Four Frightened People (1934)

 

FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE  (1934)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Cecil B. DeMille

    Claudette Colbert, Herbert Marshall, William Gargan,

    Mary Boland, Leo Carillo, Nella Walker, Ethel Griffies

This is where DeMille makes a Tarzan movie, but without Tarzan. It's about four passengers who escape a plague ship by stealing a lifeboat and find themselves lost in the jungle after they wash up on land. Claudette Colbert gets top billing as a mousy schoolteacher who becomes more assertive as she loses her glasses and civilized wardrobe. The credibility quotient is not high, but it's offset by the movie's casual attitude to its own silliness. Colbert would appear in DeMille's "Cleopatra" and Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" the same year. 

Maigret (1988)

 

MAIGRET  (1988)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Paul Lynch

    Richard Harris, Patrick O'Neal, Victoria Tennant,

    Ian Ogilvy, Barbara Shelley, Dominique Barnes

Paris Police Inspector Maigret (Richard Harris) takes on an investigation in which all the suspects appear to be connected to a family of greedy industrialists. Harris is the whole show in this, with a shuffling gait, a slouch hat, a pair of wire-framed specs and an unmistakable Irish accent. He might not be quite what Georges Simenon had in mind, but he's never not fun to watch. Made for TV.

Joe (2013)

 

JOE  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: David Gordon Green

    Nicolas Cage, Tye Sheridan, Gary Poulter,

    Ronnie Gene Blevins, Adrienne Mishler,

    Sue Rock, Heather Kafka, AJ Wilson McPhaul

Nicolas Cage plays the title role, a middle-aged guy living in a backwater hellhole where he makes a living running a crew of day laborers, killing trees for a company that wants them dead so they can be cut down. He's estranged from his family, he drinks and smokes too much, he's a regular at the local whorehouse, and he's subject to bouts of uncontrollable rage. Despite all that, he's a basically decent guy. He's not looking for trouble, but trouble always finds him. What you've got here is a Southern gothic twist on "Nobody's Fool", with Cage as a more damaged and volatile version of Paul Newman's Donald Sullivan. Tye  Sheridan plays a kid who goes to work on Joe's crew, and there's a scary performance by Gary Poulter as the boy's abusive, alcoholic father. Poulter was literally cast off the street, and there's a real sense that he's not so much acting his role as living it. He died two months after shooting ended. Director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr conjure up a dimly lit world you'll be glad you're not living in, a place you'd just drive on through, no matter how bad you needed a coke or a pack of smokes, and Cage gives one of his most compelling performances.

Laurel and Hardy's Laughing 20's

 

LAUREL AND HARDY'S LAUGHING 20's  

    D: Robert Youngson                    (1965)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

A collection of clips from the Hal Roach studio, featuring Laurel and Hardy and numerous (more obscure) silent comedy stars. Robert Youngson made a series of these compilation films, which helped keep silent movies in the public eye at a time when the public's memory of them was fading. Highlight: Extended footage of the pie fight in "The Battle of the Century" (1927).

Naked Edge / Take 10

 

Anya Taylor-Joy and some Vikings 

  in "The Northman"

Maria Ford and some dancing rat women 

  in "Burial of the Rats"

Milla Jovovich, Moira Kelly and some chorus girls 

  in "Chaplin"

Some beach girls 

  in "Evils of the Night"

Some of the nuns 

  in "The Sinful Nuns of St. Valentine"

The cheerleaders 

  in "Satan's Cheerleaders"

The wives 

  in "Satan's Wife"

The tableau girls and stagehands 

  in "Mrs. Henderson Presents"

The inmates 

  of "Love Camp 7"

F1 (2025)

 

F1  (2025)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joseph Kosinski 

    Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem,

    Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia

When my Uncle Barney was driving stock cars on dirt tracks around southern Wisconsin back in the 1950s, the strategy for racing was simple: foot to the floor and turn left. When Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) is asked how he plans to compete in a Formula One race in "F1", his answer is equally succinct: drive fast. Hayes is a barnstormer, a guy living out of a van who will race anything anywhere, and he's been off the Formula One circuit for 30 years when an old colleague (Javier Bardem) coaxes him back, to drive one of his cars and mentor a new young driver (Damson Idris) who has all the tools but still needs to learn a few things if he wants to get to the top. It's a formula Formula One script, but as a piece of summertime escape, it gets the job done. The cars fly like bullets, powered by space-age technology, and the camerawork in the racing scenes could have you bracing yourself and holding your breath. (IMAX theaters should be equipped with seat belts for movies like this.) Sonny Hayes is the kind of role Paul Newman or Steve McQueen would've played a few decades ago (and did), and Pitt's performance is a throwback to that: a movie star at the top of his game and so at ease in front of the camera, he can command the screen without even seeming to try.

Grand Prix (1966)

 

GRAND PRIX  (1966)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Frankenheimer

    James Garner, Yves Montand, Eva Marie Saint, 

    Toshiro Mifune, Jessica Walter, Brian Bedford,

    Antonio Sabato, Adolfo Celi, Françoise Hardy

Drivers and owners, wives and girlfriends follow the Grand Prix circuit in a movie that thunders and roars in its pulse-pounding racing scenes but runs low on gas when it's not on the track. There was  no CGI back then, so Frankenheimer mounted cameras on the cars and had guys drive them real fast, something he'd do again more than 30 years later when he made "Ronin". (He didn't speed up the film. The cars really are going that fast.) Garner apparently did his own driving. The split-screen montage sequences were the work of legendary title designer Saul Bass. Several of the drivers who worked on this would die racing over the next few years.