Reviews by JxSxPx

Steven Spielberg and Richard Dreyfuss have both mentioned a deep love and appreciation for 1944’s A Guy Named Joe and discussed remaking it as far back as 1975’s Jaws. A Guy Named Joe is one of those heavily romantic studio era films that easily moved into magical realism territory. You buy into silvery images of Spencer Tracy as a helpless, benevolent angel mentoring his replacement (Van Johnson) in both love (with Irene Dunne) and employment (a fighter pilot) because so many of those movies have an artifice that’s expertly weaved into their DNA.

Remaking them is a tough prospect. Spielberg has the right touch of sentimentality, sometimes too much, but he doesn’t have the right touch of magical realism. His films are often filled with wonder, like Close Encounter of the Third Kind’s mothership reveal or Jurassic Park’s first glimpses of dinosaurs, but he can’t quite get over a hump into pure fantastical imagery here. His fantasy is too grounded, too thin for its running time, and only springs to life when Audrey Hepburn graces it with her eternally sublime image.

Always replaces WWII with the Pacific Northwest and fighting forest fires. Tracy, Dunne and Johnson are replaced with Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter and Brad Johnson. Brad is no Van, though, and his pretty face is about all he has going for him throwing many scenes of him acting opposite Dreyfuss, Hunter and John Goodman into uneven playing fields where they’re trying to prop up his weakness. In fact, Goodman slowly steals the movie out from everyone’s nose by getting the chance to tap into his inner S. Z. Sakall or similar character actor from the era.

So much of Always says aloud what it should show with a moment of quiet contemplation or reaction shots from its talented actors. The smartest casting choice was Hepburn as an angel, which is a brilliant piece of casting to personality. The small handful of scenes with her speak and feel more deeply than the rest precisely because she brings so much knowledge to the role by knowing when to react silently. A small, tender smile and supportive hand gesture from her reverberations in your gut more than the supposed emotional torment of watching Dreyfuss impotently view Hunter and Johnson woo each other.  

And that’s the major problem with Always – you don’t invest much into the central premise, so the conflict remains inert. The daredevilry of the fighter pilots seems foolhardy and like it’s asking for trouble given the context, and the dialog feels like it was time displaced. It’s not quite remade enough from its 40s origins, and only witnessing a cinematic legend bidding us farewell is justifiable cause to watch Always.

The late 60s were a confusing, unmooring time for everyone, especially those expositing the virtues of total honesty and “free love.” Enter Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a comedy not so much about wife-swapping as it is about the confusion of the era of its making. “Free love” was never truly free and requiring everyone to get over their sexual hang-ups requires intense psychological scrutiny and self-knowledge and not platitudes from a woo-woo retreat for the monied liberal set. This film comes armed with sage, crystals, and a “Don’t worry, be happy” bumper sticker.

Is it a satire? Possibly, it certainly doesn’t play everything entirely straight as much of Natalie Wood and Robert Culp’s performances seem done with invisible quotes lurking around them. They’re so earnest and eager to impart their idealized self-actualization that they don’t seem to know that spouting off blunt truths is not always the best policy. They’re more concerned with virtue signaling and twisting their close friends into their newly created images that they seem to have missed that they’re still just as confused and hung-up as they were before, but they’ve got New Age-y platitudes now!

Wood and Culp go away to one of those Southern Californian retreats that’s all about “finding the light within” or “returning to love” or some other feel good nonsense that asks us to express an aggressive vulnerability and honesty that just makes everyone else uncomfortable. You know the types; they speak of dark and light forces at play and how if we manifest love hard enough everything will suddenly untwist itself into peace and harmony. Lovely bit of fairy tale logic there, but it takes more hard work than that to get proactive change in society.    

Anyway, they return from the retreat demanding complete honesty with their best friends, Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon. Gould and Cannon give the best performances in the film. Gould’s shaggy personality type, always hilarious especially when harried, provides a nice counterpoint to Culp’s handsome, aging wannabe swinger. Wood’s wide eyes contain hidden depths (don’t they always?) that contradict the words she’s often speaking or highlight them depending on the mood. Cannon’s flinty, conservative character is often the voice of reason, and she’s marvelous in the role. Her best scene is not the oft-mentioned climatic bluff calling, but an early therapy session where her defensiveness and sexual hang-ups commingle.

