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Green for Danger
The Grifters
The Grudge
The Guard
Gun Crazy
Hail the Conquering Hero
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The Great Ziegfeld 1936 Robert Z. Leonard 3.0 William Powell, Luise Rainer, Myrna Loy, Frank Morgan, Virginia Bruce, Fanny Brice. Big budget biopic (over three hours long) of great showman, Florenz Ziegfeld. Follows from early days when had no money and was selling a strong man, through his great successes of teens and twenties, and his death in early 1930s. Mostly breezy, light-hearted tone, usually sentimental (e.g., close-up of his hand dropping rose when he dies), and wall-to-wall glamour, especially with beautiful young women. Ziggy a charmer, fast talker, sincere, debonair, droll, ironic, lively, usually broke since he cared more about his reputation and putting on a great show (“art”) than making big bucks, and when he tried to make a lot of money (stock market in 1929), he lost everything; Powell carries through well. Focus on his marriage to Anna Rank (Rainer), its break-up due to his affair with Bruce, and then his attachment to Billie Burke (Loy), who took care of him until his death. Rainer got Academy Award for her fluttery, self-conscious performance with cute face and eyes pressing out tears, where her love for Ziggy battles with her pride; most famous was her phone call to Loy congratulating her on her marriage to Ziegfeld, but then of course breaking down. First half is rather slow humor and plot development, and then production numbers dominate in second half after his shows become successful. Shows some of his early discoveries like Fanny Brice and Will Rogers, who went on to great stardom. Striking production numbers, e.g., the Circus Extravaganza (a bit boring despite the exceedingly well-trained, immobile Airedale dogs!), but especially “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody,” which lasts six or seven minutes and is done in one take; all is gradually ascending spiral through 18th century, 19th century opera, ‘Pagliacci,’ etc. until you finally reach the crowning queen on the top. All is quite sappy but impressive, exactly what you would expect from an MGM musical. Pretty sad, though sentimental, at the end: Ziegfeld – “Why is the world so old, and life is so short?” Kind of fun to watch, but exceedingly long; more of a first-rate period piece than a good movie.


Green for Danger 1946 Sidney Gilliat (Britain) 3.5 Sally Gray beautiful and alluring as Nurse Linley; Trevor Howard as the grumpy Dr. Barnes, one of the suspects – he and Gray are engaged to be married, although they are fighting; Rosamund John as Nurse Sanson, one of the prime suspects – she is stressed since her mother was killed in a V-1 raid in London; Alastair Sim as the droll and ironic Inspector Cockrill, who teases his witnesses as much as he interrogates them; Leo Genn as ladies’ man surgeon “Mr.” Eden, another major suspect. A superior who-dun-it that takes place in rural England under attack from German V-1 bombs (perhaps close to London?) at the end of World War II. Six people are suspects for the murder of a postman in the beginning of the film; one of the suspects is killed, and another almost murdered; in a curiously conceived show-down in the operating room, Sims uncovers the guilty party, but only after a plot switche to keep the viewer guessing. Great pleasure for the viewer trying to keep up with the clues and speculating on the guilty party. The film has a nice McGuffin – the CO2 cartridge that is painted a bright green (color in the film would have made the visual more dramatic). The narrative is very tricky, sometimes absurdly so: it is difficult to figure out the clue about the knife holes in the operating gowns or why an innocent suspect (Nurse Woods) has a little paint smeared on the front of her gown; the showdown scene in which Sims has the suspects operate on Gray under false pretenses strains credibility, to say the least (Gray is willing to go under the knife knowing that one of the operating team has already tried to kill her?); the suspicious activity of Mr. Eden in the final scene has us believe that he is the guilty one, although he is preparing an antidote to save the life the of the guilty party (Nurse Sanson), who has taken deadly poison tablets. Some actions are difficult to explain: Sister Bates shouting to the whole party that she has discovered who murdered the postman rather than telling the inspector about it; Barnes later allowing Nurse Linley to go to her room alone when she has endangered herself by announcing that she has noticed a key clue. However, the movie is supremely entertaining thanks to expert direction and acting. The sets are dark, mysterious, and paranoia-inducing, and the constant menace of the buzz bombs and the activity in the operating room – wheeling the patient in and out, focus on the canisters used by the anesthesiologist, close observation of the breathing balloon as the participants worry about the patient’s survival, the discomfort of being so passive and a possible victim when undergoing an operation, etc. – create an atmosphere of threat and suspicion. The characters are presented in the operating scenes as masked and thus indistinguishable, but the script and the solid acting differentiate them (Eden the ladies’ man, Barnes the nervous, jilted lover, Sanson traumatized by the death of her mother, beautiful Linley not sure about whether to marry Barnes) so that the audience cares about them and has a stake in the film’s outcome. The film rather rehabilitates the tired who-dun-it genre.


