Reviews by JxSxPx

Anytime I see the names Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni together in a movie I always get high hopes. Who could forget their spicy and sexy comedies Marriage Italian Style or Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow? Or their sublime but difficult and depressing Sunflower? A Special Day is humane, sensitive and presents a similar political scheme with the novel Mrs. Dalloway: that one day, that one brief encounter can profoundly change your life and open your world. They also share the common thread of a housewife going about her normal business before tiny tremors in her life present the facts and details that have always been in front of her in sharp detail. She always saw them, but they were blurred and located in the edges of her vision. Mastroianni's character never truly evolves or changes, but without his tortured, suicidal performance Loren's character and performance would be incomplete. It's a two-hander that shows two great actors and international movie stars at ease with each other and able to bring out the best in each other.

It's the late-30's and Hitler has come to Italy to talk to his supporters and, more importantly, Mussolini. He's greeted like traveling nobility, a rock star and the grandest of all movie stars rolled into one upon his arrival. Loren's seen getting her husband and six children ready for the rally. Once they've been sent off she is left to clean up the mess and ponder what it must be like to be swept up in the excitement. For her, Mussolini is as much a sublime authoritarian leader as he is a beefcake sex symbol. She has never truly put in any deep thought about his regime, who is siding with, what he is supporting, and why she so blindly just goes with it. All of that will soon change.

Marcello Mastroianni is cast against type as a homosexual who is trying to leave italy after losing his job and spouting out anti-government rhetoric. He specialized in self-tortured characters, but they were usually virile and womanizing. Remember his horn-dog playboy in Marriage Italian Style? Or the artistically constipated but romantically overflowing director in 8 ½? To see him play someone so quiet, tortured, and, yes, gay, is to see the true extent of his range as an actor. He had the harder job here since we're only told about his character and his psychology through his own words and actions. He doesn't turn Loren's character suddenly into an anti-Fascist political insurgent, but he gives her a tiny tremor within her life that we're entirely unsure how it will play out once the film is over. These characters feel like they will live and breathe on past the end of the film. They have enriched each others lives, but who knows how deeply they have effected them.

James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice was previously filmed with movie star panache by MGM with Lana Turner as the femme fatale and John Garfield as the dangerous simpleton she pulls a fast one on. Garfield was magnetic, electric, dangerous and super-charged with a sexual energy that MGM never let their own stable of stars possess, so they borrowed someone from Warner Brother's. That was a genius move on their part. In an otherwise dull film, Garfield made everything watchable and interesting. He even gave the limited Lana Turner a boost. It is hard to imagine Turner's sexuality and movie star charisma in that film without Garfield's rough counterbalance. A remake was totally unnecessary, as this version proves over and over again.

It feels like this story was retold just so they could show the violent sex scenes, which explode with a dangerous carnal energy that feels more like a Discovery Channel special than anything you'd see normally in an American film. The way that Jack Nicholson clears the counter, violently tosses around Jessica Lange - who first threatens him violence before matching his challenge with one of her own, and starts slamming her around expresses everything you need to know about these characters. Lange ends up on top, in charge, in the masculine postion. Nicholson loves it, even if he's not totally aware of it. If the rest of the film had matched this one scene's perfect combination of desire and violence we might have had something more. But the rest is just perfunctory, as if the director had the idea for the sex scene and then just decided to lazily build a generic noir around it.

Or maybe if they had attached the correct ending instead of just leaving it all hanging in the end. In the novel the characters do indeed get into a car accident, and, yes, Lange's character does die. But Nicholson's character gets arrested, tried for her murder, and executed. The ironic twist of an ending took a book that was otherwise bland and made it something close to great. The movie feels unfinished by the time its reached its ending.

And no matter how game the performers are in their roles, no matter how great their chemistry, there's something off about the whole enterprise. Could it be that Jack Nicholson being hired to play a dim bulb drifter just doesn't sit correctly with Nicholson, the actor? He always seems so smart, blessed with eyebrows that work wonders and the intellect of an artist. To see him play someone so dim is just...wrong. He seems miscast, even if Nicholson can just stand still and give off the perfect air of menace and sexual charisma. The film truly belongs to his character, and if the central performance doesn't totally work then the film cannot possibly work as a cohesive whole.

