November-December 2020

 

MANK (2020)

     In summer of 1939, RKO gave 23-year-old Orson Welles carte blanche to star and direct his first movie. For a script, the young radio and Broadway star, after failed attempts to adapt “Heart of Darkness,” turned to Hollywood veteran Herman Mankiewicz, supreme wit, hopeless alcoholic and, like Welles, a liberal in an industry run by conservatives.

      The result, needless to say, is one of the finest screenplays ever penned, turned by Welles into Hollywood’s greatest motion picture, “Citizen Kane.”

      David Fincher, best known for “The Social Network” and “Seven,” turns this storied and controversial conception of a masterpiece into an unwieldy, over-heated, stagy picture filled with caricatures rather than people and well-worn anecdotes rather than plot.

     This high-priced vanity project, from a script written years ago by the director’s late father, Jack Fincher, offers little of interest to anyone who isn’t schooled in 1930s Hollywood, doesn’t know who William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies were or cannot appreciate the silvery beauty of black and white cinema.

     Objectively, it’s not a very successful film, but watching it subjectively, I was thoroughly entertained; it manages to both sentimentalize the era and offer a cynical insider’s view of the studio system through the writer’s eyes.

     Shining brightly amid the cacophony of this production is British actor Gary Oldman, who plays Mankiewicz, or Mank as everyone calls him, as a wonderfully entertaining character, a world-class raconteur even as he’s bedridden (after a car accident) and absconded at a remove Victorville ranch while writing the script.

      As we see in the constant flashbacks, Mankiewicz is tapping into his close friendship with Davies and his knowledge of Hearst’s public and private life to create Charles Foster Kane.

      Oldman, whose career has recent resurged with performances as master spy George Smiley in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and, winning the Oscar, as Churchill in “Darkest Hour,” plays him as a more mature Joe Orton (the radical playwright he played in “Prick Up Your Ears” in 1987), constantly punching holes in egotistical executives, getting away with openly insulting them because he’s a valuable writer.

     The real antagonist of the film, ironically, isn’t newspaper publisher Hearst (a quietly intimidating Charles Dance) but his good friend and frequent visitor to Sam Simeon, Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard, unrecognizable). The MGM mogul is portrayed as a thoroughly unpleasant man who cares about nothing but maintaining his power to make money.

      Maybe he was—I’ve never read a story about Mayer that portrayed him in a positive light—but, typical of most of the characters in the film, he comes off as a cartoon version of the man. Even though most viewers have no knowledge of these people, the actors seem to be doing imitations as the script offers little more than quips.

    Amanda Seyfried as actress Davies has some nice moments, especially when she meets with Mank after she has read the script, a portrayal that has Hollywood buzzing. Even Mank’s more sensible younger brother Joseph (who went on to director “All About Eve” and many other acclaimed films) is shocked that Davies counterpart in the script, opera singer Susan Alexander, is painted as a shrill and talentless burden to Kane.

     Though I’ve read extensively about “Citizen Kane,” I did not realize, before seeing “Mank,” that Mankiewicz had spent so much time with Davies and Hearst and the closeness of his friendship with Davies. But I’m also assuming that the script is hewing close to the truth, including a hart-to-believe scene at Sam Simeon in which a drunken Mankiewicz unmercifully tears into Hearst at a large dinner party.

      For most of the picture, Welles (Tom Burke) is but a voice on the phone, berating producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton) or questioning Mank on his progress on the script. But when he finally arrives in Victorville—after Mankiewicz has completed the script he calls “American”—he comes off as a spoiled child, demanding that the screenwriter stick to the original contract and not ask for screen credit. Welles lost that fight and they received co-writing credit for the film. The script earned the acclaimed film its only Oscar.

      For Mankiewicz, this script was the pinnacle of career that was mostly spent as a writer of comedies and rewrite man for various studios from 1926 until his death, of a heart attack, in 1953 at the age of 56.

     One of the film’s biggest missteps is the subplot chronicling journalist and socialist Upton Sinclair’s run for California governor in 1934, which confirms Mank’s hatred for Mayer and Hearst as they plot to destroy his candidacy. We’re meant to see the pure evil of these power brokers, but truthfully Sinclair’s well-meaning candidacy was doomed from the start and the political maneuverings involved seems pretty tame by 2020 standards.

      Another aspect of this film that will be appreciated by film aficionados is the theory that Mankiewicz was the sole author of the acclaimed script—most famously argued by critic Pauline Kael in the 1970s—without much input from Welles. Because of “Kane’s” importance, it remains a contentious dispute.

     The film also serves as a reminder of why so many films from that era stand up 80 years later: in an early scene, Mankiewicz walks into an MGM writers’ room and introduces Charles Lederer (coincidentally Davies’ nephew) to Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, George S. Kaufman and Sid Perelman. At the same time, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges and Mank’s brother Joe were a Paramount; John Huston and Jerry Wald were writing for Warner Bros.

