Burial of the Rats (1995)

 

BURIAL OF THE RATS  (1995)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Dan Golden

    Maria Ford, Adrienne Barbeau, Kevin Alber,

    Olga Kabo, Eduard Plaxin, Maya Menglet

Baroque softcore horror in which young Bram Stoker gets abducted by amazon rat women who dance topless and lounge around in thongs and bondage attire when they're not plotting ways to rid the world of men. Bram's prospects for survival don't look good, but then the dishiest of the rat women (Maria Ford) takes a liking to him, and the "Queen of Vermin" (Adrienne Barbeau) decides she can use his writing skills to document their activities and help them kill even more men. And there are rats, which the queen dispatches from time to time by playing a wooden flute, like a horror-movie pied piper. So I guess I'd say go ahead and watch this if you like looking at wicked women in revealing costumes, but not if you have a pathological aversion to rats. Filmed on location in Russia. The executive producer was Roger Corman.

Tarzan and His Mate (1934)

TARZAN AND HIS MATE  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Cedric Gibbons

    Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O'Sullivan, Neil Hamilton,

    Paul Cavanaugh, Forrester Harvey, Nathan Curry

Rival teams of ivory hunters set out in search of the legendary elephants' graveyard. There's a map, but only one man can get them there and back with the ivory: Tarzan.  MGM's followup to "Tarzan the Ape Man", in which Tarzan swings through the treetops, fights lions, outswims crocodiles, frolics with free-spirited wife Jane, and calls on the apes and elephants whenever he needs to raise an army on short notice. It's one of the movies that moved Hollywood to start enforcing the Production Code, provoked by O'Sullivan's revealing jungle costume and a long-censored underwater swimming scene in which Jane appears nude. (It's Olympic swimming champion Josephine McKim, not O'Sullivan, doing the actual swimming.) It's dated, silly, sexist, racist, culturally insensitive and tough on wild animals, and while it's not exactly an excuse, that's the way they made them back then. Call it a guilty pleasure. And a great Tarzan movie. 

Tarzan the Ape Man (1932)

 

TARZAN THE APE MAN  (1932)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: W. S. Van Dyke

    Johnny Weissmuller, Maureen O'Sullivan, 

    C. Aubrey Smith, Forrester Harvey, 

    Neil Hamilton, Doris Lloyd, Ray Corrigan

In his first outing as Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller swings through the trees, fights lions and crocodiles, makes the acquaintance of dishy Jane Parker and leads a couple of ivory hunters to the secret elephants' graveyard. Weissmuller had the physique of an Olympic athlete (he'd been one) and a feral quality that was tamed fairly quickly in the Tarzan adventures that followed. In this movie, he also has the advantage of not talking very much. (Delivering dialogue was not Weissmuller's most accomplished skill.) Period racism aside, this picture and "Tarzan and His Mate" are still the top of the line for Tarzan movies, thanks to Weissmuller's animal presence, O'Sullivan's saucy sense of fun, and a lot of leftover footage shot in Africa for "Trader Horn".

The Worst Person In the World (2021)

 

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD 

    D: Joachim Trier                     (2021)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielson Lie, Herbert Nordrum,

    Maria Grazia do Meo, Hans Olaf Brenner, Vidar Sandem

A woman who can't decide what she wants spends an entire movie not finding it. The woman's name is Julie, and the movie's divided into 12 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The title of one of the chapters is "Julie's Narcissistic Circus", and that's the movie in a nutshell. Life's tough when everything's all about you. My favorite chapters were the one where Julie stops time and the one where she and some other people do mushrooms. Norway's official entry for the 2021 Academy Awards. 

Somewhere In the Night (1946)

SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT  (1946)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joseph L.Mankiewicz

    John Hodiak, Nancy Guild, Lloyd Nolan, 

    Richard Conte, Fritz Kortner, Margo Woods,

    Josephine Hutchinson, Lou Nova, Sheldon Leonard,

    Whit Bissell, Houseley Stevenson, Harry Morgan

A returning war vet with total amnesia goes to Los Angeles, hoping to piece together who he is, but afraid of what he'll find out. He's got an address (a hotel) and a name, George Taylor, that he's not sure is even his. And there's a note from a "pal" named Larry Cravat, who's left him $5,000 in a bank account. But who's Larry Cravat? A nice, twisty noir mystery with a protagonist who may or may not be a murderer, he just doesn't know. Whit Bissell plays a bartender, Harry Morgan plays a bathhouse attendant, Lloyd Nolan plays a loquacious homicide cop, and a rogues' gallery of less familiar faces round out the supporting cast. It's been suggested that downing a shot every time somebody in the movie says "Larry Cravat" might not be a good idea. 

