by ·Comments Off on While the City Sleeps (1956, Fritz Lang)

Kane Kyne Enterprises runs a sensationalist newspaper/TV empire. As is often the case in crime reporting movies, it’s not enough for these guys to cover the big serial killer story, they have to solve it before the cops do, in order to create new stories to cover. Vincent Price is the spoiled kid who just inherited the company, playing power games by creating an executive director position and watching the company leaders fight for it. In the game: big brit George Sanders, big eyebrows Thomas The Kid Mitchell, and small mustache James Craig (Side Street). Free agent Dana Andrews is a TV newsman trying to get away with his fiancee before getting pulled into all this drama. For once the women are just as important in the story. Rhonda Fleming is Price’s hotwife, sleeping with the small mustache guy, which somehow lands him the big job. Ida Lupino is Sanders’ gal, kissing up to Dana to coerce and/or blackmail him into helping. Sally Forrest (star of a couple Lupino-directed dramas) is Dana’s gal, who he puts in danger by trying to bait the killer. All this leads to more and more inter-office drama, the news people caring less about the actual serial killer, who tries to reassert himself with some serial killings, but gets caught in a futile newspaper exclusive. Last-minute scale-tipping rewards the (relatively) virtuous and interferes with an employee’s honeymoon, as was always happening in 1950s workaholic movies.

by ·Comments Off on Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972, Jonas Mekas)

“Hey, I escaped the ropes of time once more.” Between shorter beginning and end chapters, the hourlong middle is a diary of a week spent with family in Lithuania, in a hundred numbered chapters. Handheld scenes, sometimes nicely composed and sometimes quick and jittery, with in-camera editing. See: Sicinski

Jonas and mother:

Episode 61: the duck was captured but not harmed:

by ·Comments Off on Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962, Albert Zugsmith)

Odd human trafficking spy/rescue story, less furious than The Furious but overall better, set in 1900ish San Francisco. Yet another movie where newspaper men have to solve local crimes themselves, sneaking around to find kidnapped brides held in bamboo cages. All the dialogue is philosophical quotes. Costarring every Asian guy they could round up to play Chinese (including the Chinese-Hawaiian Richard Loo, who played Japanese in The Steel Helmet, and the Korean-American Philip Ahn, who’d play a doctor in Shock Corridor), I found nothing wrong with the movie’s politics except when it scared a cockatoo into trying to fly while tied to a perch.

Vincent Price is a rogue element stepping into the middle of a gang war filmed on Western sets, hmm. Nice freakout scene with masks, skulls, funhouse lenses, and zoo animals. In the middle of the rescue operation Price has a couple hours to kill until the girl auction starts, so he stops to smoke some opium. Soon afterwards when he’s accosted by baddies, the drug has given him super-slo-mo powers.

Feels like a Messiah of Evil / Carnival of Souls indie. Zugsmith produced a couple Sirk films and Touch of Evil before cementing his legacy with MST3K-bound pictures about wayward high schoolers. As far as I can tell, the source book by Thomas De Quincey (best known as originator of Suspiria) is an 1810s drug memoir and contains no human trafficking thriller story. The Monthly Film Bulletin review excerpted on wiki is spot on, just add “(complimentary)” to the end of each sentence.

Philip Ahn and Vincent have the same tattoo:

The late Richard Loo faked his death, joins Price for the final fight:

Angelo/Master has a cameo:

by ·Comments Off on Try and Get Me (1950, Cy Endfield)

Ultimately a sappy social-issues message movie, worse than My Son John, ending up with an angry mob of college hunks assaulting the precinct. Everyone in this town should be in jail. But it had a promising enough beginning, when broke idiot Frank Lovejoy (played cops in House of Wax and In a Lonely Place) meets high-pantsed wealthy showoff Lloyd Bridges at a bowling alley and gets hired to drive for robberies.

Robberies are working out fine, so they try kidnapping a kid with a rich dad, but Lloyd kills the hostage. Of course Frank has been lying to the wife (Kathleen Ryan, still attracted to heist men after Odd Man Out), but he starts drinking heavily to kill his conscience, the movie blurring accordingly, then drunkenly gives up the plot to his new girlfriend. Per Rosenbaum, the last of Cy Endfield’s movies to be released before he fled the country because of the anti-commie goon squad.

by ·Comments Off on The Scenic Route (1978, Mark Rappaport)

Dry Detached Experimental Arthouse Cinema but with a bit of dramatic heat, via heightened music, color, poses.

