Reviews by JxSxPx

Timed to coincide with MGM’s 70^th anniversary and assembling as many of the remaining legends of its Arthur Freed unit as possible, That’s Entertainment! III is less a film than an extended advertisement for the home video releases of the various films highlighted here. It’s cute to see stars like Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Esther Williams, Howard Keel, and June Allyson discuss their history at the studio, provide well-known factoids about it all, and enjoy the glossy clips presented before you, but there was room for something more.

Glimpses of Eleanor Powell’s “Fascinating Rhythm” demonstrate just how much pinpoint precision, skill, and timing were required to pull these films off both in front and behind the camera. But there’s not enough of that to fill the running time. These glimpses of scenes discarded or revisited for later films are interesting as “what if” exercises. Yes, Judy Garland looks distracted and tired in the Annie Get Your Gun material, but it’s also intriguing to catch a sight of what that film was originally intended to be.

Same goes for the side-by-side comparison of Cyd Charisse’s sensual performance of “Two-Faced Woman,” discarded from The Band Wagon, with Joan Crawford’s blackface grotesquerie in Torch Song. Or witnessing Garland’s infamous “Get Happy” attire being originally conceived for Easter Parade but deemed too risqué for the time. What a difference two years can make, I suppose.

What is incredibly revealing is how clockwork precise Fred Astaire was. A side-by-side comparison shows the original concept for a scene, rejected because he looked too average, and the final version in which he resembles his typically sophisticated self. He moves in perfect harmony between the two versions with nary a variation or missed beat between them. He wasn’t just a consummate artist but an inhuman, godlike performer.

Even better is the incandescent Lena Horne detailing the racism she encountered being the studio’s lone glamorous black star. Her infamous bubble bath scene from Cabin in the Sky is here, with her commentary about its censorship and removal. She details the pain and hurt over losing the role of Julie in Show Boat, and, as Roger Ebert says, “the difference between the two song versions is a hint of what MGM lost with that decision.”

That’s Entertainment! III does the job on satisfying the “greatest hits and more” itch for MGM musicals, even if it ultimately a fleeting experience. There was ample room to be so much more, but the instinct to parade a gallery of stars and visual bric-a-brac took them over even at this late stage. The spirit of Louis B. must’ve possessed the producers.   

Every ingenue has her year. It may not be the year of their first movie or first success in some facet of the entertainment world, but the year where they elevate from “promising young talent” to the “it girl” of the moment. 1972 was Liza Minnelli’s year.

If Minnelli’s pedigree wasn’t already a leg-up with her mother a thoroughbred entertainer (Judy Garland) and her father a supreme cinematic stylist (Vincente Minnelli), she’d still be launched into the stratosphere by her sheer charisma. She wasn’t just born for the spotlight, but she feels at home in it. Having cut her teeth on Broadway and winning a Tony Award by nineteen, an Oscar nomination by twenty-three, and numerous television credits, including well-known stints on her mother’s specials, Minnelli was primed for the highest echelons of showbusiness when Bob Fosse came calling.

She’d already began her partnership with John Kander and Fred Ebb in Flora and the Red Menace, the 1965 show that won her that Tony Award at nineteen. So, the three of them were already several years deep into a life-long artistic partnership that proved most fruitful and fascinating in the dynamic range of roles and songs they wrote for her. Fosse was the upstart to cinema, with just the mixed Sweet Charity to his credit, but the titan of Broadway. This group would come together to make one of the greatest films of all-time in Cabaret.

That triumph was so nice the four of them decided to see if they could capture the magic twice. Minnelli dubbed it “the first filmed concert for television,” and I find it’s more of a one-woman stage show where Minnelli performs a medley of Cabaret, contemporary pop tunes in full jazz hands swagger, and Fosse’s iconic choreography in some of his hyper-stylized numbers. It is largely a beyond winning affair with only one section that is entertaining for its camp, but also a bit of a drag. (No pun intended.)

What emerges is an enshrinement to Liza. A singular hour-long experience where we watch her sweat, sing, dance, and act her way through a variety of numbers and Halston costumes, and it’s never less than transcendent to watch her. She seems somehow outside of time. An old-school showbiz entertainer in the vein of her mother and famous pals like Frank Sinatra in an era of deep cynicism and more naturalistic performance. Minnelli is a joyful force that could destroy the backrow with the brilliance of her shine. As she said during the press tour for the 2006 remaster, “this is the kind of work I always loved doing. This is where I belong.”

