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> April 2020 saw me focusing on films by two of the most durable, respected icons of the cinema- black actors whose intrinsic dignity and integrity made them role models for millions of African Americans and other ethnicities who were eager to rise above the inherent, systematic racism of our culture.
Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte are both in their 90’s now, and not long for this world, but their legacies will live forever.
(All ratings are on a 5 star scale. Note that a classic only becomes a classic after a decade or more.)
(Titles in purple have been expanded for Flix Pix columns.)
> This month I evaluate the following 19 of feature films:
CAPTAIN NEMO & THE UNDERWATER CITY (1969)***
SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968)* / **/ ****
TARGETS (1968)***+
THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933)*****
LIVE AND BECOME (2005)****
THE BOBO (1967)**
VAMPYR (1932)****
KRISHA (2015)***+
THE WORLD, THE FLESH & THE DEVIL (1959)****
THE WHOLE TOWN’S TALKING (1935)****
BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (1983)**+
THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1924)****
THE ANGEL LEVINE (1970)**
PLANET OF THE HUMANS (2020)****
NO WAY OUT (1950)****
PARIS BLUES (1961)**
PRESSURE POINT (1962)*****
DUEL AT DIABLO (1966)****+
EDGE OF THE CITY (1957)*****
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
CAPTAIN NEMO & THE UNDERWATER CITY (1969) ***
> As a small child, my older siblings tell me I was crazy about a TV character named “Diver Dan”. Don’t remember him, but I certainly was much more of a “Flipper” kind of guy than a “Lassie” kid.
. I dug the Disney take on 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA despite the corniness and bad giant squid effects, and consequently, the submarine ride at Disneyland was probably my favorite attraction. I loved to watch intrepid diver Lloyd Bridges on “Sea Hunt” every week. As a child, I thought I might grow up to be an oceanographer- so any undersea adventure is likely to appeal to me. I absolutely loved THE ABYSS and DAS BOAT. Rest assured this film is as flat and cardboard as those films are exciting and dangerous. CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY is a pretty crappy film actually- but with my fondness for the genre, it was a fun crappy film.
. In this iteration of the H.G. Welles classic (there are many!), the iconic Captain Nemo is played by a very tired-looking Robert Ryan, who seems a man ill-suited to his uniform. The story involves a group of shipwrecked souls who are rescued from certain drowning by the inscrutable seafarer, and spirited away to his magnificent underwater city where he is Donald Trump on steroids. Nemo is a complicated man- cultured, educated, but also driven and tyrannical. His word is law, and he has no intention of ever allowing his new charges to return to their life on land. One of the rescued and then abducted is Chuck Connors- a U.S. senator on an important diplomatic mission- setting up an inevitable conflict that endangers the very existence of Nemo’s perfect underwater world.
. A product of its time, this is more product than art. It’s not a film that celebrates the vision of H.G. Welles, but rather, tries to exploit it- rather poorly.
– 3 stars anyway, because I just love the whole soggy genre.
SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968) * / **/ ****
> I had been looking for this European trilogy of Edgar Allen Poe stories for a long while.
. My interest was perked by the fact that two of the three directors were the wonderful Louis Malle and the celebrated Italian cinematic wizard Federico Fellini. I love the work of these two great artists, though the only Vadim film I saw was the utter dog BARBARELLA. But when it came to SPIRITS OF THE DAED, the overall result is sadly less than the sum of its parts.
* The first segment (“Metzengerstein”) was a dreadful bore, badly directed by Roger Vadim. Fresh off of BARBARELLA, he dragged his leading lady along for the debacle. Jane Fonda in a series of glamorous, revealing gowns, is the only good thing about the film. Her gothic Countess develops a fascination for an aloof cousin (uncomfortably played by her brother, Peter!), but is met with rejection- so she has the man’s beloved horses killed by an act arson. Sure. Who wouldn’t? Tragically, her cousin perishes trying to save them, and the Countess is haunted- very weakly and lamely by the act. The ending of Metzengerstein is as bland as everything that came before it. One stinkin’ star!
