by ·Comments Off on The Black Room (1935, Roy William Neill)

Baron Boris Karloff is an 1830’s tyrant, and right before the villagers can violently depose him, he suggests (to the surprisingly patient angry mob) trading places with his lovable, crippled twin brother Anton. Everyone (except maybe the brother) is pleased. Before going into exile the outgoing baron shows his brother around the place, takes him into the cursed Black Room, and shoves him down a hole to his death – then pretends to have a crippled arm and a soft, friendly manner in order to retain power and marry the pretty harpist Marian Marsh (the poor girl who turns Peter Lorre’s criminal life around in Sternberg’s Crime & Punishment).

Now all Fake Anton has to do is avoid using his right arm, and never return to the black room, where the ancient prophecy said he’ll die. But signing a marriage document, his would-be father-in-law (Thurston Hall of The Great McGinty and Renoir’s This Land is Mine) spies him in a mirror (in a lovely zoom shot) and has to get murdered, the crime pinned on the harpist’s other suitor Robert Allen (a Westerns regular also in The Awful Truth). Then on the wedding day a suspicious dog chases Karloff straight into the Black Room where he falls on his late brother’s sword.

Probably better than the other Karloff movie I watched this month. Playing identical twins is always a good actor showcase, and I thought the movie would avoid throwing both Karloffs together, but right after they meet they’re in an action scene together, neat. Neill was a directing machine, cranking out 100+ movies until he worked himself to death.

Harpist and dad:

by ·Comments Off on The Man They Could Not Hang (1939, Nick Grinde)

I get barely over an hour of laptop time on the flights, and don’t wanna stoop to watching Prestige Cable TV Dramas, so this box set of 65-minute Boris Karloff movies was just the ticket.

Karloff plays a mad genius (the same year he donned the neckscrews for the third and final time in Son of Frankenstein), working with Dr. Lang (Byron Foulger, a Preston Sturges regular who would later work with the real Lang) to perfect a mechanized external glass circulatory system for reviving the dead, so patients’ hearts can be stopped then revived, rather than having to keep them alive during major surgeries. Maybe not a great era for Euro-accented scientists to advocate gassing people to death. Anyway, Karloff’s test subject is willing student Bob, whose girlfriend Nurse Betty (Capra regular Ann Doran) calls the police, who bust up the experiment, ensuring Bob can’t be revived. After receiving the death penalty, Karloff is allowed to walk around the court insulting everyone… of course he’s donating his body to science, and Lang is there to collect.

“Make it weird, make it dramatic, and make it snappy.” A megalomaniac vengeance-seeking undead mad scientist can’t be our 1930’s movie hero, so enter Karloff’s beautiful daughter Lorna Gray (the 1940’s Captain America serial and Adventure in Sahara) and her reporter boyfriend Scoop, who crash daddy’s months-later plot to trap his condemning judge and jury in a booby-trapped house and murder them one by one, using electrified walls and poisoned telephones. Lorna and Scoop and the cops stop the rampage after only a couple victims, and a dying Boris shoots up his glass contraption, because who deserves eternal life, who can say?

Karloff, Lang, and the glass contraption:

Scoop up front with a bunch of dead men:

Lorna is disappointed in her dad:

by ·Comments Off on Across 110th Street (1972, Barry Shear)

Double-featuring with Cotton Comes to Harlem, this is set in some of the same locations, driving past the Apollo during opening titles. And it’s a grim, joyless take on the same sort of story – cops and rival criminals all looking for stolen money, with a pair of cops as our heroes. This one replaces the humor and nudity with extra violence and racism, and yes it kills racist corrupt terrible cop Anthony Quinn in the final moments, but I got the feeling it wanted us to see this as a dark/unhappy ending.

Thieves dressed as cops rob a money room, killing everyone in it, and the Italians in charge want revenge – “We have to teach them a lesson, or we lose harlem.” Anthony Quinn is very mad that Yaphet Kotto is put in charge of his investigation, meanwhile Italian gangster Nick is reminding Black gangster Doc who pulls the strings, and the rest of the movie is Nick torturing the Black thieves and Anthony brutalizing Black suspects, while Yaphet and Doc stand by uncomfortably.

