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Hangover Square
Hans Christian Andersen
Harry un ami qui vous veut du bien
The Heartbreak Kid
Heaven Can Wait
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Hangover Square 1945 John Brahm 4.0 Laird Cregar in his last role as gifted pianist and composer who suffers from a split personality – one of his personae is murderous; Linda Darnell as the bad girl – cheap, gold-digging popular singer; Faye Marlowe very pretty and competent in her Hollywood debut as the good girl who tries to encourage Cregar to pursue his creative gift; George Sanders, suave and handsome as always, as a Scotland Yard psychiatrist who is on to Cregar but who empathizes with his condition. Minor horror masterpiece with excellent acting by Cregar (his bulging eyes when the Mr. Hyde personality comes on are memorable), inventive and expressive direction by Brahm, and perhaps Bernard Herrmann’s best film score. Despite obvious similarities to ‘The Lodger’ and ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, the expert teamwork makes the film interesting and fresh. Cregar, whose transitions to his murderous personality are triggered by loud noises (the cat knocks over some picture frames, a load of pipes falls into a ditch in the street, loud chords from Herrmann’s concerto), evokes sympathy for the well-intentioned main character; he is unaware of his crimes, he struggles against them, and he invites destruction when he realizes what he has done. The script gives him a choice between his libido, low art and cheap sex (Darnell) and his reason, high art and true devotion (Marlowe). The price that the creative personality pays is suffering and an unintegrated persona; perhaps the artist can never be happy and well-adjusted. Cregar oscillates between the two. The direction is first-rate expressionism: the cat sneaks around the house like a stealthy libido; death is depicted imaginatively by the burial of the cat in the construction ditch in Hangover Square and by the burning of the Darnell’s body on the Guy Fawkes funeral pyre (Cregar carries his ‘effigy’ up a long letter to deposit it on top of the pyre); the camera exploits extensively contrasts between dark and light; close-ups are tight and often quickly edited to make emotional points. Film ends in a paroxysm as a feverish and obsessed Cregar plays his concerto (a passionate Rachmaninoffian piece by Herrmann with banged chords and characteristic muted trumpets), the fire breaks out, and as the orchestra and audience escape in a panic, he remains playing his piece as the concert hall goes up in flames and crashes down around him. Interesting, compelling, and even moving small film (77 minutes).


Hans Christian Andersen 1952 Charles Vidor (Sam Goldwyn) 3.0 Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Andersen gay and lively, with a twinkle in his eye, mellow musical voice, exuding gentle kindness and good will, a devoted story-teller (he is disliked by the village schoolmaster – on professional grounds?) with a soft heart that goes out to the prima ballerina (Zizi Jeanmarie from Paris) ambiguously mistreated by her husband-director Farley Granger. The film is a fantasy dreamed up by Goldwyn based on the stories of Andersen and the songs of Frank Loesser – very good ones indeed. Narrative, which takes him from a small village to Copenhagen, has little to do with the life of Andersen: he is presented as a gentle nonconformist who loves to tell stories, and when he does tell them he often breaks into music, which is often reminiscent of Arthur Sullivan’s G&S songs. “I am Hans Christian Andersen” is quite rhythmic; “Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen” plays in the background but is never sung until the finale where Hans is surrounded by children; clever song “Altogether” on the Emperors’ clothes; “There Once Was an Ugly Duckling” that teaches us all to accept diversity (Hollywood 1952!); “Everywhere I wander, Everywhere I roam” flowing romantic song with full string accompaniment but never sung; “No Two People have ever been so in love” skipping and echoing notes sung by ballerina and Andersen in fantasy ballet sequence in which Andersen imagines that the ballerina loves him; the lilting ‘Thumbelina’ appears only very briefly in the finale. Andersen writes a ballet on the subject of the Little Mermaid for his beloved ballerina; it provides an extensive ballet interlude toward the end of the film. Filmed in very bright color on delightful artificial-looking sets. Film has very little plot – Andersen and his adopted son Peter go to Copenhagen, where Hans falls in love with the married ballerina, and when he realizes that she is happy in her marriage despite her husband-director’s tyranny on stage, he returns quietly to Odense, his home town. The film is watchable because of the energy and charm of Danny Kaye and because of the excellent score by Loesser.


