cigarette industry, with Gary Cooper as the tobacco mogul, tries for a “Citizen Kane”-like study, and almost succeeds, while Kirk Douglas portrays a temperamental musician in “Young Man With a Horn,” a film that deals with a collection of outsiders trying to find their place in the world (both films co-star Lauren Bacall).

    But the best of his output that year is “The Breaking Point,” with John Garfield as Ernest Hemingway’s conflicted tough-guy Harry Morgan, in this superbly realized adaptation of “To Have and Have Not.” A sharp script by Ranald MacDougall (he also adapted “Mildred Pierce” for Curtiz) that improves upon the original novel, maybe Garfield’s best performance and Curtiz’s dynamic direction combine to make this a great film and one of the least appreciated. 

      Not surprisingly, this industry lifer worked right up to the end, passing away a year after his last film was released.

  

SUMMER OF SOUL (…Or, When the Revolution

Could Not Be Televised) (2021)

    In July 1969, about a month before Woodstock, another multi-day music festival was held in New York—this one in a park in Harlem. The Harlem Cultural Festival also featured an impressive lineup of musical performers but was soon forgotten by all but those who were there.

    The film of the shows, discovered still in the basement of the festival’s producer Hal Tulchin (he failed to get a deal for a concert movie in 1969), has been edited, along with current interviews and clips from the turbulent times that led up to the event, into a powerful statement about a crucial period of African American life and its soundtrack. Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, drummer of the band Roots, seamlessly combines this “lost” footage of the performers with the world these artists were part of.

     Among the inspired performances delivered during the festival are Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the 5th Dimension, B.B. King, the Chamber Brothers, Nina Simone and the Staples Singers. The high point of the film is a soaring duet by gospel legend Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Introduced by Jesse Jackson, he explains that it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite song.

    The death of King, just 16 months earlier, hangs heavily over the event, making the festival as much a healing process as a musical gathering.   

     While it’s disappointing that it took more than 50 years to get this concert to the big screen (the producers became aware of the footage while doing the documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?”), I wonder if its impact will actually be greater in 2021 than it would have been a half-century earlier. If it brings underrated performers like Sly Stone, the Staples Singers and the 5^th Dimension the attention they deserve and proves to be a Black Lives Matter touchstone, it was worth the wait.      

 

BLACK WIDOW (2021)

     Unlike most action pictures, there’s never a shortage of dialogue in the Marvel Universe. Detailed explanations of every aspect of the plot, along with long discourses on the emotional failings of each character, seems as essential to these films as robotic warriors firing lasers from their wrists.

    Yet all these words just serve as little more than noise the audience suffers through to get to the next over-the-top fight or impossibly spectacular, CGI-enhanced escape.  The latest entry, much delayed and anticipated, offers the origins of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), who as Black Widow, is part of the superhero Avengers troupe.

     The tale begins with her Ohio childhood, the night when her parents are somehow identified as Russian spies. They manage (even when mother Melina is wounded by gunfire) to pilot a small aircraft to Cuba—in a sequence laughably unbelievable—where Natasha and her sister Yelena are whisked away for indoctrination, never to see their “parents” again.

    But 20 years later, sister Yelena (Florence Pugh) draws her famous sister into her obit as she tries to destroy a Russian network of female assassins, all chemically controlled from a vaguely explained secret headquarters called The Red Room. Yes, it does sound like a plotline from a “Man From U.N.C.L.E” episode.

 

     After much talk between the long-separated sisters, they hatch a plot to free their hated “father” Alexei (David Harbour), who serves as the sole source of comic relief, from a heavily guarded prison. This complex sequence serves as the film’s centerpiece as Natasha and Yelena pluck Alexei via helicopter, fighting off dozens of guards and a fast-moving avalanche, before reuniting with Melina (a miscast Rachel Weisz).

    No one doubts Johansson’s acting skills (for evidence see “Marriage Story,” “Lucy” and her three films for Woody Allen), yet she doesn’t bring much to her Black Widow character other than looking great in a white jumpsuit that never seems to get stained. In the Marvel world (this is her eighth), she always seems to be playing Scarlett Johansson.

     The directors in these MCU pictures seems interchangeable and that seems true for “Black Widow.” Cate Shortland, an Australian who previous directed a few indie films fails in the non-action scenes, providing little to unpeel these characters’ love/hate relationships.

   But most egregiously (spoiler alert!), two of the films’ most reprehensible characters are allowed to live while hundreds of foot soldiers on both sides die anonymously. That, for me, was more jaw-dropping than most of the computer-choreographed chases.

 

LORD JIM (1965) and NATIVE SON (1951)

     While there are numerous examples of great literature being turned into great films (“The Grapes of Wrath,” “Great Expectations,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” come immediately to mind) more often, attempts to turn insightful writing into screenplays has resulted in disappointment.

     Not sure why I had never seen “Lord Jim,” starring Peter O’Toole and directed by one of the best directors of the 1960s, Richard Brooks, but time has only made this adaption of Joseph Conrad’s epic more embarrassing.

     O’Toole, fresh off his breakthrough role in “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) and brilliant work in “Beckett” (1964) with Richard Burton, plays Conrad’s title character, a 19^th Century British naval officer who, along the rest of the crew, reluctantly abandons a troubled ship, leaving the passengers, Islamic religious pilgrims, to die. When they make it safely back home, Jim is stripped of his naval rank.

