Reviews by JxSxPx

Marianne Faithfull was once some kind of good girl chanteuse. My, how things changed by the time she released Broken English. No longer was she the lightly voiced blonde beauty of “As Tears Go By,” now she possessed a voice that sounded like every drug she did, every cigarette she smoked and every drink she ever drank. She sounded beaten up and dark. She became the heir apparent to Nico’s narcotic Weimar-esque musicality. Strange Weather is the sound of Faithfull finally making a Weimar Republic cabaret album. It’s not better or worse than Broken English, still her best album, but it is a great companion to that album. And the one that comes closest to topping that album from the top.

While there are a few new songs written specifically for the album, it is mostly covers from various eras. A few are from the Weimar era, but there’s also a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” an old-time spiritual, some blues songs and a re-recording of “As Tears Go By.” Her Dylan cover and the re-recorded “Tears” are particularly effective and evocative. She turns “I’ll Keep It With Mine” into a Nico-styled drone-rock piece for her ravaged vocals to wrap around and dissect. “Tears” gets redone a full octave lower and gets turned into a guttural-howl of a torch ballad. She was incapable of doing this when she first recorded it, and has marked that it is a song that one should sing only when they’re in their forties and not when they’re seventeen, as she had done. Her interpretive skills throughout are sharp and intelligent. She might have recorded quite a bit of material as a bright-eyed ingénue, but it wasn’t until she became a jaded-but-reformed bad girl that she got really interesting. Strange Weather is one of those rare and strange covers-albums that succeeds. Mostly thanks to Faithfull’s narcotic-laced vocals and hauntingly troubled persona. DOWNLOAD: “As Tears Go By”

Audrey Hepburn made most of her career playing flighty, slightly naïve, child-women who posses a strong sense of grace. Think of her gamine features and coyness in roles such as Sabrina or Holly Golightly. In Wait Until Dark none of that is evident. Hepburn is playing a real woman, a woman who is smart, resourceful, independent and trying to come to terms with her recent blindness. Her husband (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) is trying to get her to cope, and since he is a in-demand photographer he’s off-screen most of the time. Into her tiny world, which mostly consists of her apartment, the grocery store or her blind school, come three gangsters, two are pathetic thugs with some brawn and no brains and the last is a horrid monster strung out on more drugs than humanly imaginable (Alan Arkin). Inside of a doll, which wound up in their apartment through faintly ludicrous circumstances, are several small bags of heroin, the thugs want them. We’ve treated to an impossibly tense and claustrophobic film in which poor little Audrey Hepburn gets terrorized by the thugs.

With the lone exception of an intro that takes place outside of the apartment and in multiple locations, the main thrust of the film is in the cavernous basement apartment. She is so attuned to the layout and nature of her apartment that even the opening and closing of the blinds is noticed by her. Once she realizes that the reoccurring people in her apartment are actually the same group just playing dress up, she decides that if they’re going to storm into her sealed-off world then they’re going to do it on her own terms. Hurriedly going through the apartment smashing light bulbs and unplugging anything that might give off a light; she knows that she’ll give herself the upper hand when the playing field has been evened out. By the time that briefly burning matches give us the only light in the scene, the tension and terror are enough to strain and clench your jaw and muscles.

What is it about actresses playing hookers that makes the Academy Awards stand up, take notice and practically hand the damn thing out? Typically these women do very little trick turning and posses hearts of gold that transform then main character into a better man and he sweeps them happily out of their sordid lives. There are no real complications to speak of, and there’s no business dealing with pimps, gapping emotional wounds, psychological issues or anything complicated to speak of. Pretty Woman earns much of my ire for promoting this fallacy. Klute gives us a realistic portrayal of a hooker in Jane Fonda’s intelligent performance.