Happiness 1998 Todd Solondz 3.5 Dylan Baker as Bill, dull househusband psychologist who is into molesting and raping pre-adolescent boys, Cynthia Stevenson as Bill’s impossibly perky self-satisfied housewife Trish, Jane Adams in perhaps outstanding role as Stevenson's sister Joy looking for love and hooking up with at least two Mr. Wrongs, Lara Flynn Boyle as dark-haired sister Helen, who although she has celebrity friends and is adored by just about everyone still responds to the sexual advances of an obscene phone caller, Phillip Seymour Hoffmann as pitiful loner computer nerd Allen with serious impulses of sexual aggression -- he is too shy to respond to Boyle's acceptance of his telephone come-ons, Ben Gazzara in small role as paterfamilias who leaves his wife (Louise Lasser!) after 40 years of marriage, has an unsatisfactory sexual encounter with another woman, and then still hangs around as bemused observer; amazing boy actor as Billy, the searching son of Baker. Upsetting and unexpected film about serious dysfunctions -- almost of all of them sexual -- in a family of three sisters (and the men around them) and two parents. The title is a serious case of sarcasm -- everyone is looking for happiness in love and sex, but nobody even gets close. Adams hooks up with two hilarious basket cases (the Russian émigré Vlad, who steals her stereo and guitar after sex, is the more scurrilous) and she is still alone at the end; Boyle responds to the attentions of the obscene phone caller, but he avoids her in favor of an extremely fat hatchet murderer, and she also is alone at the end; Hoffmann is seriously damaged sexually, but he is incapable of acting on his desires; Baker as nerdy looking dad turns out to be a child “serial rapist” (scrawled on the wall of his suburban home) and has seriously disturbing conversations with his son (they talk very frankly about penis size (“What your friend doesn’t know, Billy, is that it’s not length that counts, it’s the width.”), Bill’s first orgasm (“when am I going to come?”), about dad’s penchant for abusing boys, etc.); Stevenson doesn’t seem to have strong sexual needs, and she leaves her husband when the shocking truth is revealed. The film comes together “six months later” in Miami when all are gathered around the table with the women hoping that Boyle will find them men; meanwhile, Billy finally has his first come watching a bikini-clad sunbather from the balcony; the dog licks the semen off the balcony rail, walks over to Mom (Stevenson) and licks her on the mouth, and Billy comes in and announces beaming “I came!” Consternation, credits roll. The only person happy at the end is Billy, and because we all know that sex gets you nowhere on the happiness road, he of course is not an exception. Film is absolutely unclassifiable – it is sometimes funny, sometimes depressing, sometimes satirical, sometimes completely off-the-wall; sometimes ironically, unexpectedly touching as when Baker shows great affection, patience and honesty with his son when they are talking about the most offensive subjects; you never know what is going to happen next. The nearest thing in American movies are semi-surrealist filmmakers like John Waters and David Lynch.


Harry un ami qui vous veut du bien 2000 Dominik Moll (France) 4.0 Laurent Lucas as Frenchman harassed by his noisy children on the way to vacation in the Massif central; Mathilde Seigner charming and pretty as his equally harassed but supportive wife; Sergi Lopez as low-key, insinuating and disturbing man who claims he went to high school with Laurent; Sophie Guillemin as pretty, empty-headed, sexy, and “bovine” girlfriend of Lopez. Fascinating, ambiguous French thriller that begins as a rather odd encounter between a harried French couple and the insinuating man who claims he was a fellow student with the husband and that ends in horrifying climax. The narrative takes place mostly in a creepy old farmhouse in the Massif central that the family is fixing up; the landscapes surrounding it are exquisitely fertile, alternately forested and open fields, and the principals driving through it provides relief from the claustrophobic atmosphere of the farmhouse. In the first part of the film Lopez is oddly and excessively solicitous of Lucas’ welfare: he insists that Lucas was a good writer in the lycée, and he does everything he can to promote it, at first mainly by strengthening his relationship with his wife. Things then turn for the worse: Lopez changes his mind about Mathilde and tells her that she is holding back her husband; Lopez then begins to do away with the people in Lucas’ entourage that he judges stand in his way: he murders Lucas’ parents by driving