But Jessica Lange practically secrets a sexual odor. Sometimes when she barely glances at the camera, she threatens to burn the film up. Her siren's call is not so much in her looks or voice, but in the fact that if anyone got too close to her they'd start to feel a pheromone reaction. Something would inflame their senses, they would become her willing love slave and partner. As long as she had a need for them, that is. The fact that she looks so fragile, neurotic and suburban only heightens her erotic allure. Girls like her aren't supposed to know or do these kinds of things.

Never thought that I'd say this before, but Postman needed more vulgarity to make it more memorable for something other than that sex scene. But what a sex scene it is! If only the rest of the film would of have the good taste to be so vulgar.

In It Happened One Night, Frank Capra created a delirious, sexy, charming and utterly perfect movie which had a wild-and-crazy idle rich girl falling for a rugged and uncouth newspaper reporter. It won the "Big Five" at the Oscars, the first film to do so, and is still a breezy and fulfilling romantic comedy today. Platinum Blonde picks up where that film ends but loses the humor, warmth and good-nature. One Night proclaimed that even during the Great Depression the two classes could find a happy middle ground, maybe even love each other. Blonde positions that lust exists between the classes, but when it comes down to it there will be no love lost if they just ignored each other.

This is a screwball comedy without a hint of joy, but plenty of sex appeal in star Jean Harlow, the screen's first gloriously bad girl who did dirty things and got away with it. It's hard to imagine a man who wouldn't have gladly become a metaphorical eunuch for her, but part of a screwball comedy's charm is in watching one of the two main characters have a crisis. Harlow's character here isn't her usual bad girl. In fact, she's quite the decent little thing. She just has a body made for sin. It's harder not to side with her then it is to identify and like the noble poor in this film. She stands by her man through thick and thin, defending him against her family's panic stricken outrage at so low class a son-in-law. Harlow started out first as a great screen presence and sexual powder keg before developing a knack for comedy. A scene where she sing-song's a flirtatious fight with her husband shows just how naturally gifted she was at the form.

But unspoken pressures send her husband back into the working class by the very end of the film. Awaiting in the wings? His former-partner and best friend, the tomboyish girl reporter who cleans up good and patiently awaits for the moment when she can sink her claws into him. Loretta Young as the good girl waiting for our main character to realize that she's his perfect match is fine, but Robert Williams as our main character is grating. He's all edge and nervous twitching before he even gets locked in the gilded cage. By the time he's trapped in his luxurious prison he's cranked the volume up on his performance.

But much like the title implies, the film belongs to Harlow. And whenever she's on-screen she's magnetic and charismatic. If the film had actually focused on her, it might have been a little better. But it instead focuses on Williams and Young. No surprise the original title was Gallagher and changed to piggyback off Harlow's growing popularity.

For every solidly entertaining Dreamworks creation like Shrek or Chicken Run, there’s some truly awful clunkers like Shark Tale, Shrek 3 or Over the Hedge. So you’ll excuse me if I had my doubts about all of the praise being heaped upon How to Train Your Dragon. Surely the movie only had to meet the most basic of competencies to send critics and audiences into a tizzy about a Dreamworks animation product given their entire oeuvre.

But I was wrong. How to Train Your Dragon deserves every bit of praise that has been thrust upon it. It is so charming, endearing, good-natured and open-hearted that it feels more like a Pixar product. And like the best of children’s films adds a true sense of menace and danger to the giddy thrills. That last battle sequence leaves our two main characters torn up and battle-scarred in several different ways.

The true heart and soul of the film comes between the symbiotic and co-dependent relationship between Hiccup, our lovably awkward hero, and Toothless, the titular dragon that needs training. There relationship is akin to a boy and his dog, one so large that he could ride it around and travel very quickly, and could also breathe fire. Symbolically speaking, it’s a chance for kids to train and tame their overwhelming emotional baggage through gorgeously rendered sequences of flight and frolic.

