Drama – Page 18 – The Magnificent 60s

Divorce American Style (1967) ***

Not so much a comedy about a failing marriage as a guide to the American divorce laws, taking place in a world where the everyman is represented not by the likes of James Stewart or at a stretch Glenn Ford but Dick Van Dyke. It’s possibly only the fact that Van Dyke lacks dramatic chops without the innate vitriol of a Rod Steiger or Lee Marvin that keeps the movie from drifting into black comedy. That, or the filmmakers’ determination to find a happy ending.

When the ever-squabbling Harmons, Richard (Dick Van Dyke) and Barbara (Debbie Reynolds), break up after 17 years and two kids, the chips seem to fall heavily against the husband, the wife walking off with all assets, the husband landed with all the bills and little more than 80 bucks a week to get by on. Such is the supposed injustice of the American divorce laws at a time when most wives did not go out to work and so relied on their husband, married or otherwise, for support.

The only way out of this unhappy financial state for Richard is for his wife to get married again, so a second husband can pick up the tab for her upkeep. Another divorced couple, the Downes, Nelson (Jason Robards) and Nancy (Jean Simmons), is in the same pickle so Nelson spends his time acting as some kind of pimp for his ex-wife, serving up potential suitors, such as Richard, on a platter. But since Richard is impoverished, a helping hand is needed to even things up, so Nelson arranges for Barbara to fall into the arms of rich and single car dealer Al Yearling (Van Johnson).

There is a big male-female divide, for the most part the guys concentrating on material things like money and what money can buy, the gals leaning more towards emotion, conversation, genuine intimacy. Richard has given his wife everything she wants, so why can’t he have a few things his own way? Or as Barbara succinctly puts it, it’s a case of supply and demand, the women are in good supply while the men demand. Even after separation, while from the Richard and Nelson perspective the wives are living in the lap of luxury and the men understanding the meaning of penury, female thoughts turn to questions of loneliness, commitment and (not again!) emotion.

While there are moments of observational comedy – an excellent montage of Richard and Barbara opening and closing all sorts of doors while preparing for bed, cleaning out bank accounts before the other can get to them, the problems of accommodating the blended/hybrid family that divorce or multiple divorce can entail – there are not many laugh-out-loud moments.

And probably just as well because without the drama-lite presences of Van Dyke (who still can’t shake off those double takes and involuntary limb functions) and Reynolds, it would have been a much tougher watch. Reynolds is capable of expressing her feelings verbally because, as a female, she is used to expressing feelings verbally, so we know that Al Yearling does not quite hit the spot. But Van Dyke, without resort to the verbal, has his best scenes of emotional loss when he takes his kids to the ball game only to discover that his wife’s new suitor has more treats to offer.

Van Dyke (Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.) and Reynolds (The Singing Nun, 1966) do a decent job without plumbing any dramatic depths, but Robards (Any Wednesday, 1966) and Simmons (Spartacus, 1960) have more to offer as the conspiring couple, while one-time MGM golden boy Van Johnson (Battleground, 1949) proves that his four-year absence from pictures was premature Hollywood retirement.

More a cautionary tale than an outright laffer, this Norman Lear (Come Blow Your Horn, 1963) screenplay without missing many targets provides a more palatable dissection of modern marriage than something as full-blooded and expletive-ridden as the previous year’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Director Bud Yorkin (Come Blow Your Horn, also) shows a nice grasp of building up situations until they go out of control.

While, certainly, many of the attitudes, are out of date, you can be sure that male self-pity is not one of them.

The Red Tent (1969) ***

If you’re unfamiliar with the abortive Italian airship expedition to the North Pole led by General Umberto Nobilo (Peter Finch) in 1928, you’ll find this an absorbing tale. If you are familiar then you will probably appreciate the film-makers’ attempts, via an unusual framing device, to carry out a post-mortem and to apportion blame for the disaster. If you know your history, you’ll also be aware both poles had been conquered, American Robert Peary first to the North Pole in 1909, Norwegian Roald Amundsen (Sean Connery) claiming South Pole bragging rights two years later.

So you’re also probably wondering what was the point nearly two decades later of the Nobilo operation? But the sled-led efforts of Peary and Amundsen were feats of endurance i.e. man vs. nature. This was science vs. nature. The dirigible was the apex of aviation advancement and nations still battled for exploration glory. So to travel in some comfort and fly over the North Pole in a few days would be a demonstration of scientific supremacy. Conquest of one of the most inhospitable places on earth was almost a PR exercise. With no intention of landing it was also a glorified tourist trip.

However, the science was flawed. Nobody had counted on the build-up of ice. The airship crashed and since this was a joyride nobody was equipped to walk their way out. Just surviving would be difficult enough. Loss of radio transmission (science) indicated a problem so rescue airplanes were deployed. But without a location to pinpoint the survivors, searchers had about two million sq km to cover. Luckily, a brilliant scientific deduction by expedition member Finn Malmgreen (Eduard Martsevich) saves the day and a ham radio user (amateur science) picks up the location. Game on!

Except airplanes are too easily thwarted by blizzards, fog and the inhospitable. Home base, set up simply to welcome home a successful jaunt, is not capable of organizing a proper rescue. A Russian ice-breaker joins the rescue attempt. Taking greater risks is aviator Einar Lundborg (Hardy Kruger), fired up by the promise of sex with desperate nurse Valeria (Claudia Cardinale), who happens to be Malmgreen’s girlfriend, and a bounty from Nobilo’s insurers. The redoubtable Valeria does not have to sell her body to persuade the more highly-principled Amundsen to join the rescue effort.