Thief (1981)

 

THIEF  (1981)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Mann

    James Caan, Tuesday Weld, James Belushi,

    Robert Prosky, Willie Nelson, Dennis Farina

James Caan plays a master safecracker who's making a decent living selling cars on the side and likes to work independently, but then a big-time gangster persuades him to hire on and James Caan figures he'll just do a couple of quick jobs and get out, but getting out turns out to be not so easy, and now the cops and the mob guys are after him and you figure it's only a matter of time before James Caan goes all Sonny Corleone on them and he does. Tuesday Weld plays James Caan's girlfriend. Robert Prosky plays the mob boss. Jim Belushi plays a safecracking accomplice. Chicago plays itself. The music's by Tangerine Dream. 

See How They Run (2022)

SEE HOW THEY RUN  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Tom George

    Saoirse Ronan, Sam Rockwell, Adrien Brody,

    David Oyelowo, Reece Shearsmith, Ruth Wilson,

    Harris Dickinson, Pearl Chanda, Shirley Henderson

Whodunits. You see one, you've seen 'em all. At least that's the opinion of Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), an American director in London, hoping to shoot the screen version of "The Mousetrap", which has gone over 100 performances and (its producer thinks) can't go on much longer. What Leo doesn't know is that in this particular whodunit, he's the victim, the obnoxious character nobody likes, the one destined to be bumped off so the investigation can begin. The investigation is in the hands of Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), and they'll get the job done, if only he can stay sober and she can avoid jumping to conclusions. It's a comic mystery in the tradition of "Knives Out" and "Murder By Death", playing off (and sometimes into) Agatha Christie's famously long-running play. One of the suspects is a stuffy, pompous Richard Attenborough (Harris Dickinson), and Ronan's a hoot as the eager, crime-solving apprentice, forever taking notes and tossing off puns, always just a hair out of sync with whatever's going on. She also does a crackup Katharine Hepburn impression.

Samson and Delilah (1949)

 

SAMSON AND DELILAH  (1949)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Cecil B. DeMille

    Hedy Lamar, Victor Mature, George Sanders,

    Henry Wilcoxon, Angela Lansbury, Olive Deering,

    Fay Holden, Russ Tamblyn, William Farnum,

    George Reeves, Julia Faye, Mike Mazurki

A legendary biblical strongman kills a lion with his bare hands, fights off an army with the jawbone of an ass, falls into the clutches of a Philistine wench, gets a haircut, loses his eyesight, powers a gristmill and finally brings down the house. If the Lord God Jehovah hadn't made all that stuff happen, Cecil B. DeMille would have. And did.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021)

THREE MINUTES: A LENGTHENING  

    D: Bianca Stigter              (2021)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

For the duration of this 69-minute documentary, you're really just looking at three minutes of film. The footage was shot by an American tourist in 1938 in the Polish town of Nasielsk and it shows members of the town's Jewish community, men, women, kids, all ages, crowding the street. Some of the kids mug for the camera. Some of the grownups shoo them away. In the decades that followed, the footage miraculously survived. Most of those people did not. Under the Nazis, the Jewish population of Nasielsk was wiped out. Like Peter Jackson's World War One documentary, "They Shall Not Grow Old", or some of the movies of Bill Morrison, this one captures a moment, and by speeding the film up, slowing it down, reversing it, or zeroing in till all definition disappears, it effectively freezes time. It's also a detective story, a search made 70 years later to try to identify some of those faces. Most of them would be murdered during the Holocaust, and yet here they are, staring into the lens, still breathing, still laughing, in the only fragment that exists of their long-lost lives. Ghosts.

The Hit List: Richard Burton

"I've done the most awful rubbish in order to have 

  somewhere to go in the morning." 

  Richard Burton

    The first time I saw Richard Burton in a movie was probably when I watched "Demetrius and the Gladiators" on television in 1961. He's actually not in that one, except for a brief flashback clip of the scene at the end of "The Robe", where the mad emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson) sends Burton and fellow martyr Jean Simmons off to be executed. 

    The first time I saw Burton on a big screen was in "The Longest Day", Darryl Zanuck's epic recreation of D-Day, in which he plays a downed aviator whose wounds have been stitched together with safety pins. 

    After that, he seemed to turn up a lot, sometimes in good movies, sometimes in great ones, and sometimes in junk where the main point of interest is wondering how much the actor was drinking during the shoot. Here are a few of the better ones:

"The Robe" (1953/Henry Koster)

Burton's a Roman soldier who ends up with the robe Christ wore to the Crucifixion. The first movie in CinemaScope.