Perhaps the greatest performance Minnelli ever gave was as her persona, cemented here, and ushered by Fosse, Kander, Ebb, and Halston. She pours tremulous poignancy into “God Bless the Child,” makes “Bye Bye Blackbird” look easy, and demonstrates a pleasing self-effacing humor in “Say Liza (Liza with a ‘Z’).” Nothing compares to the Cabaret medley, of course, but “Son of a Preacher Man” is nearly its rival for its strangeness as she belts out the song and gives a full Broadway dance number. Only the weird minds of Fosse and Minnelli could take that conceit and (nearly) make it work.

Minnelli’s so steamrolling in her exertion here that it’s easy to chalk up the entire success to her, but Fosse’s directorial eye should not be undercut. Fosse flirts with the near sensory overload that appears at the end of All That Jazz or some of the rhythmic editing of any of his works. Fosse keeps much of the choreography more attuned to Minnelli’s strengths – high kicks, lots of energy, or merely basking in her glow while she acts out the lyrics – but his telltale signs come roaring out in bits and pieces, most notably “Bye Bye Blackbird.” It’s an artistic give-and-take that cemented their respective reputations.   

Charlton Heston clearly felt some kind of kinship, or siren song, or it was “the role,” the one that all actors dream of taking on from the theatrical canon. Either which way you glance at it, Heston playing the character three times on film and television, including in his directorial debut, was a sign of a deep passion for the role and material. This doesn’t mean that this passion translated into a profound reading of the character or a good movie.

I wonder if Heston’s original choice of director, Orson Welles, would have produced a better final product. Heston’s camera is not exactly invigorating, and the scant budget shows throughout, including in leftover sea battle footage from Ben-Hur that shimmers with studio era artifice. His sense of visual language is one of overly indulgent closeups so his actors can bellow their monologues, or show off his burly physique, or lands with the leaden weight of those 50s epics that he starred in and built his cinematic legacy upon.

But those vehicles provided ample opportunity for Heston’s gritted teeth and chest-first line deliveries. He’s not a classical actor with nuance and moderation in his skill set. Rather, he is someone who needs to go big and broad and rage. This is why he’s remembered for grandiose work like The Ten Commandments, El Cid, or Planet of the Apes, and is, frankly, ill-suited to something that depends on so much vocal and emotional calibration to successfully pull off. This is where the division between classical acting and more gone-to-11 amplification he was good at.

It doesn’t help that Cleopatra is also miscast, or misdirected, as Hildegard Neil is not up to meeting the challenge of the role. She’s a lovely English Rose that demands a more vibrant inner life and reading. Her Cleopatra frequently comes off as a scorned ex, a gross simplification of “bitches be crazy,” and vaguely ridiculous in her Egyptian garb.

Antony and Cleopatra is a vision of artistic hubris, of misguided ego run amuck and producing something altogether forgettable. The disjointed quality of the finished product is evident in how comfortable the supporting players are in the Shakespearean text while the leads are a lead balloon that dooms the entire affair. It’s not as if Shakespearean adaptations always demand actors with an ease in the language. Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet is successful because Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey projected the dewy innocence and ripe sensuality of the characters, not necessarily for their grasp of the rhythms of the language. The bombast and overwrought emoting drown all else out here.

The main players deliver capital-A ACH-TING! in this adaptation of the Bard’s tale of revenge and racism, but it’s all undercut by a flatlined directorial job. This isn’t a movie. This is a filmed stage play in an almost literal sense as there’s one set with rotating parts and acts walking in and out from the wings. I swear you can nearly see the actors waiting for their cues to walk in and deliver their lines. If this were a PBS Great Performances entry, I wouldn’t feel so conflicted about the proceedings.

And all of this was before talking about the giant elephant in the room, which Laurence Olivier’s blackface. No, it’s not blackface, it’s something far worse. He looks nearly blue his makeup is so extreme. It is so distracting that it takes quite a while for the sight to settle in so you can notice his performance if you can ever get over the hump at all. Olivier gives one of his most grandiose and energetic performances in any of his Shakespearean films. Not quite the rival of his brooding, tortured Hamlet, but a layered work that comes wrapped in a horrifying relic of the theatrical past.

