High School Big Shot (1959)

HIGH SCHOOL BIG SHOT  (1959)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Joel Rapp

    Tom Pittman, Virginia Aldridge, Howard Veit,

    Malcolm Atterbury, Stanley Adams, Byron Foulger

A smart but impoverished high-school kid, the only one in his class who digs Shakespeare, engineers a heist that could net $1 million and (he thinks) solve all of his problems. Considering its title and the fact that it once showed up on MST3K, this is a better movie than you might expect, or at least a more interesting one: a juvenile film noir with a teen protagonist and a teen femme fatale. Tom Pittman, who plays the lead, has real presence and an instinct for understatement that make you wonder where his career might've gone if he hadn't died in a car crash before the movie's release. Malcolm Atterbury, who plays the kid's troubled dad, would get a moment of immortality that same year, as the man at the prairie crossing in "North By Northwest" who spots the crop-duster and observes that it's dusting crops where there ain't no crops. 

He Walked By Night (1948)

 

HE WALKED BY NIGHT  (1948)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alfred L. Werker

    Richard Basehart, Scott Brady, Roy Roberts,

    Whit Bissell, James Cardwell, Jack Webb

A noir procedural with the cops out to get an elusive criminal who uses the storm drains under Los Angeles to make his getaways. Apparently, Anthony Mann directed about half of this (the noir stuff with Richard Basehart) and Alfred L. Werker did the rest. The difference really shows. Basehart gives a chilling performance as the stickup artist/cop killer/crook, and a pre-"Dragnet" Jack Webb plays the LAPD's tech guy. The climactic chase through the storm-drain tunnels would seem to foreshadow "The Third Man".

Naked Edge / Take 8

 

Demi Moore in "Striptease"

Melinda Dillon in "Slap Shot"

Charlotte Gainsbourg in "Dark Crimes"

Jane Birkin in "Je T'aime Moi Non Plus"

Kathleen Turner in "Body Heat"

Melanie Griffith in "Night Moves"

Jennifer Lawrence in "Red Sparrow"

Lea Seydoux in "The French Dispatch"

Kate Beckinsale in "Uncovered"

Noomi Rapace in "Lamb"

Hell Drivers (1957)

HELL DRIVERS  (1957)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Cy Endfield

    Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins,

    Patrick McGoohan, Sidney James, Jill Ireland,

    Sean Connery, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson,

    William Hartnell, Wilfred Lawson, Alfie Bass

A guy just out of prison gets a job driving a gravel truck for a company whose workers have even fewer benefits than the average Amazon warehouse employee. A gritty, kitchen-sink film noir (except that nobody in it has a kitchen), with a fine cast of soon-to-be stars and longtime character players. Made in England, where director Cy Endfield was working after being blacklisted. Keep an eye on Stanley Baker and see if you don't think he and Sean Connery look enough alike to be brothers. 

Hopscotch (1980)

HOPSCOTCH  (1980)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Ronald Neame

    Walter Matthau,  Glenda Jackson, Sam Waterston,

    Ned Beatty, Herbert Lom, Severn Darden 

A cloak-and-dagger comedy starring Walter Matthau as a veteran CIA op who refuses to go away quietly when he's removed from the field. Instead, he goes off the grid and starts writing his memoirs, dispatching them from various locations a chapter at a time, while eluding the ex-colleagues who are now out to eliminate him. There's no real suspense in this, and you can't help wishing Glenda Jackson had more to do, but the writing's clever enough, and Matthau makes playing a spy on the run look as easy as drinking a beer. He makes that look easy, too. 

Glenda Jackson

(1936-2023)

Guilty Hands (1931)

 

GUILTY HANDS  (1931)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: W.S. Van Dyke

    Lionel Barrymore, Kay Francis, Madge Evans,

    William Bakewell, C. Aubrey Smith, Polly Moran,

    Alan Mobray, Forrester Harvey, Charles Crockett

Lionel Barrymore plays an attorney who believes that in certain circumstances murder can not only be justified, but gotten away with. When his daughter announces her engagement to a womanizer twice her age, he decides to put his theory to the test. So the mystery's not much of a mystery, but the ending's playfully twisted, the morals are pre-Code, and with Woody Van Dyke at the helm and a running time of 70 minutes, the pace is brisk. 

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

 

GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES  (1988)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Isao Takahata

As American planes firebomb Japan in the last days of World War Two, a young boy and his kid sister on the ground below struggle to escape starvation. This is an animated film, but you won't find a minion, a caped superhero, or a friendly talking animal anywhere. It's a haunting look at the horror of war, with burned bodies, mass graves, casual cruelty and a stark depiction of death by malnutrition. It might have more impact if parts of it weren't quite so cute, but it gets the message across, ending on a note of tragedy and transcendence. Keep a handkerchief handy, just in case.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (2013)

GORE VIDAL: THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA  

    D: Nicholas D. Wrathall                              (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

This documentary begins with Gore Vidal standing over his own grave and ends with him in it. In between, he shares his opinions on everything, while talking about his life as a novelist, pundit, political candidate, public intellectual and famously sharp-tongued thorn in the side of William F. Buckley Jr. Late in the movie, a very old Vidal is asked what his legacy is likely to be. His reply is that he couldn't care less, which may or may not be bullshit. What's obvious is that there's nobody quite like him on the scene today, and the world's a duller place because of that. 

