Movie Star Moment: Tom Berenger

Tom Berenger as General James Longstreet

in "Gettysburg (1993) 

    In "Gettysburg", Tom Berenger plays Confederate General James Longstreet with an air of sardonic fatalism, a great bushy beard and an almost ever-present cigar. (Longstreet occasionally smokes a pipe.) As Robert E. Lee's second-in-command, it's Longstreet's job to provide his commander with unfiltered advice, which he does. Longstreet warns Lee against fighting at Gettysburg, and predicts (accurately) that the Confederate attack into the center of the Union line on the third day of the battle will be a disaster. Lee doesn't listen. 

    There's this little thing that Longstreet does in the movie that you start to notice when he does it more than once. After meeting with Lee, or one of the other commanding officers, Longstreet salutes, with a cigar clasped in the fingers of his saluting hand. I don't know what saluting protocol was in the Confederate army back then, and as any veteran knows, generals generally can do what they want to, but I'm pretty sure a cigar salute is not in most handbooks on military regulations. I'd guess that salute was improvised. There's just enough subliminal mischief in Berenger's performance to suggest he might do something like that, just to see if he can get away with it. And, you know, he's playing a general, so why not?

Factory Girl (2006)

 

FACTORY GIRL  (2006)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: George Hickenlooper

    Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Hayden Christensen,

    Jimmy Fallon, Tara Summers, Mena Suvari,

    Beth Grant, James Naughton, Edward Hermann,

    Ileana Douglas, Don Novello, Mary Elizabeth Winstead

The short, wild, messy life of Edie Sedgwick, from art student to party girl to junkie to corpse. Sienna Miller plays the reckless, adventurous, star-struck, strung-out Edie. Guy Pearce plays Andy Warhol with languid indifference. Hayden Christensen plays a character identified in the credits as "The Musician", and who's obviously Bob Dylan. There's a scene where the musician points to Edie's chest and tells her her trouble is that it's empty in there, and he kind of nails it. As good as Miller is, there's not enough to Edie to make you really care. She had her 15 minutes and it was fun while it lasted, and then the fun was over and it got real ugly and at 28, she was gone.

Frenzy (1972)

FRENZY  (1972)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Alfred Hitchcock

    Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Barbara Leigh-Hunt,

    Anna Massey, Alec McGowen, Vivien Merchant, 

    Billie Whitelaw, Bernard Cribbins, Jean Marsh

For his next-to-last movie, Alfred Hitchcock went home, all the way back to the produce market in London's Covent Garden, where his father had worked as a greengrocer when Hitch was a kid. It seems that somebody's been going around killing women in the area, raping and then strangling them with a necktie. Hitchcock had toyed with perversion before in his pictures, but by the 1970s, censorship rules were breaking down, and the director's approach to his material, at least in this film, was more overt. Parts of "Frenzy" are fairly nasty, in particular a rape scene featuring Barry Foster and Barbara Leigh-Hunt. At the same time, there's a streak of perverse humor running through it, a lot of it having to do with food. (Watch for the scene with Foster in the back of a lorry, trying frantically to retrieve an in incriminating piece of evidence from a corpse stuffed into a potato sack. Or any scene in which a police inspector played by Alec McGowen tries to choke down his wife's cooking.) "Psycho" and Janet Leigh notwithstanding, this is the only Hitchcock film to show full-on nudity.

Poor Things (2023)

 

POOR THINGS  (2023)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Yorgos Lanthimos

    Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo,

    Ramy Youssef, Kathryn Hunter, Jerrod Carmichael,

    Suzy Bemba, Christopher Abbott, Hanna Schygulla

A wonderfully strange (and funny) twist on "Frankenstein", starring Willem Dafoe as a scar-faced scientist named Godwin Baxter (or "God"), and Emma Stone as his creation, Bella, the product of an especially perverse surgical procedure. A curiously accented Mark Ruffalo plays a wealthy rake who whisks Bella off to a life of hedonism and discovery, a decision he lives to regret. Fantastic production design, captured with camerawork that shifts between color and black and white, a musical score that feels as imperfectly stitched together as Bella's psyche or Godwin's face, and a central performance by Stone that takes breathtaking risks, an actress who's in total control playing a character who has no concept of it. There might be other women who could do what Stone does here, but there can't be many, and, anyway, Stone's the one who did it. You don't want to take your eyes off her for a second. And in a movie where you wouldn't think emotional engagement would even be possible, she makes you care. It's a remarkable achievement in a crazy, amazing, one-of-a-kind film.