Seeing as how this comes from the same creators of Lilo & Stitch, that beating heart and warmth shouldn’t come as a surprise. Also, that the family is broken, that the main characters are realistically troubled by their predicaments speaks to how wonderfully human this film is. And much like Lilo, Hiccup uses his brains and quick wit to solve his problems instead of relying upon action-adventure dare-deviling. Explosions are well and good, but they won’t solve the complicated problems involved in trying to make peace between humans and dragons.

To say that there’s minimal plotting involved in There’s No Business Like Show Business is an understatement. The plot, brief and confounding as it is, exists mostly to string about a series of Irving Berlin songs. The performers are all able and, mostly, entertaining and do a decent enough job, but it’s a hollow copy-and-paste job of the MGM musical machinery.

Business involves the Donahues, a family that got its start in vaudeville and continues to perform. There’s mom and pop, played by Ethel Merman and Dan Dailey, their two sons, Donald O’Connor and Johnnie Ray, and their daughter, Mitzi Gaynor. Ma and pa used to perform and take the kids along with them, eventually they settled down long enough to send their kids to school. Once the kids are all grown-up they join their parents in performing. With mom being mostly a songstress, dad being an all-around entertainer, the kids picked up an impressive array of skills. O’Connor is an all-around entertainer like his dad, Ray is a singer, Gaynor is a hoofer with passable vocal skills. Ethel Merman is an odd screen presence, and her full-throated vocals are more loud and obnoxious than anything else. She’s either too stiff in front of the camera or chews the scenery like crazy. Dailey is passable but never really ignites. O’Connor looks too old to be their son and seems at odds with his overly dramatic storyline. He creates magic whenever he’s allowed to goof around and sing and dance. Gaynor barely makes any kind of impression since she’s given so little to do. And Ray, a phenomenal talent, is a charismatic black hole in this. When he says he wants to leave the family business to become a priest, you’d be excused for thinking he was going to come out of the closet.

Marilyn Monroe, barely in the film, is a deliciously vampy and sexual hat-check girl who dreams of becoming a huge performer. That she does this is no surprise, why she’s introduced at all since she’s so quickly written off and thrown to the side is. Monoroe is criminally underused, but when she is on screen she’s a kind of combustible sex goddess – threatening to blow apart the scenery with her giggle and jiggle. Monroe even sells the “Heat Wave” number in which she is given an outfit that doesn’t look entirely flattering on her body type. But when she performs a seductive number while lying back on a couch – wowza!

In Chicago a character says that if you give them “the old razzle dazzle” that you’ll leave them begging for more. Sometimes that is the case, but you’ve got to actually give us a script, character development, heart and brains. Business is mostly just hollow eye candy, but there’s something watchable and entertaining about it. Especially whenever Monroe is on screen, but then again Monroe could make anything entertaining and give it a sexual charge.

Spellbound seems almost quaint and naïve with its understandings and handlings of complicated psychological issues, and psychiatry as a whole. But that doesn’t prevent it from being a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging thriller from the master of that particular genre, Hitchcock. (No first name is necessary.) Luckily Hitchcock armed himself with two great actors for his lead roles, gave them a brilliantly crafted dream sequence designed by Salvador Dali, and never strayed too far from his tried and true formula. I wouldn’t call it a classic, but it’s very solid throughout. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I seemed to enjoy it.

Spellbound is mostly a psychological melodrama, but there’s always a sinister undercurrent going on through out. An undercurrent that frequently threatens to come exploding out from various characters, including matinee idol lead Gregory Peck. The story concerns itself with Peck’s character, an amnesiac who assumes the identity of a well-known and respected psychiatrist who is set to take over the institution that Ingrid Bergman’s intelligent but emotionally disconnected doctor works at. Soon things such as office relations propriety and standards of conduct go out the door. They yearn for each other so they act upon it. But she notices something is slightly off about her new friend. Should she try and help him heal his wounds and discover the sinister undercurrents going on in his mind or should she turn him in? Well, there wouldn’t be much a movie if she did the latter.

