Yours Mine and Ours (1968)

 

YOURS MINE AND OURS  (1968)  ¢ ¢

    D: Melville Shavelson

    Lucille Ball, Henry Fonda, Van Johnson,

    Tom Bosley, Tim Matheson, Sidney Miller

A widower with ten kids and a widow with eight meet up and get married, with predictably cute, sitcom results. (Think "The Partridge Family" or "The Brady Bunch", only with bigger stars in the leads.) If you've got to see this, try to watch it back-to-back with "Once Upon a Time In the West" (released the same year) to catch two really different sides of Henry Fonda.

Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)

 

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Jason Eisener

    Rutger Hauer, Molly Dunsworth, Brian Downey,

    Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman, David Brunt

Transgression sidles up to Grand Guignol in a dystopian action piece that crosses a few lines you probably haven't seen crossed in a mainstream movie before. Rutger Hauer plays the title character, who gives up his dream of buying a pawnshop lawnmower and invests in a pawnshop shotgun instead. It's a vicious and cartoonish vision of urban hell and a grim speculation on what the future of human civilization might look like. Personally, I liked it, but it's a movie not everybody will want to watch. Filmed in Nova Scotia and derived from one of the fake trailers in "Grindhouse" (2007). If all of Nova Scotia looks like this, we're in more trouble than we thought. 

Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)

 

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE INVISIBLE MAN  (1951)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Charles Lamont

    Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Arthur Franz, 

    Nancy Guild, Adele Jurgens, Sheldon Leonard,

    William Frawley, Gavin Muir, John Day

Rookie detectives stumble into the case of a boxer who injects invisibility serum while trying to nail the crooks who told him to take a dive and then framed him for murder. A routine A&C comedy, part of the horror-spoof series that started with "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) and lasted till the mid-1950s, when their time at Universal ended. Claude Rains (the original Invisible Man) makes a discreet cameo appearance.

Hang 'Em High (1968)

 

HANG 'EM HIGH  (1968)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ted Post

    Clint Eastwood, Inger Stevens, Pat Hingle, 

    Ed Begley, Ben Johnson, Charles McGraw,

    Bruce Dern, Alan Hale Jr., L.Q.Jones,

    Dennis Hopper, James MacArthur, Bob Steele

A lone cowboy herding some steers across a shallow stream gets ambushed by vigilantes who accuse him of rustling and hang him. They make three mistakes. The man's innocent. He survives. And he's played by Clint Eastwood. Clint's first post-spaghetti western takes on some interesting questions about revenge and frontier justice, leaving the answers mostly unresolved. Inger Stevens plays a widow with a crippling obsession of her own. Pat Hingle plays a ruthless judge, and all kinds of familiar faces turn up in the supporting cast. Curiously, the scene that gets the most attention and screen time is one that Clint's barely in, a circus-like six-man hanging. The whole town turns out, hymns are sung, vendors hawk cold beer, and not all the men on the gallows deserve to be there. It leaves you with something to think about.

Mrs. Hyde (2017)

 

MRS. HYDE  (2017)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Serge Bozon

    Isabelle Huppert, Adda Senani, Romain duris,

    José Garcia, Roxanne Arnal, Angèle Metzger

A high-school teacher whose vocational-science class is getting out of control gets zapped by a strange dose of electricity in the lab one day and finds herself becoming transformed. As a variation on Stevenson, this is more "Blackboard Jungle" than horror, but for teachers, that's horror enough. Unless your favorite subject in school was physics, the exposition  can get pretty dense, but nobody does repressed passion with more chilling restraint than Isabelle Huppert. It's not a bad movie necessarily, but it's an odd one. 

Roman Holiday (1953)

 

ROMAN HOLIDAY  (1953)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: William Wyler

    Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert,

    Margaret Rawlings, Hartley Power, Claudio Ermelli

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who ran away from the palace and spent 24 hours cavorting around the city with a newspaperman. The princess was Audrey Hepburn. The newspaperman was Gregory Peck. The city was Rome. The movie was this one. There might be more attractive combinations than that, but not many. A comic romance with a bittersweet edge - these lovers are not going to live happily ever after together - and the movie that made Hepburn a star. Dalton Trumbo's story won an Oscar, which he couldn't collect because he was blacklisted. Ian McLellan Hunter, who got the screen credit and did some rewriting, was a front. The Academy finally recognized Trumbo's work on the film in 1993, 17 years after his death. Better late than never, I guess, but that seems awfully late.

