by ·Comments Off on Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)

After the cops nab father Peter Graves (star of Parts: The Clonus Horror), false priest Robert Mitchum moves in and takes care of mother Shelley Winters, then starts working on the kids to reveal their bank robber dad’s missing loot until they escape downriver and find a protector in Lillian Gish. I wasn’t getting the fantasy storybook quality of this movie when I watched it thirty years ago on TCM, just the plot and some odd moments, such as Mitchum popping up like a cartoon to get shot by Gish at the end.

Terrence Rafferty:

[Screenwriter James] Agee was steeped not only in the right kind of southern sensibility but also in the work of the silent-film pioneer D. W. Griffith, which Laughton, with near miraculous intuition, believed should be the touchstone for the telling of the story; Griffith was the master of heightened, poetic melodrama, and that’s what Laughton wanted for The Night of the Hunter. He screened as many of Griffith’s movies as he could dig up at the Museum of Modern Art, and hired the terrific cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had done brilliantly imaginative work in black and white on Orson Welles’s second film, The Magnificent Ambersons. The black-and-white imagery of The Night of the Hunter is in a different, more deliberately archaic style from that of the Welles film, keyed to the basic emotions of love and fear, just as the great silent movies were.

David Ehrenstein:

The Night of the Hunter has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it’s a curious and highly eccentric sort of folk fable, mixing, as it does, rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. … It may be frightening, but not in the melodramatic manner of a conventional thriller. Its story is told from a child’s viewpoint, yet it has nothing in common with the likes of Disney or Spielberg. Then, there is its style to contend with—an incredible mixture of naturalistic three-dimensional space on view one moment, replaced by theatrical two-dimensional images the next. It is clear what the film is aiming at: images from our nightmares, brought into the lucid light of day.

Only instance in history of an adult in a movie believing a kid over another adult:

Bad shadow:

Good shadow:

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 I Love Boosters (2026, Boots Riley)

The boosters (Zola, Nasha, Emerald) are ripping off clothes from Demi Moore’s fashion empire, belatedly joined by a Chinese garment worker with a stolen teleporter and a vendetta.

Don Cheadle runs a pyramid scheme called Friends Being Friendly

“Our lunch is 30 seconds”

LaKeith Stanfield (not pictured) plays a guy so cool the camera can’t look at him without blurring and shaking.

by ·Comments Off on Danger: Diabolik (1968, Mario Bava)

Possibly the first Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie I’ve ever watched on its own – though I followed up by immediately rewatching the episode. Somewhere along the way I heard that the movie is actually excellent, and that’s not true; it’s Italian Batman Mabuse 007, but the color really pops on the new blu-ray and I got to listen to Ennio’s “Deep Down” for four hours.

Eva:

Eva (artist’s rendition):

Diabolik was in Barbarella the same year, and those would make a great double-feature: jokey genre movies with high fashion and design. He’s the villain hero, out to steal whatever he pleases, for no reason but that he can, and only Inspector Michael Piccoli and Gov’t Minister Terry-Thomas can stop him. Oh I’m kidding, they can’t stop him at all, in fact Diabolik shows up at their press conference and drops “exhilarating gas” to cause a laugh riot, just to humiliate them.

One of ten-ish movies produced by Dino De Laurentiis that year, Bava between horror movies, enlisting his idiot son Lamberto to assist. Diabolik’s chick is Eva of Ken Russell’s French Dressing. She wants an emerald necklace she saw on TV, so her man goes out to steal it, starting a war with his archrival Valmont (white-haired Adolfo Celi of Thunderball) who runs a ridiculous nightclub. Hundreds more things happen: a cop has a wacom tablet, Diabolik uses emeralds for bullets, falls out a plane and fakes his own death, a woman makes a Robin Hood reference (but to Piccoli, not Terry-Thomas). Diabolik finally Fight-Clubs the country’s tax office buildings, then after the country melts all of their gold into one giant chunk to make it easier harder(?) to steal… he steals it. Technically he’s still alive at the end, encased in gold, but there would be no sequels since there was nothing left to steal.

by ·Comments Off on Man’s Castle (1933, Frank Borzage)

Great writing and premise, as poor hungry gal Loretta Young (who I just saw in The Stranger) is pitied by rich guy Spencer Tracy and taken out for a nice meal. Only he’s not rich, just pretending, and they get kicked out and retreat to his shanty town.

She loves the place and wants to settle down there, but Tracy likes to move from town to town, plus they’ve gotta eat to stay alive, so already a few conflicts before throwing in the predatory criminal next door (a banker in The Devil Doll, a burglar here) who wants to rob the factory guarded by their preacher friend Walter Connolly (a millionaire in 5th Ave Girl). Throw in a pitiful/sympathetic drunk (Tobacco Road star Marjorie Rambeau) and a showgirl who unaccountably falls for Tracy (Glenda Farrell of Little Caesar) and a not-so-surprise pregnancy, and you get a lot of plot for 75 minutes. Lovely ending as hard-headed Tracy realizes the girl doesn’t have to prevent him from leaving town if he takes her along. Loretta very wonderful if this had been silent, but miscast in a talkie, delivering homey lines like “he don’t know his own strength, he don’t” with perfect posh diction.