Of course the bulk of the movie takes place in the grand tradition of Hitchcock films – that is, a woman who helps the lead solve a mysterious case and heal his emotional wounds through her love and support. Rear Window was brilliant at taking this basic frame and running wild with it. To Catch a Thief did something similar, but was more frothy and knowingly winking to its audience. Spellbound never quite reaches the brilliance of Window, but comes close to Thief’s suspense/mystery/romance good times.

Bergman’s character is a workaholic who takes no time for herself; she is a dedicated and intelligent woman who has a lot to prove. Not only is she an educated professional in a male dominated world, she’s doing all of this in 1945. She has to be five times as strong, tough and smart as the next male competitor. She might not want to be the head of the hospital, but she does want to be one of the best. Naturally, and you see this quite often in real life, she has ignored such things as a private, romantic and social life. She is her work. She takes one look at Gregory Peck and gets all school-girl weak in the knees. But who wouldn’t? The performance she delivers is typically strong, not just for her, but for her partnership with Hitchcock. It doesn’t surpass her performance in Notorious, but it’s a very solid piece of work. By freeing him from his guilt complex, curing him of his amnesia and, finally, proving his innocence, she has done everything that Grace Kelly did for Cary Grant and James Stewart, but with a more proactive stance in the plot. The movie might just be hers in the end.

And what of Gregory Peck? Unfairly, his reputation as an actor has never really been as well-considered as his reputation as a great movie star or moral person. To see his work in Gentlemen’s Agreement, To Kill a Mockingbird and in this film is to see his range. He could be stoic; he could stand for moral and righteous indignation with an authority and grace that is greatly missing from films today. But, especially in this film, he could subvert that nice-guy/handsome leading-man persona into something twisted. There is a reaction shot where his face is ablaze with something that resembles demonic possession, it is not big and flashy, like much of Peck’s work it’s quiet and small but it plays so wonderfully. And the way he can switch back and forth from tortured soul to romantic hero to mysterious rogue in the blink of an eye should put any questions about his acting ability to rest. The way the plot maneuvers sets him up as the Sleeping Beauty who can only be freed from true love’s kiss. The fact that it is a three-pronged kiss only makes the movie that much more interesting.

Dialogue too often explains complex psychological issues in overly simplified and contrite terms, but that’s not entirely the scripts fault. Again, this was made in 1945. Psychiatric evaluations were still a relatively new science. As a culture we were only beginning to discover just how crazy and complicated we are. But try as it might, it never fully overcomes this hurdle. Realizing what is causing your guilt complex doesn’t cure you; it’s only the first steps towards emotional and mental health. When I first viewed the film I couldn’t get past this hurdle. I kept tripping up over it, but I kept thinking about sequences and ideas and moments in the film. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that is was a love story, like many of Hitchcock’s films, wrapped in suspenseful melodrama with psychological issues as an added flavor. Then it all made sense and a enjoyed it more.

It may take some work to go with it, possibly even multiple viewings, but Spellbound is well worth even the most cursory of glances if only to view the dream sequence. Salvador Dali, one of my favorite visual artists, created something so cerebral and bizarre that it can only be described as beautiful. It’s possibly the most authentic visualization of dream that I’ve seen in a film. The way that symbols take over, that faces become blurred, how you randomly shift from one place to another with no explanation – it’s all right there, complete with his visual wit.

Out of all the possible films from which to choose as the one to give Marlene Dietrich her only Oscar nomination Morocco would not be that film. Witness for the Prosecution, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress -- these would be a few of the choices that immediately spring to mind. But I can see why in 1930 the Academy would bend over backwards to nominate her for this. Morocco has one hell of a [Link removed - login to see], and for that one scene alone it is worth a look.

Clad in a man’s tuxedo and a top hat, Dietrich comes strolling out, cool and confident, sizing up the audience, singing a little here and there, and flirts with both men and women. When she finally stops to take a flower from a woman, she bends down and kisses her on the mouth before throwing the flower to Gary Cooper, her lust object in the film. Wowza! Now, THAT is an entrance. Although one must admit that her singing voice is slightly droning, but that is part of her post-modernist charm. While she is frequently compared to Greta Garbo, between them Dietrich is the lesser actress but an equal film presence, Dietrich’s ironic masculinity and Germanic singing voice have aged beautifully. And while The Blue Angel technically came before this, it was only released in Germany before Morocco. Around the world Morocco was the introductory film of Marlene Dietrich and The Blue Angel came a short while later.