One weird thing about this movie: each character states their age aloud, I think the point being that everyone’s slightly desperate because they’re past the age when they should’ve been advancing in their organizations – or I’m giving the screenwriter too much credit.

I liked Paul Benjamin as the murderous lead robber (who throws his share of the cash to a playground full of kids as he’s dying) – he’d later play one of the three shit-talking corner guys in Do The Right Thing. His girl Gloria would play Maya Angelou’s sister in Poetic Justice, and Italian torturer Anthony Franciosa would star in Tenebre. Connections with Cotton: Doc’s enforcer Chevy led Cotton‘s five-man Black Berets group, and the robbers’ getaway driver Antonio Fargas (the first to die, after being extremely uncareful about throwing stolen money around) was in Putney Swope, which was shown playing on a marquee in Cotton. Shear followed up by replacing the fired Sam Fuller on The Deadly Trackers, which now I have even less incentive to watch.

by ·Comments Off on Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970, Ossie Davis)

Ossie’s feature debut, after screen acting throughout the 60’s, has great energy and is absolutely packed. Some clunky parts, but the nonstop motion and added comedy (unexpected after finding this in Criterion’s neo-noir section) easily win the day.

Just too much going on to address it all, or I’ll be up all night, but charismatic con man Reverend Deke is robbed, and it’s an inside job, the money stashed in a cotton bale. Deke ditches his girl Iris, who ditches the white cop guarding her by getting naked and pretending to seduce him, then she discovers Deke with another girl and spends the rest of the movie hunting him. The lead cops Grave Digger and Coffin Ed are trusted by the locals despite these nicknames, capably chasing Deke and Iris and the cotton and all the other mysterious characters. As in the next movie I watched, Across 110th Street, the Harlem Black mob guy has an Italian boss afraid of losing control. There’s a lot of punching and whacking and flying through the air, not too much shooting, a bit of blackface, and a surprising amount of bird tossing. The cotton ends up onstage at the Apollo, the centerpiece of a musical striptease act, junkman Uncle Bud gets away with the money and the Italian covers it, so the people get back the cash they were throwing at their beloved con man a couple days earlier.

The two lead cops (and the fool white cop) would return in sequel Come Back Charleston Blue. The Reverend Calvin Lockhart would quit acting after a couple David Lynch movies. Judy Pace (Iris) didn’t get a lot of roles, would costar in Frogs. Comedian Redd Foxx played Uncle Bud, would soon find steady work on Sanford & Son.

by ·Comments Off on Pig (2021, Michael Sarnoski)

Nic Cage’s pig gets violently kidnapped and he recruits his truffle buyer Amir (Alex Wolff, the Rodrick-looking guy in Hereditary) on a search-and-rescue quest through nearby Portland. I knew so little about this movie going in because I didn’t want to discover whatever people are saying you should watch the movie without knowing. I assume it’s not the subterranean restaurateur fight club, but the fact that Cage plays a retired superchef who uses his eatery connections and cooking skills to track down the culprit, a sort of Ratatouille take on the John Wick template. But hot damn, there’s also a subterranean restaurateur fight club.

Cage is a local legend, a food philosopher-king, who just wants to be left alone with his pig friend in a shack in the woods. Amir’s dad Adam Arkin turns out to be a rival mushroom buyer and the pig thief, and the internet believes this to be stunt casting since Arkin once played an “off the grid, genius gourmet chef” on Northern Exposure. Sarnoski’s first feature, has too much handheld camerawork but not terrible. And the story comes together a little too neatly, that Cage gets answers by recreating a life-pivotal meal he once made for his helper’s pignapping father. These are small complaints about a delightful movie. I would’ve loved to show it to Katy, if not for the subterranean restaurateur fight club.

by ·Comments Off on Annette (2021, Leos Carax)

Brutish Adam Driver and delicate Marion Cotillard get together and have a magical singing baby, to the consternation of accompanist Simon Helberg – and it’s all performed as an opera written by Sparks, who appear (along with the director and his daughter, the film’s dedicatee) with the cast in the great opening number. A good pick for my first movie back in theaters for over a year.

