The Fast and the Furious (1954)

 

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS  (1954)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Ireland, Edward Sampson

    John Ireland, Dorothy Malone, Bruce Carlisle,

    Iris Adrian, Larry Thor, Bruno VeSota, Byrd Holland

Not to be confused with the unending 21st-century franchise starring Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez, this is an early Roger Corman production about an accused murderer and a girl with a souped-up Jaguar on the run together. They elude the cops and enter a road race that conveniently ends in Mexico, which is where the guy is trying to escape to. Low-budget vroom vroom, shot in nine days for $50,000, with some classic vintage race cars and tough, B-movie performances by Ireland and Malone. Snub Pollard, a comedy star from the silent era, turns up in a supporting role.

Louise Brooks (1986)

 

LOUISE BROOKS  (1986)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Richard Leacock, Charles Chabot

A documentary from the BBC's Arena series, about the recklessly alluring silent star whose place in cinema history and popular culture has long transcended her brief career. Brooks made only a handful of notable films, most famously "Pandora's Box" (1928), whose hedonistic, self-destructive heroine eerily mirrors Brooks herself. In interview footage shot years later, Brooks claims she didn't know what she was doing when she acted, but she was naturally good at it, and her work stands out in the silent era for its instinctive minimalism. Her career collapsed with the advent of sound films, not because she couldn't act in them, but because she had burned too many bridges in Hollywood. By the 1950s, she was living in obscurity and alcoholic squalor when she was rediscovered, moved to Rochester, New York, and embarked on a second career writing about movies. She died at 78 in 1985, a year before this film aired on TV. Linda Hunt does Brooks' voice here, reading from her essay collection "Lulu In Hollywood". 

The Gunfighter (2013)

 

THE GUNFIGHTER  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Eric Kissack

    Shawn Parsons, Scott Beehner, Hannah Knight,

    Jordan Black, Brace Harris, Circus Szalewski

Not Gregory Peck's "The Gunfighter", but a short comic western about a saloon full of desperate characters who can't escape an invisible narrator's all-knowing voice. A goof played stone-cold straight (or mostly straight), like if Tarantino shot a sketch for "Saturday Night Live". 

Behind Convent Walls (1977)

 

BEHIND CONVENT WALLS  (1977)  ¢ ¢

    D: Walerian Borowczyk

    Ligia Branice, Howard Ross, Marina Pierro,

    Gabriella Giacobbe, Loredana Martinez, Rodolfo Dal Pra,

    Mario Maranzana, Alex Partexano, Olivia Pascal,

    Gina Rovere, Dora Calindri, Francesca Balletta

Baroque nunsploitation, a lewd look at life and lust in the cloister. So one of the nuns carves dildoes. One writes erotic letters to and from an imaginary lover. One draws dirty pictures and sells them to the other sisters. One thinks she's gotten the stigmata.One's pregnant and gives birth. One finds a novel use for a violin. My personal favorite (spoiler alert!) was the one who prays while doing naked yoga exercises. The camerawork is gauzy and soft-focus, the nuns are all cute (the young ones, anyway), the storytelling is minimal, and there's just enough nunly nudity to make you want to keep your eyes open. It's too contrived to be really sinful, but just in case, Father Sebastian will be hearing confessions in the chapel on Saturday afternoon.

Born To Kill (1947)

 

BORN TO KILL  (1947)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Robert Wise

    Claire Trevor, Lawrence Tierney, Elisha Cook Jr.,

    Walter Slezak, Phillip Terry, Audrey Long,

    Esther Howard, Isabel Jewell, Kathryn Card

Lawrence Tierney plays a psycho who murders a couple of people, and Claire Trevor plays the newly divorced dame who finds the bodies on the floor. They cross paths at a casino and then on a train on the way out of town, and this being film noir, nothing good happens for them or anybody else. A vicious, low-life thriller with a scary performance by Tierney as a hair-trigger head case women somehow find irresistible. Trevor's role is trickier, a gold-digger angling to marry her way to an elusive sense of self-worth, and her performance is a study in moral disintegration as her facade slips away. Walter Slezak as a verse-loving detective and Elisha Cook Jr., in one of his better roles as Tierney's watchful pal and guardian, provide scene-stealing support. 

A Quiet Passion (2016)

 

A QUIET PASSION  (2016)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Terence Davies

    Cynthia Nixon, Jennifer  Ehle, Keith Carradine,

    Joanna Bacon, Duncan Duff, Jodhi May

The quiet, passionate life of Emily Dickinson, from the time she left school in 1848 to her death at 55 in 1886. Dickinson spent  just about all of that time - her whole adult life - in her family's home, living for years as a virtual recluse. She also turned out 1,800 poems, only ten of them, severely edited, published during her lifetime. Cynthia Nixon recites some of those poems in voiceover while playing Emily in this film. It's beautifully designed and composed and shot, but the script is literate to a fault, with characters exchanging perfectly formed sentences as if they were engaged in a contest to see who can score the most elegant rhetorical points. The actors do what they can, but it's hard to imagine real people talking that way, even if it is the 19th century and one of them is Emily Dickinson. 