The plot is a bit of an absurdity, like all of the Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations, in which Dietrich plays a singer coming to Morocco to escape something from her past. She needs no man and wants no love, but falls for the effeminate Gary Cooper. And who wouldn’t? His matinee idol good looks are just feminine enough to let you know that Dietrich is the alpha in charge here. And that’s a trait that carried over well into her later career. Dietrich always worked best opposite some feminine looking leading man that she could dominate and turn into putty with her remote-but-aggressive sexuality and confident bitchery. Anyway, he’s a Foreign Legionnaire, and she’s caught the eye of a worldly and sophisticated man in town. In the end she chooses to run off with her stunningly beautiful soldier boy. It’s the stuff that camp dreams are made of as she walks off into the desert in her high heels. It’s wonderful that it is shot in utter silence, save for the howling winds, because any music over those last images and it would have turned into the kind of purple filmmaking that so many ‘women’s pictures’ turned into.

Sternberg, always concerned with matters of the codes by which we live, obsession, sexual desire and our needs, lays bare the tug-and-pull of these characters as they constantly circle around each other but never inviting each other in. There’s something still very modern about the seven films that these two titans made together. It’s not just the visual poetry that Sternberg could so easily manipulate, or the way that Dietrich plays it all so coolly, but it’s the themes. The ways in which we repress our deepest impulses and secret desires to live in the normal world, and Sternberg knew what was and still is going on behind closed doors. Just look at the androgyny and masculine sexuality that he played up in Dietrich in every film they made together.

Blonde Venus might not be the best of the films Marlene Dietrich and her mentor/lover/victim Josef von Sternberg made together, but it’s definitely one of the more iconic. In each film there is a man who falls into Dietrich’s web, a man that she uses, abuses and laughs as he comes crawling back for more. There is a small element to that in this film, but mostly it’s just a showcase for Dietrich to work her glacial sexuality and supernova magnetism on the screen. But mostly it fluctuates wildly between being a preposterous melodrama and super-realist story about a woman who has damaged her home life and is on the run towards uncertainty.

In a storyline that bounces back and forth between threadbare details and realist tome, Blonde Venus introduces us first to Dietrich as a hausfrau and not as a glamorous femme fatale nightclub singer. When her husband, who is a scientist, gets sick and requires an expensive medical procedure, she goes back to work as a glamorous and aloof nightclub singer. Her performance of “Hot Voodoo” is frequently brought up as an iconic moment in the Sternberg/Dietrich films and as a movie star moment for Dietrich. (Watch it [Link removed - login to see].) It’s faintly ridiculous, but so is the movie. Anyway, she meets up with Cary Grant, a suave and sophisticated rich boy, who offers to give her money in exchange for…uh…her ‘company.’ Once her husband discovers what she’s been doing while he was away, she goes on the run with her son. Normally so ice cold and placid, so remote and completely apathetic to everything around her, here Dietrich must be a warm and loving mother. She eventually turns into a stone cold ice queen after being on the run and becoming a prostitute has done things to her. Hattie McDaniel’s brief appearance as a pimp is a memorable piece in the film. She always came on with a BANG!, and the way she slyly and passively tries to size up a possible cop before turning slightly dangerous is a fantastic bit of acting.

While it might wildly fluctuate in tone and pace, Blonde Venus is definitely one of my top three favorite Sternberg/Dietrich movies (with The Scarlet Empress and The Blue Angel being at the top, although I have yet to watch Shanghai Express, of which I hear nothing but platitudes). Why do you ask? Because it’s all so beautifully shot, it’s all so meticulously acted and arranged that it just sticks out so uniquely and wonderfully as something interesting, something different.

The Devil Is a Woman is the last in a series of seven films which Marlene Dietrich and her svengali Josef von Sternberg made together. Each contained some kind of prophetic or weirdly autobiographical element within the storyline, and Devil comes across as the summation of their relationship being acted on film. It also happens to be the least of their series of films with an exaggerated performance from Dietrich and a plot which feels like Sternberg acting out his frustration and wounded pride with his muse/former lover.