Greenberg 2010 Noah Baumbach 3.0 Ben Stiller as gaunt, self-deprecating gentle neurotic taking time-out house-sitting in LA; Greta Gerwig as plain Jane, unkempt, but charming personal assistant to Greenberg’s brother and wife – the viewer spends a lot of time watching her drive impassively through LA traffic; Rhys Ifans as Greenberg’s scruffy old buddy trying to save his marriage; Jennifer Jason Leigh in cameo as Greenberg’s ex-girlfriend. Endearing, low-key film about psychology and personal relationships in modern America. Greenberg, who used to live in LA but fled to New York, where he has been working as a carpenter, has returned to Los Angeles after a stint in a mental hospital; his only purpose seems to have a little down time. He meets his brother’s personal assistant Gerwig, and they pursue a hesitant off-again, on-again relationship; at first it is mainly through the family’s German Shepherd, who develops a very expensive immune disorder; but then they give into their mutual attraction (desperation?) and make very awkward love two times. Both characters are somewhat depressive, self-doubting non-performers, although Greenberg is more aggressive and willing to hurt people around him than the sweet Gerwig. Gerwig keeps saying she is not interested in starting a relationship, and yet she goes ahead and has sex with two characters; every time Greenberg feels that he is getting attached to Greta, he dumps her, gets very angry, shouts and has a tirade, and then leaves in a huff; but then of course he returns, since he is not only a contemptuous loner, but also lonely. Both characters come across as losers with a good heart, although Greenberg does a better job of covering his vulnerability. Film culminates when Greenberg gets high on cocaine with a bunch of 20-year-olds and generally makes a fool of himself while Gerwig is in the hospital recuperating from an abortion; he then is tempted to run with a couple of the girls to Australia (fun! Geographical fix!), but his conscience qualms stop him cold; he jumps out of the car at a traffic light, and goes to the hospital to bring Gerwig back to her apartment, where he tucks her in (she pushes the covers back off), and he settles down near her, apparently to stay for a while. The credits roll – we are led to believe that he will “stay”, however that works out. Very low key film emphasizing small social and psychological observations; nothing much happens but the viewer comes to feel affection for these flawed but good-hearted people looking for a connection. A romantic comedy in camouflage.