More fascinating as thought experiment than it is satisfying as finished film, Uptight is still a complicated, contradictory experience that’s worth the effort. How often do you come across something that’s an update of classic John Ford movie, this time substituting Irish revolutionaries for a Black Panthers-like group, co-written by Ruby Dee, starring many of the best black artists of the era, and directed by Jules Dassin, of all people, that explored the traumatized psyche of the Civil Rights Movement in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination? Exactly, this is a once in a lifetime confluence of talents and ideas that’s fascination outweighs its demerits.

The strangeness of Uptight’s existence doesn’t stop at its assembly of talent in front and behind the camera, but at the simple fact that a major studio released something so aggressively political. Paramount financed and produced Uptight right before the onslaught of black cinema known as blacksploitation, and while Uptight has relatively little in common with many of those films, there’s still the rage of the ghetto, the wariness of oppressed, and an unapologetic blackness that draws a straight line between what this film does and what that movement was expressing.

Yet Dassin’s artistic impulses feel at odds with the story he’s trying to tell. There’s a grit and truth in the script that his impressionistic camera can’t pull off. His bold color palette and arty compositions often turn the politics into moot points as if the imagery, at times too melodramatic, is more important than the words and performances from the likes of Dee, Roscoe Lee Brown, Juanita Moore, and Julian Mayfield. This was a film that longed for more cinematic realism and less for filmic poetry.

Same goes for the disparate tones. His informer, Mayfield, is at times played for too clownish and pitiable an alcoholic figure to really register as a tragedy waiting to happen, and his revolutionaries are too cool, smart, and direct to balance out some of the more parodic scenes of the informer. However, there’s one perfect scene in which everything is working in perfect synchronicity. Mayfield wanders into the funeral gathering for the man his informing got killed, and his mixture of confusion and grief is palpable. The various attendees at the wake stare down at him as if vengeful judge and jury perplexed by his erratic behavior.

It is in these tiny moments that Uptight becomes good enough and worthy enough to seek out. I’ll let Roger Ebert have the final say about it: “There’s no backsliding toward a conciliatory moderate conclusion. The passions and beliefs of the black militants are presented head-on, with little in the way of comfort for white liberals. White racists, I guess, will be horrified beyond measure. Good for them.”

The cycle of violence becomes an ever-widening gyre in Frank Borzage’s Moonrise. Less a violent story than a story about violence, and there is a difference between the two, where each successive action strengths that cycle of violence and chaos. The aftereffects of a parent’s death by capital punishment lead to that child’s stunted adulthood and barely concealed urges for retribution and score settling.

Borzage builds his reality on clearly artificial sets that underscore the suffocating ties that bind this society together. Swamps and ponds aren’t merely these things but haunted places to bury secrets or to seek refuge from the world. This is after all a cinematic world that’s recognizably like our own but filled with secretive places that become near holy in their emotional power within the narrative context. An abandoned mansion becomes a love chamber, a Ferris wheel takes on the same tenor of a confessional, and a shed in the swamp becomes a place where the cycle of violence dissipates into empathy and forgiveness.

Moonrise takes the pieces of noir and does something humanistic and warmly tender with them instead of the gritty black hats versus white hats with a gray hat in the middle of it all. Here is the story of a man who lost his father to capital punishment, only to have the sins of the father (and his death) used against him by childhood bullies and polite society to ostracize him further. When he finally snaps and murders his tormentor in an act that’s complicated, it’s not quite self-defense but it’s also not premeditated or a passionate flareup, the rest of the narrative finds him committing more acts of paranoia and violence to try and cover the first one up. Cause and effect are on naked display, and Borzage’s anti-hero is seeking spiritual forgiveness and a way to move beyond his traumas.