Manhatta (1921)

MANHATTA  (1921)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Charles Seeler, Paul Strand

Visions of New York, inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman. The scale is grand: skyscrapers, steamships, bridges, rail yards, streets. There's no intimacy at all, no closeups, not even a face, just the anonymous crowd, dwarfed by the immensity of the city. [Note: The movie's title really is spelled that way.] 

Stormy Weather (1943)

 

STORMY WEATHER  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Andrew L. Stone

    Lena Horne, Bill Robinson, Cab Calloway,

    Fats Waller, Dooley Wilson, The Nicholas Brothers

An all-black musical with an all-star lineup of legendary acts. Lena Horne sings the title tune and several more, Fats Waller sits in at the piano, Cab Calloway does the "Jumpin' Jive" (and models a spectacular zoot suit), and Bill Robinson dances on a drum, but nobody tops the Nicholas Brothers. Some bits might be less than politically correct at this point, but there's no denying the level of talent involved. It's a hell of a show. 

Welcome To the Sticks (2008)

 

WELCOME TO THE STICKS  (2008)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Dany Boon

    Kat Merad, Dany Boon, Zoé Felix, Anne Marivin,

    Lorenzo Ausilia-Foret, Philippe Duquesne, Guy Lecluyse,

    Line Renaud, Stéphane Freiss, Michel Galabru

A fish-out-of-water comedy that set box-office records in France, about a post-office supervisor who's passed over for a post on the Riviera and assigned to an outpost in the North, where it's believed the days are short and bleak, the nights are cold and depressing, living conditions are primitive, and the inhabitants are drunken louts who barely speak French. That last part, about the language, turns out to be true. The dialect is all but indecipherable, and knowing French won't necessarily help, so keep an eye on the subtitles. (The subtitles won't help much, either, but they're funny.) The best stuff comes when the postmaster's wife turns up, and the locals go out of their way to act even more uncouth than she thinks they are. It's not hard to imagine an American version of this being set in Northern Wisconsin.

Roger Corman: Hollywood's Wild Angel (1978)

 

ROGER CORMAN: HOLLYWOOD'S WILD ANGEL

    D: Christian Blackwood                                    (1978)  ¢ ¢ ¢

B-movie mogul Roger Corman talks about his approach to making films - make 'em fast, make 'em cheap, and make sure they make money - while David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme and others tell what it was like to start out working for Corman. Corman directed a bunch of movies - most notably a series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for American International - but his most profound impact was as a producer with an eye for young talent and an impeccable sense of what a mostly young audience out there wanted to see. "Night of the Blood Beast", "Burial of the Rats", "Teenage Cave Man" and "Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader" are all movies that would not exist without Roger Corman. The world would be poorer without them, don't you think?

The Tree (2010)

 

THE TREE  (2010)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Julie Bertuccelli

    Charlotte Gainsbourg, Morgan Davies, Marton Csokas,

    Christian Byers, Tom Russell, Aden Young

An Australian truck driver dies unexpectedly, leaving behind a devastated widow and four children. One of the kids, an eight-year-old girl, starts to believe her dad's spirit has migrated to a giant tree that overlooks the h0use, and the tree starts to take on a life of its own. A movie about grieving and letting go and moving on, with an undercurrent of something mystical and a touch of horror - the kind of thing the folks down under seem uniquely adept at pulling off. You've never seen tree roots like these.

Devil's Angels (1967)

DEVIL'S ANGELS  (1967)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D:  Daniel Haller

    John Cassavetes, Beverly Adams, Mimsy Farmer,

    Leo Gordon, Russ Bender, Buck Taylor, Nai Bonet,

    Marc Cavell, Marianne Kanter, Buck Kartalian,

    Richard Anders, Salli Sachse, Mitzi Hoag

Anarchy becomes transgression becomes nihilism when a biker gang led by John Cassavetes roars into a small town and tears it to pieces. Cassavetes took the role to help finance the completion of his own independent feature "Faces." The plot, such as it is, echoes "The Wild One". The ending is bleak. 

Yoyo (1965)

 

YOYO  (1965)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Pierre Étaix

    Pierre Étaix, Claudine Auger, Philippe Dionnet,

    Luce Klein, Martine de  Breteuil, Philippe Castelli

A feature-length collection of sight gags stuck to a thin story about the life of a famous clown. Étaix might not be a household name, but his comedy is kind of where Chaplin, Keaton, Jacques Tati and Ernie Kovacs all come together. Some gags run a little long and don't really go anywhere, but a lot of his stuff is brilliant. Favorite bit: the scene where Adolf Hitler imitates Chaplin.