Gods and Monsters (1998)

 

GODS AND MONSTERS  (1998)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Bill Condon

    Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser, Lynn Redgrave,

    Lolita Davidovich, Arthur Dignam, David Dukes,

    Kevin J. O'Connor, Rosalind Ayres, Jack Betts,

    Cornelia Hayes O'Herlihy, Martin Ferrero

The last days of James Whale, the Hollywood director who made a couple of monster movies everybody's seen, retired when he couldn't control his own work anymore, and turned up dead at the bottom of his swimming pool in 1957. The movie opens with Whale (Ian McKellen), old, frail and recovering from a stroke, looking out the window of his modest but beautifully appointed home. He perks up visibly when his gaze falls on a hunky new gardener named Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser) who's come to mow the lawn. The rest of the movie's about the relationship between the two men, the openly gay Whale and the adamantly straight Boone, with Whale's devoted housekeeper (Lynn Redgrave) running interference now and then. Both men are a little contradictory (and more alike than it might first appear), and Condon does a nice job of conflating Fraser's character with the Frankenstein monster, but the results aren't entirely convincing. Flashbacks to the making of "Bride of Frankenstein" aren't convincing, either, for anybody who's seen "Bride of Frankenstein". (Nobody could really do Elsa Lanchester except Elsa Lanchester, though Arthur Dignam as Ernest Thesiger isn't bad.) There were rumors of foul play after his death, but Whale did leave a suicide note, and it's generally believed that, faced with failing health and a deteriorating mental state, he conducted his own demise.

The Game (1984)

 

THE GAME  (1984)  ¢ 1/2

    D: Bill Rebane

    Tom Blair, Jim Iaquinta, Carol Perry,

    Wally Flaherty, Don Arthur, Debbie Martin,

    Lori Minnetti, Pamela Rohleder, Randy Hicks,

    Ronnie Hicks, Aaron Harper, J.D. Beckman

A super-low-budget horror thriller with some people at an island resort competing in a possibly deadly game in which the last one still playing - and breathing - at the end wins $1 million. So one of the contestants gets hanged. And one gets chewed on by rats. And a horny couple get locked in a sauna and almost freeze to death. And what's with all the dry-ice fog? That's pretty scary, huh? Um, no, not really. Wisconsin auteur Bill Rebane strikes again. His movies aren't very good, but, well, let's just leave it at that.

Freud (1962)

 

FREUD  (1962)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Huston

    Montgomery Clift, Susannah York, Larry Parks,

    Susan Kohner, David McCallum, Eric Portman,

    Eileen Herlie, Rosalie Crutchley, Fernando Ledoux

Montgomery Clift plays Sigmund Freud, working to unlock the secrets of the subconscious. What do our dreams tell us? Are we sexual beings from infancy? And are symptoms like tremors and paralysis always physiological, or is the mind sometimes involved? The movie's a lot of talk, and unless you've cracked a psych book somewhere along the way, it's easy to get lost. Clift spent the last few years of his own life cracking up, and you can't help wondering how much his troubled emotional state played into his performance. He was also dealing with cataracts at the time, while giving a performance that relies a great deal on the way he uses his eyes. Another thought that has little or nothing to do with the film: When you see Clift in a beard and a top hat, smoking a cigar, a different historical figure comes to mind - U.S. Grant.

Forsaken (2015)

FORSAKEN  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jon Cassar

    Kiefer Sutherland, Donald Sutherland, Brian Cox, 

    Michael Wincott, Demi Moore, Greg Ellis

A remake of "Unforgiven" by way of "Pale Rider", with Kiefer Sutherland in what would be the Clint Eastwood role as a man trying to move on from a violent past he can never escape. It's nice to see the Sutherland boys working together playing father and son. Donald has the more flamboyant role as an inflexibly righteous preacher, but it's Kiefer's haunted stoicism that moves the story along and carries the film. You know it's only a matter of time before he gets out his gun again, and it's going to be hell for somebody when he does. Brian Cox plays the corrupt local kingpin, Michael Wincott's an elegant rival gunman, and Demi Moore plays an old flame, now marred with a young kid. They're all good and so is the movie, but it's Kiefer, lost, forsaken, and never more than a stone's throw from madness, who makes the movie hard to forget. 

Important News (1936)

IMPORTANT NEWS  (1936)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Edwin Lawrence 

    Charles "Chic" Sale, Charles Trowbridge, Granville Bates

A small-town newspaper publisher has to make a crucial editorial decision when he witnesses a shooting in the street. Ten minutes of homespun Americana, playing on the notion that what constitutes front-page news in Chicago or New York might be relatively less important in Deerfield or Cottage Grove. The gangly, bespectacled layout guy in the newspaper office is a young Jimmy Stewart.