The Grifters 1990 Stephen Frears 4.0 John Cusack low-key as small-time, short-con grifter whose steady life is thrown off by the arrival of his mother, Angelica Huston, the mother who has good study job controlling race track odds for her bookie employer Bobo (played by Pat Hingle), Annette Bening pretty stunningly cute (especially when she presents herself to us undressed) as Cusack’s girlfriend but with a lot more brains (despite her initial clueless, giddy behavior) than the guy. Pretty terrific up-date of Jim Thompson novel (published 1963). Focuses on the personal lives of the family of grifters rather than on their art. When Huston decides to visit her son (she gave birth to him when she was 14), everything is thrown into disarray: Cusack starts to be dissatisfied with comfortable little life with short cons; Huston’s job performance begins to slip, and when because of her concern for the health of her son in the hospital she misses a horse race in La Jolla (?), her bookie Bobo thinks she is stealing from him, and her life begins to crumble; Myra (Benning) does not get on well with Mom, and Myra identifiers Huston and Cusack as potential marks. The viewer is terrifically entertained by trying to follow the cons and to determine, for example, whether Myra really would like to team up with Cusack for long cons, or whether (as he suspects) she is trying to con him and to get his stash (hidden in the frames of two of his paintings). It turns out that Myra is strictly predatory and is after Huston’s stash in her trunk (yes, she is stealing from Bobo) as well as Cusack’s living room stash. Unrealistically, I must admit, it turns out that Myra is murderous – she follows Huston to a hick motel and tries to strangle her to death, but – reversal of fortune! – she is shot through the mouth by Huston, who was expecting a hostile visit, apparently from Bobo. But when son visits the local morgue to identify the body, he (and we) realize that it is not Huston but Myra!! since the cadaver’s hand lacks the burn mark that Bobo had ground into it in a previous punish session with Huston. Cusack keeps quiet, and his mother later shows up, determined to take advantage of this favorable stroke of fate in order to escape from the implacable vengeance of Bobo and to go off and start a new life. But she has no money, and when her son refuses to give her his stash, she gets seductive and comes on to him; when he resists her horrified, she hits him with a briefcase and when it breaks the glass in his hand, he is accidentally wounded and bleeds to death! She makes a half-hearted attempt to clean up and then leaves. Such is the twisted state of Huston’s heart and her relationship with her son. Good atmosphere, excellent performances from all the principals, delightful twists and turns and suspense (what is she up to?): the viewer is rapt with attention. Some incidents strain credibility, and the ending might have been better set up with more development of Huston’s and Cusack’s character; but who cares!?


The Grudge 2004 Takashi Shimizu 2.5 Sarah Michelle Gellar attractive and simply coiffed as exchange student in Japan – she volunteers as a social worker; Jason Behr reasonably hunky as her boyfriend Doug; Grace Zabriskie as somehow zonked out older woman lying on her back in the nasty house; Bill Pullman as Peter, the college professor teaching in Japan who is pursued by the teenage girl of the cursed family (she appears in the background of numerous photos inspected by a detective); Ryo Ishibashi as the chief police inspector looking into the crime. Japanese-style horror movie about a house which carries a terrible curse – the people who faced their own horror in the house will take their revenge on the people subsequently associated with it; somehow the fury engendered by the original deed (a Japanese man kills the members of his family and then commits suicide) is visited on any of the innocents having the misfortune of setting foot in the damned place. There is an extraordinary body count – after the original murders, most of the members of a family that dares to rent the place, a Japanese social worker who visits Zabriskie in the house, the police detective, and the boyfriend of Gellar. Sarah Michelle Gellar appears to escape the curse, but in the moderately shocking final scene, the corpse of her boyfriend turns into the haunting ghoul (the usual long straight hair hanging over the face with one staring eye exposed) who presumably will make her also a victim. The narrative is decidedly non-linear, bouncing back and forth between several time frames and leaving a lot of connections unexplained and undeveloped. Absent a credible narrative and characters we care about (the woman who lies on the ground and claws at the transparent Japanese walls all the town, the Japanese social worker who reappears regularly sans lower jaw, wrapped in bloody cloths, dripping blood on the floor, the little ghost boy originally murdered by his dad), the focus of the film is in the shocks and special effects: the police inspector putting his hand in the bathtub to open the drain and having his wrist seized by an unidentified hand shooting out of the water, the policemen investigating the telltale attic to find two white-colored corpses lying in relaxed posture in the corner, Gellar comforting the supine Zabriskie and having a cloud of hair turn into a frightening ghoul hovering over them, etc. The shocks are definitely effective, but the film does not draw the viewer enough into its web to make us care and thus be really scared when the characters are threatened. Obvious connections with the producers of the ‘Ring’ series including a video tape that plays some role in the film. Well produced film that leaves the viewer a bit on the outside.