So, this Othello is no match for the Orson Welles version, or even the Laurence Fishburne one from decades later, but it is a chance to see several great British thespians give round tones to exhaustive monologues. Maggie Smith makes for a fine Desdemona, and Frank Finlay gives his Iago a forked tongue. The movie is a largely a bloated affair with only the three leads fiery work to give it some semblance of mobility and life.

A translation of director Max Reinhardt’s Hollywood Bowl production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most sumptuous, shimmering, and enthralling adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. Yes, the use of movie stars was and remains controversial (the more things change, right), but there’s surprises aplenty in discovering how wonderful, say, James Cagney is with the language. Combining ballet interludes, expressionistic visuals, Shakespeare’s language, and a general air of magic throughout, this is a film from the golden age ripe for rediscovery.

Here is the first big budget crack at the Bard during the talkie era, and it combines elements of accepted “High Art” like classical music and dance with the new-kid-on-the-block energy of the cinema. The results are a prestige film that doesn’t feel entombed in its own sense of self-importance but alive with mirth and fun. Several Shakespearean films feel bloated or overwrought with self-importance forgetting that his works were supposed to be fun or thrilling or achingly romantic, depending on their primary mood.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one the better-known romantic comedies filled with mistake identities, love triangles (or maybe a square?), hammy actors, and the faerie folk. There’s a lot going on, but it is never boring or hard to follow. The delineation between the “regular” world and the “forest” world is clearly marked, so when the magical elements come into play, we know we’re in the other realm.

To summarize: Hermia (Olivia de Havilland, feisty in her debut) loves Lysander (Dick Powell, even he knew he was out of his depth), but her father has her betrothed to Demetrius (Ross Alexander). Theseus, Duke of Athens (Ian Hunter) tells her she either marries Demetrius or becomes a nun who worships Diana, goddess of the moon. While Helena (Jean Muir) pines for Demetrius from afar. The four of them wind up in the woods where the fairies play tricks on them and the young lovers find themselves in a screwball comedy of sorts.

In honor of Theseus’ upcoming marriage to Hippolyta (Verree Teasdale), Peter Quince (Frank McHugh) and his players are preparing a production of Pyramus and Thisbe. Nick Bottom (Cagney) is the main player you need to know as his head is transformed into a donkey and he engages in a romance with Titania, Queen of the Fairies (Anita Louise). They do eventually perform their play for the royal court, and it is a hilariously incompetent production that alternates between hammy theatrics and unprepared obtuseness.

Now we get to the fairies: Oberon (Victor Jory) and Titania are in a fight over a changeling, and Oberon has Puck (Mickey Rooney, best in show) play tricks on, well, just about everybody. Eventually, Oberon and Titania reconcile, attend the wedding, and bless the house. We wrap with Puck’s address to the audience about what we’ve just seen was nothing more than a dream.

And what a dream it is! The forest world is alive with twinkling lights, scenes of fairies descending and dancing upon the mist, and glittering costumes that seem made out of thorns, tinsel, and flowing fabrics. It’s no wonder that this wasn’t just the first Shakespearean film to be nominated for Best Picture, but the only win to ever win a write-in Oscar. Hal Mohr’s gorgeous work was somehow not officially nominated, but it deservedly won anyway.

There’s also the chance to see surprising work from cinematic greats. Cagney goes full bluster for Bottom, and it is a refreshing demonstration of range from an actor so synonymous with gangsters. Olivia de Havilland is positively lovely and dynamic as Hermia as she gives the role a fiery, independent core that’s quite nice. But I cannot write enough nice things about Mickey Rooney’s Puck, a performance that is so broad that it remains a love-it-or-hate-it prospect to this day. I find Puck to be a role that can handle as much limitless energy as a performer can throw into it, and Rooney had a lot of energy. He giggles, cackles, and throws himself about with an abandon that threatens to incinerate the celluloid.

Not quite like any other Shakespearean adaptation, or even any film from the era, this is a under heralded classic. Sure, it’s not without its flaws, but it is a pleasing little surprise that manages to give due to the love stories and the otherworldly in a way that makes the entire thing feel like cinema straight from the tap. There’s magic and foolishness here, and, perchance, 133 minutes of an enchanting dream.