The Cosmic Man (1959)

 

THE COSMIC MAN  (1959)  ¢ ¢

    D: Herbert S. Greene

    John Carradine, Bruce Bennett, Angela Greene,

    Paul Langton, Scotty Morrow, Herbert Lytton

A glowing ball from outer space, a kid in a wheelchair, a guy who once played Tarzan, theremins on the soundtrack and John Carradine in weird, coke-bottle glasses as the Cosmic Man.

Breaking Surface (2020)

 

BREAKING SURFACE  (2020)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Joachim Heden

    Moa Gammel, Madeleine Martin, Trine Wiggen

Two scuba diving sisters go into some ice-cold water in northern Norway and are forced to improvise when one of them (the one who's the better diver) gets stuck at the bottom of the fjord. There's a brief introductory backstory that involves family dynamics, but once that's out of the way and the women get into the water, it's intense, a straight shot of survival-thriller suspense. How long can you hold your breath?

Dash and Lilly (1999)

 

DASH AND LILLY  (1999)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Kathy Bates

    Sam Shepard, Judy Davis, Bebe Neuwirth,

    Laurence Luckinbill, David Paymer

Dash is Dashiell Hammett, writer of murder mysteries like "The Thin Man" and "The Maltese Falcon". Lilly is Lillian Hellman, writer of plays like "The Children's Hour" and "The Little Foxes". Together, they were one of the more celebrated literary couples of the 20th century, a loving, enduring and volatile relationship that lasted 30 years. Both were promiscuous. Both drank. Both ran up against the House Un-American Activities Committee. This movie covers the bases of all that, and if it takes a few shortcuts along the way, you've still got Sam Shepard and Judy Davis playing Dash and Lilly. Hammett apparently based Nick and Nora Charles on them, so you see William Powell and Myrna Loy briefly, too. Made for cable television. 

Brewster McCloud (1970)

 

BREWSTER MCCLOUD  (1970)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Altman

    Bud Cort, Sally Kellerman, Michael Murphy,

    Shelley Duvall, William Windom, Stacy Keach,

    Rene Auberjonois, John Shuck, Margaret Hamilton

Bud Cort plays a kid who works as a chauffeur and lives in the Houston Astrodome, where he's building a set of wings and hoping to fly. He's got a guardian angel played by Sally Kellerman, who has scars on her back where her wings used to be. Then there's a hotshot detective from San Francisco, played by Michael Murphy, who turns up to investigate a series of murders whose victims all end up strangled and splattered with bird shit. And an oily politician played by William Windom. And a spacy tour guide played by Shelley Duvall. And a lot of other familiar (and unfamiliar) faces, including Margaret Hamilton, whose character dies wearing the witch's ruby red slippers from "The Wizard of Oz", which makes as much sense as anything else that happens in this movie. Definitely one of the oddest things to come out of Hollywood in the 1970s, and a kooky good time, as long as you don't try too hard to figure it all out. Shelley Duvall's first film.

Shelley Duvall

(1949-2024)

Byleth: The Demon of Incest (1972)

BYLETH: THE DEMON OF INCEST  (1972)  ¢ ¢

    D: Leopoldo Savona

    Mark Damon, Claudia Gravy, Aldo Bufi Landi,

    Franco Jamonte, Caterina Chiani, Silvana Panfili

Slow-moving Italian horror about a disturbed young nobleman who lusts after his sister and gets all distraught when she marries somebody else. Demons are involved. The DVD print I saw was dubbed in German with English subtitles, but I'm not sure it makes much difference. 

Personal Best (1982)

 

PERSONAL BEST  (1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Robert Towne

    Mariel Hemingway, Scott Glenn, Patrice Donnelly,

    Kenny Moore, Jim Moody, Kari Gosswiller

A lesbian love story set in the world of track and field, with Hemingway and Donnelly as athletes who become romantically involved while training for the Olympic pentathlon. Towne has a voyeur's appreciation for the bodies of female athletes, and a cameraman (Michael Chapman) who knows just how to capture the grace and beauty he sees in them. But exploitation isn't the point. The script plays on the unmovielike notion that young people aren't always glib and articulate. They're more likely to be confused and awkward and unsure of themselves, and Hemingway and Donnelly play into that nicely. On its own terms, "Personal Best" is a daring piece of work. Like its lead characters and the women who play them, it's real to the exact extent that it risks total embarrassment. 