       “Mank” could have used some polish of the type these pros did for thousands of scripts during the Golden Era, but for the handful of movie fans still around who relished that era, this movie isn’t to be missed.

HAMILTON (2020)

      I can’t remember any production—film, television or stage—in the past 30 years that has been showered with such universal acclaim as this Broadway musical. Overnight, Lin-Manuel Miranda was heralded as a theatrical innovator, an acclaimed triple threat as a writer, actor and singer.

     Though I’d seen endless interviews with the charismatic Miranda since “Hamilton” debuted in 2015 and knew the bullet points that made it so special (a hip-hop score, multiracial cast, a fresh look at a Founding Father), I was still surprised when I finally experienced the musical, as the filmed version of the original Broadway show.

    Not only did I find the lyrics and plot pedantically dull, but the all-singing script does little more than offer a Power Point version of the American Revolution and the first years of the nation, with emphasis on the role of Alexander Hamilton.

    But, to get right to the most baffling aspect of the production, I never could figure out the point of the racially incorrect casting. What statement is Miranda making by casting African American actors as Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, among others?

      If these were fictional characters I would fully support racially blind casting—it’s the only way actors of color are ever going to achieve equality in theater and film. But I cannot buy a black Gen. Washington unless you are trying to make a point. 

     I’m all for a black Macbeth, an Asian Willy Loman or a Latino Maggie the Cat, but the author better have something to say if he casts a Chinese actor as FDR or a black man as JFK. As far as I could discern, Miranda doesn’t. It’s all a stunt: it’s cool and, on its surface, progressive. but nothing more.

        I somewhat see why he cast himself as Hamilton, an immigrant, like Miranda, who moved to New York. But the outsider role doesn’t fit for Alexander, who found a spot as Washington’s righthand man during the war and became the nation’s first secretary of the treasury.

       There’s also the problem of Miranda’s acting. This is an epic musical about a politician, with few set changes or much in the way of spectacle. (In fact, the sets looked like something from a spare drama rather than a high-energy musical.) It demands a bigger-than-life performance and Miranda doesn’t deliver. He seems like a supporting performer in his own story.

   Diminishing Miranda’s presence is the excellent work by others in the cast, including Daveed Diggs as both Lafayette and Jefferson (again, why?), Phillipa Soo as Hamilton’s long suffering wife Eliza, Leslie Odom Jr. as a conniving Burr and Jonathan Groff as a comical King George.

      I know this will sound ridiculous, but I was more impressed with a high school production of Miranda’s earlier musical, “In the Heights,” finding it ten times more entertaining than his 11 Tony Award-winning megahit. To my ears, the score to “Hamilton” wasn’t near as catchy or heartfelt as “In the Heights” and its more expansive dance numbers didn’t come close to making up for its musical lackings.

       I will stay clear of taking on the “facts” of the musical’s book; it clearly plays fast and loose with the details and conveniently turns Jefferson into a “johnny come lately” to the nation’s birth (yes, the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence). But even within the musical, Miranda does a poor job of defining the central relationship between Hamilton and Burr, whose duel is the predictable climax.

     I’m not expert on the politics of the early days of the nation, yet I didn’t learn anything from “Hamilton.” The idea that this musical resurrected a neglected founder seem way overplayed—isn’t this the same guy whose picture has been in everyone’s wallet for almost 100 years? 

      The upside is that watching the filmed version saved me many “Hamiltons” that I was planning to shell out to see the musical live when it returned to Los Angeles after the pandemic. Instead, I’m looking forward to the film version of “In the Heights.”

 

 

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 (2020)

       One of the great legacies of the 1960s and ‘70s is the many protests marches, sit-ins and other public demonstrations against government policies. In the tragic year of 1968, the growing discontent over the Vietnam War culminated in a gathering of high-profile activists in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention.

     The resulting overreaction by the police against the demonstrations overshadowed the nomination of Hubert Humphrey as the media turned its camera across the street to Lincoln Park.

      Almost a year later, after Richard Nixon took office, the justice department decided to make an example of the leaders whose groups were in Chicago, bringing conspiracy charges against eight prominent leaders of activist organizations. (The case against Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale was dropped mid-trial, making it seven.)

      The circus-like trial of these men is the subject of the latest film by writer-director Aaron Sorkin, acclaimed screenwriter of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The Social Network” and “Moneyball” who made his directorial debut with “Molly’s Game” (2017).

     Both educational and entertaining, this slickly structured and well-written history serves as the perfect metaphor for the clash of the establishment and the provocateurs who felt it was time for a sea change.

