two fritz langs and a walter wanger

Ministry of Fear: (1944. dir: Fritz Lang) Right now, at this moment, this is my favorite Lang film of all. Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from a madhouse (we don't know why until later; Lang is wonderfully coy with his exposition) during the heaviest part of the Blitz, and immediately steps into a chain of unsettling events. Milland has so amiable and capable a presence that we don't doubt all will turn out well, which assuages some of the bale from Graham Greene's book, for better or worse, but allows us to follow the very dark war-time spy-tale with confidence.

I was going to say that Lang unfolds his eerie story at an easy pace, but it's not easy, not at all. There are stuttering stops in it, dread-filled ebbs and pauses, emphasized by a master's use of shadow and light, but there is nothing easy about it. The war was not over when this was made, and it feels almost as if it's from a later time, a Red Scare "they're-under-our-beds" movie, only the Nazis are the ones who are suddenly everywhere in England, wearing English masks, speaking with posh, BBC diction. The innocent parts of life, --a cake won at a charity fete, a favor done for an elderly bookseller, minutes passing on a clock's face, the scissors of a tailor,-- twist into the darkest possible dangers, and the distinction between good guys and bad guys is nearly impossible to decipher. It's marred by a whimsically twee tag-on end-scene, but that is thankfully short, and the rest is marvellous.

Moonfleet: (1955. dir: Fritz Lang) It feels less like a Lang film than one of those Disney movies they used to show on Sunday night television when I was a kid. A little more violent, a little sexier, but just a little. I kept expecting Elsa Lanchester to emerge in a funny hat and bat someone over the head with an umbrella. It's charming, all the same, with Stewart Granger as nobleman Jeremy Fox, suaver than humanly possible while breaking hearts, running a gang of smugglers, fighting a duel with a rapier against a fellow wielding a halberd, and finding a wrench thrown into his works when the son of an old lover turns up on his doorstep. There's a spooky churchyard, the legend of a lost diamond, a pair of obvious aristocratic fiends (George Saunders and Joan Greenwood: you can tell straight off by the honey-tongued voices), also the hellish fury of a woman scorned (Viveca Lindfors, with funny hair and sultry gaze; see above), and a little boy's journey, not quite into manhood, since he's still very much in the dark when we leave him at the end, but a journey which anyway catalyzes Fox's own belated entry into adulthood.

Tap Roots: (1948. dir: George Marshall) A poor man's Gone With the Wind, with Van Heflin sporting both Rhett Butler's moustache and his particular brand of romantic cynicism, while Susan Hayward is the one having her bodice cinched tight whilst clinging to the bedpost.

As talk of secession mounts, the wealthy Dabneys, lords of Lebanon Valley in Mississippi, refuse to serve any masters at all, yank or reb, and send out a call that any who want to secede from both North and South should join them in their stubborn outpost. The story was ostensibly inspired by Newton Knight, a Mississippi rich man and Confederate deserter who refused to hold slaves and lived openly with his black wife, declaring his land holdings a free state, but poor Newton is betrayed by Alan Le May's screenplay, which is instead a pandering attempt to recapture the old GWTW magic, including fair-to-middlin' replicas of Mammy, Scarlett, Rhett, and Ward Bond as the family patriarch, who winds up wandering half-mad through the battle he's instigated in a near dead ringer for Thomas Mitchell's mad Mr. O'Hara.

It's a doomed project from the outset, because what can compete with the original? but Heflin and Hayward are good company, and it's given a racy understory, with the faux-Scarlett's faux-Ashley (in this version, he's paradoxically both far blander and far more villainous) betraying her with her sexy sister (Julie London) while she's confined to a sickbed.

loups-garous, siamese twins, and the siren call of oil

the Grey: (2011. dir: Joe Carnahan) As a contemplation on death and how to die with dignity and grace, the Grey is a lovely film, with good actors, photography, and use of sound and editing all interweaving to form a gorgeous memento mori. As an action film about unarmed men in the wilds fighting wolves, it is less successful: the wolves act (and look, and sound) more like monsters from a creature-feature than true predatory animals, and often they are deployed to jump-start the action when a new plot turn is needed. Liam Neeson, in the end, is the reason we watch: he wields both the chops and charisma to carry off the difficult final scene and, indeed, he is a perpetual magneto at the film's center, emitting magnificent pulses of electrical current throughout.

Sisters: (1973. dir: Brian De Palma) Yeah, there's Hitchcock in it, but also, interestingly, a slight portent of the approaching Cronenberg. De Palma's creative use of split-screen, drug-induced dream sequence, and a constant playfulness with his central motif of voyeurism gives this early venture an ageless vitality alongside its lodged-firmly-in-the-70s look. The performances and script veer wildly across the scale from pretty good to kind of silly, the vicious blood-letting scenes are made plain weird by blood thick like orange-red paint, and the final scenes are kind of a let-down, although I do love that shot of the cow standing next to the sofa in front of the railroad tracks.

Mostly, this is a piece of cinematic history, and should be viewed as such, from a time when De Palma was still fresh and his flaws were balanced and sometimes outweighed by his berserker levels of enthusiasm.

Day of the Falcon: (2011. dir: Jean-Jacques Annaud) The best thing about this movie is Mark Strong. The second best thing is that the editing is sufficiently smooth that we never have to linger long on any of the endless string of cliches from which the story is assembled. The third best thing is that it is beautifully colorful.