God’s Own Country finds tenderness to be the antidote to emotional abuse and a way to reinforce emotional strength. I suppose finding any tenderness in the Yorkshire countryside is a feat in itself as the frigid, windy landscapes aren’t exactly an inviting landscape to thrive in. This miserablism reflects itself in the life of our protagonist, Johnny (Josh O’Connor), and his eventual emotional awakening.

Johnny lives with his exacting grandmother (Gemma Jones) and disabled father (Ian Hart), neither of them provide much emotional succor, working their farm and spending the occasional day getting drunk and engaging in casual rough sex with random twinks. It is an isolated and punishing life that is just marinating in self-loathing and anger. Into this stasis comes Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian immigrant hired to help with the sheep. Gheorghe derails Johnny’s self-destructive behaviors by teaching him the joys of tenderness, vulnerability, and monogamy.

Sure, that God’s Own Country relies upon an “other” to teach is… not great. Gheorghe essentially has to teach Johnny how to “be” in an emotion and process them instead of evading or destroying them. He must melt layers of emotional armor and baggage and cause Johnny to open-up. At least the narrative provides him with a fully realized personality that keeps him from sliding into “magical other” that teaches the white guy how to feel/be better.

It helps that O’Connor and Secareanu craft real people that invite our deepest sympathies and make us root for them. Yes, I wanted them to have a fairy tale ending of some variation and got deeply emotional when the climatic scenes started to pile-up. The planting and payoff of their relationship and Johnny’s maturation are wonderfully done between the writing and the performances.

Johnny’s bullish understanding of intimacy is evidenced by his first aggressive sexual encounter with Gheorghe as they wrestle in the mud. After this first encounter, where the two of them fight like apex predators without saying a word, Gheorghe begins to disrupt the cyclical nature of these encounters by demanding tenderness and affection. Johnny has spent so much mistaking abuse for affection that he seems bewildered and blindsided by this brand new, freely given gift.

God’s Own Country really makes understanding his plight the crux of the narrative. Not only is there the prominent romance, but his well-drawn out relationship with his family. Johnny’s newly discovered vulnerability repays itself towards his father in a scene of shocking candidacy as he bathes his father after another stroke has rendered him entirely dependent. He promises to take care of the family farm but demands that the rules governing the place change under his rule. If nothing else, it underscores how so much of the film is about how masculinity can be a prison and force people into the closest through silence, shame, and intimidation.

I was exactly the target age for a rebooted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle franchise that wasn’t explicitly kiddie back in 2007. I know I’ve watched this movie at least twice, each time thinking I hadn’t seen it before only to realize I had but forgotten practically all of it. That about summarizes things, really.

At least a vague prior knowledge of the material is required as it wastes no time in reintroducing the characters well into their vigilante life. April is even in on the action game as we’re introduced to her adventuring somewhere in Central America, and she brandishes a sword in the climatic fight. Vague plot details punctuation between the action scenes only long enough to get us from point A to point B.

Shredder is long gone, but the Foot Clan is still around and being led by Karai. She’s working for an immortal businessman who wants to go back to morality, but he needs to capture thirteen monsters and sacrifice his reanimated monstrous siblings. The turtles, of course, are all that stops between humanity and total destruction if they could just stop fighting long enough and get it together. They do, naturally, as this is not a film that is seeking to reinvent the wheel but merely reanimate a franchise. In short: forgettable cinematic junk food that attunes itself towards your childhood nostalgia.

Well, it’s been nearly 33 years since Hollywood Shuffle came out and its various critiques of Hollywood still largely hold true. Yes, the miniscule budget and ramshackle narrative structure mean that it is only as good as any particular satirical scene, but enough of them are smart and barbed to overcome these limitations. Perhaps it still holds so true because it came from a real place of frustration and daring.

Robert Townsend stars, directs, writes, and exhumes his own stories throughout. Bright, eager, talented, and capable of more than what the industry was providing, Townsend created his own opportunities through various favors and scrapping together his means. The fact that the resulting film is watchable at all is no small feat and a testament to this then untapped potential.