I read so many articles on this, and have gone back and forth about aspects of it, but it seems like a movie that’s gonna last. Bilge’s second Vulture article helped with the ending (which I didn’t love at the time), Sicinski’s analysis also useful (“even its flaws are kind of endearing”), and the GQ interview with Simon Helberg gives insight into Carax’s methods. And from the NY Times:

At first, Carax turned down the offer, not wanting the film’s fraught father-daughter relationship to confuse his own teenage daughter, Nastya, or invite speculation on the parallels between the film and his life, given his tendency to transform his male leads into proxies of himself. He reversed course, however, when she took a liking to songs Sparks had sent him, creating the opportunity to clear up any misunderstandings.

by ·Comments Off on No Sudden Move (2021, Steven Soderbergh)

A few guys get a job to camp out menacingly in a family man’s house until he retrieves some documents from his workplace, but the documents aren’t so easily retrieved, and somebody dies, and who’s really working for who? It’s that sort of movie, and I could do a whole plot rundown but it’s twisty and fun so I’d rather just forget the particulars and watch it again in a few years. I’ll say that everyone’s sleeping around, all the women are dangerous, the documents are about the auto industry wanting to avoid pollution regulation, and Soderbergh shoots the action with a widescreen lens that perversely distorts everything on the sides.

Besides the superstars, we’ve got family man David Harbour (star of the Hellboy remake which I accidentally bought on blu-ray for a few bucks thinking it was the original, dammit)… his wife, hostage Amy Seimetz (director of last year’s finest film)… and Ray Liotta’s wife is Julia Fox (Uncut Gems).

Not how you want to meet Don Cheadle:

You do not impress Bill Duke:

You don’t want Brendan Fraser pointing his napkin at you:

by ·Comments Off on Fauna (2020, Nicolas Pereda)

I’m glad I gave Pereda another shot after Greatest Hits. This starts out rough, but leads to some likeably awkward scenes when Luisa’s new man Paco is failing to make an impression on her dad. Luisa’s brother Gabino is visiting at the same time (played by Gabino, who plays “Gabino” in all of Pereda’s films). Paco is an actor with a nonspeaking role on a season of Narcos, and the others want to see him perform, so he creates a larger speaking role for an impromptu acting showcase at a bar. The master-shot real-time thing, playing with performance and identity, all pretty appealing. But just like Greatest Hits replaced Gabino’s father halfway through (one of the fathers is playing his father again here), this movie shifts modes, becoming a story created by Luisa about strangers meeting at a hotel, all the actors from the first half as different people. It all feels minor but I was smiling the whole time.

by ·Comments Off on Dracula (1992, Francis Ford Coppola)

Been a long time since we rocked with this movie, and I can’t trust my teenaged thoughts so I had no idea if it’d be good. It’s very good, Coppola inspired by the birth of cinema in his 1897-set story, drenching his delirious movie in dramatic shadowplay and stylish crossfades. Gary Oldman wins the day, appearing in six or eight different forms, and as in The Book of Eli, evil Oldman’s henchman is played by Tom Waits. But Tom’s Renfield seems less pivotal here than I’d hoped – he’s in a few scenes but doesn’t even leave his asylum cell. At least after playing calmly menacing in one movie and a cool gearhead in another, I get to witness him screaming mad in this one.

Waits #1:

Reeves vs. Oldman vs. Oldman’s shadow:

The other actors are hit or miss. You can plunk Winona Ryder into any costume and time period and she’ll thrive, but who had the idea to have Keanu Reeves play a Brit and Anthony Hopkins play a German? Ryder gets a little fan club of diehard dudes in the second half: Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes and cowboy Billy Campbell (The Rocketeer himself, a year prior), which leads to some good chase and adventure at the end. Monica Bellucci was a nobody back then, playing one of D’s nameless hissing vampire brides.

Waits #2 with Richard E. Grant:

Train #1:

Train #3: