The H-Man (1958)

THE H-MAN  (1958)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ishiro Honda
    Yumi Shirikawa, Kenji Sahara, Akihito Hirata,
    Koreya Senda, Makoto Satô, Yoshio Tsuchiya
A Japanese variation on "The Blob", in which radiation from atomic testing in the Pacific produces a "liquid monster" in the form of some mysterious green slime that can move through sewers, up walls and under doors, and make people dissolve. I've got a special place in my moviegoer's heart for this one, which I first saw by mistake at the age of 11 or 12. My dad dropped my brothers and me off at the Eastwood Theater on Atwood Avenue, thinking we were going to see some Disney movie about a dog or a horse. Somehow nobody bothered to look at the marquee, so we didn't know the program had changed till the lights went down and there we were watching "The H-Man". It was a formative cinematic experience. When you're a kid with a waning interest in Disney movies, anyway, you don't forget something like that. 

Quote File / Take 14

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 
  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. 
  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the
  Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be 
  lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
  Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty
  in "Blade Runner" (1982)
  Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples
  From a novel by Philip K. Dick

Rutger Hauer

(1944-2019)

The Golden Boys (2008)

THE GOLDEN BOYS  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Daniel Adams
    David Carradine, Bruce Dern, Rip Torn,
    Mariel Hemingway, Charles Durning, 
    John Savage, Julie Harris, Angelica Torn
Three retired sea captains, sharing a house on Cape Cod in 1905, decide they need a woman around the place and take out an ad for a mail-order bride. They get one, and it's Mariel Hemingway, but her would-be husband (Rip Torn) has cold feet. That's enough to get the story going, such as it is. It's a likeably low-key comedy that plays like a television pilot, and an affectionate showcase for its cast of aging stars. Carradine's especially good, showing that behind the zen persona, he had a deceptive range. He died the following year. 

The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971)

THE INCREDIBLE 2-HEADED TRANSPLANT  
    D: Anthony M. Lanza                               (1971)  ¢ 1/2
    Bruce Dern, Pat Priest, Casey Kasem,
    Albert Cole, John Bloom, Berry Kroeger 
A movie about what happens when mad scientist Bruce Dern sews the head of a homicidal maniac onto the body of a mentally challenged giant. Like, what could possibly go wrong? The variable cleanliness of Bruce Dern's T-shirts suggests that continuity was not a high priority here, but it's probably the best two-headed-transplant movie from the early '70s you'll ever see, except for maybe "The Thing With Two Heads" starring Ray Milland, released the following year. 

The Hit List: Bruce Dern

"I like playing people that live just beyond 
  where the buses run."
  Bruce Dern

   There's a moment in "Chappaquiddick" where Ted Kennedy, distraught and disoriented after going off the bridge, gets on the phone with his father to find out what he should do. "Alibi!" the old man hisses. "Alibi!" You don't see the old man. He's just a voice on the other end of the line. But the anger and contempt he conveys with that one word is unmistakable. So is the identity of the actor playing him. You know that voice. It's Bruce Dern.
    "Chappaquiddick" is a marginal movie, except for maybe two or three minutes, and they belong to Mr. Dern. Dern claims not to like the idea of "stealing a scene," but he does it all the time, and he's been doing it in movies for close to 60 years. It's an inescapable fact that when he's on screen , no matter how small the part or obscure the film, you pay attention to Bruce Dern. 
    He grew up in relative affluence on the outskirts of Chicago. His grandfather, George Dern, was FDR's first secretary of war. He angered his family by dropping out of the University of Pennsylvania to try acting in New York, where he auditioned his way into the Actor's Studio and came under the influence of Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. It was Kazan who gave him his first movie role, a small part in "Wild River" (1960), and he's been acting in films ever since. Here are a few of them:

"Silent Running" (1971/Douglas Trumbull)
An eco-sci-fi thriller with Dern as an astronaut caring for the earth's last forest, in space.
"The Cowboys" (1972/Mark Rydell)
Bruce at his nastiest. He shoots John Wayne.
"The Laughing Policeman" (1975/Stuart Rosenberg)
Dern and Walter Matthau play mismatched partners in a detective movie set in San Francisco.
"Smile" (1975/Michael Ritchie)
Dern plays a civic booster in Ritchie's subversive depiction of a teenage beauty pageant.
"Family Plot" (1976/Alfred Hitchcock)
Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane and Karen Black play the four main characters in Hitchcock's final film. 
"Black Sunday" (1977/John Frankenheimer)
Dern plays a terrorist with big plans for the Super Bowl.
"Tattoo" (1981/Bob Brooks)
Dern's an obsessive tattoo artist. Maud Adams plays his canvas.
"On the Edge" (1986/Rob Nilsson)
Dern's perfectly cast as a blacklisted runner competing illegally in California's Dipsea Race.
"Wild Bill" (1995/Walter Hill)
Bruce does an eccentric bit as a crippled gunfighter who challenges Wild Bill Hickock  from his wheelchair. 
"Nebraska" (2013/Alexander Payne)
Dern got an Oscar nomination playing an old guy who embarks on a quixotic journey across the plains to redeem a sweepstakes ticket. 
"The Hateful Eight" (2015/Quentin Tarantino)
Bruce plays a Confederate general in Tarantino's snowbound, wide-screen western.

   If there's a common denominator in Dern's characters, it's that they're all a little desperate. They long for something more than they can ever hope to get, which hasn't stopped them from trying to get it. Some of them have rejected society completely. Others are convinced that society has rejected them, or are terrified that it will. Their wounds might be self-inflicted, but most of Dern's people are damaged. They exist on society's edges. They haunt the margins. They don't fit in perfectly anywhere. 
    Dern's a runner and has been since he was a kid. He ran track at Penn and came close to making the 1956 Olympic team. He's in his 80s now, and his goal, looking ahead, is to make it to 100, and to be able to run a mile and act in a movie when he gets there. That seems kind of ambitious, but why not? A career like Dern's is at least partly a product of endurance, and Dern himself has always viewed it that way. He's in for the long haul, and I wouldn't recommend betting against the guy. He could be stealing scenes for a long time yet.

Apollo 11 (2019)

APOLLO 11  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Todd Douglas Miller
Pretty much anybody who was around back then can tell you where they were that day in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Anybody who wasn't around probably knows the history. Which makes it sort of interesting  how suspenseful this documentary on the moon landing manages to be. Partly that's due to Todd Douglas Miller's skillful editing, and partly to Matt Morton's percussive musical score. The footage is all archival stuff shot by NASA - it looks fantastic - and the voice work is mostly communications between the astronauts and ground control, with a little Walter Cronkite (inevitably) thrown in. One thing you notice (at least I did) is how straight-arrow everybody looks, from the NASA guys in their regulation crewcuts, white shirts and ties, to the touristy crowds camped out around Cape Canaveral. There's not a hippie in sight, and this was just weeks before the tribes gathered at Woodstock. Same country. Different cultural events. Same moment in time. Radically different fashion statements. 

The Mule (2018)

THE MULE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Clint Eastwood
    Clint Eastwood, Bradley Cooper, Taissa Farmiga,
    Dianne Wiest, Laurence Fishburne, Alison Eastwood,
    Michael Peña, Andy Garcia, Clifton Collins Jr.
It's not much of a stretch for Clint Eastwood to play an old man anymore. He's become one. Eastwood was 88 when "The Mule" came out late in 2018, and the character he plays is even older, so the casting makes sense. The movie's based on a New Yorker article titled "The Sinaloa Cartel's 90-Year-Old Drug Mule", and it stars Clint as Earl Stone, a horticulturist who specializes in flowers. When his business fails due to competition from the Internet, Earl puts his lifelong safe-driving record to use, moving cocaine from El Paso to Chicago in his pickup truck, because who would suspect a guy like that would be smuggling cocaine? It's not one of Clint's great movies, but it's a passable diversion, playing on a theme he's explored many times before: the primal importance of families, both biological and surrogate. At one point, Earl asks a young associate why he doesn't just split and find another line of work. The man replies that the cartel is his family. Earl himself is at odds with his wife and daughter, the family he's basically abandoned to pursue an award-winning career as a grower. (Parallels to Eastwood's own approach to family life may or may not be coincidental.) Other filmmakers have made movies at Clint's age or older, but not many, and it's the same with actors in starring roles. As far as I know, doing both simultaneously at that stage in life is unprecedented. At a point where most folks are lucky to be breathing, Eastwood's not just still in the game. He's having a real good time. 

On the Bowery (1955)

ON THE BOWERY  (1955)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Lionel Rogosin 
    Ray Sayler, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews
A believably gritty docudrama about life on skid row, with non-actors improvising their lines while essentially playing themselves. A lot of them didn't have much longer to live, and you can see why. Others simply wandered off and were never heard from again. If you want to know what slow death by alcohol looks like, you'll find it here. 

