The Irishman (2019)

THE IRISHMAN  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Martin Scorsese
    Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino,
    Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale,
    Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, Stephanie Kurtzuba
In "The Irishman", the "GoodFellas" grow old, with Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran, a coldly efficient mob enforcer with a conflicted sense of loyalty to a pair of powerful mentors: crime boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino.) Scorsese made this for Netflix, which allows him to be expansive - the movie runs three and a half hours. That might be an hour longer than it needs to be, the CGI technology that's supposed to make the stars look younger isn't especially convincing, and it's pretty much devoid of sympathetic characters. De Niro plays Sheeran with the matter-of-factness of a guy who knows how the world works and knows his place in it. (He pays a hard personal price for that acceptance, but there's nothing he can do about that, either.) Pacino goes over the top yet again: It might be vintage Pacino, but it's not Jimmy Hoffa. The standout in the cast is Pesci as the capo who knows all the angles and knows how to play them. He's this movie's equivalent of Brando in "The Godfather": omniscient, self-assured and lethally understated. It's probably the best work of his career. Several times in the movie, Frank and Russell sit down together over a loaf of bread and a glass of wine. It's their personal sacrament, an act of communion, and the symbolism, in a Scorsese movie, is not accidental. Significantly, Sheeran never does that with Jimmy Hoffa.

Three Strangers (1946)

THREE STRANGERS  (1946)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Jean Negulesco
    Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Geraldine Fitzgerald
There's a recurring theme that runs through much of John Huston's work, from "The Maltese Falcon" to "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" to "The Man Who Would Be King" to "Moby Dick": the protagonist who sets out after some fabulous prize, becomes obsessed with it and ultimately achieves it, even as the quest itself destroys him. This movie, which Huston cowrote, is another riff on that, telling what happens to three shady characters who sign a pact to share the proceeds from a sweepstakes ticket. Be careful what you wish for, in other words. Lorre's outstanding as the film's resident fatalist, the only one of the three who understands from the start that the deck's stacked against all of them, no matter how the cards are played, and whose only ambition is to get drunk and stay that way till the hangman comes. According to noirmeister Eddie Muller, the role was intended for Humphrey Bogart, and it's not hard to imagine Bogart delivering Lorre's lines. 

Mary (2019)

MARY  (2019)  ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Goi
    Gary Oldman, Emily Mortimer, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo,
    Stefanie Scott, Chloe Perrin, Owen Teague
A family buys a ghost ship and sails it into the Bermuda Triangle. That sounds like a good idea, right? The framing device isn't especially believable (though Emily Mortimer acts convincingly crazy in it), and the ending's a disappointment, but some of the stuff on the boat is intense. The writer, Anthony Jaswinski, was responsible for "The Shallows" (2016), another terror-on-the-water thriller.

The Phantom Carriage (1921)

THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE  (1921)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Victor Sjöstrom
    Victor Sjöstrom, Astrid Holm, Tore Svennberg,
    Hilda Borgström, Concordia Selander, Lisa Lundholm
As midnight approaches on New Year's Eve, three derelicts huddle beneath a clock tower drinking wine, and one of them tells about a legend that the last man to die before the year ends must drive Death's carriage through the following year, picking up the souls of those whose lives have expired. Then something happens, and at the stroke of midnight, the man who just told the story dies. There's a radical shift in the main character toward the end that contradicts the film's otherwise grim fatalism, but the acting is believably naturalistic, and the use of double exposure in the carriage scenes is spooky. The movie had a significant influence on Ingmar Bergman, who apparently watched it at least once a year for most of his life. Sjöstrom went on to direct silent movies in America, and ended his career playing the old professor in Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" in 1957.

Parasite (2019)

PARASITE  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Bong Joon Ho

    Song Kang Ho, Lee Sun Kyun, Cho Yeo Jeong,

    Choi Woo Shik, Park So Dam, Lee Jung Eun

Scenes from the class struggle in South Korea, about a slum family just trying to scrape by and the affluent family that employs them. There's a touch of Luis Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel" in this, but the movie goes its own way. There's nobody to root for, really. You'd be inclined to sympathize with the working-class family - you admire their resilience and determination and devotion to each other - but there's also a casual ruthlessness in the way they deceive and even ruin people to get where they want to go. If their upper-class counterparts aren't necessarily evil, they are condescending and clueless. There's a smugness about them you sometimes see in privileged people, who either don't realize how smug they are, or just don't care. A key scene occurs toward the end, when the mother of the rich family and the father of the poor one are together in the Mercedes. He's behind the wheel, driving, and she's riding in the back seat. A devastating rainstorm has hit Seoul and left the man's family homeless. He's just spent the night in a crowded gym, and hasn't had a chance to wash or change clothes. All the woman can talk about is what a blessing the rain is because it's left the air smelling fresh and clean. The chauffeur's face hardens as the woman rattles on. She doesn't get it. She never will. There's a lot of talk about metaphors in this, and the movie's full of them. If you watch it, see if you can figure out what they all signify, and who or what the parasite of the title refers to.

99 and 44/100% Dead (1974)

99 AND 44/100% DEAD  (1974)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: John Frankenheimer

    Richard Harris, Edmond O'Brien, Ann Turkel,

    Bradford Dillman, Kathrine Baumann, Chuck Connors

A mob enforcer named Harry Crown ventures into a war between two criminal gangs in an offbeat action thriller starring Richard Harris in the kind of role Michael Caine used to own. Also on hand (so to speak) is Chuck Connors as "Claw" Zuckerman, a murderous amputee with an arsenal of unusual devices that plug into his prosthesis. It's deadpan, sardonic and cartoonish in about equal amounts, and Harris, whose mod, '70s hairstyle looks a bit silly now, gives a lethally contained performance. Notice the way he takes off his glasses and slips them into the pocket of his suit coat. And get out of his way when he does. 

The Cardinal (1963)

THE CARDINAL  (1963)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Otto Preminger

    Tom Tryon, Romy Schneider, John Huston,

    Carol Lynley, John Saxon, Dorothy Gish,

    Burgess Meredith, Ossie Davis, Jill Haworth,

    Raf Vallone, Chill Wills, Patrick O'Neal,

    Murray Hamilton, Arthur Hunnicut, Wolfgang Preiss

An ecclesiastical potboiler about a Catholic priest named Stephen Fermoyle (Tom Tryon), who moves up through the clerical ranks in the years between the two world wars. When Preminger made this, the Second Vatican Council was still going on, but in the first half of the 20th century, Catholicism was still pretty much medieval, and while the rules could seem to be absolute, the moral arithmetic could get kind of murky. Fermoyle, echoing the Church's inflexible stand on abortion, effectively murders his own sister, while some of his priestly colleagues go out of their way to accommodate Hitler's Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. If this came out today, it'd be a miniseries, at least. As a feature-length film (even at close to three hours), it feels episodic and incomplete, with some key characters coming and going and dropping away before you get to know much about them. It's a gold-framed, stained-glass window on the way things used to be, but the script and execution are heavy-handed. Tryon eventually retired from films to pursue a successful career as a novelist. 

John Saxon

(1936-2020)