     Seeking to redeem himself, he ends up attempting to aid a local uprising in the imaginary Southeast Asian country of Patusan, where he becomes a hero of sorts, living with a tribal leader’s daughter.

     But he ends up being tested again and again, first by an Asian warlord (the very non-Asian actor Eli Wallach) and a murderous pirate (James Mason). Conrad’s critique of European incursion into Eastern culture is lost in the muddled plot populated by characters whose motivations are unexplainable. Even as the white man’s place in this part of the world is questioned, Lord Jim displays resourcefulness that seems beyond the natives’ abilities.

    But the biggest drag on this picture is O’Toole, one of the great actors of the 1960s and ‘70s. Throughout the film, he goes through the motions as if he’s a George Romero zombie, reciting his lines expressionless while attempting, I guess, to show a man who has given up on life. It’s more like an actor whose given up trying.

     In fact, O’Toole is an interesting study of an actor who earned his reputation early and then seemed to cruise through a career. Looking at his post-“Lord Jim” career—from age 33 to his death at 81—there are few highlights.

      He gave another Oscar-nominated performance as Henry II, the same character he played in “Becket,” in “The Lion in Winter” (1968); played an insane dilettante in “The Ruling Class” (1972); and then, in the 1980s, played two arrogant showbiz characters, the heartless director in “The Stunt Man” and the Errol Flynn-type Alan Swann in “My Favorite Year.”   No actor has been nominated more times, eight, without winning, but also few acclaimed actors have given so few memorable performances in a career lasting more than 50 years.    

    Yet he was a legendary drinker and raconteur, which became more important than his actual acting career.

    The rarely screened film version of Richard Wright’s landmark novel of race, “Native Son,” isn’t nearly as bad as “Lord Jim,” but it’s quite an oddity as the 43-year-old author plays the twentysomething protagonist Bigger Thomas. Not sure whose decision that was, but the casting undercuts the story of a young man hired to drive for a wealthy white family who accidentally kills the family’s daughter after she has befriended him.

     The film, directed by French director Pierre Chenal and filmed in Argentina, clearly some producer’s lark, doesn’t do a bad job of capturing the horrific conditions of Chicago slums, but once the young, white, well-to-do couple start trying to “enlighten” their Black driver, the heavy-handed issues overwhelm the human story.

     Bravo to Eddie Muller for screening the film on TCM’s Noir Alley, but I wasn’t buying his argument for the movie’s value as a noir (I love the show, but Muller does tend to oversell some second-rate pictures.)

    Co-star and victim Jean Wallace also played Richard Conte’s girlfriend in the noir classic “Big Combo” (1955).

 

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

     At the same time that innovative directors were reshaping the American cinema, the popularity of drive-in movies spurred an explosion of cheap, amateurish films about high school life.

     In my town, where there wasn’t much to do for a high school student, summer meant drive-in movies. Weekly, pictures like “The Pom Pom Girls,” “Porky’s,” “Malibu Beach,” “The Van,” and “Cheering Section” offered outrageous classroom behavior we’d never dare attempt, clueless administers we immediately recognized, plenty of cute girls and, if we were lucky, a dash of female nudity. The king of this underbelly of the movie industry was Roger Corman (still around at age 95) who has produced hundreds of films starting in the 1950s and served as mentor to such future legends as Jack Nicholson, Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese and Ron Howard, to mention just a few.

     “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” abides as one of the masterpieces of the genre, primary
because the band featured—there’s almost always a band—is the Ramones, the essential performers of punk and the most influential post-60s American rock band.

   They became the house band of the New York club CBGB in 1974 and two years later the group’s debut became a critically hit and ignited the punk movement.

     The movie takes place at Vince Lombardi High School where spunky high school girl Riff Randell (P.J. Soles, who was a B-movie presence through the 1980s, including in “Stripes”) is obsessed with the Ramones and determined to pass along a song she wrote to the band. When the Ramones are scheduled to play the Roxy, Riff skips school and stands in line for three days to buy for tickets for her classmates.

    Back at Lombardi High, Principal Togar (cult film actress Mary Woronov) has just taken over the school with the mission of stopping any interest in rock ‘n’ roll. Of course, it’s ridiculous, but Woronov, one-time member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, gives a great comedic performance, channeling a Nazi prison commander as she directs a pair of sycophant hall monitors to carry out her orders. The other prominent adult is Paul Bartel, another cult film legend, as the music teacher who learns to love rock ‘n’ roll.

    There are the usual romantic complications (Dey Young and Vince Van Patten) and even a student love counselor (an enthusiastic Clint Howard), who gives advice from his “office” in the boys’ restroom.

     But it’s the stage performance of Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Marky that makes the film a must-see. Director Allan Arkush, who convinced Corman to drop the original plans for “Disco High School,” hoped to feature more interaction between the band and the actors, but the musicians’ off-stage shyness made it impossible.

    The quartet do make an appearance at the high school for the explosive finale, when Woronov delivers the classic line: “Do your parents know you are a Ramone?”

     Today, more serious, realistic movies give a truer picture of high school life, but contemporary teens are missing out on what, back in the ‘70s, was a rite of passage and an early lesson in the hypocrisy of adults.

 

Photos:

Jennifer Hudson and Forest Whitaker in "Respect" (MGM)

Michael Curtiz (Warner Bros.)

Scarlett Johansson in "Black Widow" (Marvel Studios)

P.J. Soles with the Ramones in "Rock 'n' Roll High School" (New World Pictures)