Klute tells the story of a detective (Donald Sutherland) who seeks out a top NYC call girl trying to make-good and become an actress (Fonda) to help him solve a cold case. She’s been through this once before with the police, and she doesn’t trust him. But she’s been getting disturbing phone calls and letters, she’s gotten into therapy to help cure her raging paranoia (amongst numerous other things), and, God help her, she kind of likes the guy. The thriller portion of the film isn’t the interesting aspect of the film, which would be the character study behind Bree Daniels. Don’t misunderstand, the thriller stuff is the glue that holds everything together, the thing that allows the plot to move forward and for our characters to grow and change. But it wavers between perfunctory and truly interesting. The landscape of junkies, cocaine-fueled pimps and partiers and damaged goods is truly engrossing. Sometimes the demimonde is just more intriguing than the ‘burbs.

Fonda’s performance is made up of rather strange but fascinating choices. She feeds her cat then licks the spoon – why? Well, this woman has dulled herself into not feeling. She has convinced herself that she is merely an actress waiting for her big break and that being a hooker was but a small time thing. So why can’t she stop doing it? It’s easy for her, it’s familiar and safe for her. She’s in control, and everyone involved must answer to her. Disturbing calm and professional she tells clients that certain acts and situation will cost more. In therapy confessionals she constantly blocks her chest with her arms, creating a kind of armor to protect herself from the questions and answers that are coming up. She’s intelligent, but most afraid of herself and her demons. This is a woman who is broken from within, a walking and talking emotional wound. Her journey is not reveal a heart of gold, but to relearn that she has a heart in the first place. This is a woman who must rediscover herself and her soul. Fonda is transcendent.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is a thoroughly enjoyable novella, a tightly written and executed piece about an actress refusing to acknowledge her age but able to admit that the gig is over. She goes to Rome with her husband to escape from it all, he dies mid-transit, and she ends up staying in Rome and becoming a doomed woman drifting from one meaningless and unfulfilling relationship with one younger man after another. It’s not quite as wonderful as the best of Williams’ stage work, but it still worth seeking out to help provide an overall glimpse into his talents. In the right hands it could have been turned into an impressive movie. These were clearly not the right hands.

One of the main problems with the production is that everything is far too glossy and obviously studio-made. Not one frame of this looks dingy, dirty or old enough to be Rome, the backstage of a theater or anywhere remotely plausible or lived in. It needed the suffocated atmosphere of A Streetcar Named Desire or the claustrophobia and hot house sexual anxiety of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It needed something that felt real or alive, not this limp dick studio backlot.

Nothing is at stake within this world because everything is so neatly and perfectly placed. Obviously the director and/or screenwriter didn’t know that Williams’ was both darkly, richly funny and an honest portrait of psycho-sexual desires, depression, alcoholism, fear, anxiety and the eternal debate of the old versus the new. It plays everything seriously and offers none of the mordant wit. A scene where Leigh examines her aging face in the mirror should evoke pity, not chuckles for its (almost) high camp values. Her throwing of the key to the Angel of Death that has followed her around Rome throughout the story should have been sadder, more depressing, more disturbing in the way she seems to be giving in to death, surrendering to unhappiness and the inevitability of melancholia in her life. Instead, it’s purple prose and more head-tilting for its mishandling of the situation than anything else.

And while Vivien Leigh delivers a typically strong and on-point performance (was she ever bad?), she is surrounded by a supporting cast that by and large does her no favors. Chief among them is the young Warren Beatty in only his second screen appearance. Beatty is truly atrocious in this film. Not just horrendously miscast – he is far too corn-fed all-American to be a swarthy and deadly Italian lothario – but too faux-bronzed and in possession of one of the most hilariously bad accents in all of film. Each time he speaks his accent will do one of three things: get more ridiculous, stay about the same, or not appear. And the less said about bubble-head ‘actress’ Jill St. John the better. Her line delivery is cringe-worthy, especially her final “Goodnight,” which should have been charged with eroticism and sexual longing but instead sounds like the speak-function on a Mac glitching out. Only Lotte Lenya as the proprietress of the gigolos makes any kind of impression. Her madam is a barracuda who only smiles to reveal that all of her teeth are truly that sharp. She was deservedly rewarded with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.