them off the road; he murders Lucas’ hippy-acting brother because he mocks his brother’s writing; he then murders his own girlfriend since he decides that she is an empty-headed cow. In the climax, Lopez is determined to murder Mathilde and all the children, even handing Lucas a knife so he can participate; just as the viewer is shouting “kill him!”, Lucas stabs him in the gut and buries him in an abandoned well; Mathilde knows nothing about it. In the meantime, Lucas’ creativity has somehow been awakened and he has been able to finish a story entitled “Les Oeufs”. The last scene has his wife driving down the freeway toward Paris with Lucas contentedly holding his completed manuscript in his lap. The film is a masterpiece of escalating subtle menace, of suggestive imagery, closely observed psychology, and of ambiguity. One is never sure what the meaning is of the pink-tiled bathroom that Lucas’ parents install without his knowledge (he does his writing there sitting on the toilet); one wonders about the significance of the abandoned well (turns out to be a recurring McGuffin for murder); and most importantly the eggs that Lopez eats after he has sex with his girlfriend (he says that it restores his virility) and that Lucas stares at in extreme close-up just before his breakthrough to restored (?) creativity. The film works well as a horror movie. Its underlying theme seems to be the connection between masculinity and creativity: Lopez’s menace is tied to sexuality and masculinity and eventually to prying Lucas away from his domestic subjugation to his wife and (noisy, fussy, demanding) children; his writing is associated with his separation from his wife (he works in the pink bathroom) and with the egg-shapes seen in the refrigerator (these seem more like testicles than breasts); and in the final scene Mathilde has taken over the driving, the children are asleep in the back seat, and Lucas is relaxing with his work in his lap. For all his menace, Lopez seems to have restored Lucas’ maleness in all of its contradictions and ambiguities – artistic creativity and murder. Riveting film.


He’s Just Not That Into You 2009 Ken Kwapis 2.5 Ginnifer Goodwin a discovery with her genuine smile, soft, round face, and amiable cluelessness; Kevin Connolly as rather nerdy real estate salesman who ends up with “the girl of my dreams”; Scarlett Johansson as yoga instructor – sexy and full-bodied as ever; Bradley Cooper with engaging smile and personality as apparently happily married man who is a narrative focus with his involvement with both his wife and Johansson; Jennifer Connelly as somewhat uptight wife of Cooper – she spends a great deal of the movie remaking her apartment into the perfect yuppie lair; Justin Long as uncommitted restaurant manager playing the field – he eventually commits himself to Ginnifer; Jennifer Aniston somewhat less glamorous than other actresses – she is unmarried in a long-term relationship with Affleck; Ben Affleck lots of straight white teeth as nice guy who adores Anniston but just doesn’t believe in marriage; Drew Barrymore with a smaller role – surrounded mostly by sympathetic effeminate gays, she finds Mr. Right (Connolly); Kris Kristofferson in cameo role as Anniston’s father, who provides some drama when he has a non-fatal heart attack. Somewhat vapid but entertaining spin off of ‘Sex and the City’ that follows the romantic fortunes and misfortunes of five women and their search for the perfect mate; most of the characters live happily ever after at the end, with the exception of Johansson, Connelly, and Cooper, who are punished in part for their infidelity. The rather long film (2:09) resembles about six episodes of ‘Sex and the City’ combined in one. The hook is that young women are desperate to find Mr. Right, but those men are so elusive – they don’t call you back, they are vague when they are prompted to exchange contact information, they are opposed to marriage even when they are in love with you, they are playing the field and opposed to commitment, they are playing the field and opposed to commitment, they don’t pay attention to your signals, etc. Goodwin carries perhaps the brunt of the slightly integrated plot with her desperate search for a mate – to the point of staring at her cell phone waiting for a guy to call back. The movie is partly saved by its romantic cuteness and by the extremely engaging cast. Amusing moments: Barrymore sounds off about there being too many means of communication (cell phones, email, texting, phoning, etc.) for there to be clarity between the sexes; Cooper is forced to have sex with wife Connelly while furious lover Johansson listens from an adjoining closet. Nice chick flic.


