My Journey Through French Cinema (2016)

 

MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA  

    D: Bertrand Tavernier                            (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢

Bertrand Tavernier looks back at some of the filmmakers and some of the films that have influenced his own life and work, from Jacques Becker and Jean Renoir to Jean-Pierre Melville and Claude Sautet. The clips are wonderful and you see a lot of Jean Gabin, whose career covers roughly the same time frame the movie does. On the minus side, the talking-head witnesses are unidentified, leaving casual viewers in the dark about who they are, and reading the subtitles while Tavernier narrates in French takes your attention away from what you really want to be looking at. (I usually prefer subtitles, but this is one foreign-language film that should've been dubbed.) A documentary aimed squarely at cinemaphiles, specifically those who already know French.

Bertrand Tavernier

(1941-2021)

Play Misty For Me (1971)

 

PLAY MISTY FOR ME  (1971)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Clint Eastwood

    Clint Eastwood, Jessica Walter, Donna Mills,

    John Larch, Jack Ging, Donald Siegel 

Clint plays a whispery-voiced deejay whose bed-hopping lifestyle turns into a bloody nightmare after he picks up an obsessive fan in a bar. Eastwood's first film as a director, a combination star vehicle, psychosexual thriller and cinematic tourist brochure for Monterey and Carmel. There are a few too many idyllic shots of the star and Donna Mills walking among the cypress trees, but some key elements of Eastwood's filmmaking style are already evident: the use of dark lighting (with cinematography by Bruce Surtees), the musical accent on jazz, and the very first shot in the picture - a long, sweeping, helicopter's eye view of the California coast. A precursor to "Fatal Attraction", with a blood-chilling performance by Jessica Walter as the kind of girl you don't want to pick up in a bar. Eastwood mentor Don Siegel makes an on-screen appearance as Murph the bartender. 

Jessica Walter

(1941-2021)

The Weak and the Wicked (1954)

 

THE WEAK AND THE WICKED  (1954)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: J. Lee Thompson

    Glynis Johns, Diana Dors, John Gregson,

    Olive Sloane, Rachel Roberts, Jane Hylton,

    Athene Seyler, Sidney James, Sybil Throndyke

Glynis Johns and Diana Dors check into prison together and start paying their debt to society. They've both got boyfriends on the outside, but how long can the men be expected to wait? On the other hand, how many inmates in a women's prison ever looked like Diana Dors? In a movie like this one, probability is relative. The flashback episode featuring two scheming old women, a mean old man and a pot of tea spiked with weedkiller would've pleased Alfred Hitchcock. Alternate title: "Young and Willing".

Steamboat 'Round the Bend (1935)

 

STEAMBOAT 'ROUND THE BEND  (1935)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Ford

    Will Rogers, Anne Shirley, Irvin S. Cobb,

    Eugene Pallette, John McGuire, Berton Churchill,

    Francis Ford, Stepin Fetchit, Roger Imhof

Will Rogers plays a riverboat pilot out to win a race and save his nephew from being hanged. In this movie, the river people hate the swamp people, the swamp people hate the river people, everybody hates the Yankees, and a sign that reads "WHITES" over a door at the railroad depot lets you know you're in the Jim Crow South. And there's Stepin Fetchit. Rogers died in a plane crash before the picture's release. 

Yellowbeard (1983)

 

YELLOWBEARD  (1983)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Mel Damski

    Graham Chapman, Peter Boyle, Marty Feldman,

    Madeline Kahn, Eric Idle, James Mason,

    John Cleese, Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong,

    Peter Cook. Michael Hordern, Kenneth Mars,

    Martin Hewitt, Beryl Reid, Susannah York,

    Spike Milligan, Ronald Lacey, Nigel Stock

A Pythonesque spoof on pirate movies. Aargh!

Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988)

 

THELONIUS MONK: STRAIGHT, NO CHASER 

    D: Charlotte Zwerin                           (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

Clint Eastwood's company produced this documentary on the brilliant, eccentric pianist, whose impact on the jazz world was profound, despite escalating mental-health issues that eventually caused him to stop playing. If Monk wasn't completely detached from the rest of the world, he was at least at odds with it. He seems to be spinning - literally and figuratively - in his own universe, touching down only when he's playing music, and even then he's in a world of his own. The movie is conspicuously nonlinear, which makes sense, and a lot of it is just Monk at the piano, which makes sense, too. Whether there needs to be footage of his girlfriend's cats (of which there are way too many), or Monk ordering liver and mashed potatoes from room service, seems questionable, but any time his fingers are stabbing at the keys, you can see what made him unique. Look for the part where Monk, playing in a club somewhere, takes a cigarette out of his mouth with one hand, uses a handkerchief to wipe his face with the other, and seemingly never misses a note. Who could do that? Only Thelonius Monk.

Un Carnet de Bal (1937)

 

UN CARNET DE BAL  (1937)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Julien Duvivier

    Marie Bell, Harry Baur, Pierre Blanchar, Fernandel,

    Louis Jouvet, Raimu, Françoise Rosay, Alfred Adam,

    Pierre-Richard Willm, Maurice Bénard, Pierre Alcover

In the wake of her husband's death, a middle-aged woman comes across her dance card from a ball she attended when she was 16. Wealthy and lost for something to do, she decides to track down the men whose names are on the card, the guys who told her they'd always love her, to see what became of them. She's chasing ghosts. The ball exists only in memory (in slow-motion flashbacks), but it haunts the woman and those long-ago suitors still. One's now a gangster. One's a priest. One's a hairdresser. One's a small-town mayor. One's a doctor on the skids, susceptible to seizures and seen only in tilt shots. One has escaped to the mountains. One's dead. She even encounters a girl who could be a ghost of herself. She finds her old partners. They all remember. And she learns something else. You can't go back to the ball.

Silver River (1948)

 

SILVER RIVER  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Raoul Walsh

    Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Thomas Mitchell,

    Bruce Bennett, Monte Blue, Barton MacLane

Errol Flynn plays a Union Army captain who's drummed out of the service for a decision he makes during the Battle of Gettysburg: He burns a payroll wagon rather than let a million dollars fall into enemy hands. From then on, he's determined to act only in his own self-interest, and he does. He makes a fortune in gambling, mining, banking, and eventually owning a big chunk of the western United States. There's a downside, of course. He's screwed over practically everybody, and those people are broke, miserable and extremely pissed off. Flynn was showing some wear and tear by this time. His drinking was an issue during the shoot, and Raoul Walsh, with whom he made seven pictures, never worked with him again. The movie's not great, but there's something uniquely American about a story that's all about money and ends with a street brawl between two gangs of vigilantes, suggesting that if there's one thing our culture reveres more than scorched-earth capitalism, it's a lynch mob.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

 

THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE  (1972)  ¢ ¢

    D: Ronald Neame

    Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons,

    Carol Lynley, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters, 

    Jack Albertson, Pamela Sue Martin, Arthur O'Connell

Just moments after midnight on New Year's Eve, the mother of all tsunamis smashes into an ocean liner and turns it upside down. Ignoring the advice of the crew, a daring band of passengers try to make their way up through the bowels of the ship to the hull, where they hope somebody will rescue them. A really terrible movie that's fun in a junky kind of way. It made a ton of money and helped launch a decade's worth of big-budget, all-star disaster films. The producer, inevitably, was Irwin Allen, and the picture won Oscars for best song and special effects. An early stage in the unlikely route to survival involves scaling a tall artificial Christmas tree, which requires both the retired prostitute (Stella Stevens) and the teenage hottie (Pamela Sue Martin) to discard their skirts, something the solidly built Jewish matron (Shelley Winters) is not asked to do. Carol Lynley, sporting a sporty pair of shorts, gets by without a wardrobe adjustment.