Sudden Fear was the last of Joan Crawford’s three Best Actress nominations and, outside of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, was one of her last good movies. Sudden Fear frequently ventures into great film noir territory, and it would have stayed there as well if it wasn’t for Crawford’s occasional dips into movie star megalomania. When she commits to the character she is surprisingly effective, but there are numerous moments when she slips into movie star posturing, namely when she’s clenching her jaw tightly and pulling her facial muscles to look younger and sexier, that hits a wrong note and tone. She gets to play the victim and victimizer, always a perfect combination for the actress to engage in. (Crawford sure did love to put her characters through some intense emotional BDSM, didn’t she?)

Crawford stars as an heiress-turned-playwright. While auditioning for the romantic male lead in her next production, she insults Jack Palance. She deems him too stern and incompatible with her romantic ideal for the role. Naturally, he runs into her again while on a train returning home. Instead of getting off at his stop, he stays on and goes with her back to San Francisco. They court, marry, and he’s now got the cushy life of a high society playboy. All is well until Gloria Grahame enters their world. She’s Palance’s ex-girlfriend, the one he left for Crawford. She wants to scam his new wife out of money, no, better yet. Kill her and get it all. Palance is weak to her femme fatale’s charms and scheming. Grahame and Palance deliver the best performances in the film.

By accidentally leaving a dictating machine on, Crawford learns of the entire plot and decides that she won’t go quietly into that goodnight. She sees and knows each one of their cards, but her poker face is the best of them all. She’ll lie and manipulate her way out of this. She outsmarts them, temporarily falling into the demimonde that Palance and Grahame revel in. Her playwright is smart, and manages to always be at least three steps ahead of them. Her chilly to-do list of revenge schemes is perfectly acted by Crawford. Her quick snapping out of it while hiding in Grahame’s apartment waiting for her chance to shoot Palance is even better.

And Palance, with a face that looks like it was carved out of stone with a hatchet, seemed doomed from the start to make a career out of playing ‘heavies.’ God bless him for it. Telegraphing at the beginning that he wasn’t right for a romantic lead in a fictional play is a nice bit of symbolism. He may come on like Don Juan, but he’s ready to opportunistically strike at any moment. The cinematography, excellent throughout, has a few disturbingly beautiful moments which wash out his features, leaving only his pitch-black hair and slits for eyes and skeletal lips and cheekbones. He looks like a specter of encroaching death.

Faintly ridiculous, but oddly charming thanks to two incredibly talented and charismatic leads who could read the phonebook as a series of love letters and find a way to make it fresh, funny, romantic and compelling.

An Affair to Remember has a frothy and adorable first act which sees our soon-to-be lovers engaging in some sparring and romantic tension that's pure romantic-comedy mode before switching to achingly romantic melodrama. Eventually it turns into a weepie and has some serious problems towards the end of the second act/beginning of the third in which things sag and drag. The endless amount of wait time for them to reunite and declare their undying love gets to be too much. How many needless scenes of her group of students singing and dancing do I really need? How many times do they have to pass each other before she’ll finally reveal what prevented her from going to the Empire State Building do I have to endure? It can get to be a little much, a little purple prosaic in a way. To be blunter: exercise in tedium. It practically derails the film as a whole and leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

When it all finally comes to an end, with Grant coming in to her apartment and discovering the truth, it’s an exhale you’re happy to have finally had. I don’t understand the enduring popularity of this movie, but I do know that it doesn’t deserve the fetishization that it got in Sleepless in Seattle, which proved that Tom Hanks might be likable enough but he’s no Cary Grant. The less said about Meg Ryan the better.

Stanley Donen, known primarily as the director of musicals like Singin’ in the Rain, was also quite adapt at making stylish espionage thrillers that gleefully mish-mashed genres and ideas together just to see what sparks would fly off. Charade is, without a doubt, the better of the two films, but Arabesque can be just as stylish and entertaining.