So it’s gripping clock-ticking-down stuff, action shown in considerable detail, almost over-populated in one sense as director Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying, 1957) covers multiple storylines, the various disjointed rescue efforts, the survivors weakening by the day, imperiled by marauding polar bears and the ice cracking up beneath their feet.

In the main it’s a true story, Valeria the only fictional element, inserted for genuine cinematic purpose, to give the audience someone to emotionally root for back on land and for her character to guide us in an almost contemporary touch through the ghoulish carnival onshore as thousands gather to witness first-hand news of disaster.

What’s obviously patently untrue is the framing device, given that it shows the still-living Nobilo summoning up the ghosts of others involved in the event for a post-mortem, in which his guilt drives him into the position of sacrificial lamb. Although on first encounter it appears a bizarre idea, that, too, soon achieves dramatic purpose. Clearly there was intense discussion at the time and in the immediate aftermath by those who survived the disaster and there must have been high-level talks behind closed doors that usually excluded the main characters of the kind that was played out in a host of historic pictures made during the decade. Lawrence of Arabia (1963) and Khartoum (1965) had many such set-pieces where reputations were shredded.

This approach permits opportunity for all the principals to come together for confrontational purposes in the one room. Not all of that discussion follows the expected path and there is an interesting argument between Nobilo and Amundsen about leadership. From an audience perspective, it is, of course, quite satisfying to see Sean Connery (The Hill, 1965) facing off against Peter Finch (The Sins of Rachel Cade, 1961) with Hardy Kruger and Claudia Cardinale (The Professionals, 1966) embroiled in the debate.

There is the bonus of fabulous cinematography of the majestic Arctic, the icy waste, and breaking up of ice floes and collapsing icebergs has never been captured in such widescreen glory. Further pluses are in the performances, especially Connery as an aged Amundsen, Finch as the glorious pioneer bewildered the sudden turn of events and Cardinale as a woman willing to go to any lengths to save her lover. Ennio Morricone provided the score.

However, you are best going into this aware that while Finch has a goodly amount of time onscreen, Connery and Cardinale (the ostensible stars judging by the credits) are not seen so frequently. That said, the movie works well as an account of the disaster. The version I saw was just a shade over two hours – cut by about 30 minutes from original release.

Streaming channel Sweet TV has the longer version but I couldn’t find a workable link.

Kinds of Kindness (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

Wonder if director Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, 2023) was tempted to go full tilt batshit arthouse boogie on this one and run it all as one big picture rather than setting it into neat episodes, the opposite of what Kevin Costner has done – and been lambasted for – in Horizon (2024). What a riot it would have been if critics had been set the jigaw of trying to work out what part the several main actors were playing at any given time. Am sure that would had had critics out of their seats at both ends of the appraisal syndrome.

As it is, the Dogma-esque notion of the the main actors each essaying three different roles doesn’t work. We all know they’re pretty good actors – Emma Stone (Poor Things) a two-time Oscar-winner. Willem Dafoe (Poor Things) a four-time nominee, Jesse Plemons (Civil War, 2024) nominated once – so they’re hardly needing to prove anything, least of all that they’re versatile. Would have been much better as an all-star (in arthouse terms) cast of nine actors and none of the episodic separation since the stories all take place in a similar disturbed Lantimos-esque world. In fact, you could have tucked the whole lot into Poor Things (2023) and not missed an artistic beat.

Sure, when you think of the episodes individually, it comes across as Twilight Zone-lite or Stephen King on an off day, with (except once) none of the satisfying resolution or alternately deliberating confusing endings. But when you run all the episodes together without any real differential it packs a lot more punch and the world is more fully delineated.

So you get a shipwreck survivor chopping a finger off to satisfy the mania of her husband and him preferring instead a whole leg though he’ll settle for a kidney. Same fella wants to check out old videos of his wife and they turn out to be wife-swapping ventures captured on film. A female jumps headlong into an empty swimming pool in order to facilitate some kind of superpower in her twin.

A cult revolves around determining contamination by licking skin. Their devotees derive mystical loyalty from drinking water into which their cult chief has dropped his tears. Sexuality is fluid, not just the wife-swapping, but bisexuality abounds, and within what might appear to be sexual freedom is a lot of coercive control. But if anybody’s going to get slapped around, it’s the men.

Did I mention the dogs controlling the planet? And a vet who’s too dumb to notice that the cut on a dog’s paw is far too clean to have come from an animal? And, in a riff from Sommersby (1993), the ill-fitting shoes that suggest an imposter. And that a husband is feeding his wife abortion pills?

This is all pretty much standard territory for Lanthimos. But where Poor Things took place is an all too unreal world, here everything would be legit – business, cops – except for the behavior of the characters.

So you wonder if, presented with the script, the main actors couldn’t decide which part they wanted and so Lanthimos just said, heck, play them all. And it’s true you’d have a hard time deciding which part each is best at although as a rule each actor is dominant in only two sections and less important in one. Personally, I’d go for Emma Stone as the shipwreck survivor going along with her husband’s madness in order to save their marriage. For Jesse Plemons I’d choose the businessman under complete control of his boss, down to the clothes he wears each, what he eats and at what time he makes love to his wife. For Willem Dafoe, I’d go for his creepy cult personality.