The Ten (2007)

THE TEN (2007) ¢ ¢
    D: David Wain
    Paul Rudd, Famke Janssen, Winona Ryder,
    Liev Schreiber, Gretchen Mol, Ron Silver,
    Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Oliver Platt,
    Bobby Cannavale, A.D. Miles, Jason Sudeikis, 
    Rob Corddry, Jon Hamm, Justin Theroux
A series of short comic sketches based on the Ten Commandments, some of them sort of amusing, some of them in questionable taste, and all of them just a bit off the wall. Like there's one where Winona Ryder gets it on with a ventriloquist's dummy. And one where two suburban neighbors try to outdo each other to see who can own the most CAT Scan machines. And one where a white woman tries to convince her black twin sons that their biological father is Arnold Schwarzenegger. My personal favorite was the Woody Allen spoof starring Paul Rudd and Famke Janssen. The prison rape episode and the one about the naked men's group that meets every Sunday morning, not so much.

Time Limit (1957)

TIME LIMIT  (1957)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Karl Malden
    Richard Widmark, Richard Basehart, Rip Torn,
    Dolores Michaels, Martin Balsam, June Lockhart,
    Carl Benton Reid, Kigh Dheigh, Yale Wexler 
A well-acted Cold War drama starring Richard Widmark as an Army lawyer investigating the case of an ex-POW (Richard Basehart) who's about to be court-martialed for treason. A lot of it revolves around people making judgments based on preconceived notions of the truth and resisting any thorough (or inconvenient) examination of the facts, an issue that resonates just as much now as it did in the 1950s. Some of this anticipates "The Manchurian Candidate". Widmark produced. Malden's only credit as a director.

Rip Torn

(1931-2019)

The Reports On Sarah and Saleem (2016)

THE REPORTS ON SARAH AND SALEEM  
    D: Muayad Alayan                        (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    Maisa Abd Elhadi, Adeeb Safadi, Sivane Kretchner,
    Ishai Golan, Mohammad Eid, Jan Kühne
Adultery can be a tricky game to play anywhere, right? Now imagine that the man's an Arab, the woman's Jewish, his wife is pregnant, her husband's an army officer, the place is Jerusalem, and Israeli security knows about them and suspects they're up to something more than a bonk in the back of his van. There's no good way this can end, but for its whole 127-minute running time, the tension never lets up. Issues are resolved up to a point, but the ending's ambiguous, a personalized take on the question that hangs over the wider conflict in the Middle East: What now?

Scent of Mystery (1960)

SCENT OF MYSTERY  (1960)  ¢ ¢  
    D: Jack Cardiff
    Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre, Beverly Bentley, 
    Paul Lukas, Liam Redmond, Leo McKern,
    Peter Arne, Diana Dors, Judith Furse 
Denholm Elliott plays a vacationing mystery writer who tracks an attractive blonde all over Spain, believing that somebody's trying to kill her. Peter Lorre plays his accomplice and sidekick, a taxi driver who always keeps the meter running. This was originally released in "Smell-O-Vision" - a gimmick in which scents were introduced in the theater, corresponding to whatever the characters were doing (or smelling) at the time. It bombed at the box office and was eventually reissued under the title "Holiday In Spain". The camera soars, swerves, sails and swoops all over the place, but it's really not much of a movie: big, long, colorful and completely innocuous. It's not hard to see why it lost money. Smell-O-Vision didn't last long, either, though John Waters did attempt something similar with scratch-and-sniff cards when he released "Polyester" in "Odorama" in 1981.

La Bohème (1926)

LA BOHÈME  (1926)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: King Vidor
    Lillian Gish, John Glbert, Renee Adoree,
    Edward Everett Horton, Karl Dane, George Hassell
Starving artists in Paris write, paint, make music, and struggle to pay the rent in a silent melodrama based on Puccini's opera. Gish at her radiant peak.

Queen of Outer Space (1958)

QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE  (1958)  ¢ ¢
    D: Edward Bernds
    Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, Laurie Mitchell,
    Patrick Waltz, Paul Birch, Lisa Davis
Astronauts knocked way off course crash on Venus and meet Zsa Zsa Gabor. Which is just about as silly as it sounds, and arguably the high point of Zsa Zsa's marginal big-screen career. Unaccountably, it was shot in CinemaScope and Color by Deluxe, with a script by Charles Beaumont from a story by Ben Hecht. Eric Fleming, who plays the spaceship's captain, was best known as the trail boss on television's "Rawhide".