Borzage’s heavy use of symbolism and heightened romanticism is nearly exotic as it has gone so far out of vogue with the pervading ‘realism’ or blunt-force delivery of modern cinema. The line between a trapped racoon and the anti-hero of the film blur together until you’d be forgiven for mistaking one’s fateful capture for the other. But that’s not the only place where Moonrise visually tells or reveals its sentimentality instead of spouting it, like the near baptism of a rain scene or the ways in which that rain and memory become the same storm.

Occupying some neverwhere between Borzage’s typical romanticism and film noir’s inky shadows, Moonrise is a fascinating oddity. I suppose the closest other near parable/fairy tale-like noir-esque film like it would be The Night of the Hunter, another film that spliced genres together and provides a near dream-like, highly atmospheric world in which its story unfurls. Rarely has watching a man’s moral compass lose of true north been so lyrical, haunting, beautiful, and empathetic at it is under Borzage’s sympathetic lens.  

Time to demonstrate my gay card as I speak positively over Gaslight’s two hours of diva in full martyrdom! George Cukor’s gothic melodrama about a naïve young wife being slowly driven insane by her gold-digging husband is a lot of fun. It’s as atmospherically cluttered and inky as a Universal Monsters film and as well-acted as any of his heralded “women’s pictures” from the era. Of course, having actors as great as Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and Angela Lansbury in major roles doesn’t hurt, either.

Sure, time has dulled some of the psychological terror that comes with watching Ingrid Bergman’s Victorian wife slowly losing grip on sanity, but there’s still plenty of studio-era visual poetry and lyrical acting gestures on display. The very artifice of a film like Gaslight is its own pleasurable reward. We’re not looking into complex insight here but for a hissable villain, here embodied by a complex Boyer, and a brittle woman on the verge of hysteria with colorful supporting parts, especially Lansbury as a slutty Cockney chambermaid and Dame May Whitty as a nosy neighbor.

There isn’t much in the way of mystery as Boyer’s duplicitous nature is practically spelled out from the get-go, but there is the pleasure of watching the normally stolid Bergman begin to deteriorate mentally and emotionally as up becomes down and nothing is quite what it appears. Gaslight is a tightly wound costume drama with a dash of complex horror and a healthy dose of atmosphere to separate it from the pack. It works as its evenly paced unraveling corresponds with Bergman’s.

If anything, Gaslight’s crumbling martyr is a portrait of the danger women face both inside and outside the home. Bergman’s character sought tranquility and stability in a life that’s been marred by scandal as her aunt was killed in this very house when she was a child, and now she’s trapped in an abusive marriage. If she’s unsafe in her marriage, and by extension for the time period her entire life, then she is unsafe any and everywhere. There’s seemingly no reprieve from the ominous shadows, the flickering lights, or the isolation for this woman. How many others can say the same?    

If you’ve ever wanted to watch a rigidly square peg try to slink into a round hole, then Two-Faced Woman is the film for you! It’s not that Greta Garbo couldn’t do comedy, she’s a sensation in Ninotchka, but that film built humor around her dour, serious iconography and found a sly way to subvert that image. Two-Faced Woman asks Garbo to become Irene Dunne or Carole Lombard, and that’s just not the type of actress she was. Screwball comedy was a genre that eluded her, and I love Garbo for her tragic romances.

Garbo was best suffering, as if she were perpetually being punished for some cosmic infraction at birth that necessitated her proverbial cutting down to size. Even her previous comedy had her paying a price for falling in love. Sure, there was an eventual happy ending, but first Garbo had to suffer, become isolated, and revert to a humorless presence. It’s what makes her acting so potent and poetic. No one suffered as romantically or gorgeously as Garbo.

It’s also one of the myriads of reasons that this film is an inevitable failure. It asks Garbo to play events light, flirty, and frivolous. She’s clearly throwing herself into it with relish and a game face, but it’s not working as efforts to minimize her glamorous exoticism into an Americanized society girl reveal Garbo as a pre-modern screen presence. Hers was an ornate foreign elegance that was attuned to Anna Karenina and Camille, and not a ski instructor trying to play a saucy trick on their husband by posing as her twin sister to test his fidelity.