     The self-appointed front man of the group is Tom Hayden, leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, based in Berkeley, and portrayed by Oscar-winning Brit Eddie Redmayne as a man with an air of entitlement and, to the dismay of his colleagues, a willingness to compromise. Hayden, who later was a longtime California legislator and husband of actress-activist Jane Fonda, works in concert with famed leftwing attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) to knock down the government’s case.

    Yet the other defendants, especially the incorrigibly rebellious Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), leader of the Yippies who delivers biting sarcasm in and out of court, don’t always cooperate with the plans.

    The film is strongest when this all-star collection of social movers and shakers, living together during the trial, debate the best way to change what they all believe is a broken system. It’s a discussion that seems to have found new oxygen in 2020.  

     Cohen, whose own films I have little interest in, steals every scene he’s in as Hoffman, a legendary disrupter and the smartest guy in the room. Rylance, the great British stage actor, gives another superb performance, as does Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the young government prosecutor, who isn’t sure which side he should be on.

    Reigning over it all is the foolish, out-of-touch Nixon stand-in Judge Julius Hoffman, wonderfully played by Frank Langella.

    While occasionally the film slips into caricature, especially in John Doman’s raving performance as Attorney General John Mitchell, Sorkin does a good job of creating real people and making this 50-year-old trial relevant.

 

 

I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS (2020)

      No Hollywood writer in recent years has gone further in exploring the deepest recesses of the human brain and our never-ending search for a place in the world than Charlie Kaufman. His thoughtful but confused characters deliver dryly sarcastic, half-serious dialogue in a world gone surreal as they push the rock up that damnable hill with Sisyphus.

     His best, “Being John Malkovich” (1999), “Adaptation.” (2002), “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) and “Synecdoche, New York” (2008)—which he also directed—were the most daringly original and outlandishly entertaining films of the first decade of the century.   

      Yet his latest, released on Netflix, left me scratching my head; not only did his point escape me but it was about as an entertaining as a Halllmark Christmas movie. Not unlike his stop-action, Claymation-like 2015 picture, “Anomalisa,” “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” tries to capture the quirky, somewhat random reality of contemporary relationships.

      We first meet the 20something couple, played by Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons (coincidence that this couple is played by actors with the virtual same first name?) as he drives them to his parents’ home for dinner. During the drive, while college professor Jake, trying to impress, goes on about a variety of topics, the audience hears the young woman’s thoughts (she’s given no name) on the tentative state of their relationship.

     It’s clear Kaufman has steered us into his “twilight zone” when the parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) let them wait downstairs for what seems like hours before finally greet them. At dinner, the conversation is odd, but just close enough to the uncomfortable chit-chat we’ve all engaged in during similar circumstances. Yet the girlfriend doesn’t seem to notice the horror-film atmosphere of the family home, even after the parents age about 30 years after dinner. Time does fly, but then, suddenly, they are middle-aged again.

     At this point, Kaufman is just getting warmed up.  When they finally leave (escape, really) the parents’ house, instead of heading home, Jake drives to the local high school where his girlfriend meets what seems to be his older doppelganger—the school janitor—and then watches a pair of ballet dancers performing. The last 30 minutes plays like a grad school student’s attempt at a David Lynch film.

     We’d need to be inside Kaufman’s head (“Being Charlie Kaufman”?) to decipher this metaphorical mess. Buckley, who played Judy Garland’s assistant in “Judy,” and Plemons, memorable as the lonely neighbor in “Game Night,” seem totally committed to characters stuck in a surreal world, but I don’t think they understood what the hell Kaufman was getting at any more than I did.

 

 

TARGET ZERO (1955)

    For about 10 years, starting in the mid-1940s, Richard Conte was one of the most interesting actors in Hollywood, playing mostly cold-hearted criminals. But he was just as convincing as a working stiff battling a corrupt system or a hard-nosed soldier.

    In a series of film noirs, including “Cry of the City” (1948) “Thieves Highway” (1949), “The Blue Gardenia” (1953), “Highway Dragnet” (1954) and, at his best as the ruthless Mr. Brown, in “The Big Combo” (1955), he established himself as a mainstay of the genre, an actor who always made the least of his films better.  This intense performer, discovered by Elia Kazan and John Garfield while serving as a singing waiter, worked on Broadway before scoring a supporting role in the World War II hit, “Guadalcanal Diary” (1943).

     Before his career moved from movies to television—where he spent most of the late 1950s and 1960s—he starred in this well-made Korean War actioner as Lt. Flagler, whose small patrol unit joins forces with a British tank unit to retake a crucial hillside position against overwhelming odds.

       Along with the usual tension between the Brits and the Americans, this is the rare war film that adds romance into the mix. A U.N. worker, Anne Galloway (Peggie Castle, best known for the TV series “Lawman”), is rescued after her co-worker is killed, just before the Americans enter the picture. The British sergeant (Richard Wyler) has eyes for Anne, but so does Conte’s Flagler.

      Sounds a bit cornball, but it plays out believably as scripted by James Warner Bellah (who later co-wrote “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”) and Sam Rolfe (the creator of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”) and directed by veteran film editor Harmon Jones. The picture also features a fine supporting cast, including Charles Bronson, L.Q. Jones and Chuck Connors.

     After playing the police pal of P.I. Frank Sinatra in “Tony Rome” (1967) and “Lady in Cement” (1968), Conte scored his best-known late career role, as Don Barzini, the mafioso rival to the Corleone family in “The Godfather” (1972). Conte fit the role perfectly and might have scored an Oscar nomination if the film hadn’t featured so many memorable performances.

      Though he had often been cast in distinctly Italian-American roles, this one was career defining. He spent much of his remaining life acting in the Italian cinema. Conte died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of 65.

 

 

FIRST COW (2020)

     Like most of her films, this Kelly Reichardt picture gives minimalists a bad name. Her leisurely paced, sparsely scripted movies have grown less and less interesting over the years.

  As much as I enjoyed “Wendy and Lucy” (2008), about a woman (the always brilliant Michelle Williams) facing hard times with only her loyal dog to count on, I tired of her approach with “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010) and “Certain Women” (2016). 

    In her latest, the unlikely pair of King-lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese drifter, and Cookie (John Magaro), a white cook just recently escaped from a gang of fur trappers, end up as roommates in a small Oregon town in the early part of the 19^th Century.

    They cash in when Cookie stars baking a French biscuit that everyone in town can’t get enough of. But the secret ingredient is the fresh milk the men “steal” from the town’s wealthy landowner and his only cow.

    The highlight of the film is the heartfelt relationship Cookie forms with the cow as he sneaks into the barn each night for milking. But you just know this setup isn’t going to end well.

     The script, written by Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond, whose novel it’s based on, adds little of interest to this bare-bones plot. Both men are somewhat fish-out-of-water character, not really suited for the pioneer world of the West, yet they do display the kind of gumption that was to help define the American spirit. 

    My impression of the film was so slight that I couldn’t imagine it gaining any critical traction, even in this one-of-a-kind movie year. Yet it started showing up on Top 10 lists and then was voted best picture by the New York Film Critics Circle.

     At best, it’s a minor slice of 19^th Century life, but maybe in 2020 that passes for the year’s top film.

 

 

HARUM SCARUM (1965)

    One of the more foolish traditions I started a few years back is watching at least one Elvis Presley film every year.

     It’s depressing to realize that I’m just a third of the way through (10 of 31). While I remain a fan of Elvis the singer and recognize his importance in 20^th Century popular music, with every film I watch it’s more astonishing just how bad of an actor he was. This cartoonish adventure movie is especially lame—even judged by other Elvis films—but what really struck me was Presley’s lack of growth as an actor. This was his 19^th film in 10 years, yet he seems utterly clueless as to how to read a line or act naturally in a scene.

      Even an untrained performer (think of Frank Sinatra, Kris Kristofferson, Dolly Parton) develops some skills after numerous times in front of the camera—except the King. Actually, in a few of his earlier films, “Flaming Star” (1960) and “Wild in the Country” (1961) he shows promise, but by the mid-1960s he was just going through the motions.

     You could argue that no actor could have been very inspired by this role, singer-actor Johnny Tyronne. The idiotic plot, slightly less coherent than an episode of “The Monkees,” opens with a roomful of Arab dignitaries watching an action movie starring Tyronne called “Sands of the Desert.” After it ends, Johnny sings for the group as part of this promotional tour.

      Invited to one of the attendee’s country—allured by a beautiful woman, of course—Johnny is kidnapped and forced to participate in an assassination plot. One of the most humorous aspects of the story is that, having seen Tyronne defeat a gang of henchman in the movie, the Arab plotters believe this actor capable of doing the same in real life. Yet it’s never played for a joke: Johnny’s movie marital arts skills are portrayed as a match for any trained killer.

        Not only is Presley especially wooden—even when singing—but he’s surrounded by mediocrity. Mary Ann Mobley, one-time Miss America, playing the king’s daughter and the love interest, seems to be dazed by Elvis’s hair, barely managing to finish her lines. At least she did improve over the years, during a busy television career that last until 2003.

      Michael Ansara, who made a career playing foreign bad guys, offers up the usual cliches as does Billy Barty as a pickpocket. The entire film feels like a first run-through.

      Then there’s the sets, which you’d think would at least be extravagantly lavish to make up for the grade-school level actions scenes and silly plot. Instead, the movie looks like it was shot on a discarded TV set from “Batman.”

        Presley’s film career came to an end in 1969, a year after his acclaimed comeback television special that returned him to his musical kingdom. But I wonder, if he had lived longer (he died in 1977 at age 42) might he have returned to the big screen?

      Probably, especially if manager Col. Tom Parker was still running his business affairs. Can’t you see Elvis in “Police Academy” or as a fight promoter in a “Rocky” movie?  And you just know that Scorsese would have found a role for him in “Casino.” But trust me, no matter what he would have done, he could not have stooped lower than “Harum Scarum.”

       

    

 

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 2020

TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN (2017, TV)

     It took me awhile, but I finally watched the third season, shown on Showtime and now on Netflix (but not for streaming), of David Lynch’s Earth-bound sci-fi series about the murder of a small-town high school girl.

     While the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death was “solved” by FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), the door remained open concerning the strange goings-on in the area around Twin Peaks, Washington, after the series’ second season on ABC ended in 1991. Lynch’s 1992 feature, “Fire Walk With Me,” offered some answers to this bizarre world from Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost, but was mostly head-scratching.

     Even though season one of “Twin Peaks” may be the most imaginative, audacious and creepy drama ever aired on network television, I wasn’t exactly pining for Lynch to return to the story. But he clearly sees the story’s frame as the perfect vehicle for his flights of fancy into a world just beyond what’s known.

      The 18 episodes of season three spend plenty of time (maybe too much) among the oddball characters of Twin Peaks: the crew at the Double R Diner, Hawk (Michael Horse) and Sheriff Truman (now the brother of the original, with Robert Forster filling in for Michael Ontkean), the Great Northern Hotel and the oddball Horne brothers, the log lady and the Roadhouse, a small town hipster hangout, where Lynch returns to end each episode. But the focus of the mystery is on Cooper, who has split in two.

     The dark side of Cooper is a ruthless killer looking for a way into the Black Lodge, abetted by two comical assassins played by Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh. While much of actions of this Cooper, who can’t be killed by ordinary measures, are unexplainable, the “other” Cooper is just as baffling.

     That Cooper, known as Dougie Jones, is a Las Vegas insurance agent with a gambling problem who magically wins tens of thousands at a casino and then becomes pals with the erratic Mitchum brothers (Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper), who own the joint. His wife (Naomi Watts) seems to barely notice his behavior—he’s like a newborn, unable to talk or do the simplest of tasks—and takes this new Dougie in stride.

     Tracking all this strangeness is FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (Lynch himself) and his team: Albert (Miguel Ferrer), Cooper’s ex-partner Diane (Laura Dern), and newcomer Tammy (Chrysta Bell).

     For the first four or five hours, I wasn’t sure this was going anywhere, but I put my trust in the twisted brilliance of Lynch and was eventually rewarded with a thrilling finale that brings Cooper back to Twin Peaks.

    There must be 100 characters in this series that are given a scene or two to leave their mark on Lynch’s dark, mysterious world, including Don Murray (who deserved an Emmy as insurance chief Bushnell Mullins), Harry Dean Stanton, Ashley Judd, Russ Tamblyn, Tom Sizemore, Amanda Seyfried and Candy Clark.

       Though acting in a Lynch film or series is a different art than what’s called for by every other creator, by any measure MacLachlan is astonishing as the two Coopers, making them almost unrecognizable as the same man. Watts, Dern and Forster, as you’d expect, are all memorable, but it’s Lynch himself as the deaf, corny Gordon, who serves as the anchor to most of the story while giving the audience just enough bread crumbs to keep us on the right path.

      Almost as integral as the plot to making this series so memorable is Peter Deming’s (“Mulholland Drive”) cinematography, especially the black and white interiors and nighttime desert landscapes, along with the visual effects, which are as disturbing as one would expect from a Lynch work.

     Like most of Lynch’s films, there are plenty of loose ends that never get tied up, but that’s of little concern. It’s an “Alice in Wonderland”-like journey, with the absurd diversions—both hypnotically fascinating and repulsively frightening—along the way that that grow curiouser and curiouser.

     Not surprisingly, a bizarre turn takes place to conclude the series, questioning the relativity of time and space, and taking the plot down another rabbit hole. Lynch hasn’t finished with these characters.

     He’s hooked me again: I’m looking forward to another visit to Cooper’s dream room, with the checkerboard floor and thick red drapes and the little man who speaks backwards and the unimaginable strangeness that will follow.

DA 5 BLOODS (2020)

    Once upon a time, Spike Lee was one of the best filmmakers in American cinema, creating “Do the Right Thing,” “Mo Better Blues,” “Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X” and “Crooklyn” in a six-year period. Almost singlehandedly, he made movies about African Americans a part of Hollywood mainstream.

    Now, he’s turned crusader who prefers to offer cinematic history classes, turning his dramas into agenda-driven fictions that hammer home worksheet bullet points, using characters and stories as merely jumping off points. 