Just like Horizon, the length (164 minutes here) didn’t bother me. There was generally enough going on, what with all the twists, to keep interest high.

This kind of has the feeling of one for Lanthimos rather than a more accessible one for a wider audience as instanced by The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things. The Academy might well respond to actors taking on more than one role though not quite in Alec Guinness/Peter Sellers fashion and if so the biggest nod should be in the direction of the under-rated Plemons.

Written by the director and regular collaborator Efthimis Fillipou (The Lobster, 2105).

Didn’t have me on the edge of mys eat, but I didn’t fall asleep either, and I certainly wasn’t fretting like some critics at the supposed waste of their valuable self-entitled time.

Begin Again (2013) ***

Timely reminder that Hollywood could make decent coin from lightweight romantic froth. Imagine how many movies this year would be delighted to be walking away with $84.1 million (around $111 million in today’s money) from the worldwide ticket wickets, especially given the low budget. So you have to wonder: what was the magic formula that audiences responded to that they’re not responding to now. Because, to be honest, this is the most unlikely of unlikely concoctions.

After a previous fairy tale Once (2007) – whose real-life happy ending included being adapted for theater and turned into a Broadway hit – writer-director John Carney (following two low budget flops) tries again but drives a tank through credibility. At this point rumpled Mark Ruffalo, whose undeniable charm has saved many a picture, had apparently lost the last of his nine marquee lives so that he now fell into the category of American actor fawned over by British filmmakers because he deigns – even though relegated to second billing – to get involved. For the top-billed Keira Knightley (Atonement, 2007) it would prove to be her last hit.

Musician Adam (Dave Kohl), on the cusp of stardom, has been flown over to New York by his record company. His girlfriend Gretta (Keira Knightley), along for the ride, is an unsuccessful songwriter. After Adam has an affair, she dumps him, wandering the streets with a bag and a bike until, lo and behold, she bumps into (as one does in a city of 19 million people) old pal Steve (James Corden) busking on a street corner.

At an open mic gig, she is pestered to do a number. The minute she starts singing the entire audience starts chatting amongst themselves. But wait, just-fired depressed alcoholic record producer Dan (Mark Ruffalo) in the audience recognizes her “talent,” immediately envisaging the string and percussion arrangement that could magically transform the number. Except, she doesn’t want fame, she wants purity. Initially, rejecting his (artistic) overtures, she agrees to his world-beating notion of recording an album in the streets, Steve having miraculously accumulated sufficient recording equipment. Cue umpteen shots of cute New York (Brooklyn Bridge, Greenwich Village) and no hummable songs.

There’s kind of a will-she-won’t-she romantic subplot with Dan but he’s still smitten with estranged and acidic wife Miriam (Catherine Keener). Another subplot involves his daughter Violet (Hailee Steinfeld). Sparks never fly and you start wishing for the next best thing – a speedy resolution. No such luck. Dan makes said album, complete with (would you believe) 24-page glossy booklet. Gretta rejects a record deal out of supposed purity, but in fact greed, wanting more than a 10% cut of the pie.

The disc sells 10,000 copies in a day on the internet. Rewind. It sells that amount because (purity be damned) one of Dan’s buddies is Mos Def and he is a God of Twitter and enough of his millions of followers obey his every command. There is but one subtle scene, when Knightley intuits her boyfriend’s betrayal and without a word slaps him in the face.

A few more slaps would have done this film good. Knightley gushes like one of the Famous Five, the film itself like a 1940s movie where rejected theatrical nobodies put on a show in a barn. The central theme of artistic purity and refusing to give in to an over-commercialized business scarcely rings true, but somehow it provides the movie with the kind of innocence that the more romantically-inclined among the audience would vote for in a world of wishful thinking.

And, actually, precisely because it refuses to give the audience what in one way it’s demanding – a proper romantic movie – and goes down the other route of artist fighting for integrity, it comes off with something of the rare feel of a movie being true to itself.

Of course, since then, Ruffalo’s career has occasionally soared, both artistically (three more Oscar nominations, most recently for Poor Things) and commercially (long-running role as The Hulk). Conversely, Knightley’s career has plummeted. Outside of The Imitation Game (2014) in which she had a supporting role and a bit part in the final Pirates of the Caribbean adventure, each successive movie in which she has been top-billed has made less than the last. From a $14 million haul for Colette (2018) we’re now down to $1.9 million worldwide for Misbehaviour (2020) and $400,000 for Silent Night (2021). After her breakthrough in True Grit (2010), Hailee Steinfeld’s career had also been wayward, big budget flops including Bumblebee (2018) and The Marvels (2023).

If the movie’s box office sounds like a Hollywood fairy tale and you maybe recall it as not doing much business Stateside, that’s because, in one of those anomalies that occasionally shine on a movie, it proved an absolute sensation in South Korea. Just under half of its entire worldwide revenue came from South Korea. Go figure.

Even without that, a $43 million haul for an improbable lightweight semi-romance mainlining on artistic purity would have had the backers rubbing their hands with glee.