This is the putative story of how the Arab desert became the wealthy distributor of oil that it is today. If it has a remarkable virtue, it is that the only Westerners in it are the Texas oil-workers who instigate the trouble, and that their part is largely played off-screen. Everything else about it seems a little dubious (one comes away with a sense that it's been absurdly simplified and many evils shunted into unseen corners), outlandish (the army just happens to arrive at the stretch of strand from which they can see the fresh water bubbling up off-shore?), and, ultimately, dull. The lead character, a bookish boy grown into an unlikely military leader, is seriously boring.

The role of women is depressing to the point of inducing nightmares. Although Annaud tries to feist (and sex) up these (all drop-dead gorgeous) gals, every woman here either dies in childbirth, retreats into her bedroom to die of despair at her man's choices, peers out at the world with increasing frustration from behind the walls of a harem, or works shackled as a slave.

mykelti williamson good times potsherds and muck double feature

Lucky # Slevin: (2006. dir: Paul McGuigan) Remember that guy Josh Hartnett? The first time I saw him, in the Faculty, I thought, man, this cat is going to be a MOVIE STAR, and made a mental note to keep an eye on him, observe his ascension into the heavens of cinematic immortality. Then he made the Virgin Suicides and I was like, yup, yup, here we go, hold on tight.

And then? Nothing. I mean, he was in Black Hawk Down, but so was everybody else, and everybody else didn't make Pearl Harbor the same year, a maleficent blot on the resume which spreads its spoiling stain across many an otherwise redemptive virtue.

I mean, this kid had everything: talent, looks, charisma, sex appeal, subtlety, chops. Was it a bad agent? an inability to cope with the crippling demands of good fortune in Hollywood (which, I believe, are many and often unbearable to those unfortunates born with talent and ambition but without a particular rhinosaurus-hide gene)? The killing blow came when he made, back to back, the appalling 40 Days and 40 Nights and Hollywood Homicide, a movie with a title so lame that I wouldn't watch it if it was serving a full all-you-can-eat buffet of all my favorite actors including Peter O'Toole when he was 25 and the long-dead Zbigniew Cybulski and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

My hopes, then, were slim for Lucky # Slevin, particularly since I tend to harbor suspicions towards the too-clever and too-hip cinema. This one, it turns out, is pretty good. It resides in the Usual Suspects category of trickster ventures, movies in which narrators may be unreliable and so the writer has to be very, very generous towards his audience to ensure that we do not feel duped in the end, but pleasantly surprised. This one was, and I was indeed pleasantly surprised.

It's chock full of good performances, my favorite being by Mykelti Williamson, almost unrecognisable in a small role as a simple-minded thug.

*SPOILER ALERT*

the First Power: (1990. dir: Robert Resnikoff) Forget 1990. This schlock has '80s written all over it, from the dread-filled Stewart Copeland synth-track to the cute-instead-of-sexy heroine with the massive shoulder-pads to the satanic-panic plotline. And, within those claustrophobic bounds, it is enjoyable. The plot makes no sense, none, and the characters never spring into life. There is not a single set that does not feel like a set, rather than a real place where real things happen, from dwellings to crime scenes ("We'll have a guy trampled by a horse-drawn carriage on Olvera Street, and they gotta find a crucified body suspended in the girders above the Los Angeles River") to the bar they stop into so the too-twee heroine can establish herself some street cred as a heavy drinker.

The thing it's got are some interesting performances. Williamson, for whom I watched it, sees his talents utterly wasted but is good-natured in his attempts as the cop's partner in the red shirt, doomed from the word "go" by his friendly disposition and lack of darkness. Poor fellow has to say things like "kiss my black ass," all the stuff the cop-partner had to say back in the '80s, and then he suffers an awkward and ignominious death scene.

One of the best performances is by Jeff Kober, hard-working journeyman actor who would later feature in Joss Whedon's stable in a rare, two-character run in Buffy: first as the mad vamp Zachary Kralik whom Buffy tricks into drinking holy water, later as the magic-pusher Rack who leads Willow down the slippery slope deeper into her addiction. (He's still working: he's been a regular on Sons of Anarchy recently.) In this, he plays the evil serial killer who is so beloved of Satan that he has been gifted with what the Catholic Church (allegedly) terms The First Power: the power of Resurrection. You see where I'm going with this? Once super-cop Russ Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) captures him and sees him executed, he returns, more powerfully than ever, and seeking vengeance against our hero! The Church, in fact, plays an interesting role in this movie, a role that was common in the 80s but has since mellowed. It begins with a (visionary? or plain nuts?) nun warning the cynical cardinals that Satan is afoot in these murders, and, later, when push comes to shove, she steals a "treasured religious icon" --a dagger disguised as a crucifix, I kid you not,-- with which the mad demonic entity can finally be sent to hell where he belongs.

The other very fine performance is a one-scene wonder by TV actress Julianna McCarthy as the dead killer's grandmother. In an excruciatingly badly-written five minutes, we discover that the killer was the seed of his grandfather's rape of his mother, all embarrassingly badly done, except for this woman, whose dignity and clarity of choice convey not only truth but a certain enigmatic creepiness.