Charlie Chan At the Opera (1936)

 

CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OPERA  (1936)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: H. Bruce Humberstone

    Warner Oland, Boris Karloff, Keye Luke,

    Charlotte Henry, Thomas Beck, Margaret Irving,

    Gregory Gaye, Nedda Harrigan, William Demarest

Detective whose working vocabulary conspicuously lacks articles investigates murder at opera house. Chief suspect is escaped maniac, but case might not be so simple. "This opera is going on tonight, even if Frankenstein walks in," stage manager says, and guess which actor plays maniac?

Zotz! (1962)

ZOTZ!  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Castle 

    Tom Poston, Julia Meade, Jim Backus,

    Cecil Kellaway, Zeme North, Fred Clark,

    James Millhollin, Mike Mazurki, Margaret Dumont

Tom Poston was a prolific comic actor who had a long career on television, while appearing in just a handful of theatrical films. In this one, he plays a professor of ancient languages who comes into the possession of a medallion that appears to give him extraordinary powers. It's a light-weight, Cold War comedy from William Castle, whose specialty was gimmicky horror. Here, Castle's trying to steal from Frank Capra, which doesn't exactly make him Frank Capra. The movie's pleasant but slight. Louis Nye, Poston's old colleague from the Steve Allen Show, makes a cameo appearance, and Margaret Dumont turns up in a late-career role and catches a cake in the kisser.

True Story (2004)

 

TRUE STORY  (2004)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Stephanie J. Via

    India Schell, Jordyn Pugh, Foxy

In voiceover, an old woman tells a story from when she was a little girl. The story has a disturbing part, but there's a moral at the end of it. It involves a cat. At the same time, on the screen, an old woman pokes through an empty old house, picks up a photograph and looks at it, hears something and looks out the window, and sees a little girl with a cat. At the end, the old woman and the little girl (but not the cat) walk away together. It's shot in stark, old-photo black and white and lasts five minutes.

Destination Tokyo (1943)

 

DESTINATION TOKYO  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Delmer Daves

    Cary Grant, John Garfield, Dane Clark,

    Robert Hutton, Alan Hale, John Ridgeley,

    William Prince, Tom Tully, Faye Emersion,

    Peter Whitney, Warren Douglas, John Forsythe

Exciting World War Two adventure starring Cary Grant as the captain of a submarine on a mission to recon Tokyo in advance of the Doolittle bombing raid. I first saw this on TV when I was a kid, and the part where the pharmacist's mate performs an appendectomy while the sub sits at the bottom of Tokyo Bay is still intense. Even in the context of a wartime propaganda flick, the anti-Japanese rhetoric is vicious. 

Africa Screams (1949)

 

AFRICA SCREAMS  (1949)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Charles Barton

    Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Hillary Brooke

    Clyde Beatty, Max Baer, Buddy Baer, 

    Shemp Howard, Joe Besser, Frank Buck

Idiot bookstore clerks go on an African safari and much jungle nonsense follows. A fairly amusing A&C comedy, even if the gags are familiar and the running time of just under 80 minutes feels a little long. The supporting cast includes the Baer brothers as a couple of strong-arm enforcers, and Shemp Howard and Joe Besser, who at different times (but never together) were part of the Three Stooges.

Gunga Din (1939)

 

GUNGA DIN  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: George Stevens

    Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Victor McLaglen,

    Sam Jaffe, Eduardo Ciannelli, Joan Fontaine,

    Montagu Love, Robert Coote, Abner Biberman

The classic adventure yarn based on Kipling, with Grant, Fairbanks and McLaglen as army sergeants fighting off the brown-skinned savages in the name of Her Majesty the Queen. Grant gets most of the funny stuff, Fairbanks gets the romance (which doesn't last long), and McLaglen bears a striking resemblance to late-stage Errol Flynn (0r maybe it's that Flynn toward the end of his life was starting to look like Victor McLaglen). I'm still not sure how Grant survives the climactic battle after being shot, stabbed and tortured, but in a movie like this one, it's better not to ask too many questions.

Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927)

 

BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY  (1927)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Walther Ruttmann

A remarkable documentary tracking a day in the life of Berlin at about the half-way point between the two world wars. Some parts were obviously staged, but even those look real enough. The most startling: a sequence somewhere in the middle, a series of increasingly tight closeups of a woman about to commit suicide. Like Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" (released two years later), Ruttmann's eye doesn't miss anything. Speeding trains, empty streets, a man walking a dog, kids going to school, people walking to work, taxicabs, typewriters, factory machinery, horse-drawn wagons, a nightclub, a cinema, a coffin, a cat. From early morning to late at night, it's all there. The print I saw on YouTube had no sound at all, not even a musical score, but the picture quality was exceptional. If you're cruising for something to look at some night, and you've got an hour to spare, check it out.

Rooster Cogburn (1975)

 

ROOSTER COGBURN  (1975)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Stuart Millar

    John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Zerbe,

    Richard Jordan, John McIntire, Strother Martin

"True Grit" meets "The African Queen", with the Duke reprising the role that won him an Oscar and Kate again cast as a feisty, rock-ribbed spinster. The chemistry between the two looks so effortless, you'd think they'd been acting together forever, but this was their only joint appearance onscreen. The plot, about some outlaws and a wagonload of nitroglycerine, is serviceable, and in this case, that's enough. The stars take care of the rest.