   In “Da 5 Bloods,” streaming on Netflix, Lee jams so many stories and lessons into the picture that it almost plays like a complication of clips from other films.

    It begins with great promise as four Vietnam War vets reunite to unearth and bring home the remains of the leader of their Army unit, Norman, an outspoken advocate for social justice.

       Meeting up in Ho Chi Minh City, Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clark Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis) and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)—purposely, I’m sure, the names of the original members of the Temptations—hit the clubs (including the ironically named “Apocalypse Now”) and hire a local guide, playing tourists before venturing out into the jungle. The group becomes a quartet when Paul’s son David (Jonathan Majors)—another Temptation name—arrives unexpectedly, worried about his father.

      The film also reveals, in flashback, the other reason they have returned to Vietnam; after a brutal encounter with the North Vietnamese, they discovered a large cache of gold bars and buried it for future recovery.

      At first, I was convinced that the 1968 scenes were a stylized fantasy because the actors actually portray their younger selves. Only Norman, who didn’t make it out alive, is played by a young actor (Chatwick Boseman) in the war flashbacks; watching these retirees pretend to be 20something took me right out of the story.

      The film is on surer footing when it returns to present day, but the journey soon turns contentious as Lindo’s Paul grows more and more belligerent (he’s a proud Trump supporter, which Lee uses to designate him as the angry outsider), turning the initial bonding of old friends into a nonstop bitch session. Taking a page from the classic film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Lee and his co-writers examine how greed changes relationships. 

      It seems that the only reason David is brought in, disrupting the symmetry of four returning vets, was so Lee could have the old guys offer nuggets of black history to educate the youngster, which the director punctuates by inserting still photos of whatever legend they are speaking of.  At times, I felt like I was watching a Power Point rather than a feature film.

    The second half of the film becomes an action picture, with the vets turning into “Rambos” to fight Vietnamese thugs who also want the gold. There is also a clumsily inserted plotline about a team of volunteers working to remove old landmines.

     There are plenty of compelling scenes and discussions in this overlong, scattershot work, but it fails on the most basic levels: telling a coherent story and providing characters with believable emotional reactions. Strangely, when death inevitably revisits this band of brothers it is treated as collateral damage rather than friends losing friends.

     The film’s disregard for age really bothered me; it seems to be a symptom of Lee’s lack of care for the fictional integrity of the script. And not just in using the old guys in the flashback scenes.

     In a scene near the start of the film, Eddie reconnects with the Vietnamese woman he had an affair with when he was a solider a half-century earlier. When he meets the child they had together, she’s not even close to 50, but a woman in her late 30s.

     To appreciate recent Lee films—including his acclaimed 2018 film “BlacKkKlansman”—you can’t get hung up on his mixing of fiction and documentary-like material or his disinterest in story details. I can’t fault Lee for what he sees as his mission to educate moviegoers on the systemic racism of America, but I think he’d be more successful doing it with traditional storytelling. No one goes to the movies to be lectured to.

THE STRATTON STORY (1949)

    I’ll argue until there’s no vodka left in the house that James Stewart is the greatest film actor of them all, but why did anyone think he should play the young baseball phenom Monty Stratton?

    Stewart looks younger than his 39 years but not young enough to play a 22-year-old. That’s how old Stratton was when he left his Texas farm and earned a spot on the roster of the Chicago White Sox in 1934. And it’s not like this was some little-known player from long ago: in 1949 almost everyone knew the story of Stratton. 

    Almost as crazy, his sharp-tongued mother is played by Agnes Moorehead, who was born just three years before Stewart.

    Stratton was just hitting his stride as a pitcher—he had won 15 games back to back years—when he lost his leg after accidentally shooting himself during the 1938 off-season.

    With the unceasing support of his wife (played in the film by June Allyson), Stratton returned to professional baseball and had success at the low minor leagues. Though he never returned to the big leagues, it remains an inspirational story.

     For an A-level picture, Sam Wood (“A Night at the Opera,” “The Pride of the Yankees”) offers lackluster direction, especially when the film shifts to the baseball diamond. Not for a second does Stewart look like a pitcher who could get anyone out.

   The film features a few major leaguers, including Yankee Hall of Fame catcher Bill Dickey, but that’s where the authenticity ends.

    Stewart does his best, but he can’t help but look more like one of the coaches than a kid off the farm trying to prove himself.

THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW (1992-1998, TV)

     For the past month, I’ve been re-watching “The Larry Sanders Show,” to me one of the Top 10 sitcoms in television history. Just as fresh 22 years after it went off the air, the talk show sendup remains the funniest and most insightful look at the production of a TV show and the privilege of celebrity. (with a tip of the hat to Carl Reiner’s “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which could only go so far in the 1960s)

     Sadly, two of the stars have died within the last few years. Garry Shandling, who died of a heart attack in 2016 at age 66, was one of the most important comic figures of the last 40 years. After a standup career that culminated with guest host spots on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” he created “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” in 1986, a Showtime sitcom that mixed reality with fiction that included Shandling talking directly to the audience.