The Guard 2011 John Michael McDonagh 3.0 Brendan Gleeson charismatically comic as police (Gaelic is “garda”) sergeant on duty in a small town near Galway; Don Cheadle a bit dull as straight arrow FBI agent sent to work with him to stop a big drug-smuggling operation; Fionnula Flanagan in colorful role as Gleeson’s mother who is dying of cancer; a host of charming Irish actors that add a lot of humor and piquancy to the film. Kind of buddy movie emphasizing the comic as well as the suspenseful, an unevenly directed but very entertaining film from first-time director McDonagh. The slacker cop Gleeson presides over a small town in the West where the viewer knows that a big drug trade is about to happen; but he slowly responds to the challenge when murders are committed and Cheadle shows up to prod him into action (but only after a great deal of mutual irritation); the rather weak plot peaks in a shootout at the port at the end, when an energized Gleeson – backed up by the AK-47 wielding Cheadle – charges the bad guys directly, killing all of them but also dying himself. The fun is in the details. One wonders how Gleeson ever got promoted to sergeant: he lies around in his apartment, he drinks too much (in a bar he drinks both whisky and Guinness), he brings in two prostitutes from Dublin on his day off and after they are finished he sighs with satisfaction that there is not a drop of gism left in him; when first introduced to Cheadle he unleashes a series of pointless racist insults; he visits his dying mother and they converse about life with a liberal use of the f… word. The opening sequence is memorable: a speeding car speeds by the impassive Gleeson, who barely bats an eyelash; when the car crashes and Gleeson approaches a dead man in the road, he coolly rifles through pockets, takes out a pill (acid or something?) and with a self-satisfied grin pops it into his mouth. The Tarantinoesque crooks speak constantly out of their context, talking about Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell (he and Dylan Thomas are two famous people who came out of Wales) and they adopt a droll and off-the-cuff attitude when speaking with cops. Film comes across as pretty chaotic – often the viewer cannot help but ask himself how a character like Gleeson could ever function as a policeman – but the fiendishly entertaining moments keep the viewer’s interest.


Gun Crazy 1949 Joseph H. Lewis 3.5 Peggy Cummins intriguing and convincing as Annie Laurie Starr, kind of serious Annie Oakley character with an unexplained homicidal impulse that gets her and her boyfriend in trouble, John Dall (also in ‘Rope’) not a very good actor, but well cast as easy going guy with a big grin – he doesn’t like to kill, but he has an unstoppable fascination with guns (shown in the beginning in a failed attempt to steal from a gun shop by breaking the windows), Rusty Tamblyn as the teenage Dall in the beginning. Hard-hitting film noir that rises to a tragic level largely because of the crazy and devoted love between the principals, and the knowledge all the way through that they are doomed to extinction. Based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor. Crisp back and white photography with often imaginative cinematography and editing: the fish-eyed shot of Tamblyn when he is caught by the policeman in the beginning; the low angle shot of Cummins as Dall watches her step onto the stage for the first time; the single shot scene of the Hampton robbery – very exciting and dynamic shot of the getaway drive from the back seat of the car; the meticulously plotted longish robbery scene of the Armour Plant toward the end of the movie – here the aesthetic is realistic and matter-of-fact; the poetic end of the lovers in the mountain swamps surrounded by tall reeds and fog as the sheriff’s posse closes in on them. The film aesthetic sometimes changes from poetic to surreal to realistic. Chemistry between Cummins and Dall is compelling: the initial scenes between them crackle with sexual tension (her outlined body, bare leg, frank look in the eyes, remarks about liking a man who “goes all the way”, Dall eating her up with his eyes, etc.) that is never much lessened. The two kids adore one another with a kind of animal hunger that lasts until the tragic end; they don’t fight much; they cling to one another when they dance; and Cummins, who says she wants a man who can give her the good things in life, nevertheless remains loyal to him until death. The viewer pities them because of the sincerity and passion of their attachment; and our involvement in increased even more as we realize that there is no escape for them; when they dance on the Santa Monica pier, they barely have time to turn once around the floor when they have to run again from the law. The finale in the swamp is true to character: Annie is ready to fire at the lawmen (who are Dall’s childhood friends), and to save them, Dall instinctively fires at her killing her; then the police kill him. Two rather endearing young people who never had a chance; and we don’t really know why.