The Devil Is a Woman has a title which reeks of misogyny, but tells a tale of male masochism being acted out. Dietrich is Concha, a Spanish factory girl who seduces and repeatedly rejects Don Pasquale (Lionel Atwill), before she performs her act on his younger friend and revolutionary (Cesar Romero). The film is told in flashbacks as Pasquale warns his young friend about Concha, a beautiful rose with poisonous thorns. If you subscribe to the storyline that Sternberg loved Dietrich while she felt raging indifference after a period of time, then the film’s two main players are effectively the director and star. It makes for a fun bit of behind-the-scenes tabloid gossip informing and creating the work. As each man continually goes back for more of Dietrich’s pleasure torture, they lose a piece of themselves and their dignity. They revel in every moment of it until it’s all over and the guilt sets in. It’s all a dark comedy about the war between the sexes, with Dietrich always coming on top.

And while the film is overflowing with the typical visual excesses and startlingly beautiful cinematography of his other films with Dietrich, it’s the star who makes their last film together so off. Normally so finely restrained and a glacier who oozed sexuality and a dominatrix-like intent is here seen stomping her foot and bugging out her eyes in a manner that suggests Bette Davis slumming it in her earliest films. If the intent was to portray the damaged little girl inside of Concha then they could have gone about it in a different way. The sets and costumes retain their visual poetry, but Dietrich’s image and pathological indifference to all around her were an equal part of that poetry. Her acting here helps proclaim that their relationship is really and truly over if she can’t continue on with the image and acting style that Sternberg crafted for and with her.

Despite some problems with the faintly ridiculous storyline and Dietrich’s performance, The Devil Is a Woman is well worth a look. It’s visual sumptuous and contains a great final scene in which Dietrich leaves the young stud to go about destroying her next victim. Or possibly to return to the sad sack Pasquale one more time, just because she can. The moral of the story which Dietrich proved time and again in her later Hollywood years and Sternberg had to learn the hard way? No man can tame Marlene Dietrich, though many have tried.

Stage Fright is one of the less memorable Hitchcock films, and for good reason. Much of Stage Fright is fitfully dull, lacking in droll humor and never quite becoming the sum of its parts. There might have been a good thriller in here somewhere, but the film is given a disservice by numerous problems including the false flashback. While an interesting concept, it leaves a bad taste in the viewer’s mouth for having been so strongly deceived from the start and given a false impression. It’s been built around a shoddy excuse for a filmic device, one more intriguing to film school academia than anything else.

The plot mechanics are retold endlessly instead of anything new or interesting happening in way of the plot. We’re told and retold endlessly who probably killed who, and a probable motive, and that our intrepid heroine is going undercover to try and get information to clear her crush’s name, etc. It operates in fits and starts and is a frightful bore for much of the film. There’s never an instant where we feel that Eve is in any real danger, that any real threat could possibly befall her.

Another problem is the stiff and wooden acting from all of the male leads. None of them do any interesting or exciting work. They all pale in comparison to James Stewart in Vertigo or Laurence Olivier in Rebecca or Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train. But his two female leads deliver fine work. Jane Wyman has the trickier role as Eve than Marlene Dietrich does as the femme fatale. Wyman must portray several different kinds of women: a reporter, a struggling actress, a detective, and a cockney maid. She does fine work in each and every incarnation and has some surprisingly funny and memorable moments. I personally loved when she was trying to design a look for her cockney maid and try it out on her mother, but her mother sees right through it instantly. Wyman’s face is priceless. Dietrich though is the real treasure, which has to do with a combination of her droll bitchery and incredible star magnetism. Her performance of “The Laziest Gal in Town” seems beamed in from another movie, but she nails one of the film’s few intense sequences when a little boy is walking up to her performing “La Vie en Rose” with a doll containing a stain identical to her blood stained dress from earlier. It’s a wonder that Hitchcock didn’t work with her more since she so clearly possessed the kind of ice-queen blonde looks he loved so much.