Of course, there’s eternally a changeover in the old guard of Hollywood and few rarely survive the changing tides. For instance, several stars failed to transition from silence to talking, while many never recovered once the Hays Code came into being, and still more fell away as World War II approached and the lyrical romanticism of films gave way to paranoia, candy-coated musicals, and the first reverberations of Method acting. Garbo and Two-Faced Woman are one such example of this upheaval. By mutual decision, Garbo and MGM terminated her contract after the failure of this film and her eventual comeback vehicles never materialized. This is better known as a piece of historical trivia than it is widely seen, and maybe it should stay that way.

Louisa May Alcott’s oft-filmed story gets a wonderfully warm, charming, if rushed treatment in George Cukor’s celebrated version. Two prior silent film versions, from 1917 and 1918 respectively, beat this one to the screen, but this was the first version where all the disparate pieces came together to form a satisfying whole. Director George Cukor, star Katharine Hepburn, a pervading sense of optimism in the face of strife and a pleasing but not overpowering sense of socially progressive ideals at play mark this version as a resounding success.

Fans of the novel tend to either, very generally speaking, adore this version or the 1994 version starring Winona Ryder. Frankly, I think they’re about equal with the 1994 version possibly coming out on top with a stronger sense of an ensemble and a less overpowering sentimentality at play. This version also feels like it’s speed-reading through the material with moments like Beth’s untimely death barely registering their full emotional impact. Having said that, Little Women is still a strong film overall.

A really strong film overall, in fact. If ever a part was born for Katharine Hepburn to play it was Jo March, a head-strong New Englander tom boy with progressive beliefs. She’s marvelous in the role as she finds a part that matches her patrician accent, fierce angularity, and physically domineering energy. 1933 was the breakout year for Kate the Great, but I can’t help but feel that Morning Glory Oscar maybe should’ve gone to her for this film instead. Sure, it’s a bit type casting, Hepburn would go on to bring a queerness (both how you’re thinking of that word and also its original definition) to other superwoman in later roles like Woman of the Year or Adam’s Rib, but she’s just so joyful and fun here that I can’t knock the obviousness of the casting in any meaningful way.

The only actor that matches her fire is Edna May Oliver as the March’s elderly aunt. Of course, she’s another that seems right at home playing the monied spinster aunt as that was one of her character types. Cukor assembled a strong group for the rest of the family, including a beatific Frances Dee, bratty Joan Bennett, and lovable Paul Lukas, and they add immeasurably to Little Women’s strength.

While Little Women is set during the Civil War, it was released during the Great Depression and functions as something of a soothing morale booster for a nation enduring a psychological scar. Here was balm and a recognizable reality as the March family discusses rationing, economic anxiety, and perform desperate measures to stay afloat, such as Jo cutting off her hair to ward off starvation for a while longer. Sure, it’s a glossy and sentimental, but those aren’t bad things as they melt away during the second half’s escalation of life’s disappointments, struggles, and loses.

Our Betters wants to both titillate us with its tale of the idle rich and their different rules for love, marriage, and society while finger wagging over amorality. It wants to build up its main character, an American socialite who married into the British upper class, while also slut shaming her to an absurd degree. Too wooden, too meandering, and populated by actors who can’t find the right undertone of frivolity-meets-acid, Our Betters is a misfire from George Cukor, a sophist director who seemed attuned to this material on paper.

There’s not much in the way of an actual plot so much as a series of vignettes loosely tied together around themes of love sought for convenience, either economic, social, or desperation (often a combination) but never from a place of love. Constance Bennett’s socialite learns that her husband married her for money on their wedding day by overhearing him talk to his girlfriend. Her pride is wounded, but she carries on and becomes the most powerful member of the upper crust’s freak show of kept men, aging dowagers, and effete male companions.

Bennett is not at ease with the material as she was the tough, workaday waitress-turned-star in What Price Hollywood?, and her awkwardness with the rhythms of a drawing room comedy make for an uneven experience. She’s fantastic during a late scene where she lashes out at those were judge her for crafting a life of privilege and power on her own terms but can’t quite deliver the flowery wordplay with as much ease. She isn’t alone as no one seems quite attuned to the musical and muscular structure of the script, especially an American boy played by Charles Starrett.