Estelle narrates from her notebooks. “I pretended I was malleable… I know it’ll happen again.” Her troublesome sister comes to stay, and they juggle two men between them – mostly Mustache Paul but also Estelle’s ex Jack, counting down until at least one of these men gets murdered.

They seem to have no life or interests besides men and each other. They all disco dance in the living room, because it is 1978. Eventually Paul tries to sister-swap, creeping into Estelle’s bed, not having listened to the backstory to realize this is how you get stabbed.

Mostly the movie isn’t a straight narrative but a Ruizian carousel of framing games. The DP has range, shot this and Girlfriends, Q: The Winged Serpent, The Dead, and Freddy vs. Jason. Mustache Paul is better known as a writer of Meet Joe Black.

by ·Comments Off on Panic in the Streets (1950, Elia Kazan)

Another 1950s movie about an underpaid, overworked guy who neglects his wife in favor of his job. This time instead of a newspaper man, he’s a US health guy trying to save the country from a deadly outbreak, slightly more excusable. Our guy is Richard Widmark (same year as Night and the City and No Way Out) and the wife is Midge from Vertigo… he’s neglecting Midge! So, it’s back to being inexcusable.

Murderer Jack Palance (in his sharp-faced debut) isn’t about to let himself get caught, and he’ll throw any obstacle or friend under the bus to escape from the cops assisting the health guy, not realizing (or giving two shits) that the immigrant he knocked off was patient zero. I’m surprised his whiney friend Zero Mostel makes it all the way to the end. Their other friend Tommy Cook (American Guerrilla in the Philippines the same year), sick on a stretcher, gets hurled down the stairs as a diversion. Meanwhile, Widmark tries to convince any of the locals to help but everyone is uncooperative.

In the end, Jack Palance is defeated by a baffle on a rope, exactly the same way I stop squirrels from getting to my bird feeder.

My main takeaway is that I don’t see Richard Widmark often enough, and I could easily program a Richard Widmonth with ten good movies I haven’t seen before:
1947 Kiss of Death
1948 Road House
1948 Street With No Name
1950 No Way Out
1952 Don’t Bother to Knock
1955 The Cobweb
1961 Two Rode Together
1961 Judgement at Nuremberg
1964 Cheyenne Autumn
1968 Madigan

by ·Comments Off on Broken Blossoms (1919, DW Griffith)

Local boxer beats his wife until she runs into the arms of an adoring Chinese shopkeeper. Multiple gossipy spies get involved, jealousy ensues, everyone dies. Nice story but the titles doing too much heavy lifting; they hadn’t invented cinematography yet.

Lillian Gish (who I just watched yesterday in Night of the Hunter) lives a dismal life here. A weak tree with branches for no birds, good for nothin’ in this old world, I spent half of the movie thinking she should jump into the river. Battling Donald Crisp would also be third-billed in a 1955 movie, as the ranch owner of The Man From Laramie. Fake Chinese Guy is Bat, the guy everyone hates in Only Angels Have Wings.

the famously anti-racist DW Griffith:

by ·Comments Off on The Odyssey (2026, Christopher Nolan)

Real animals in this one, and oh that cyclops design, that makes up for a lot. And there’s a lot to make up for: three hours of battle scenes and whinging about the downfall of respectful society. Bunch of excellent actors and the Nolan bombast and the seat-rattling IMAX beat us into submission. MVPs: Cyclops, Travis Scott, the murderous giants, Elliot Page, Leguizamo, Pattinson, Agamemnon’s armor, Samantha Morton, the raven.

by ·Comments Off on Woodstock (1970, Michael Wadleigh)

Long doc, full of split-screens to fit as much rock action into the widescreen frame as possible, and still manages to miss major events (Creedence) in favor of a portrait of the guy who cleans the toilets (a highlight) and reporters hounding the fest organizer over whether the fest is losing money. With 30+ hours of music recorded that weekend plus all the interviews and split-screens, this event would be a prime candidate for the Eno treatment.