The plot, that silly little thing, concerns an American professor teaching at Oxford who gets wrapped up in the assassination plot of a foreign diplomat. Gregory Peck is the professor who specializes in Arabic hieroglyphics, and Sophia Loren is the enticing woman who keeps shifting her alliances and story. Peck gets to show off some action-hero muscles and gets his rich voice around some hilariously caustic quips. He really delivers the goods. I always think of him as an Atticus Finch-type, and here he gets to let loose and have a good time. Loren, hired mostly to be eye candy and to wear faintly ridiculous outfits, acquits her comedic skills to good use here. She can make standing in the shower naked except for a towel wrapped around her head into a humorous moment and almost distract you from her va-va-voom body and earthy beauty. Did I mention that she’s actually the Cary Grant role, if we are to continue our comparison to Charade? She’s the secret agent who constantly changes her allegiances and back story to suit the moment, but since it’s Sophia Loren we happily believe whatever story she’ll tell us. But much like Hepburn, she’s given an impossibly stylish wardrobe to go along with. This means that Peck has been given the Hepburn role, he is the innocent for falls hard for the roguish ally and gets wrapped up in something that seems simple at first but spirals out of control very quickly. But he gets to quip like Grant and be just as pro-active in the plot and action scenes.

Arabesque contains a very mod England visual style, which I enjoyed greatly. It’s a bit like Hitchcock played for laughs and with a more sexually suggestive sense of humor. Throw in a dash of Sean Connery-era James Bond stunt work, and you’ll be in the ballpark for what this film is like. Very chic, very tongue-in-cheek, with a plot that takes a backseat to movie stars having a mad-cap good time in an espionage thriller, Arabesque is an entertaining little film. This kind of spy-based intrigue film which aims for witty insouciance instead of seriousness just doesn’t get made anymore, what a pity.

I don’t know what happened with Let’s Make Love. From a production standpoint this should have been a surefire hit. And out-and-out tasty little musical truffle filled with nice production numbers, some romance and a dash of screwball comedy. You have George Cukor directing, who did such a solid job on A Star Is Born and My Fair Lady, and Marilyn Monroe doing musical-comedy, something which was as natural for her as a fish swimming. So where did all of it go so absolutely wrong?

Yves Montand stars as a French billionaire who falls hard for Monroe’s showgirl after discovering that the musical revue she’s staring in features a not-so-nice comedic jab at him. He’s mistaken for an actor auditioning for the part, and he plays along in order to woo Monroe. This is an Idiot Plot in full bloom. Unlike other movies which feature Idiot Plots but are more charming, like Top Hat, Let’s Make Love is uncomfortably sad. A lot of the blame could go to Montand who as a musical comedy star is not a decent comedic actor, a passable dancer or a singer of any kind. His charisma is practically in the negative percentile, and he generates no chemistry with Monroe. Why she chose him as her co-star is anyone’s best guess.

But not even Monroe is free from the blame. Her she looks frequently out-of-it. The downers taking their toll, especially in close-ups where she looks anesthetized. She’s appealing, she could never be anything less even when playing bad (Niagara), but she’s lacking much of her spark. If Fox hadn’t routinely forced her into doing films that she didn’t want to do to fulfill a contract, as was the case here, her story might have played a little different. She’s got two good musical numbers that showoff some of her gifts, but in a movie that plays out like its three times longer than it really is that’s not really enough. Luckily, the songs are “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and “Let’s Make Love.” She performs one kittenish and innocently naughty, and the other in full-blown orgasmic yearning. It’s a shame that Cukor obviously hated her because these two sequences show some life in her performance and in the film.

Ah, Cukor. He directed brilliant comedies like The Philadelphia Story, Adam’s Rib, The Women and Born Yesterday. He knew how to move things along at a brisk pace and keep the comedy going. He also knew how to get great performances out of his actors. He was especially talented at getting classic performances from actress. Who could forget Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday? Or Katharine Hepburn in any of the numerous films he directed her in? He must have decided to leave these talents at home and do a workman-like job. There is no joy, no pacing, no sense of comedy in any of this film. It slowly and boringly plods along to its predictable conclusion with no warmth or humor. Monroe is frequently filmed in frumpy and dowdy clothing, in bad hair and makeup and in unflattering close-ups of her stoned face. Are these truly the best takes? Not even calling in favors from Bing Crosby, Milton Berle or Gene Kelly can save the film. So what went wrong? Everything. My only response to the film’s suggestive come-on title is this: Let’s not and just forget the whole thing.