     Then, in 1991, having been passed over for the best late-night host jobs, he started “Larry Sanders” on HBO, playing a host interviewing real stars playing themselves, but showing the chaos behind the curtain. He brought a nervous, ego-centric manner to his characters that, though never transferring successfully to film, worked brilliantly on TV.

     Rip Torn, who played the show’s producer, was 88 when he died last July after a long career in both film and television.

      As entertaining as Shandling’s Larry; Jeffrey Tambor’s Hank “Hey Now” Kingsley, the clueless, sycophant sidekick; and all the highly original characters and priceless guest stars are, it’s Torn’s Arthur that keeps me coming back to the show. 

       Some great actors don’t have great careers—in Torn’s case because he was a pain in the ass and a drinker who gave headaches to more than a few directors and producers. But he was unquestionable one of the great talents of his generation and his portrayal of Arthur stands as one of the finest supporting performance in the history of television.

    As the producer of the fictional late night TV show, he changes his opinions on a dime to agree with temperamental star Sanders, regularly puts cloying Hank in his place and keeps the guests content before the show starts taping. Arthur stands in for all the behind-the-scenes pros who were there at the beginning of TV and continued to contribute into the 1980s and ‘90s.

     While the show lifts the curtain on the making of a talk show (Sanders is in competition with David Letterman, Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall at a time when the cut-throat world of late-night talk was at its height) offering juicy, embarrassing, highly offensive portrayals of both host and his staff, it also provides a heartfelt look at the first generation of TV creators, like Arthur, who ran things by the seat of their pants.

      No one delivers off-handed rejoinders like Arthur as he fends off temperamental guest stars, unhappy staffers (usually Hank) and network executives (“I killed a guy in Korea that looks just like her”). Arthur somehow manages to maintain his integrity while unceasingly kissing up to Larry; he loves him like a son and knows when to kick his butt.

     When Larry goes back to his first wife, Arthur is incensed: “Are you insane? That woman smashed your People’s Choice Award. So you cheated on her. Why take it out on the People’s Choice Award?”

     Torn, who was 61 when he took the “Larry Sanders” role, had been giving memorable performances since the mid-1950s, starting on stage and live television, winning a Tony Award for his supporting role in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ “Sweet Bird of Youth.” He repeated the role for the 1962 film while continuing to work mostly in TV.

     Among his best work in film are roles as the sniveling crime boss in “The Cincinnati Kid” (1965), notorious writer Henry Miller in the censorship-provoking “Tropic of Cancer” (1970), the cruel, egotistical country and western singer in “Payday” (1973), a humble turn-of-the-century rancher in “Heartland” (1979) and, earning an Oscar nomination, as a neighbor of “The Yearling” writer Marjorie Rawlings  in “Cross Creek” (1983).

     On television, in addition to dozens of series guest appearances, he starred as Richard Nixon in the acclaimed 1979 miniseries “Blind Ambition.”

     After “Larry Sanders,” which earned Torn six straight Emmy nominations, winning once, he scored the high-profile role as Will Smith’s and Tommy Lee Jones’ boss in the first two “Men in Black” films. This century, he was the veteran dodgeball trainer in “Dodgeball” (2004), Louis XV in Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” (2006), part of an old-guys road trip in “Three Days to Vegas” (2007) and also had a reoccurring role on “30 Rock,” earning another Emmy nod.

     In his best late-career role, he played a legendary record producer with a discontented, much younger Russian wife, and an adult son he can’t connect with in “Forty Shades of Blue” (2005).

     One of the most infamous incidents of his career concerned a role he didn’t get. While the details are disputed—and were the subject of a lawsuit—Torn lost a chance to play George Hanson in “Easy Rider,” which his replacement, Jack Nicholson, build his career on, after heated words (and maybe a knife and certainly fisticuffs) were exchanged with director Dennis Hopper. 

    Hollywood stories about Torn abound, most involving alcohol, though probably only half of them are true. Though he was charged with breaking into a bank later in his life.

     There is plenty of that “one-time wild man” in his Artie on “Larry Sanders.” The character would have little chance to survive the current PC world of entertainment, but just because we don’t approve of everything about a character shouldn’t mean they disappear from fiction. Torn, and the superb “Larry Sanders” writing team, gave us one for the ages. 

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

and THE UNDERWORLD STORY (1950)

      At least once a month, TCM’s Noir Alley introduces me to a low-budget crime picture I had never seen; often, never heard of. These two recently aired films surprised me with their high-quality performances and original storylines.