Loretta with Marjorie, whose redemption comes from shooting the thief:

Dave Kehr was a fan: “Few love stories have achieved the emotional intensity of Man’s Castle, and most of the others belonged to Borzage as well. He possessed the most delicate romantic sensibility in the movies, and his films are pervaded by a sublime spiritual quality that no one else has been able to capture.”

Did street pigeons look like this in 1933?

by ·Comments Off on The State I Am In (2000, Christian Petzold)

Would’ve made a good One Battle After Another double-feature. A wanted couple is staying on the move, low on resources and comrades. Their teenage daughter is starting to become a liability, acting impulsively and attracting attention. In increasing order of importance, the daughter just wants: cigarettes, stability, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, trip-hop. A boy she meets tells her about his parents vacant modernist house, so the family moves in and plans one more bank job. Surely if they can pull this one off they’ll be home free.

Dad ended up in the teen trilogy Vampire Sisters. Mom would return as the mom in Miroirs No. 3, and the girl would go on to be stunt-cast in Carlos.

by ·Comments Off on Normal (2025, Ben Wheatley)

Somehow when I wasn’t paying attention to the drug TV shows and the Russian-made genre flicks, Bob Odenkirk became an action star in his sixties. Here he’s a traveling fill-in lawman, and while halfheartedly playing sheriff for some Minnesota town a lot of shit goes down – a bank robbery brings the yakuza-payrolled townsfolk to armed warfare. “That’s not where I was aiming” – Bob’s first return shot blows apart Evil Mayor Fonz. The dead ex-sheriff’s daughter Jess McLeod teams up with him. It’s all shooting and ‘splosives until the two sides team up to con the Japanese into not murdering them all, then the ruse is exposed and it’s all shooting and ‘sploves some more. A pretty good time, more generic than Free Fire but also better.

Fukasaku Fest:

by ·Comments Off on Marnie (1964, Alfred Hitchcock)

Normie-me often lets down cinephile-me. I’d love to feel the same ecstasy as the people with the five-star reviews blathering about “bodies in motion through space” or analyzing the use of color, but all I can see is Hollywood discovering psychology, Tippi Hedren’s childhood trauma prefiguring a million more tedious psych-dramas.

Tippi gets office jobs then robs the office and moves to another town. It’s a sweet gig until she’s recognized by Sean Connery, who has business with two of her employers. After two hours of Sean trying to figure out her deal with theft and horses and the color red, we’re rewarded with a flashback of her killing her mom’s abusive boyfriend Bruce Dern with a fireplace poker.

Connery’s sister Diane Baker starred in Strait-Jacket the same year, and in the mid-90s would play mother(s) to Matthew Broderick and Sandra Bullock. Tippi’s judgemental mom Louise Latham was in Sugarland Express. The mom’s neighbor girl Kimberly Beck would grow up to appear in a few Friday the 13th sequels, while Young Killer Marnie played in late-70s thrillers The Car, Piranha, and The Fury.

by ·Comments Off on The Mastermind (2025, Kelly Reichardt)

Regular family guy Josh O’Connor, haunted by his past life as an art thief in La Chimera, and in love with Arthur Dove, puts together a halfassed plan to steal four paintings from a local museum. All three of his accomplices turn on him (one drops out, one goes to the cops, and one goes to the mob, who re-steal the paintings), he borrows money from his parents that he can’t pay back, his wife is mad at him, the friends he’s staying with kick him out, he finally robs an old lady to afford a border crossing then gets randomly arrested while laying low in a protest march.

This has more of a commercial period genre feel than Reichardt’s other crime movies (Night Moves, First Cow, River of Grass) but with a pleasingly soft grainy look, and requisite time spent on important details (Josh laboriously negotiating a barn ladder while stashing the paintings). Rob Mazurek contributes the best score of the year.

Josh’s mom Hope Davis:

Robert Rubsam in Defector is really good.

The Mastermind is Reichardt’s third film in a row about a frustrated artist … These are lonesome characters, isolated by their means and their practice, persistently frustrated by the knowledge that they could accomplish something great, if only their true labor held any temporal or monetary value … Yet when it comes to his own heist, he’s more than happy to shunt the labor to his fuck-up friends, keeping his hands clean of criminal drudgery. You get the sense his career probably foundered long before the work dried up.

He seems infinitely more comfortable when stashing away the stolen goods than he does relating to his kids or pleading with his wife. Swaddled in the loving embrace of family and suburbia, he acts like a man living hand-to-mouth, creating new problems so that he — and the women in his life — can solve them. Like a cornered animal, he must do something, or die. It’s not so much a high-wire act as a slow ascent up a shaky ladder with no way to climb back down.