Night Has a Thousand Eyes (John Farrow, 1948)

Fans of Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947) or the new Guillermo del Toro remake should check out Night Has a Thousand Eyes. Both films feature a phony mentalist act. But where Tyrone Power's Stan in Alley is a loser swindling vaudeville patrons out of their ducats, Edward G. Robinson's John Triton ("The Mental Wizard") suffers from accurate premonitions and strives to save people from the dangers that await them. The typical noir sense of fate thus works both ways here; the first third is dominated by a flashback but the remainder gets pressed down by a future-oriented inevitability, especially since all of Triton's visions appear to become true.

And it's a genuinely frightening film. Triton predicts that a lion somehow works into the Jean Courtland's (Gail Russell) future peril. And indeed, we learn that a lion has escaped from the zoo! As Jean chats with her intended Elliott Carson (John Lund), Farrow tracks back slowly to reveal an undulating curtain. I won't spoil what's behind it but aaaaaiiiiieeeeee! At least close some of those ginormous damn windows!

William Demarest is on hand as a barky cop injecting humor into the proceedings without throwing off the menacing noir balance. So is hunky Richard Webb. Story not being my strong point, I have no clue what he's doing here. But he would go on to play the dad in one of my very favorite gay films, The Gay Deceivers (Bruce Kessler, 1969). Screenplay co-written by one Barré Lyndon [sic!] based on a 1945 novel by Cornell Woolrich.

Grade: A-minus

The Last Outlaw (Christy Cabanne, 1936)

From an original story by John Ford, The Last Outlaw stars Harry Carey as Dean Payton, yes, that Dean Payton, famed bank robber who's just got out of prison after 25 years. The older but unbowed Payton is not adjusting to the New West too well - cars, rude people, ineffectual police, byzantine bureaucracy (a banker prattles on in government lingo, e.g., "the CPA - the Cattle Purchase Act") and, in one of the best scenes, talking pictures (Payton talks back to a newsreel)! Payton and pal Chuck Wilson (Hoot Gibson - one of the oatiest names I've ever heard) attend a singing cowboy movie and they're baffled at the "fancy getup" and "soprano" voice of star Larry Dixon. And in a lesson in how things never change, they get shushed for their "very annoying" talking. 

In their indispensable The RKO Story, Richard Jewell and Vernon Harbin deem The Last Outlaw "a minor masterpiece" (96). I wouldn't go that far. The first half is as creaky as Payton's bones. But the climactic gunfight is a minor masterpiece unto itself arriving at an implosive complexity unexpected from a 70-minute oater. In fact, it's barely a gunfight at all. Payton and Wilson defeat a band of newly minted bank robbers through patience and the preservation of ammunition, taking out the water and heat from the bad guys' lair. Payton even shoots at a water pail carried by his own daughter who's been taken hostage.

I also watched John Ford's 1919 version, a two-reeler of which only the first reel exists. The ten minutes are not much to go on. Edgar Jones as Bud Coburn plays the Payton role. In the most redolent scene, he sits outside of a (movie?) theatre and dreams of a rowdy dance hall of old, proving that depletion and nostalgia will always form a foundation to the western if not American life in general.

Jewell and Harbin link the 1936 version to Ride the High Country (Sam Peckinpah, 1962) and Lonely are the Brave (David Miller, 1962) as films that "chronicled the losing of the west." I suggest a quadruple feature of all three with, oh, let's say Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021).

The Last Outlaw (1936): A-minus

The Last Outlaw (1919): Not fair to grade without the second reel. Check your attics. 

You Know What? Two Okay Comedies!

I watched Heartbreakers (David Mirkin, 2001) only because Mirkin's sole other directorial effort is my beloved Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997). Predictably, it's not fit to shine Romy and Michele's Pradas. The main problem is that it has a 123-minute running time as opposed to Romy and Michele's 92 minutes, far too long for such a bauble. Still, Mirkin pulls off the neat trick of fashioning a cute film out of a nasty story about mother-and-daughter con artists (Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love Hewitt). Featuring the last onscreen appearance of Anne Bancroft and one of the last glimpses of the Twin Towers in a contemporary film. 

Switch (Blake Edwards, 1991) is lesser Edwards about a pieceashit sexist (Perry King) who is murdered by three wronged women. He ascends to Purgatory where God (voiced by a man and a woman) works with The Devil (Bruce Martyn Payne, looking like the love child of Gillian Anderson and Matthew McConaughey) to send him back to earth in the body of a woman (Ellen Barkin, up to the task and then some). If he can get one woman to like him, he will gain entry into heaven. 2022 viewers will twist themselves into a wiener package trying to determine if this film is transphobic or homophobic or whatnot. For sure, its view of gender is pretty rigid. Me, I'm content with the fact that the word "homophobic" is even uttered in the film. It was from the early 1990s, after all, an era which is quickly sliding into a "that's how things were back then" profile. In fact, I just helped it along that path.

Heartbreakers: B+

Switch: B+

Two trauma-horror films

Trauma appears to be the operative mode in an increasing amount of horror films, the genre that gives me no peace. Sometimes this leads to swill like Malignant or The Empty Man. But here are two good ones.

In Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019), Morfydd Clark plays Katie, a palliative care nurse who has recently lost a patient although Glass never makes it clear if the death is Katie's fault or not. Now under the name Maud, Katie tends to Amanda Köhl (Jennifer Ehle, still convincing me she's Meryl Streep's sister), a famous dancer terminally ill with lymphoma. Maud has grown devoutly religious since her patient's death and takes it upon herself to save Amanda's soul, especially when she learns Amanda's paying a companion, Carol (Lily Frazer), to have sex with her. Amanda is amenable to Maud's crusade depending on her level of desperation in the face of death. But Maud becomes violent at one of Amanda's urbane parties and she is promptly fired sending her deeper into her religious fervor. 

As I always say in relation to so many horror films, Saint Maud is over when it's over. I'm not sure what to do with it. But as a portrait of a woman spiraling out of control (or taking extreme measures to gain control of her life), it's plenty pungent. And 84 minutes is a humane-enough running time so I don't rue the expenditure unlike Malignant or The Empty Man which top out at 111 minutes and 137 minutes (!) respectively. 

Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond, 2021) is far more my speed. At the height of the Video Nasties era in 1985, Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) works as a censor for the British Board of Film Classification. She reviews a film with the redolent psychotronic title of Don't Go in the Church directed by sleaze merchant Frederick North (Adrian Schiller). The scenario resembles the circumstances of her sister's disappearance when she was a child which gives Enid hope that she may still be alive. When she tracks down a copy of one of North's banned films, Enid believes that the lead is indeed her sister grown up. She confronts North and more tragedy ensues.

Like Saint Maude, Censor devolves into the requisite gore beats for the finale. But it's plenty chewy. Enid matches Maud's intensity. But her arc allows the viewer to ponder not just the role of censorship but the function of horror films. Are horror films cathartic enough to redirect our basest instincts in socially responsible ways? Or do they augment our basest instincts and thus require censorship? Or do the horror of the Thatcher years and its venal bootstraps philosophy render such questions moot? In any event, Censor has the exact same running time as Saint Maud! Watch them both instead of The Empty Man!

Saint Maud: B+

Censor: A-minus

Murder on the Orient Express (Kenneth Branagh, 2017)

MASSIVE SPOILER

Finally dragged this carcass out for a viewing and it was far better than I expected, Citizen Damn Kane compared to Branagh's risible Belfast. It's difficult to get too angry at a typically dopey Agatha Christie property as long as the pace keeps up. This one takes a while to get cooking. But soon you're blinded by the impressive star wattage which carries the film all the way to its gross justifiable homicide conclusion. Harmless but I won't remember it tomorrow.

Speaking of remembering, though, something odd happened while watching this. At about the halfway mark, I figured out the ending and not because I was paying close attention (I wasn't). I had a suspicion that I saw the ending somewhere else. And when it hit me, I guffawed. It wasn't Sidney Lumet's 1974 version which I saw as a kid and recall nothing about. It was Mad's parody of same, Muddle on the Orient Express, from the October 1975 issue, no. 178. I found a copy of the issue and there it was on page 47 (see below). No clue what Sidney Poitier is doing there. He's not in Lumet's film and he's referring to The Bedford Incident, a 1965 film directed by James B. Harris whose next film was 1973's Some Call It Loving which some adjudge the greatest film ever made. Decent flick. But was it so ubiquitous that it would signify in a juvenile humor comic a decade later? 

Grade: B

The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986)

Even seeing this first run as a teen, it was obvious that Rutger Hauer as John Ryder was a gorgeous Teutonic manifestation of cutie pie Jim's (C. Thomas Howell) gay panic. That helps justify both Ryder's Jason-Voorhees-like supernatural abilities and his perpetual coming on to Jim. A sexy-ass film when it isn't ripping women in half. But like so many horror films, it's over when it's over. Once you crack the not-so-difficult code, there's not much left to chew on. Ryder awakens feelings in Jim, Jim wants to eliminate them (especially when it's clear to even the cop trying to save him that there's something going on between the two of them), and then he succeeds in doing so. Not sure what it all says about gay panic. But as a de facto form of gay porn, I can swallow two hotties angsting against one another for 97 minutes. Love the tagline too. "The terror starts the moment he stops." Stop...mmmm...no, don't stop...just don't tell...

Grade: B+

Noises Off... (Peter Bogdanovich, 1992)

I've not seen Noises Off, Michael Frayn's celebrated 1982 farce, on stage so I must reserve judgement on how well it works there (although I suspect it'd come off like the terrible comedy Lora Meredith starts her stage career with in Sirk's Imitation of Life). But it definitely does not work on film. Peter Bogdanovich ventilates the play admirably, the impressive cast surpasses the dexterous requirements of the material, and the entire project has a mild Cubist/modernist/Celine and Julie feel to it as the principals run through three performances of the same play, once mainly from backstage. It really is a brilliant piece of comedic writing. 

But the timing required to pull off the physical comedy loses the thrill of its dexterity in film where myriad takes can perfect it. In a theatre, the audience can be impressed together and have their laughter build off one another. In a movie theatre or at home, you're stuck with film's reality quotient and soon, moribund questions of realism arise such as why would theatre professionals allow unprofessional behavior like drunkenness and personal gripes to ruin a performance, not to mention three performances? Oh well - at least it's an admirable failure rather than an enraging one like Bogdanovich's smug, indulgent catastrophe At Long Last Love (1975).

Grade: C+