** The middle segment (“William Wilson”) was Louis Malle’s contribution- and it is certainly among the least of his efforts. At this point in his fine career, the skillful French director was just concerned with making money to produce the wonderful MURMUR OF THE HEART. Making a brief film inspired by the works of the great master of horror was just a paycheck to him. In it, French leading man Alain Delon plays a bully who cannot abide a rival who shares his name. Murder is his response- but once again, it is an act that torments him and comes boomeranging back with the point of a knife. Bridgette Bardot is mere window dressing, injected to sex it up a bit. Two lonely stars.
**** But the third segment, (“Toby Dammit”) was a short Fellini gem, that basically covered the same ground as 8½ and LA DOLCE VITA. Terence Stamp is perfectly cast in this is a little treat, as a spoiled, alcohol-addled actor struggling to negotiate the frenzy of stardom. He is blearily besieged by paparazzi and hangers-on constantly demanding his time and attention, while he gradually sinks into an ever more self-destructive madness. There is so much to enjoy here, with the usual inimitable Fellini visual flair. The second part of it drags a bit, once Toby takes the wheel of the sportscar he gets as payment for a typically surreal celebrity appearance. Seriously impaired as usual, Toby tears recklessly through the narrow, curvy byzantine streets, past flat wooden facsimiles of people, on a delirious appointment with destiny. He has an inevitable rendezvous with a menacing little girl with a white ball. Death, Toby explains, comes in whatever form most scares the soul about to die…
– Too bad the first two segments were not even close to being in the same league as the third. Fellini rocked.
TARGETS (1968) ***+
> Peter Bogdanovich’s debut feature was a winner.
. A “genre” picture, absolutely immersed in the Hollywood of its era and all the great cinema that came before it, TARGETS is a story about a bland, average (heavily-armed!) Joe, who just snaps one day and goes on a random shooting spree. Yeah- doesn’t sound like much fun. But it features both Bogdanovich himself and a very good Boris Karloff playing a thinly-veiled version of himself.
. It’s a film with great tension, and the final showdown at a drive-in movie theatre is tense, exciting and rewarding, because the payoff is just perfect, giving Karloff one of the best scenes I’ve ever seen him play.
. Even cooler for me- this was shot on the home turf of my childhood, in an era I richly remember. I remember the storage towers across from the Sepulveda Dam where the madman assumes his first sniping position, taking aim at random L.A. drivers on Interstate 405. (Every time we’d pass it in the car, we kids took unbridled delight in referring to the “dam house” on the top of the spillway, because we could get away with “cursing” in context.) I remember even more vividly the Reseda Drive-In where the crazed sniper takes up position behind the screen- a brilliant storytelling device, because the victims are looking directly at their assailant but cannot see him. The scenes in the little playground for restless kids and the low-ceilinged snack bar were virtual time capsules for me.
. This unsettling film was really ahead of its time in its depiction of the most terrifying of all violence: senseless, unpredictable, inexplicable carnage from the man next door. Tim O’Kelly is just perfect as the maniac, because he is as non-threatening and white bread as possible. When he turns the gun on his mother, she never sees it coming. As they say: it’s always the people you would least expect.
. Karloff and Bogdanovich have an awkward, unconvincing drunk scene that is supposed to be comic relief, but outside of that, Karloff is very moving as a celebrated horror actor nearing the end of his career, who has been so pigeonholed that he wistfully doubts he could even handle a straight role anymore. The irony of course, is that this is exactly who he is and what he is doing in this sensitive nuanced, winsome role. It’s an almost painfully self-aware moment. And then there is his dynamite moment at the end that makes it all worthwhile.
. An interesting note: Here, Karloff’s character is named “Byron Orlac”. Most people will miss the reference to the great silent German horror film THE HANDS OF ORLOC. I would have been one of those people, had I not just seen this vivid expressionist nightmare.
– TARGETS is good filmmaking that started off a very good career.
THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933) *****
Fritz Lang revisits his master criminal 11 years after his silent classic DR. MABUSE THE GAMBLER- and what a difference a decade makes! It’s a talkie, for starters, with good production values where the original was a silent, and so badly damaged, the original production values were hard to discern. This sequel picks up the story after the criminal mesmerist went mad and was imprisoned in a mental institution. He does not speak, but only scribbles his “manifesto” wildly. The thing is, even though he lives in silent isolation, he still appears to be somehow masterminding his ongoing criminal organization. The mad doctor is played again by the wild-eyed Rudolf Klein-Rogge, but there is a new Commissioner in town played by the expansive Otto Wernicke, and he is determined to solve the enigma. German expressionism was a totally unique animal, and although they are not as stylized as THE CABINET OF DOCTOR CALIGARI, the touchstone of the genre, these Mabuse films are stylish affairs. This one often feels shockingly modern, especially in the final reel where there is a great action sequence, though it moves at a pace than modern audiences would never stomach. Still, at two hours it certainly runs at a much swifter clip than its almost five-hour predecessor! It is impossible to come away from these films with anything short of extreme respect for Fritz Lang. He was certainly among the early pioneers of cinema- a man whose work helped create the language of film, as such- an absolute visionary of the medium.
LIVE AND BECOME (2005) ****
> This accomplished film has scope and vision, and an admirable attention to detail.
. It’s a sprawling story about “Operation Moses”, in which some 8000 Ethiopian Jews who were terribly persecuted in Islamic Sudan, were covertly airlifted to Israel in 1984. I knew nothing about it. History, even recent history, is always rife with compelling stories to tell.
. This canvas is so large that three actors are called upon to play the central figure- a traumatized young man who feels abandoned by his mother, when she sends him away from the hellish refugee camp they are squatting in so that he might escape her fate, so he might have a chance to “live and become something”. Her abandonment was actually the most extreme case of unbridled motherly love- but tell that to small child who is being shoved away by the only family he knows.
. The frightened boy is taken under the wing of a grief-stricken woman who has just lost her son, and passed-off as a Jew so he might find a new life in the promised land. But it is not an easy fit. For many Israelis, Judaism is not a one-size-fits-all religion. Darker hued Jews who have no tradition of circumcision are viewed with skepticism, and sometimes, with outright racism. When the damaged child grows into adulthood he is obsessed with only one thing: becoming a doctor, and returning to the displaced peoples camps in Africa to find his mother, if she is still alive to be found, and replace the part of himself that has been missing since the day they separated.
. There is some wonderful acting in this Israeli film, and some very effective storytelling about a culture and historical event most Americans know nothing about. There is so much tragedy here, but we are not left with that sour taste of heartbreak, but rather, with a beautiful moment of transcendent hopefulness, as in Bergman’s masterwork CRIES AND WHISPERS.
– Four stars.
THE BOBO (1967) **
> This plastic film is pure silliness.
. It tells the story of a singing matador with no discernible talent, who makes a bet with a lecherous empresario that if he can bed Barcelona’s most desired but notorious maneater within three days, he will win an engagement at the showman’s theater. It’s silliness- pure, crude, dumb silliness. That’s okay. After all, it’s a vehicle for Peter Sellers in his prime, and Britt Ekland in all her fecund glory.
. The producer is a real piece of work. He epitomizes the misogyny of the entire film rather well. (He is played by the actor Adolfo Celi, seared into my head as Bond villain Thunderball.) The film’s depiction of Ekland’s heartless user of men is a pretty ugly stereotype. Which is not to say I have not met women like her before. When one is made to believe that their only personal power lies in their sexuality, it should come as no surprise when that sexuality is weaponized. Of course, Seller’s talentless buffoon is so sure of himself and the lure of his manly pheromones, it seems a foregone conclusion that he will succeed where legions of lesser men failed.
– More than 50 years later, THE BOBO is an entertaining embarrassment.
VAMPYR (1932) ****
> After seeing the stunning ORDET and his almost unrivaled classic THE PASION OF JOAN OF ARC, I became very interested in seeing more work from the great Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer.
. When I found his foray into horror on The Criterion Channel, I had to give it a look.
. For the early part of the film, I appeared to be watching a stunning classic. Despite the very spotty quality of the image (having been reconstituted from two sources in different countries), I could see the exceptional artistry, as the protagonist Allan Gray, a border in a spooky French country inn, gradually gets drawn into a supernatural mystery unfolding around him. On his first night there, a mournful old man enters his room and stares down at Allan intensely, who cowers in fear in his bed. The terrifying intruder leaves a packet on the end table saying: “Open this when I’m dead.” A terrific setup!
. Soon, Allen is following lithe shadows of figures that are not there, who seem to have a life of their own. It’s a terrific segment, as he shadows the shadows through a derelict barn, across the grounds and into a nearby castle. There, he witnesses his mysterious nighttime visitor being murdered by a formless shadow, gradually drawing him into the orbit of the undead vampire who curses every life it touches. Unfortunately, this is when the film grew less interesting. The build-up was better than the payoff. Still, there is much to impress here.
– With VAMPYR, Dreyer was helping to invent an entire sub-genre that is still a cash cow for practitioners of the art of scaring the cash out of audiences.
KRISHA (2015) ***+
> Jeez- it took some gumption for first time director Trey Edward Shults to draft his entire extended brood to play the nuclear family nearly obliterated by addiction and alcoholism spotlighted here!
. His script is so tough and naked, it would be a challenge for highly trained actors, let alone amateurs. It’s one of those “dysfunctional families at Thanksgiving” films- now a sub-genre unto its own. And it’s a good one.
. Trey’s real-life aunt Krisha Fairchild plays the “KRISHA” of the title, and one can only hope that she is not being asked to play herself, as this character is so difficult, so damaged, there is not one ray of humor or even hope in her! Krisha arrives determined to take the responsibility of preparing the holiday meal. From the moment she knocks on the door, you know this is a very bad idea. Her entire family feels angry and estranged from her, after, sunk in addiction, Krisha appeared to just abandon them in favor of her self-destructive lifestyle.
. She yearns painfully to reestablish a connection with her son, played as a barely contained human explosion by director Shults, but he cannot even look her in the eye. At one point, you would not have blamed him if he punched her in the face! Tragically, that would have been consistent. There is a toxic masculinity in the family that borders on brutality, so casually rendered it’s terrifying.
. Some really great dialogue here. This filmmaker has a sharp eye for the way families speak to each other! Most of the performances (outside of Krisha’s searing turn), are somewhat flat and not fully convincing. People do not come off in the best of light. One family member gave a really interesting “performance”- in quotes because I am not entirely sure he wasn’t playing himself! Bill Wise presented a truly fresh character for a relative amateur, smart-alecky and piquant but charming. He seemed to be the only one in the family with any charm. The rest could be a pretty strident bunch that would be hard to stomach in a flick, if the tension and pacing didn’t keep the story propelling forward. And it does!
– Trey Edward Shults pulls it all off here, making me very interested in seeing his sophomore effort.
THE WORLD, THE FLESH & THE DEVIL (1959)****
> Harry Belafonte had a production company for a brief time in the late ‘50’s. “HarBel” Productions (Get it?), only made two features, and this is one of them.
. This dystopian racial drama was a seminal film in my childhood. I would have been all of 2 years old when this rumination on systemic racism shamed America on the silver screen. Given the entrenched racial attitudes of the time, it must have rocked the boat a bit! I came to see it through re-runs on our monster TV when I was perhaps 7 or 8. Even at this tender age, I was already beginning to wrestle with questions of race in America. Because I had already fallen in love with LILIES OF THE FIELD and his “Live at Carnegie Hall” LP, Harry Belafonte was already my ideal of a “real man”. His unwavering dignity helped me form a positive image of people of darker pigmentation than I, in my most formative years. I am grateful for that, though I have come to learn that across color lines, dignity and integrity are just as ubiquitous as the ugly human traits. A man should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. The story this tells about race in America represents the world I lived in when I was a mere baby. Many things have changed for the better. Some things feel like they will never change.
. Here, the whole fraught conflict was reduced to three characters: a black man (Belafonte), a white woman (Inger Stevens), and a white newcomer (Mel Ferrer), whose arrival destroys their budding inter-racial relationship. It all begins when Belafonte’s engineer gets trapped in a mine cave-in just as nuclear Armageddon strikes. (How’s that for timing!) By the time he digs his way out, the world seems completely deserted. He drives into New York City to find a veritable ghost town.
. It is the stuff of my dreams- literally. (It is the plot of my first book “THE END. A BEGINNING?” that I wrote when I was 14 without any realization I had practically stolen the title from the end of this film.) This sequence is spectacular as a snapshot of the Big Apple circa 1958- minus a single living soul. How they got these shots I cannot imagine. They do not appear to be effects of the era. The streets must have been cleared just after dawn for very quick takes. Failing, I don’t know- some pandemic of some kind, I can’t imagine how one would get these shots today except digitally.
. Using his engineering skills, the last man left alive sets up shop in Manhattan, unaware that he is being watched by the only woman left alive, who is afraid to make herself known, partly no doubt, because of the racial divide. He may be the last man alive- as far as she knows, but he is still a Black man. It is awkward when she does, because if the world were still going full tilt boogie, it would be socially taboo for her to bond with him- even illegal in some states in 1958! Once the white guy arrives, the conflict becomes ever thornier, until it comes down to a private war between two men, fighting over the most limited resource of all: the only known living female.
. Ferrer and Belafonte stalk each other like human prey through the empty skyscraper canyons of the ghost city, until… one of the two or three most egregious endings I have ever seen in a movie. Such a total, almost demoralizing cop out! The choice is such a letdown. And worse, the closing words so heavy-handedly splashed across the screen that I unconsciously chose them to title that first book.
– Great film. Horrible ending!
THE WHOLE TOWN’S TALKING (1935) ****
> John Ford deftly helmed this delightful comedy about a meek, milquetoast of a newspaper clerk, whose entire life is completely upended when the world comes to recognize his astounding resemblance to “Killer Mannion”, public enemy number one.
. The more I see of him, the more impressed I am with Edward G. Robinson. He was great in THE SEA WOLF and THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and THE RED HOUSE and SOYLENT GREEN- he’s great here in the dual role of unlikely hero and nasty villain.
. The plot is great fun: Once the good Robinson is mistakenly arrested and his true identity revealed, he is given a “police passport” that verifies he is not Killer Mannion, but merely his exact doppelgänger. But the real killer gets wind of this, and recognizes it as his get-out-of-jail-free pass. The ruthless criminal pays a visit to his meek lookalike and tells him how it’s gonna be, see? The timid clerk gets the exonerating pass by day- but the vicious gangster gets it by night, to use as cover for his regular crime sprees that set the entire city on edge. It gets even better. Jean Arthur is here too, doing her spunky ‘gal Friday’ thang, though her attraction to Robinson is never believable for an instant. They have no chemistry whatsoever.
. Expect delightful twists and turns as the poor schmuck leaps from the frying pan into the fire.
– So much fun, this one!
BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (1983) **+
I was excited to see this very British social satire, because it was considered the third in a trilogy by director Lindsay Anderson, and although I was somewhat bored by the first film (IF…) I was absolutely gobsmacked by the second (O! LUCKY MAN), that continues the adventures of young Mick Travis, memorably played by A CLOCKWORK ORANGE’s Malcolm McDowell. This film lampoons the British health care system in ways that non-Brits may just not understand fully. But most of it is ridiculously obvious: like shooting fish in a barrel. The end is so far over-the-top, that it slips from satire to broad farce- losing me in the process. If you are not old school British to the bone, you can safely skip this tepid, insular comedy.
THE HANDS OF ORLAC (1924) ****
> More silent German expressionism! (Well, Austrian, in this case.) Good.
. Like VAMPYR, it’s another seminal horror film that helped shape the genre to come. THE HANDS OF ORLAC is a very creepy tale:
. A celebrated concert pianist loses both of his hands in a terrible train wreck. A visionary surgeon manages to give him new hands- but echoing the fate of Frankenstein’s monster, with his “bad brains”, having belonged to an executed murderer, the appendages seem to have a mind of their own. The lead actor is Conrad Veidt, the same man who was so memorable in the silent classics THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI and THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. (In fact, director Robert Wiene was also the in the director’s chair for CALIGARI- one of the most acclaimed silent films of all time.) The plot gets very tricky, as the former pianist begins to believe his new hands are killing people, completely unbeknownst to his brain. But is he being played by a very clever criminal, keen to blackmail the tormented man?
. I would have certainly deemed THE HANDS OF ORLOC a classic, if only it didn’t move so slowly. What’s here is very good, but everything is dragged out too much, bogging the proceedings down. I would be curious to see the reboot from 1960, with Mel Ferrer in the role.
– For modern filmgoers, the remake might be more judiciously edited.
THE ANGEL LEVINE (1970) **
> I have been a big fan of Zero Mostel from the days of Fiddler on the Roof, and of Harry Belafonte since LILIES OF THE FIELD, so I was excited to see them together.
. My interest waned fast.
. This story about an aging Jewish tailor caring for his quickly declining bedridden wife, when an angel enters their lives in the unlikely form of an antsy, belligerent black Jew, certainly had a promising set-up: The angry angel only has until dawn to convince Mostel’s spiritually skeptical character that he is truly an angel sent from his estranged God. But here’s the kicker: It has to happen on faith alone. This angel is not allowed to perform any corroborating miracles. And if he does not succeed, Belafonte’s angel ceases to exist with the coming dawn. (God drives a cold bargain!) Great plot for a stinky movie.
. The dialogue goes in circles without ever gaining traction. The score is God awful. Belafonte has an earthbound mistress that he treats like shit- even battering her on camera! WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING BELAFONTE?! You were a role model for countless black (and white!) youths. Is this the example you wanted to set? Yeah, I know: he was only playing a character. But this a character Belafonte should never have played, because he was not just any actor: Belafonte was Hollywood’s conscience at the time this film was made. Bad choice for his legacy! And the ending? Ack! Terrible! The filmmakers chose the least satisfying possible ending- a cold splash of nihilism.
– Skip this turd!
PLANET OF THE HUMANS (2020) ****
> I had a difficult time giving this extremely alarming documentary the review it deserved, because there was so much more to this searing documentary expose of failed leadership in the environmental movement than I could ever address.
. I came away from this film feeling borderline suicidal. If the situation is as bad as depicted in this film, if all our best efforts and every solution on the horizon are abject failures- not moving toward a sustainable population and lifestyle, but away from it- there didn’t seem to be much point in any of my life’s efforts to help steward the planet to a better place. Why bother? PLANET OF THE HUMANS was just so damn dark and disempowering- it may have been the most painful doc I’ve ever watched.
. I am now not sure how much of it I can trust entirely, but I certainly learned that I had accepted the sweet fib of biofuel far too blithely, based on the surface reality alone. It seemed like a promising, environmentally responsible energy alternative. I didn’t look any deeper. But what if the “bio” that is burned for “fuel” is composed of the trees making up what’s left of the nation and world’s forests? How would The Lorax feel about that?
. I STAND WITH THE LORAX, ALWAYS.
. This bleak reality-check also gave me a very unpleasant whiff of Al Gore, who is savaged here for what appears to be good reason, and when confronted- when given a chance to defend or explain himself, Gore totally cops-out, in a smug, superior kind of way. Was this a case of deceptive editing? Was Gore misrepresented? Is this film all it purported to be?
– READ Gary A. Patton’s take on it. Gary performed a much better analysis than I could have achieved, and it is very eye-opening indeed:
https://lastcre8iveiconoclast.wordpress.com/2020/05/16/quiet-in-the-back-an-in-depth-look-at-the-controversy-surrounding-planet-of-the-humans/
NO WAY OUT (1950) ****
> Joseph L. Mankiewicz directs this tense, successful racial drama from 6 years before my birth.
. NO WAY OUT tells the story of a black doctor (a typically poised, contained Sidney Poitier), who is treating a white racist (the volatile Richard Widmark in an excellent turn), and his woozy brother after a botched robbery. Poitier realizes that the racist’s brother is likely suffering from a brain tumor, and performs an emergency spinal tap, but the man dies on the operating table. Widmark’s wild, nasty hater blames Poitier for the death, and becomes consumed with retribution. As the first black doctor at the hospital, Poitier’s reputation is on the line.
. Was he right in his diagnosis or somehow guilty for his patient’s death because he let the racist taunts cloud his judgment?
. The only way to tell is an autopsy, but the dead man’s vile brother is next of kin, and convinced it will be used as part of a hospital cover-up, the racist will never allow it. Things quickly ratchet-up to a fever pitch, as race riots engulf the town- white against black against white. NO WAY OUT was very intense stuff for its era. I was pleasantly surprised an the hard-edged reality Mankiewicz summons here, coming from a time that was better known for platitudes and polemics than confronting painful truths.
– Its sophistication comes as a nice surprise, and the ending of this gritty black-and-white powerhouse is just about perfect, Poitier’s final line, a gem!
PARIS BLUES (1961) **
> Martin Ritt directs Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier as wholly unconvincing jazzmen, pursuing their Muses in the close musical cellars of Paris.
. Neither of them are believable behind their instruments. Newman does not appear to be even trying! No jazz trumpeter worth his weight in salt plays solos without the soul of the music playing clearly across their faces. Newman has no facial expression whatsoever at these moments, looking more like a sleepwalker than a jazz musician. Odd!
. Two American tourists enter their lives, introducing the possibility of fundamental change. Conveniently, in a racially stratified time, if not a racially stratified place, one of them is black (Diahann Carroll), and the other white (Newman’s real-life mate Joanne Woodward). Romance ensues for both- forcing each to make a tough decision. For Poitier, he has to decide if his new love is powerful enough to go back to a racist country where he will be seen as “black” first and “human” second. For Newman he has to decide if he is willing to walk away from a successful Parisian career to return home and be “domesticated”. Predictably, these parallel crises lead the friends in different directions.
. As you can see from my 2-star rating, this film ain’t much. Certainly, it is among the least of Martin Ritt’s work. But this has two spectacular things going for it that belie my low rating: The musical director on this film is… Duke Ellington! The music itself is hot, hot, hot- partly because Louis Armstrong is a secondary character, who represents the colorblind lure the Paris jazz scene had for musicians of that era. Any glimpse of Louie is a slice of heaven!
– Ritt’s recreation of the era is not bad, but more than a bit romanticized by the Hollywood treatment it receives here.
PRESSURE POINT (1962) *****
> Hubert Cornfield directs this tense psychological drama about the pathology of blind racial hatred, and it is a deep dive into the dark night of the human soul.
. PRESSURE POINT is a story within a story:
. Peter Falk is a clinical psychologist, deeply frustrated with his inability to make any progress with a black patient who loathes him and every “white” person. Agitated, he asks his boss (a focused, intense Sydney Poitier), to reassign him to another patient. In reply, the older mentor begins to recount the particulars of a similar case he faced as a young doctor, when he was charged with treating a World War II Nazi sympathizer who loathed blacks and Jews and any convenient target that can be painted as “other”. I have never been a particular fan of Bobby Darin, but he is very, very good here as the vile hater, tormented by events from his own youth that led him astray.
. Director Cornfield does a masterful job of storytelling, using the technical tricks of the medium to heightened effect. Some therapy segments meld the worlds of the therapist and patient with the childhood world where the damage was caused, to thrilling effect. Darin’s retelling of his descent into Nazism is chilling indeed. For a film from 1962, PRESSURE POINT feels far, far ahead of its time. I could not possibly suggest this great film more avidly. And horribly, it was a prescient story, foretelling a future that arrived with all the horrors predicted here…
– And more. Lots more.
DUEL AT DIABLO (1966) ****+
> Ralph Nelson directs this near-classic western with a steady hand.
. He throws you right into the action, when traumatized cowboy James Garner finds a woman alone in Indian territory, about to be ravaged. Fiery Swedish actress Bibi Anderson (a staple of Bergman films, slumming it here in Hollywood), is stalked by vengeful Apaches who will torture her to death if they can get their hands on her. Fighting him every step[ of the way, Garner rescues Bibi and brings her home to a bitter, disgraced husband, played with palpable bile by a very good Dennis Weaver. But she keeps running away to return to the tribe she once lived with, even though it will likely mean her death. What is up with this crazy woman?