Compulsion (1959) ****

One movie that didn’t need Orson Welles to ride in and save the day and in some senses he gets in its way. Not because he’s – as was often his wont if lacking strong direction – over-acting but because his presence shifts the narrative imperative from motive and psychiatric investigation to a plea against passing the death sentence. A fictionalized version of the “crime of the century,” the kidnapping and killing of a young boy by Leopold and Lowe, a pair of intellectually arrogant wealthy young men, in Chicago 1924, it would make ideal fodder for a Netflix true crime slot, especially as there was no contesting the evidence.

Until the arrival of woebegone defense attorney Jonathan Wilks (Orson Welles) – Clarence Darrow in the real case – this has been given a low key docu style treatment even if it only touches upon what might have caused Arthur (Bradford Dillman) and Judd (Dean Stockwell) to embark on their terrible deed. They have intellectualized murder, believing that they are beyond mortals in their cranial superiority and therefore not only capable of committing the perfect crime, but relishing the prospect of getting away with it and rubbing their inferiors’ noses in the dirt.

Cocky sexually confident Arthur is the dominant one, constantly tormenting his friend for his social deficiencies, Judd the more vulnerable, astonished to find that someone can interpret the loss of his mother as impinging on his emotional security. We enter the tale post-crime and the narrative assumes the audience is already familiar with the Leopold and Lowe case, which proves a distraction now because I had to look them up to fill in the blanks.

Setting aside their superiority, the movie brings to the fore aspects of criminal behavior only familiar to us from more recent analysis. For example, Arthur wants to remain close to the investigation, offering the police advice, and taking malicious enjoyment out of pointing out possible suspects. Police procedure, which would still have been in its infancy, nonetheless turns upon tracing 4,200 purchases of a very common type of spectacles which, in an unexpected twist, is suddenly whittled down to three thanks to this particular pair containing an unique advanced design element.

However, alibis only fall apart by accident as the pair stick to their rehearsed stories even in the face of intense interrogation, especially Judd’s contention that his spectacles could have fallen from his jacket pocket close to where the body was discovered by pure coincidence. The pair have already confessed when Wilks rides to the rescue, or at least save them from corporal punishment. Most of this is via a legal trick. He places the onus of deciding their fate on the thoughtful judge who can follow legal argument more easily than a bloodthirsty jury appalled at the crime and out for revenge.

In his deployment of Orson Welles, director Richard Fleischer (The Boston Strangler, 1968) plays a blinder. Audiences expecting to see Welles in full bombastic oratory flow were blindsided by the almost apologetic tone taken. There’s virtually none of the usual courtroom sparring and there’s no last-minute witness final twist as was de rigeur for the genre. But, then, you’ve got Orson Welles, the greatest American actor never to win an Oscar, given what he could do with words, glances, whispers and silence. He’s always going to get the last laugh in an exchange of banter, but with a life a stake this isn’t the time for bluster.

It’s an incredibly well-judged performance. Setting aside the monologue, the kind actors would kill for, it’s his general demeanor, almost self-effacing, nothing swanky in his dress, and yet not resorting either to actor gimmicks like wiping sweat from his head with a handkerchief nor even raising his voice. Compare this to the Oscar-winning performance of Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and you’ll wonder why the Academy chose to overlook Welles.

But he’s not the only standout. Bradford Dillman (Circle of Deception, 1961) has the showiest role, oozing icy charm and indifference, but the more obviously emotionally-crippled Dean Stockwell (Psych-Out, 1968) has the more difficult. Perhaps Diane Varsi (Wild in the Streets, 1968) has the toughest part, convincing as the girl who finds something worth caring about inside a killer.

Richard Fleischer has always been unfairly tabbed as the not-great director who made a number of great films. Whichever way your sympathy falls on this issue, this is one of his great movies, steering clear of the sensational, cleverly keeping Welles out of sight until virtually the final third of the movie and then, courtesy of how well he has managed the material, not allowing the actor to steal the show.

Hardly dated at all given the death penalty is still practised in many U.S. states and countries around the world. The plea for clemency isn’t so much the driving force as the acceptance that money doesn’t buy immunity from psychiatric disorder and may well be its cause. Despite his arrogance, Arthur seeks the approval of “Mumsy”, while Judd has no mother. With a host of servants to carry out the parenting, the actual parents can go off and enjoy themselves, ignorant of the dangers of lack of attachment.

It’s still hard to feel any sympathy for the pair, indulging in a thrill kill because wealth protects them and at the mercy of intellect, and while Fleischer makes no attempt at exoneration or mitigation a contemporary audience would intuit more about the family imperfections or lack of parental care or psychiatric awareness that drove them to this.

Unmissable.

When Time Ran Out (1980) / Earth’s Final Fury ***

The Director’s Cut, can you believe? Or less pompously, The Expanded Version. An extra 30 minutes added to the general release version that traveled the world to general disfavor. (The original 121-minute cut was edited to 109 minutes and this version clocks in at 144 minutes.) Was it a sense of disgruntlement – or sheer opportunism – that led to the Director’s Cut, so many of which scarcely improved on the original version. How many versions can an audience take of The Exorcist (1973) or Blade Runner (1982)? And even where extra length definitely added depth to Kingdom of Heaven (2005) that couldn’t overcome its major flaw, in a massive case of hubris, director Ridley Scott believing he could get away with casting Orlando Bloom instead of waiting till Russell Crowe became available.

When Time Ran Out killed off the disaster cycle and the Hollywood career of uber-producer Irwin Allen who had started that particular ball rolling with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), upped the ante with The Towering Inferno (1974) and dropped the ball with The Swarm (1978) and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979).

This doesn’t feel so much like a disaster movie as a picture tying up all the knots, various relationships coming asunder, and having to accommodate a bunch of well-known supporting actors of dubious all-star-cast status before they suddenly spring into dramatic narrative view. Audiences had never been particularly keen on volcanic pictures, after all what can the trapped characters do but dodge a sludge of soup and hope they don’t run straight into a tidal wave or, worse, have to negotiate a rickety/rope bridge. The chances of you having a tightrope walker coming to the rescue would generally be remote but that’s what we have here (step forward Burgess Meredith).

I had thought from the title and some guy in a hazmat suit wandering over a desolate area that this might be a prophetic eco-disaster, but excepting that there’s, for reasons best known to the scriptwriters, an oil well being drilled close to a volcano and that hotel investor Shelby (William Holden) has the bright idea of using the volcano as a marketing prop, there’s nothing much going on. The special effects are okay on the small screen, but even if they had been spectacular on the big screen their effect on the much smaller environs of DVD would in any case have been diminished.

So, basically, it’s reliant on working up sufficient audience interest in the relationships to make us care for the characters. We’re offered a pair of two-timing teams. First up, we’ve got Shelby’s secretary and marketing guru Kay (Jacqueline Bisset) who’s just turned down the offer to become his sixth “or seventh” wife, but who, presumably is enjoying, this being the 1980s and not the 1930s, some kind of sexual dalliance with him. When Kay meets up with oil driller old flame Hank (Paul Newman), they rekindle their romance, although with doom impending there’s not much time to take it forward beyond a picnic on the beach.

Next up, hotelier Bob (James Franciscus) is cheating on wife Nikki (Veronica Hamel), Shelby’s god-daughter, with staff member Iolani (Barbara Carerra) who is due to be married to childhood sweetheart hotel manager Brian (Edward Albert). To flesh out the tale, both Shelby and Bob have daddy issues, Tom (Ernest Borgnine) is a New York cop on the tail of swindler Francis (Red Buttons), and no doubt audiences will be desperate to find who wins a cockfighting contest being held in a local saloon.

Modern transport proves no match for an eruption, so in quick succession we see a car and a helicopter tumbling down the mountainside. The tsunami wipes out a good chunk of the actors that didn’t make it into the all-star-cast bracket and everyone else takes to the hills, no doubt hoping they won’t encounter a rickety/rope bridge. Disaster turns enemies into pals, Tom and Francis, for example, though it’s only now that Nikki comes across her husband’s infidelity.

And this would be a disaster all round except that having hooked myself into watching this, courtesy of a freebie on YouTube, and nothing of real dramatic interest going on, I found myself, oddly enough, concentrating on the three principals and was treated, even more odd I guess, to fine examples of just what these stars do to earn their crust. Paul Newman (The Prize, 1963) in particular, with very little to react to, does very little but with incredible facial agility, to genuine effect, portraying emotion with infinitesimal gesture. Sure, he’s always had the shrug and the walk, both far more suggestive of inner turmoil than any other actor I can name, but here, with very little dialog coming to his aid, you can tell exactly what’s going on in those baby blues.

Jacqueline Bisset (The Cape Town Affair, 1969), too, dressed a good bit less suggestively than in the posters, essays a confident woman coming unstuck when confronted with a romantic error. The scenes between the pair are not meant to be scorching, so there’s none of the screen charisma audiences might feel they’ve been sold, but instead it’s a slow-burn, a couple trying to come to terms with each other, passing through disappointment and hopefully onto something better. And you can’t find anyone better to carry disillusion than William Holden (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968).

Abject swansong for director James Goldstone (Winning, 1969) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Carl Foreman (The Guns of Navarone, 1961) but Oscar-winning co-writer Stirling Silliphant (Marlowe, 1969) carried on longer. Who wrote the most effective scenes, Shelby’s engagement ploy and Hank’s initial rejection of Kay, is anybody’s guess but there is some quality writing here. Probably the strangest part of the whole debacle was that the source was a piece of non-fiction, The Day the World Ended by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, about a 1902 eruption on Martinique that had nothing to do with oil wells or hotel construction.

There’s always something wrong with a disaster picture if you suggest watching it for the acting, but happily, this is the case.

In Search of Gregory (1969) ***

Off-beat examination of the fantasy vs. reality conundrum with an ever-watchable Julie Christie as the woman on the titular hunt. The only film of acclaimed British theater director Peter Wood is a more whimsical cousin to the more deliberately obscure works of Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966) which pivoted upon the question of whether events presented actually occur or exist only in the head of the leading character.

Catherine (Julie Christie) is enticed to Geneva by her father (Adolfo Celi) for his latest wedding on the basis that she will meet the impossibly handsome Gregory (Michael Sarrazin). On arrival she discovers the agoraphobia of younger brother Daniel (John Hurt) has been temporarily lifted by Gregory. Catherine appears set to meet Gregory on a number of occasions, but either he does not turn up (the wedding) or somehow, they miss each other, even at one point occupying adjoining phone booths. And it would have been a pretty dull picture if that was all that was going on. But whether the result of reality or Catherine’s imagination, the Gregory we see is a vivid screen presence. The world the characters inhabit is unusual to say the least, so unique that it is either obviously real or fake, but virtually impossible to determine which.

The best Gregory sequence, of which Steve McQueen would be proud, involves the character moving by means of the windscreen from one side to the other of a car driven at high speed. In another scene Gregory plays the equally perilous game of Autoball, a kind of polo with stock cars. As convincing is Gregory’s avant-garde orchestra consisting of two guitars, bottles, a bicycle wheel, a waste bin and coins in a glass.

The detail is so extraordinary that it must be real. The brother seems real enough, too real if anything, close to enjoying (or pining for) an incestuous relationship with his sister. But for every moment that appears questionable – did she really witness Gregory making love to her future mother-in-law – there are others where doubts are immediately quelled (an address which appears non-existent is not). And long before anybody came up with the idea of selling bottled water, Gregory is apparently in the business of selling tinned Alpine air. Other moments she does not witness – Daniel riding a Lambretta/Vespa with feet on the handlebars – add to the prospect of genuine reality.

Catherine might even have met Gregory except that in going to bed with the man who looks very much like what we believe Gregory to look like she determines that he shall remain anonymous. So it’s anybody’s guess whether Gregory is a figment or phantom of her imagination. And why, of course, should such invention be necessary? Does it mean that her father and brother do not exist either?

It’s an entertaining mystery. There’s no great angst. Antonioni had the sense or cunning to ensure that consequence mattered in Blow-Up – a murderer escaping justice. But there’s no such tension here. While Catherine is tabbed a nympho by her brother (who never questions her father’s predilection for multiple marriages), the suggestion that she’d fly from Rome (where she lives with her boyfriend) to Geneva is the hope of a hook-up seems too far-fetched.

Despite the presence of Julie Christie – who can certainly carry even as slight a picture as this – and a quixotic turn from John Hurt (Sinful Davy, 1969) it’s neither obscure enough to be arthouse nor sufficiently plot-driven to be mainstream and remains an oddity. If you are going to be irritated beyond belief that will occur in the first fifteen minutes or so, but if you stay the course, you may find it a worthwhile watch rather than a cinematic car crash. Written by Bonnie Golightly (her only screenplay), Oscar-nominated Tonino Guerra (Blow-Up, 1966), and Lucile Laks (The Black Belly of the Tarantula, 1971).

Under Paris (2024) ****

That’s no ironic four-star rating either. While this would easily go straight into the Top Ten Guilty Pleasures the fact that it’s so darn good takes it out of the So Bad It’s Good bracket. Netflix has taken time off from beating down Oscar’s door with $200 million arthouse epics to steal summer. In a Hollywood galaxy a long long time ago this is the kind of unexpected blockbuster that would have sneaked into cinemas on Memorial Day as counter-programming and hit the jackpot.

As well as tearing up with astonishing confidence every trope in the monster playbook and not even stooping to attempt the kind of artistic kudos that lassooed so much critical acclaim for Godzilla Minus One, this is truly a terrific stomp. And it hoodwinks the audience along the way. From the onset it looked more like Jaws Goes Woke with eco warriors determined to save a thriller killer no matter how many humans he gulps down. And then there was a side helping of gaga science of the Moonfall variety, in this case that a shark had beaten evolution by being able to breathe freshwater as well as the saltwater of its natural habitat (in case you don’t know a shark should suffocate in freshwater). Plus it grows at an unprecedented rate and it don’t need no male to replicate and can get pregnant within a month or so of being born.

So it’s not just one shark swimming up the River Seine in Paris, France, and hiding out among the skull-sodden catacombs, but it’s hundreds of the darned monsters. And the mayor of Paris is all set with a giant lunch box when she fires the starting gun for the Triathlon. So you’ve got hundreds of red-hatted swimmers heading in the direction of a giant shark. Not to mention that there’s all these unexploded shells loitering at the bottom of the Seine and what with all the commotion one way or another they are apt to go off and bring down all the pretty bridges across the river, the apocalypse so stunning you’re pretty well astonished that in all the carnage the Eiffel Tower remains standing.

So how the heck did we get to this? Well, three years previously, oceanologist Sophia (Berenice Bejo) has been tracking a particular shark near Hawaii in (eco-nod number one) the Pacific Garbage Patch only to watch the beastie gobble up her husband and the rest of her diving team. So now, turns out the shark still has an electronic tag and somehow (gaga science of course) it has made its way 7,500 miles to Paris where the beacon is picked up by eco warrior and computer whiz Mika (Lea Leviant) and her girlfriend Ben (Nagisa Morimoto) who head up Save Our Seas which aims to stop sharks being slaughtered.

Sophia alerts disbelieving cops (who, by the way, are really nice to homeless guys) to the problem and eventually, minus cameras of course, they take to the water. Up to this point all we get are brief glimpses of a fin and a flashing shape but once Mika and Ben decide to put into action their own ploy and assemble dozens of their followers in the catacombs where the cops are chasing the shark then all hell breaks loose. The shark’s no respecter of eco-dopes and the eco-dopes prove no respecters of each other, trampling over each other in the water once the feeding bell rings. This is the kind of movie where nobody gets hauled out of water unless they’re going to be missing their legs.

Having assembled all the usual suspects – venal mayor desperate to hide the truth, river instead of beach teeming with potential victims, a great backdrop in the shape of the catacombs – then director Xavier Gens breaks all the rules. There’s no Jason Statham here to knock sense into the beast, and there’s no clever Quint, and there’s no keeping the public out of harm’s way. Instead this is Joe Dante with a bucket of style. Tangle with sharks and you’re gonna get yours is the message here not the usual let’s have a happy ending.

There’s are some stunning images. Torches of dead cops float down to a skull-strewn river bed, an underwater flare reveals just how many sharks there are, a shark dragging a string of yellow buoys heads towards swimmers decked out in red caps, the bridges tumbling down, the ensuing tsumani (bet you never expected that). And on top of that there are some neat scenes. Sophia’s pompous ecology lecture is punctured by giggling kids who, checking her up on social media, point out her credentials are somewhat tarnished given she lost her entire crew to sharks. One sensible cop doesn’t go along with the usual sacrificial nonsense as his colleagues put themselves in harm’s way because his family means more to him than a shark.

This should have been Netflix going DTV. Instead, it’s Netflix showing Hollywood where to go.

Unmissable. You gotta see this.

By Love Possessed (1961) ***

You couldn’t get further away from The Magnificent Seven (1960) than this buttoned-up –Peyton Place melodrama but director John Sturges, struggling to put together a more favored project, ended up here. It’s not that he didn’t have experience in this genre, having helmed Spencer Tracy legal drama The People Against O’Hara (1952) and June Allyson in The Girl in White (1952) but it was only when you turned to this field that you realized how much more freedom there was in a western.

There’s no shortage of pithy dialog courtesy of Charles Schnee (Butterfield 8, 1960). The marriage of Arthur Winner (Efrez Zimbalist Jr) and wife Clarissa (Barbara Bel Geddes) is more “merger” than romance. Opposing lawyers are “friendly enemies.” Arthur’s son Warren (George Hamilton) balks at a “smug career.”

There a couple of marvellous scenes and the characters are well-drawn, too well-drawn perhaps, audience constantly being reminded of personality defects, and it reeks of the formulaic, wealthy lives coming apart in Mansionworld. The biggest problem is there’s way too many characters that suffocate the life out of the picture. The heat the director clearly expected to generate is missing, hardly surprising in a world where duty dominates.

We’re pretty much nearly halfway through the picture before adultery crops up, bitter alcoholic wife Marjorie (Lana Turner) falling for Arthur, the business partner of her husband Julius (Jason Robards). Just around the same time Warren avails himself of a one-night stand with local “tramp” Veronica (Yvonne Craig) because he wouldn’t dare lay a hand on fiancee Helen (Susan Kohner), the town’s richest gal.

Simmering in the background is what today we might recognize as early onset dementia, which in those days was just treated as the frailties of old age, when Arthur discovers his boss Noah (Thomas Mitchell) has been stealing from a client. So, as you can imagine, the whole set-up is all set to explode as characters rebel against self-imposed restraint.

First to crack in the bigger sense is Helen who commits suicide when a spurned Veronica accuses Warren of rape. Then you can take your pick of various other outcomes. And that’s a shame because there’s interesting material here, mostly left unexplored because we’re wrapped up in a game of consequences.

Ace Harvard law student Warren falls out with his father over the case, just discussed but never played out, of a young mother who has killed her baby. The woman, with a mental age of eight, believed her newborn was dead and so buried it. Warren argues his father should offer a plea of insanity, which Arthur rejects as a legal dodge. The question of how the pregnancy occurred is never discussed, but you can guess it could as easily be incest or at the very least someone taking advantage of an incapacitated youngster.

There’s a great scene – the Majorie A and Marjorie B sequence – where Julius explains how on the one hand his wife runs a great house and is a terrific social adjunct and on the other hand is wild, impulsive, demanding and it’s the second one he fell in love with and, although currently rejected, refuses to give a divorce. And it’s Julius again who has the best character defining scene, when he acknowledges that pity is “a dirty word.”

Some surprisingly raw language is used when it comes to the question of rape. “The law assumes a common tramp like Veronica can still be raped” and the question of consent carries a contemporary sting.

Perhaps the biggest issue is the unspoken. It’s not love the main characters are after, it’s sex. Julius is lame after an auto accident and that appears to hinder his activities in the marital bed. Warren is too scared of Helen’s reaction to engage in the normal fumblings of youth.

The top-billed Lana Turner (who headlined the original Peyton Place, 1957) is kept at bay for too long as the other factors are brought into play and to be honest she is way out of the league of the likes of Efrem Zimbalist Jr (A Fever in the Blood, 1961). He would scarcely come up to scratch for a woman like her unless she was desperate. And perhaps she is. Turner steals every scene she’s in. The only character who shows screen spark is the vengeful Veronica who refers to herself in the third person – “nobody treats Veronica like a tramp but Veronica.”

George Hamilton (A Time for Killing, 1967) has some moments, but not enough. The same goes for Yvonne Craig (Batgirl in the Batman TV series 1966-1968). Jason Robards (A Big Hand for the Little Lady / Big Deal in Dodge City, 1966) takes an early stab at the simmering tense persona he would make his screen template. Charles Schnee was so annoyed with what happened to his original script, adapted from the James Gould Cozzens bestseller, that he insisted on using the pseudonym John Dennis.