Hail the Conquering Hero 1944 Preston Sturges 4.0 Eddie Bracken as patriotic marine Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith; Ella Raines cute, clean-cut and convincing as his fiancée who is engaged to someone else – she does an awful lot of smiling; Raymond Walburn amusing in leading role as bumbling, blustering, motor-mouth, opportunistic mayor of the city; William Demarest perfectly cast in dominant role as tough-talking, motor-mouth, conniving sergeant; Franklin Pangborn his usual nervous, fussy, hysterical self in charge of the running about the bands; Freddie Steele athletic-looking as mother-obsessed orphan marine – “You shouldn’t do that to your mother!” “If you make one more crack about your mother, I’ll…”; Georgia Caine pretty and serious as Bracken’s mother; Bill Edwards as Ella’s straight, dull, apple-pie fiancé; Jimmy Conlin as the folksy, often bemused judge. Famous satirical but feel-good Sturges comedy about politics in small-town America during World War II. Plot focuses on the romantic fate of Raines and Bracken in the context of his duplicity. The film of course finishes on happy note: Ella chooses to be with Woodrow, the townspeople forgive Woodrow for his lie, and they make him stay to be elected mayor – he is “honest, courageous, and veracious”. The satire is pretty pointed: war hero worship – big welcome celebration, the town buys back his mother’s mortgage, plans to raise a statue in his honor, the town fathers “persuade” Bracken to run for mayor; character of wartime America is “business as usual”, i.e. take advantage of the war effort for personal profit; mother worship expressed mainly be Steele; politics where the crowd stampedes for a candidate when he doesn’t even want the office, partisans marching endlessly through the streets singing political songs and carrying banners; bullshitting, motor mouth local politicians who don’t even remember the name of the Pacific battlegrounds and wish that the war hero would have come home just a little later so they could get quietly reelected; telling war stories on a rant (Demarest). The welcome scene when Woodrow arrives in town with his buddies is a masterpiece of confusion, satire (of hero worship in a small town), and slapstick. Walburn trying to give a pompous welcoming speech but interrupted by bands which take up their music spontaneously and Pangborn running around blowing his whistle telling them to stop; ends with three competing bands playing at the same time. The film is maniacally fast-paced with rapid-fire overlapping dialogue except in the sentimental scenes, which usually occur between Bracken and his mother, who maintains a shrine devoted to her war hero husband killed in World War I, or between him and his girlfriend. Some good Sturges lines, such as bartender to depressed Bracken: “Why don’t you acquire a gay viewpoint? It’s all mental; every bit of it. Smile and the world smiles with you. Frown and you frown alone.” The maitre d’ in the beginning says that he has received from broke GIs, among other things, the seat of Rommel’s pants and a button from Hitler’s coast. The film possesses marvelous small-town atmosphere similar to Frank Capra or Hitchcock’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt’, showing the affection of New Deal and wartime America for its small-town culture. Overall the film is quite patriotic: Bracken gives a heartfelt patriotic speech about the exploits of the Marine Corps in the beginning of the film; although bumblers, the six Marines are admirable war veterans and eager to charge back into the fray at the end; the satire is about small-time America during the War and not about the rightness or nobility of the war effort. Beautifully shot and edited; the comic acting by the Sturges troupe is first rate.