He Walked by Night 1947 Alfred Werker (or Anthony Mann?) 2.5 Richard Basehart as methodical thief/killer who befuddles the police; Jack Webb as crime lab chief who at least has a sense of humor; Roy Roberts as the captain of detectives who persistently pursues the killer. Police investigation film done in semi-documentary manner; it apparently owes a lot to Italian Neo-Realism. Film seems seriously overrated by film noir aficionados. Two-thirds of the film is dogged police work – bringing in people for line-ups, conducting a (primitive) system for building a composite drawing of the killer, hoofing around asking routine questions, descending on Basehart’s bungalow in large numbers, etc. The most interesting aspect of film is performance of Richard Basehart as the thief – solitary, isolated, impassive without apparent emotions, changes types of crimes to throw off the police, willing to operate on himself to remove a bullet – the camera dwells on his face contorted with pain as he does it. We don't know why he commits crimes; we don't know whether he gets pleasure out of outsmarting the police – he is just the way he is; he rarely talks. Film ends with an extended chase in the city storm drains that Basehart habitually uses to move around the city; the sequence was obviously adopted by Carol Reed in the following year for the finale to The Third Man. The dead pan style with narration, the depiction of boring detective work, and "The names have been changed to protect the innocent" obviously had an influence on the development of Dragnet through Jack Webb. The print available was quite fuzzy with poor contrast, and it was thus impossible to appreciate the film's renowned cinematography.


The Heartbreak Kid 1972 Elaine May (writer Neil Simon) 3.0 Charles Grodin in rather thankless role as aggressive but mindless romantic and upwardly mobile Jewish kid from New York; Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter) as his New York bride; Cybill Shepherd as wealthy WASP kid from Minnesota who gets her hooks into Grodin; Eddie Albert in priceless, AA-nominated performance as Shepherd’s dad who is very hostile to Grodin. Slow-starting but ultimately interesting and fairly amusing satirical comedy from the pen of Neil Simon. Grodin rushes into marriage with Berlin and regrets it even before they arrive at their honeymoon destination in Miami Beach (“I knew it all the way back in Virginia!”); he meets the goddess-like Shepherd on the beach, and pursues her doggedly to their palatial home in snowy Minnesota until she finally succumbs and marries him at the end of the film. The style of the film is quite different from the usual Simon play-based fare: May uses a lot of long-running shots with informal, improvised-sounding dialogue; Grodin seems to be ad-libbing a good part of the time; the only character with neat, chiseled lines is Albert, who delivers hilarious well-aimed, irascible, and biting insults at Grodin especially toward the end of the film. Berlin does a good job coming across as whiney and clinging: Was it good? Tell me! A girl needs the assurance! In her classic beauty Shepherd does not have to say much, but she effectively conveys the emptiness of her character – when Grodin protests to a standoffish Shepherd that he has divorced his wife for her, all she can think of to say is “I’m flattered”. The film is satirical. Miami Beach vacationers are depicted in all their white-belted and striped-pants finery. Much contrast between the brash, fast-talking New York personality and the quiet, bland, respectable upper middle class Midwest; Grodin’s attempt to praise Midwestern food in the dinner scene toward the end is funny – the potatoes are sincere and honest! Woody Allen’s famous WASP sequence in ‘Annie Hall’ must surely be based on this scene. Ultimately the film is about the defects in the American romantic ideal. After her initial flirtatiousness Shepherd is a clueless, passive vessel who mostly just reacts to Grodin’s overtures. Grodin is relentless in the pursuit of his romantic goal, but his fast talk is empty and in the end he doesn’t know what he really wants: during the reception after his marriage to Shepherd, he talks to everyone about his ambitions – “to give back to the land instead of taking from it” – while Shepherd wanders through the room looking for him. The viewer does not believe for a minute that the marriage will work any better than his first one; and where will he go from there?