"The Longest Day" (1962/Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki)

Burton's sardonic fatalism stands out in a movie loaded with star cameos. 

"Becket" (1964/Peter Glenville)

Burton and Peter O'Toole face off as Thomas à Becket and Henry II.

"The Night of the Iguana" (1964/John Huston)

Burton's a defrocked priest on the skids in Mexico, in the company of Ava Gardner, Sue Lyon and Deborah Kerr.

"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" (1965/Martin Ritt)

Cold War cloak-and-dagger work, from a novel by John le Carré. The anti-james Bond.

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (1966/Mike Nichols)

"The Taming of the Shrew" (1967/Franco Zefirelli)

Mr. & Mrs. Burton in an Edward Albee psychodrama and a Shakespeare comedy. 

"Where Eagles Dare" (1968/Brian G. Hutton)

Burton, Clint Eastwood and a million rounds of ammo. A great guilty pleasure. 

"Anne of the Thousand Days" (1969/Charles Jarrott)

Genevieve Bujold plays Anne Boleyn. Burton plays Henry VIII.

"Villain" (1971/Michael Tuchner)

Burton plays a vicious gangster in a movie Guy Ritchie must've watched once or twice.

"1984" (1984/Michael Radford)

Burton persuades John Hurt to love Big Brother.

    As a young stage actor, Burton's intensity and charisma, along with a magnificent voice, earned him comparisons to Gielgud and Olivier. On screen, he didn't always bother to scale it back, but he could be devastating when he did. 

    He was famously married to Elizabeth Taylor (twice), and for a time was probably known as much for that and an extravagant lifestyle as he was for his film and theater work. 

    The years and a lifelong affection for alcohol caught up with him eventually, and in some of his later films, he looks ravaged. Yet even then, his haunted presence makes you want to watch. And he has that voice. 

    Burton died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 5, 1984. He was 58.

Walk On the Wild Side (1962)

 

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE  (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Edward Dmytryk

    Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda,

    Barbara Stanwyck, Anne Baxter, Joanna Moore,

    Richard Rust, Donald Barry, John Anderson 

Not Lou Reed's "Walk On the Wild Side", but a steamy melodrama starring Laurence Harvey as a drifter who tracks an old girlfriend to New Orleans, where she's working nights in a brothel run by Barbara Stanwyck. Capucine plays the girl he's trying to find. Jane Fonda plays a floozy he meets on the road, and wouldn't you know it, she ends up with a job at the brothel, too. The pot boils over and Elmer Bernstein's jazz score is incessant. Anne Baxter, as the down-to-earth owner of a roadside cafe, gives the movie's least hysterical performance. 

Woman Times Seven (1967)

WOMAN TIMES SEVEN  (1967)  ¢ ¢

    D: Vittorio De Sica

    Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, Alan Arkin,

    Peter Sellers, Lex Barker, Rossano Brazzi,

    Anita Ekberg, Robert Morley, Vittorio Gassman,

    Elsa Martinelli, Patrick Wymark, Philippe Noiret

Shirley MacLaine plays seven different women in seven different stories, all set in Paris. In one, she's a widow in a funeral procession. In another, she's an angry housewife who falls in with some prostitutes. In a third, she's a diplomatic translator who likes to recite poetry in the nude. Shirley looks good in all of them, but the stories don't amount to much. The last episode is the best. Michael Caine costars in that one and doesn't say a word. 

WUSA (1970)

 

WUSA  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Stuart Rosenberg

    Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Anthony Perkins,

    Laurence Harvey, Pat Hingle, Cloris Leachman,

    Moses Gunn, Bruce Cabot, Don Gordon,

    Wayne Rogers, Leigh French, Michael Anderson Jr.

Three lost souls turn up in New Orleans, where a right-wing radio station is blasting hate to the masses. Robert Stone wrote the screenplay from his novel "A Hall of Mirrors", and it's a cynical, despairing journey into America's heart of darkness, eerily predating and anticipating both Fox News and Donald Trump. There's not much in it to cheer you up, and the picture was not a commercial success. Moral ambivalence doesn't always translate well to the screen, and that's kind of what Stone does. Robert Altman would take a more whimsical approach to similar material in "Nashville" in 1975.

Three Cheers For the Girls (1943)

THREE CHEERS FOR THE GIRLS  (1943)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Jean Negulesco

A compilation of clips from Warner Bros musicals, with the spotlight on the chorus girls whose bare legs, smiling closeups and eye-catching costumes made those outlandish production numbers so much fun to watch. What would Busby Berkeley have done without them?