It all comes to a climax that feels less like the ending of a film and more like everyone just got tired of trying. As if everyone involved just decided this scene was good enough and decided to move on with their lives. This leaves Our Betters an incomplete work, a thinly sketched series of moments in search of a wider organizing principle.   

While not exactly the foundational brick for the four official versions of A Star Is Born (to date, tick-tock on the fifth), What Price Hollywood? is still owed a debt of gratitude and payment when discussing those films. If you were to officially rank it among the four, it would slide obviously above the Barbra Streisand version and below the Janet Gaynor leaving it in fourth place. It zips along with a saucy (and soused) Pre-Code energy with the scrappiness and disparity of the Great Depression nipping at the heels of its starry-eyed dreamer.

Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before: waitress with dreams of motion picture stardom (Constance Bennett) has a chance meeting with a big Hollywood player (Lowell Sherman), he gives her a shot in a bit part that leads to eventual ascension. Her fame grows, his alcoholism worsens, she meets a polo player (Neil Hamilton, best remembered as Gordon to Adam West’s Batman), marries, and finds the lifestyle of the rich and glamorous more fraught than she imagined. Eventual tragedy looms over everything, but we still get a triumphant (I guess?) final scene before the end credits roll.

Ok, so it’s not exactly the tortured romance of A Star Is Born, but it’s close enough. So close that RKO threatened legal action against David O. Selznick when he produced the first Star in 1937. But What Price Hollywood? gives Constance Bennett a great part, she knows it too as she delivers a complex essay of a sturdy archetype, and sacks her with a leech of a love triangle that goes nowhere slowly and removes much of the energy, charm, and wit from the movie.

One of the best choices the eventual variations of this story made was removing the secondary character. Hamilton’s polo player is a #MeToo waking nightmare of a character. He breaks into Bennett’s house, forces her into a date she blew off, and routinely proves that he’s fragile masculinity personified as being Mr. Movie Star is too much for his wounded pride. He needed to go for a variety reasons, one of them was his toxic and abusive idea of “courtship,” but his complete lack of chemistry with Bennett sinks half of the story.

Bennett and Sherman have a better chemistry together and their characters are more fun to watch interact. It’s rare to see male/female relationships played for something other than eventual marriage and domesticity, and it’s sweet to watch her continually stay by her friend’s side as everyone else in town treats him as a pariah. They sling fun barbs, treat each other with respect, and are clearly enjoying playing off each other in both high melodrama and bawdy comedy.

What is patently obvious is how enamored and disturbed George Cukor is with Hollywood both as a physical location and a place of vast mythology, then in the earliest process of drafting it. Scenes where Bennett’s limited dreamer rehearses her scene until her artifice strips away and she’s onto something better is a glimpse into the hard work and thought required to make art. What Price Hollywood? is problematic and uneven, but there’s always Bennett and Sherman in two great parts, Cukor’s sophistication, and enough juicy bits of expose to keep your interest.

Total: from Joy Division to New Order isn’t exactly the all-encompassing expansive set that its title would promise. Joy Division gets a meager five songs out of eighteen, and the last chunk of New Order’s section prove that they’ve been a confused legacy act for a while. I suppose if all you want are the biggest singles (“She’s Lost Control,” “Bizarre Love Triangle,” “True Faith”) then you’ve got a one-stop shop, but this set had the potential to be so much more. It doesn’t exactly do either acts legacies any large favors but it’s not completely worthless either. It’s just kind of …there. It for sure doesn’t represent the totality of their musical outputs – plenty of Joy Division’s non-album singles found on Substance are MIA, while New Order had several classic albums released in the 80s. I suppose my biggest complaint about Total is that it doesn’t feel purposeful but is merely another entry into the never-ending expansion of “best of” compilations from both bands historic and exalted careers.  

DOWNLOAD: “Transmission,” “Temptation,” “Hellbent”