Heat 1995 Michael Mann 4.0 Robert DeNiro solid, sincere as resourceful, fair-minded boss of a LA heist team; Al Pacino over-the-top as obsessive police lieutenant determined to nab DeNiro; Tom Sizemore as mild-mannered confederate of DeNiro; Val Kilmer as hot-headed younger member of group with a pony tail; Kevin Gage as the psycho in DeNiro’s gang; Jon Voigt as a shadowy boss-confederate of DeNiro; Ashley Judd, Diane Venora, Amy Brenneman, Natalie Portman as various of the women in the lives of the male principals. Totally engrossing, expertly plotted crime film that lasts almost three hours. The bulk of the attention is focused on the criminal gang around DeNiro and Pacino, who heads a featureless police squad out to capture them, although the script devotes a lot of time to the personal lives of the principals. Several absolutely riveting action sequences: the beginning armored car heist that includes overturning the car with a huge tow truck, the blasting open of the rear door, and the execution of the four guards begun by the psycho Kevin Gage (DeNiro later beats him up, throws him out of the gang, and he will later get even with him by giving information to DeNiro’s enemies); the shootout after the foiled back robbery toward the end, in which the gang blasts away with automatic rifles against an outgunned police force for about ten minutes, bullets riddling police cars all around, gang members firing through the windshield with their AK-47s, etc. (the sequence is cited as the inspiration of the infamous North Hollywood shootout of several years later); and the penultimate suspenseful sequence in which DeNiro enters a busy hotel at LAX to kill Gage theatrically in revenge for his betrayal of the gang. The dramatic core of the film is the adversarial, yet interdependent and respectful, relationship between top criminal and top cop; their rivalry is a fight to the finish, and yet they respect one another’s intelligence and resourcefulness, even getting together once in a coffee shop to exchange innuendos; DeNiro’s performance comes across as low-key compared to the often hysterical, wide-eyed one of Pacino. Pacino’s final victory over DeNiro off the end of the runway at the airport is due in part to DeNiro’s bad decision to kill Gage rather than just escape from the country and in part to chance since (apparently) the landing lights of an approaching jetliner blinds DeNiro allowing Pacino to get off the fatal shots. Mann goes to great lengths to fill in the personal lives of the principal characters: the characters of the crooks surprisingly show loyalty and affection among themselves (especially the informal father-son relationship between DeNiro and Kilmer) and most of them try to maintain relationships with their women (DeNiro being the exception when he says that to be a successful thief you must be ready to walk away from any relationship in 30 seconds when the heat appears). One wonders whether the family drama might have been cut to tighten the film. Moody electronic music and beautiful, deep-toned, highly detailed cinematography help make it impossible to take one’s eyes off the screen. Even with its faults, an outstanding film; Mann is an engrossing storyteller.


Heaven Can Wait 1943 Ernst Lubitsch 4.0 Don Ameche very good as fast-talking, womanizing but lovable man who is truly attached to his wife, Gene Tierney as usual very beautiful (although her hair in her last scene is bizarre and unattractive!), long-suffering wife who extracts a tear from viewer when she dies young, Charles Coburn as Ameche’s life-loving grandfather, who defends and justifies his playboy grandson and plays major role in getting Tierney back when she suddenly and unexpectedly leaves Ameche and returns to her parents in Kansas, Eugene Pallette with his usual gravelly voice plays comically ill-tempered father of Tierney. Moving, sentimental and constantly entertaining World War II-style movie about womanizing husband, who having died has an interview with the Devil (a suave, rather sensible and sensitive fellow dressed in tails); after Ameche recounts his life decade-by-decade, Satan decides he belongs “up there,” although Ameche will be housed in an anteroom for several hundred years (apparently Purgatory). Film takes place mostly in Belle Époque in impossibly over decorated rooms recorded in brilliant (garish?) Technicolor. Film is sometimes corny, but has foundation of genuine emotion about love, fidelity, the family sticking together that perhaps betrays its World War II period (this is worth fighting for) and carries it through. Viewer is always on the side of Ameche, even though he chases after showgirls; we are thrilled when he and Coburn show up in Tierney’s Kansas bedroom and virtually kidnap her away from her hick parents and stuffy former boyfriend (who again declares his affection for her) taking her back to the city. Film is Lubitsch-style with its indulgence for a wayward husband; the judgment is that he is good-hearted, truly loves his wife, and even with his straying it is much better to have loved than to be married to a stuffed shirt, respectable guy, and that anyhow he has made his girlfriends happy over the years – they are waiting for him in Purgatory too (a sly reference to sex)! Film is much more reticent on the subject of sex than Lubitsch’s pre-1934 films, but he must have used all his personal prestige to get the script past the Breen Office. Raphaelson’s dialogue is usually clever, entertaining and heartfelt. One magnificent Lubitsch touch at the end: as Ameche is dying, he recounts his dream about a pretty girl and then waking he recoils from the unattractive nurse who is trying to take his temperature; since her replacement has arrived, she walks out of the room, stops in front of a mirror, where she arranges her hair and glasses (most unattractive) and walks away; the camera holds on the mirror, and then an attractive young blond nurse moves in front of it, where she arranges her beautiful self, and then turns, opens the door, and walks into Ameche’s room, closing the door after her; Ameche’s voice over then announces that he died happy. A late near masterpiece by a master filmmaker.