Screen Test / Take 14

 

Match the following movies with the actors who appeared in them:

                     1. "Harry and Tonto"

                     2. "Harry and the Hendersons"

                     3. "The Trouble With Harry"

                     4. "Harry Brown"

                     5. "Harry &  Son"

                     6. "Give 'Em Hell, Harry"

                     7. "Harry Black and the Tiger"

                     8. "Harry In Your Pocket"

                     9. "Dirty Harry"

                   10. "Harry and Walter Go To New York"

                                 a. James Coburn

                                 b. John Lithgow

                                 c. Stewart Granger

                                 d. Clint Eastwood

                                 e. James Whitmore

                                 f. Michael Caine

                                 g. Art Carney

                                 h. Paul Newman

                                  i. Shirley MacLaine

1-g / 2-b / 3-i / 4-f / 5-h / 6-e / 7-c / 8-a / 9-d / 10-f

Yoga Hosers (2016)

YOGA HOSERS  (2016)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Kevin Smith 

    Lily Rose Depp, Harley Quinn Smith, Johnny Depp,

    Austin Butler, Tyler Posey, Adam Brody,

    Justin Long, Tony Hale, Natasha Lyonne,

    Genesis Rodriguez, Vanessa Paradis, Haley Joel Osment,

    Ralph Garman, Sasheer Zamata, Jason Mewes, Stan Lee

Kevin Smith goes to the well once more, with another comedy centered around a convenience store. This time the store's in Manitoba and the clerks are a couple of high-school sophomores played by Smith's daughter Harley Quinn and Lily Rose Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp. It starts out with the girls being hit on by two senior boys who turn out to be Satanists, and ends with them fighting a monster whose moves are choreographed by an army of Nazi sausages. Weird? Yeah. But not funny weird. More like weird and what's the point. Johnny Depp, disguised beyond recognition, plays a crackpot author, and Jason Mewes appears just long enough to remind you that Smith used to make movies ruder, cruder, smarter and more inspired than this.

Pickup On South Street (1953)

 

PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Samuel Fuller

    Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter

    Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Milburn Stone

A pickpocket working the New York subway lifts the wallet out of a woman's purse, not knowing that it contains a strip of film the commies and the FBI both want real bad. This is set in a backstreet world Fuller knew well from his early career as a crime reporter, and the movie got some McCarthy-era flack for being un-American, with a protagonist whose beliefs and motives were thought to be dangerously apolitical. That the movie has no use for communists, either, is the flip side of the equation. Fuller was an equal-opportunity provocateur. Widmark's perfectly cast as the shifty, smart-talking pickpocket. Jean Peters plays the hard-luck dame who's trapped between the feds, the reds, the thief and the cops, and desperately wants to get the film back. Murvyn Vye's a cop named Tiger and Richard Kiley's a communist agent, but the scene stealer is Thelma Ritter as a tired old woman named Moe, who knows every grifter in town, and just wants to make enough money peddling ties and information to buy herself a decent burial.

Invasion of the Neptune Men (1961)

 

INVASION OF THE NEPTUNE MEN  (1961)  ¢ ¢

    D: Koji Ota

    Sonny Chiba, Ryûko Minikami, Mitsue Komiya,

    Kappei Matsumoto, Takashi Kanda, Junji Masuda

Schoolboy astronomers help scientists fight off an attack from the planet Neptune. Good thing a caped superhero called Space Chief is on their side. Japanese sci-fi in the style of Flash Gordon, apparently conceived for seven-year-olds of all ages. The Neptune Men look like a metallic variation on Saturday Night Live's Coneheads, but they don't say much, and they don't even pretend to be from France.

The Bamboo Saucer (1968)

 

THE BAMBOO SAUCER  (1968)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Frank Telford

    Dan Duryea, John Ericson, Lois Nettleton,

    Bob Hastings, Vincent Beck, Bernard Fox,

    Rico Cattani, Nick Katurich, James Hong

A team of Americans and a team of Russians join forces when a UFO touches down in China. Cold-War sci-fi with an incidental lesson in space-age dentistry: A flying saucer that runs on magnetic energy can be hell on steel fillings. Dan Duryea's last movie.