Robert Towne

(1934-2024)

Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924)

AELITA: QUEEN OF MARS  (1924)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Yakov Protazanov 

    Yuliya Sointseva, Nikolai Tseretelli, Nikolai Batalov,

    Valentina Kuindshi, Igor Iliyinski, Konstantin Eggert,

    Yuri Zavadisky, Aleksandra Peregonets, Pavel Pol

An early Soviet propaganda piece in the form of a science-fiction movie about a scientist working on a rocket formula that can take a spaceship to Mars. The Martian sequences look cool - "Metropolis" meets "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari". The socialist melodrama that frames them is dreary. (The workers' paradise does not look like a place you'd want to live.) In the end, the scientist abandons his space-age research to serve the proletariat, a dubious choice in the context of the movie, but understandable if you're a filmmaker looking for the Politburo's seal of approval. Carry on, comrade.

Carry On At Your Convenience (1971)

 

CARRY ON AT YOUR CONVENIENCE  (1971)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Gerald Thomas

    Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey,

    Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw, Hattie Jacques,

    Kenneth Cope, Patsy Rowlands, Jacki Piper,

    Richard O'Callaghan, Bill Maynard, Davy Kaye

The workers at a toilet factory go on strike, and the Carry On Gang runs amok. There's much silliness, and the double entendres are about what you'd expect, but this one's loose, even by the standards of a "Carry On" film, and the underlying sentiment is conspicuously anti-union. The highlight is probably an extended sequence toward the end, with labour and management together on an excursion bus, getting drunk and running around an amusement park. Then they all go back to work. Alternate titles (listed in the opening credits): "Down the Spout", "Ladies Please Be Seated", "Up the Workers" and "Labour Relations Are the People Who Come To See You When You're Having a Baby". That's "Carry On".

The Blue and the Gray (1982)

 

THE BLUE AND THE GRAY  (1982)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Andrew V. McLaglen

    Stacy Keach, John Hammond, Gregory Peck

    Sterling Hayden, Diane Baker, Colleen Dewhurst,

    Rip Torn, Rory Calhoun, Geraldine Page,

    Lloyd Bridges, Kathleen Beller, Warren Oates,

    Paul Winfield, John Vernon, Robert Vaughn

Watching this six-hour miniseries is like reading one of those big 19th-century novels in which characters connect and then reconnect over a vast expanse of time and geography. It follows the Civil War adventures of a Virginia farm boy whose talent for drawing lands him a job with a Gettysburg newspaper on the eve of the conflict. Encouraged by Abraham Lincoln to cover the war as an artist/correspondent, he turns up at every key battle and event from Bull Run to Appomattox, recording it all with his pencil and sketchbook. John Hammond, who plays the artist, could be Eddie Redmayne's twin brother. Stacy Keach is both jaunty and commanding as a dashing Union spy. Sterling Hayden, in his last screen appearance, plays John Brown. Rory Calhoun plays Meade. Rip Torn plays Grant. Gregory Peck, whose stoic demeanor was sometimes called Lincolnesque, plays Lincoln. Director Andrew McLaglen got his start as an assistant to John Ford, and went on to make a lot of mostly ordinary movies. Here, he shows what he could do on a large canvas with a decent script. The scale is epic, but the storytelling is intimate, and the second-unit work is first rate. 

The Chaperone (2018)

THE CHAPERONE  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Michael Engler

    Elizabeth McGovern, Haley Lu Richardson, 

    Géza Rohrig, Victoria Hill, Campbell Scott, 

    Blythe Danner, Miranda Otto, Andrew Burnap

In 1922, Mrs. Myra Brooks of Wichita, Kansas, dispatches her precocious, 15-year-old daughter Louise to New York City to pursue a career in modern dance. To keep an eye on the girl while she's there, Myra sends along a middle-aged mother of two named Nora (Elizabeth McGovern), and the movie's about what happens to the two of them once they get off the train. New York turns out to be nothing like Wichita, and that's just fine with Louise, but Nora has a history in the city and a personal quest of her own. Her story as she unlocks the key to her past and (literally and figuratively) loosens her corset is crucial, and McGovern captures Nora's gradual awakening with understated sympathy and grace. Haley Lu Richardson, who plays Louise, gets the look right sometimes, but the real Louise Brooks had an "it" factor on screen that no actress playing her could hope to duplicate. That's not Richardson's fault, and as an impetuous teenager out to take life and the city by storm, she's not bad. She's just not Louise Brooks.