The Prince and the Showgirl does feature an odd pairing, that of Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, and a slow moving storyline, but I was always totally and completely enthralled and mesmerized by it all. A part of that has to do with the magnetism of Olivier and Monroe, their different acting styles make for a unique sexual friction between their characters, and the other part has to do with a storyline that throws so many different balls up in the air and somehow manages to juggle them all. It’s frothy and predictable, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t enjoyable or without artistic merit.

The story is set during King George V’s coronation and dignitaries from around the world are arriving for the event. Among them are King Nicholas and his father, Prince Regent, from Carpathia, who tour England before returning to the embassy. One of the stops is at a musical revue called The Coconut Girl. There Olivier meets Elsie Marina, an American showgirl who has a bit part in the musical, and is immediately in lust. While she initially comes off as a bit of a ditz, she reveals herself to be a street-smart and perceptive person. The Prince tries to get rid of her after the one-night stand doesn’t exactly go as planned, but she stays on for about three days and changes his life.

The story beats are predictable, but the performances, especially from Monroe, hit graceful and beautiful notes that keep the film feeling fresh and inventive. Olivier could always be relied upon to give a performance for an aristocratic man who is full of bluster and grandstanding. Big emotions from big men were his bread and butter. But the best performance comes from Marilyn Monroe. Frequently cast in her vehicles at 20th Century Fox as a sex goddess incarnate who just so happened to be funny, Monroe gets to demonstrate dramatic skills which typically went ignored outside of Bus Stop. Olivier practically screams Royal Shakespearean Company grandiosity, while she brims with a sense of playful sexuality; she also forsakes her typical fragility for most of the film for a determined and street smart tone. It’s nice to see her play smart after playing: dumb-as-a-brick (The Seven Year Itch), near-sighted slapstick (How to Marry a Millionaire), gold-digging-sexual-predator (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Those three films encapsulated her “dumb blonde” era, with only one of them actually qualifying as a legitimate “dumb blonde.” Here she is luminous, adult and smart. Radiant, sexy and magnetic, of course, but those were charms that exploded in front of the camera no matter what she did.

And the ending is most curious, but rather adult and oddly satisfying. After spending a few days playing Miss Fix-it to this group of royals, she announces that she cannot go with them back home because she has a contract with her stage show. The prince says that he’ll be tied for most of the year with his duties as his son reaches eighteen and becomes old enough to assume the throne. They agree that, maybe but only maybe, in roughly a year-and-a-half when everything is finally said-and-done to possibly meet up again and see if the spark is still there. We’re left hanging, and it’s a nice bit of genre manipulation which tells us that normally these two would get together and ride off into the sunset. It is a credit to Olivier’s steady hand as a director that this plays so sublimely and as a satisfactory conclusion to their affair. It always seemed too odd from the start for a fairy-tale ending.

While recreated from over nine hours of footage and the definition of “best guess,” the thirty-seven minutes that have been assembled of Something’s Got to Give are enough to make you curse history. Cruel fate took Marilyn Monroe away from us way too soon. While there’s only forty minutes worth of an actual film to judge and review, what’s there is light, breezy, sexy and funny. An effortless, charming comedy of bedroom antics and sexual politics that could have become a very enjoyable film if fate had been kind. Monroe’s nude midnight swim in the pool is sexy, but her giggly and effervescent demeanor show that her sexual magic was in being almost naïve in her carnal magnetism. She’s just an all-American girl taking a nude swim in the middle of the night and having a grand ol’ time. What could possibly be erotic about that? She’s long been my favorite actress for her ability to ring laughs by acting like she came upon her lines by chance, for being able to manipulate her beauty and sexuality to be both inviting and destructive (her work in Niagara is wonderful), and for her aching vulnerability and intelligence and hint of sadness behind her big blue eyes. Cyd Charisse is her typically hopeless self, lovely to look at but can't carry a scene that doesn't involve dancing to save her life. Most surprising is seeing Dean Martin play against type as a neurotic type. I've long thought of him as an undervalued comedic player (and his dramatic chops aren't anything to scoff at, see Some Came Running), and he gets plenty of chances to play a character totally different from his persona. Oh, what could have been!