Knowing when to end a sketch is an elusive art that even the best in the business struggle with, and several points of Hollywood Shuffle go on for a few beats too long. These rough edges are also visible in the supporting roles who are largely underwritten or one-note characters. While Townsend is busy deriding the stereotypes that Hollywood asks black male actors to play, his critical eye doesn’t appear to expand to women and queer characters who can feel like the very thing he’s decrying. If he had it bad, imagine being a queer black man or woman in the era.

Something of a compromise yet still a huge triumph, Hollywood Shuffle was proof of an untapped talent waiting to shake things up. Townsend has since gone off to a solid career alternating between writing, directing, and acting. This will probably go down as his greatest triumph, which is as it should be.

Fred Zinnemann made several great films of the studio era, like From Here to Eternity, High Noon, and The Nun’s Story. His style was spartan craftsmanship with an emphasis on the psychological reality of his characters, and a keen eye for casting that brought some of the best performances of their respective careers. Think of Gary Cooper’s stoic sheriff, Donna Reed’s weary call girl, Julie Harris’ moody tomboy, or Don Murray’s drug addict, and how they’re highlights in uniformly strong ensembles.

These qualities carry over into A Man for All Seasons, Zinnemann’s tony adaptation of a respectable play. It cleaned up at the 39^th Academy Awards, nabbing six wins out of eight nominations, during an era where that voting body loved three things: British cinema, stage adaptations, and musicals. A Man for All Seasons checks two out of three of those boxes. It is a fine if stagey, overly talky affair. The kind of film that feels predetermined to win Oscars over the thornier material of a given era, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Seconds, just to pick two nominated movies that lost to this one in various categories.

To quote Pauline Kael, “there’s more than a little of the school pageant” about the final product. The cast, including but not limited to Wendy Hiller, Robert Shaw, John Hurt, and Orson Welles, all deliver fine work, the costumes and sets are lovingly detailed, and a vague sense of homework in reaching the end credits as numerous scenes drag. It feels much longer than its two-hours as what could be told visually is often spoken aloud. Film is a primarily visual medium, and A Man for All Seasons is a bit of a filmed stage play.

Is Samuel Fuller a B-movie poet or a masculine cult figure of the American cinema? A little bit of both, in my opinion as it depends on the film. Even then, sometimes the film in question is a blurring of the two modes.

Take The Crimson Kimono, a pleasurable little jewel that lands somewhere between rough noir, racial drama, and conflicted love story. Fuller’s bait-and-switch is masterfully controlled and revealed smartly as we’re slowly introduced to the interracial cop partners (James Shigeta, Glenn Corbett) investigating the murder of a stripper and their erotic fixation on a potential witness (Victoria Shaw). Think of the hard-boiled, often drunk (both on alcohol and her own mythmaking) Mac (Anna Lee), a noir creation that gives vibrancy and flavor to the proceedings. She’s a poetic and tough creation, the kind of thing you only find in pulpy cinema.

The Crimson Kimono generates palpable tension by allowing prolonged scenes of these characters merely interacting. Their tensions with each other provide sub-textual crackle, like the vague homoeroticism of cop partners in these ultra-masculine stories who feel tremendous hurt when a woman derails the stasis. Or watching Lee and Corbett size each other up and talk around each other while their sexual tension and amusement with each other rises.  

The emphasis on building the emotional infrastructure of these relationships undergirds the tension as things go sideways. Is Shigeta right that Corbett’s reaction and bruised ego at “losing” Shaw to him an ugly racial flareup? Well, the matter-of-fact way Fuller treats their love story is potential evidence, or there’s a few other possible readings as Fuller loved to give his work contentious material. I’ll leave a few of them to your imagination.

If there is any problem with The Crimson Kimono it is in the whiplash that happens as you transition from the gritty murder-mystery to the love triangle and beyond. The murder-mystery becomes a distant memory as the film reaches a climax and the mixed couple go off… into the sunset? At least Fuller provides an exploration of a post-war psyche that is fractured and scarred for Shigeta as he feels between worlds, both American and distinctly foreign at the same time. This provides some continuity between the two divergent narrative aims as the white hero is sidelined and the “other” occupies the spotlight. Consider another notch for Fuller’s canonization as empathetic macho man.