Latest Posts
The Big Steal
Of course The Big Steal is a noir. With a title like that what else could it be? And yet it’s also an undeclared screwball comedy. The IMDb might say crime, film noir and romance, but screwball is the real dynamic, and that’s how Don Siegel directs it and stars Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer play it. It’s a cat and mouser, with Mitchum as Halliday, an army lieutenant trying to clear his name by tracking down the man who really ran off with a huge amount of the military’s money. Along for the journey, in an uneasy alliance, is the man’s fiancée, Joan Graham (Greer), who has has been conned by him … Read more
The Chronology of Water
So Kristen Stewart made a movie and, in spite of what the goons hoped, didn’t fall flat on her face. The Chronology of Water will infuriate people who harbour a grudge. Though, on the other hand, surely the twittersphere (Xsphere?) can’t still be hating on Stewart? After all this time? For the RPatz stuff? Or the sulky features and mumbling performances. Or suddenly becoming the highest paid actress in the world – briefly, till she walked away from all that. Who knows? There’s an irrational hellbeast out there for all of us if we look hard enough. Personally, I’m a fan, of Stewart’s “fuck you” attitude but particularly of the sort of films … Read more
The Window
If you like Rear Window you might like The Window, a thriller from 1949 running on the same fuel – impotent voyeurism. Both films are based on short stories by Cornell Woolrich. This one from a “boy who cried wolf” tale called The Boy Who Cried Murder, about a doughty kid who, on a hot summer’s night goes out onto the fire escape of his parents’ New York apartment to sleep, and while out there sees his neighbours killing someone. Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) is a bit of a loner who makes up stories to fill the gaps where friends should be, so when he tells his parents (Barbara Hale, Arthur Kennedy) what he … Read more
In Cold Light
Maika Monroe’s lean athleticism – she used to be a professional kiteboarder – suits her to In Cold Light, a grungey thriller in which she plays a drug dealer who goes on the run when things take a “shit got real” turn. It’s a subjective chase movie, very tightly focused on Monroe’s Ava, who we meet in a pre-credits sequence in the middle of a police raid during which she crashes through a window and tries to make a break for it. Post-credits it’s a few years later and Ava is fresh out of prison and trying to take back her drug business from her brother, who now has his feet under the table. … Read more
The Walking Target
The Walking Target packs a lot of people and a lot of plot into its brief 74 minutes running time. That is a feature not a bug. It’s a story about a man freshly out of prison who is, as the prison governor tells Nick Harbin (Ron Foster) while reluctantly releasing him, a “walking target”. Because he’s never divulged where the heist money was stashed that got him the jail sentence in the first place. As he heads out through the front gates of the prison there they all are waiting for him. The girlfriend, Susie (Merry Anders), who visited him only once while he did his five-year stretch but now wants to … Read more
Man Finds Tape
Like one of those Victorian novels that spends a chunk of time laying out its bona fides, Man Finds Tape does a lot of scene-setting early on, establishing the who and the what and the where. This all really happened, it insists. But this being the 21st century rather than the 19th, its claims to authenticity rest on different foundations. Victorians were happy to be fed a yarn about the narrator being told a tale by a stranger in a coaching inn on a dark stormy night, a tale that purportedly came straight from eye-witness accounts. Fast-forward to now and Man Finds Tape does it with a camera, a voiceover and a welter … Read more
I Love Trouble
I Love Trouble is The Rockford Files, or a dry run at it, give or take. If you don’t know what The Rockford Files is, that means you’re not ancient, so well done you. It’s the TV show where James Garner played a dog-eared detective raising a wounded eyebrow as he got beaten up week after week. Roy Huggins wrote both. I Love Trouble was his screen debut, an adaptation of his own novel, The Double Take, which S Sylvan Simon directs with half an eye on the drawing-room whodunits of yore. Huggins also wrote 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive and Maverick (also starring Garner) – so was something of a TV colossus … Read more
Lesbian Space Princess
So what are you expecting from a film called Lesbian Space Princess? A countercultural screed with a blast of porn maybe? Once upon a time, maybe. But these days things are slightly less urgent. “Real-life girlfriends” (their scare quotes) Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese want to tell us an animated story that’s light and bright and very cute, with swear words and some cultural critique slid in on the downlow. Take “downlow” on advisement because it’s all set on the planet of Clitopolis – “famously hard to find” – where, as things get going, our heroine, Princess Saira (voiced by Shabana Azeez) is being dumped by her girlfriend Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel), … Read more
Long Live the Republic!
Memory, fantasy and the Second World War make surprisingly comfy bedfellows in Long Live the Republic! (Ať žije republika), Karel Kachyňa’s lyrical and lovely coming-of-ager from 1965. A Czech movie set in Moravia as the German army pulls out and the Soviet army readies itself to take over, it’s far less critical of the communist regime than you might expect from a mid-1960s film. Especially from a film-maker who’d later make The Ear, a film so scathingly anti that it was instantly banned and not seen until communism collapsed. But poke around a bit and there’s a critique of sorts going on, delivered with the maximum of plausible deniability. The non-plot follows a … Read more
Alias Nick Beal
Also known as The Contact Man, Alias Nick Beal is the much better title of this unusual political allegory meets supernatural drama. The Nick is Old Nick and the Beal is short for Beelzebub. Got it? A retelling of the Faust story is the idea, with Ray Milland as the Mephistopheles stand-in and Thomas Mitchell as Joseph Foster (Foster/Faust, see?), a principled and upstanding district attorney determined to nail a career criminal who has been outsmarting him for years. I’d give my soul to get that guy, says Foster in so many words at one point. And that’s it – unbeknown even to himself the deal is done. So when he meets the … Read more
Splitsville
Fans of the prosthetic penis will like Splitsville. For the rest of us there’s smart writing and a farcical plot aiming at… I have no idea… modern relationships? Is this really how people behave? I doubt it. Shorthand – it’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice meets The Break-Up (the one starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston as an estranged couple sharing an apartment). The basic set-up is that Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona) are a married couple who split up suddenly when she decides she can do better than this deadbeat. She’s also hotter than him by an order of magnitude – Arjona is hotter than almost everybody – so … Read more
The Woman on Pier 13
Imagine that, the man who directed Mary Poppins also directed 1948’s Cold War thriller I Married a Communist aka The Woman on Pier 13. Though, when all is said and done, both are about infiltration and indoctrination when you come to think of it. One, of course, was madly successful and the other was such a clanger that they had to change its title (which is where Pier 13 came in). Whereupon it flopped all over again. It’s not hard to see why. This is anti-communist propaganda so flagrant it’s hard to swallow, in which the capitalists are the good guys – how they strive to improve the lot of the working man! … Read more