. The reason finally becomes clear: She had a baby with an Indian brave, who she longs to be reunited with. But the tribe holds her responsible for the death of that brave, and means to take her life to avenge his.
. For his part, Garner is ever-searching for the man who killed his Native American wife. What he discovers is a shocker. Sydney Poitier is here too, playing a self-absorbed dandy who is initially only looking after his own best interests, but gradually becomes more of a heroic figure. (Really nice to see Poitier in a “colorblind” role, where race is never mentioned and never figures in the conflict and the character is more Man than Black Man.)
. This DUEL is so damn good. Amidst the usual cliches of the western, the landscape is gorgeous, the storytelling excellent, in that the stakes are constantly rising and the odds of survival constantly sinking. Subplots intertwine to keep the tension taut. The editing is first rate and the action sequences, exciting- though I have to remark that I hate to see horses used the way they are in films like this. No equine actor ever signed a waiver for stuntwork, acknowledging the risk. I know they are highly trained, etcetera, but this film is from 1966- before studios felt it necessary to include any disclaimers that “no animals were harmed in the making of this production”. No doubt many were! There is an obvious stunt cue these western riders give their horses. You see it all the time: They inexplicably pull up on the reins, letting the horse know it’s time to take a fall. It’s stupidly fake, I notice it every time, and every time, I hate to see such an intelligent animal so roughly used. Nelson went with a lot of day-for-night here- a convention of its day that looks dumb now. The shadows are always far too pronounced to be moonlight. but once again, it is a film terribly marred by the musical idioms of the era. The overwrought score by Neil Hefti (THE ODD COUPLE and TV’s campy Batman), is god-awful! It absolutely reeks of 1966, for events that are supposed to be happening in the 1880’s. It is so precious and calculated and bombastic, that it only serves to pull you out of the reality of the film. James Garner does that for me too, unfortunately. Outside of VICTOR/VICTORIA, I can never ever see a character there- only a different shade of likable but lightweight James Garner.
– With a bit more restraint, maybe some better casting, DUEL AT DIABLO coulda been a classic western. As it is, it comes awfully close.
EDGE OF THE CITY (1957) *****
> Martin Ritt directed this tense, exciting, well-written racial drama with a light hand that did not reduce a complicated, thorny issue to platitudes and well-worn tropes.
. A haunted, wounded John Cassavetes is ‘Axel’, a man with a troubled past who drifts from job to job and city to city in a fruitless attempt to run from his own past. Painfully estranged from his parents after going AWOL from the army, he phones them regularly but cannot bring himself to speak. The family is roiled in hell. Axel applies for a job as a longshoreman, loading crates on the dock, fibbing to get the position, but his wily foreman (a scary Jack Warden at his best), choses to play along with the ruse, seeing it as an opportunity for lucrative graft. Warden knows Axel’s dark secret, and uses it as leverage to garner underhanded kickbacks on his hourly wage. Poor Axel is treated like shit on toast, to keep him disempowered, but he befriends one of the managers, a gregarious Sydney Poitier, who gradually leads Axel to a self-respect he has never had.
. Finally coming into his own, Axel tells Warden to go stuff it, setting off a terrible serious of conflicts, culminating a shocking violent confrontation between Warden’s snarling bigot and Poitier’s unapologetic black moralist, that changes everything.
. This script is just so damn good. The movie crackles with energy and spews sparks that could ignite a powder keg at any moment. In fact, this may be Ritt’s best film, which is saying a lot, considering he also directed HUD, NORMA RAE, SOUNDER, THE FRONT, CROSS CREEK, HOMBRE and THE GREAT WHITE HOPE! The ending just kicks ass! It is so triumphant that truly, I don’t know that I have ever been so thrilled by the ending of any film I have ever seen! EDGE OF THE CITY is just cinematic dynamite that will keep you on the edge of your seat!
– 5 very enthusiastic stars!
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And that was the month that was. Here’s to the films of tomorrow!:
Vive Cinema, denizens of the dark!
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