       I never would have imagined that a film starring Vince Edwards, the bland TV actor best known for his 1960s series “Ben Casey,” could be as intense and brutal as “Murder by Contract.” Edwards’ character, Claude, is a strange loner who, unexplainably, presents himself to a local crime boss in hopes of becoming a hit man.

     The mobster makes him wait for a month before he offers a contract and it’s during that stretch that it’s clear why Martin Scorsese has cited the film as an influence. Claude nervously paces around his small room, exercising and waiting for the call. There is more than a little bit of Travis Bickle in Claude.

     After he pulls off a couple of hits, creatively impersonating a doctor and a barber, the boss sends him to Los Angeles to knock off a witness in a mob trial.

In L.A., the script, by Ben Simcoe, takes an odd turn, when an awe-struck Claude demands that his handlers (comically played by Herschel Bernardi and Phillip Pine) take him to see Southern California sites. Then, when he finally gets around to focusing on the job, he freaks out when he learns the witness is a woman (Caprice Toriel, impressive in her only screen role).

    The last act drags a bit as Claude stalks his well-protected prey, but that just adds to the film’s quirkiness. Edwards is very effective, showing a steely demeanor and determined independence that makes the character much more interesting than your usual noir anti-hero.

   Irving Lerner, who later directed many of the “Ben Casey” episodes, isn’t much of a stylist—the film looks more like a TV show of the era than a feature—but he doesn’t shy away from the psychotic nature of Claude nor does he offer moral judgments.

    “The Underworld Story,” which more accurately should have been re-titled “Journalist on the Loose,” is all about morals. Dan Duryea plays Mike Reese, an ethically challenged newspaper reporter who is fired from his big-city job in the opening scene. As pushy and arrogant as any lead character in a film—even a low budget noir—Reese cajoles his way into the editorship of a struggling small- town paper run by a young woman (Gale Storm). In addition to his rudeness, he’s a classic mid-century sexual harasser.

    Not unlike Billy Wilder’s examination of journalistic avarice, “Ace in the Hole” (1952), this film explores the way different newspapers twist the news to sell papers. In this film, another newspaper publisher’s daughter-in-law is murdered, and her African American maid is accused. (Needless to say, this film takes a very dim view at American journalism.)

     In addition to Duryea, the acting highlights of the film are provided by Howard da Silva playing the high-spirited, sadistic mobster Carl Durham. The veteran character actor’s career (“The Lost Weekend,” “They Live by Night”) was derailed when he was blacklisted in 1951 and didn’t work for the next eight years. The same fate damaged director Cy Endfield’s career, who was forced to move to England soon after this picture to keep working, eventually making the classic British war film “Zulu” (1964).

   One of the oddest aspects of “The Underworld Story” is the casting of Mary Anderson, a white actress, in the role of the black maid. Reportedly, it was done to avoid being banned in Southern states, but African Americans had been playing small roles in films since the silent era. She doesn’t wear blackface, but she’s shot in shadows to make her look like a light-skinned black woman.

     In most other ways, the film is progressive in that the newspaper publisher and Reese, to a lesser degree, refuse to accept the official version of the murder at a time when blacks rarely received justice. But the offensive casting undercuts the film’s message.

     For those who live in Southern California, it’s worth noting that the film contains one of the few movie appearances of the Los Angeles Times’ Globe Lobby, standing in for a fictional “big city” newspaper. Though shot 70 years ago, the lobby and the entrance onto First Street, which Duryea walks through, remain unchanged even as the paper has relocated.    

GIRL CRAZY (1943)

     The final eight minutes of this by-the-number, childishly idiotic musical will make you forget that you just sat through more than 90 minutes of Mickey Rooney playing a pompous society kid brought down to earth at a small college way out west.

     George Gershwin’s crowd-pleaser “I Got Rhythm” is given the full MGM treatment, a set-piece that may be choreographer-director Busby Berkeley’s finest work. (He only directed this sequence; he was replaced by Norman Taurog.)

      With the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, brought in for the college’s Wild West Rodeo, backing up Judy Garland, along with close to 50 dancers in cowboy attire, the scene has almost all of the Berkeley trademarks—moving camera, severe closeups, fast pull-a-ways, perfectly aligned dancers—except an overhead shot.

    Garland’s voice is at its peak, as is her command of the stage, especially when she and Rooney lead the entire troupe in a tap dance segment worthy of Astaire and Rogers. The only musical finale that can match this is another Gershwin masterpiece, the “An American in Paris” ballet sequence.

    The only other scene worthy watching happens just a few minutes before “I Got Rhythm,” when Garland sings the heartbreaking ballad, “But Not for Me.”

    If there is ever a category for best ending of a bad film, this is the winner.