A well turned-out potboiler.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady / Big Deal at Dodge City (1966) ****

An absolute delight. Thrilling too. Knocked sideways in the box office battle of the poker pictures by the purportedly classier The Cincinnati Kid (1965) with Steve McQueen in one of his most iconic roles facing off against Edward G. Robinson and underrated ever since. But this more than holds its own against the Norman Jewison number. In part because of terrific untypical performances from Once Upon a Time in the West alumni Henry Fonda and Jason Robards.

I get my daily movie fix late at night when the rest of the house is abed and disinclined to share my interest in old movies but when at a critical point my DVD gave out instead of, as would be more sensible, giving up and going to bed, I spent ten minutes frantically scouring YouTube for a copy, even glancing hopefully at one in a foreign language, and expended the same time again tearing apart my DVD collection, which at one point had been sensibly arranged alphabetically until too many additions made nonsense of that arrangement, until I found another copy. Finally, I settled down, even later at night, to watch an enthralling finale.

*A more blatant example of artistic license you couldn’t find. The movie is set in Laredo, not Dodge*.

Fielder Cook (Prudence and the Pill, 1968), with only a handful of movies to his name and generally considered no great shakes as a director, plays this hand brilliantly. It reeks of mystery, as a poker table should. We begin with an undertaker’s coach racing from town to town and house to house collecting with urgency a disparate collection of people delivered to the backroom of a hotel in Laredo, Texas, where, nonetheless, the townspeople are excited beyond belief. It’s the long-awaited poker game between the five richest men in the territory.

As he stuffs more cash in the safe and pulls out bigger and bigger batches of poker chips, the hotel owner (James Berwick) is constantly badgered by his exuberant customers as to who is winning. He remains mute on that score until Doc Scully (Burgess Meredith), heading out to deliver a baby and a foal, asks the same question. Such is the medic’s local standing, the owner gives a reply. This means something to the onlookers but not to us because we have very little concept of the players.

And that remains largely the case beyond some good-humored and occasionally tense banter when we learn that Drummond (Jason Robards) abandoned his daughter’s wedding to get here and that lawyer Habershaw did likewise in court leaving his client to defend himself. And the game itself is boisterous, devoid of the cathedral-like atmosphere of The Cincinnati Kid.

But when a relatively impoverished newcomer Meredith (Henry Fonda) enters the fray the situation turns ugly as he is besieged by insult and verbal abuse as his paltry stake gets smaller and smaller. When he takes his last $3,000 – the whole sum intended to provide a new future for his wife and son on a farm near San Antonio (“San Antone” he quickly learns is the correct pronunciation) – he discovers that he is undone as his fellow gamblers raise the bidding beyond his amount.

At which point he collapses, potential heart attack. Doc Scully hauls him off on a makeshift stretcher. The money will be defaulted unless upstanding wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) of the anti-gambling fraternity can be called upon to play out his hand in a game of which she is completely ignorant and, more to the point, raise the cash to be allowed to continue.

The players sneer at what she has to offer. The richest men in the territory have no need, even at a cut-price offer, of a gold watch and a new team of horses and wagon. For a moment you think Mary, seeing her family fortunes going downriver, is going to offer herself as collateral, but instead, she decides to try and get a loan, based on the hand she holds, from the bank. You might as well try to get blood out of a stone from bank owner Ballinger (Paul Ford). Maybe she has something worth more to him as collateral than watch and wagon.

I won’t spoil it for you by revealing the ending but it’s well worth the wait and the mystery.

I was knocked out by Henry Fonda’s acting. Usually, he is gritty, upstanding, sometimes the last man standing, and his smile is often more of a grimace. Here, he is nervous, jumpy, anxious, and desperate, the reformed gambler unable to resist temptation, persuading himself that this one last game would be worth all the broken promises given his wife. His smile is so ingratiating you wouldn’t want anything to do with it. As regards the temptation facing addicts it’s on a par with the heroin victim of The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and the alcoholics of Days of Wine and Roses (1962).

With him removed from the equation, the acting lot falls to Joanne Woodward (A Fine Madness, 1966). She’s the prim opposite and doesn’t overplay her hand, restraining as best possible her confusion and fear. And this is a very fine turn from Jason Robards, most commonly accused of over-acting or under-acting, and here he gets the balance just right, volubility matched by arrogance, and a determination not just to win but to demolish an opponent.

A raw truth is expored here. Winners don’t just like winning – the medal, the lap of honor, the pile of cash, all that jazz – but they enjoy more seeing the defeat of their opponent, savoring that disgrace. This ain’t the kind of game that ends in a handshake or embraces sportsmanship. This is real in a way that The Cincinnati Kid is not.

There are a couple of familiar faces, John Qualen (The Sons of Katie Elder, 1965), and Charles Bickford (Days of Wine and Roses) in his final movie. The rest of the cast is largely anonymous, there to add febrile excitement, with hollering and racing around, desperate to keep up with the action.

Screenwriter Sidney Carroll had been here before, the big stakes, no-hoper taking on the world in The Hustler (1961) but he and Cook had managed a small-screen rehearsal of this picture a few years before on U.S. television in the DuPont Show of the Week series.

Every now and then, as I’ve maybe mentioned before, one of the joys of this little odyssey into the world of the 1960s movie is that you come across a little gem.

This one sparkles.