Reviews by JxSxPx

Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Diva is all impeccably detailed frames, cool, smooth surfaces awash in bold colors like pinks and whites and wrapped up in moody lighting and scoring. The details of the plot are inconsequential and preposterous as they merely exist to serve the mood of the piece. Diva is not about what happens in the story but about the act of watching it and its sustained tone.

There’s a postman fan of opera who crafts a bootleg of his favorite diva, an artist who has refused to record her voice, and winds up getting caught between Taiwanese bootleggers, crooked cops, a kleptomaniac and her philosopher roommate, and a dead prostitute. Except for the opera diva, these details are pure unadulterated noir, and Diva often reconstitutes that genre’s visual textures into the colorful, pop-like aesthetic of the 1980s. How and why Taiwanese bootleggers are so obsessed with a bootleg recording of a soprano is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, as he’s sneaking out his bootleg recording (and stolen the white dress she just performed in), a prostitute with a recording of her own sneaks the hot item into his bag. She then promptly gets killed. Her recording implicates the chief of police in sex trafficking, and now this poor guy has got seemingly everyone in the criminal underworld and police department after him. Still, he finds time to engage in a tender relationship (of sorts) with his beloved diva and quirky friendship with the kleptomaniac that he catches in the act.

Diva was widely regarded as the first major work in the cinema du look, a movement that took the alienated youths of the New Wave and dropped them into the candy-coated cinema of the studio era. This movement placed the emphasis on the look and posturing of the film and not their content. Think of it as “story” in the same sense that fashion magazine layouts used to tell a “story.”

Being an exercise is in style and lacking distinctive substance is not always a negative criticism of a film. Film is primarily a visual medium, after all, and sometimes all you want is a visual narcotic. Diva will provide that fix and offer up an entertaining and loose-limbed narrative. There’s a freedom to Diva’s commitment to provide ample opportunity for gorgeous visual delights, like a justifiably famous chase scene involving a moped and the metro.

There’s a sensuousness and sumptuousness here that is highly pleasing. Yes, the plot is completely strange, but the characters and performances are universally appealing. They heighten the atmosphere on display and lull you into the tone. Seek this one out.     

What a fascinating and godawful curio this is. Can something with a banging soundtrack really be all that bad? In the answer, it would appear, is yeah, it can. Famous for being the first big screen role of Debra Winger, containing Donna Summer’s immortal “Last Dance” (which won the Best Song Oscar), and a disco soundtrack that’s still sonically pleasing, Thank God It’s Friday never bothered to populate its busy plot with compelling characters or incident. Everyone is only as deep as their initial impression and they don’t develop much from there. Aside from Winger, Jeff Goldblum is probably the biggest actor in the cast here, and it is fun to see Summer and the Commodores lend some veracity to the era-specific ethnography. Unless you’re deeply curious about the disco scene or want to watch Berlin’s Terri Nunn in her pre-fame acting days, then there’s not much incentive to check out the film. Seek out the soundtrack, though. That’s worth your time. 

Of Busby Berkeley’s three 1933 Warner Brothers films, I would place Footlight Parade in the bronze slot with Gold Diggers of 1933 in the gold and 42^nd Street in silver. I suppose a lot of the enjoyment one gets out of Footlight Parade is your ability to stomach the likes of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler in their blushing, virginal pairing roles. Frankly, I’d rather spend a lot more time with James Cagney’s scheming producer, Joan Blondell’s gal Friday, and the various contract players filling in the colorful supporting roles.

By this point, the less time I must spend watching Keeler’s off-beat dancing, all the better. Same with Powell’s perpetually erect chipmunk routine. Powell was much better as darker characters where his bland, wholesome looks stood in contrast to the material. Keeler here gets to take that “mousy girl lets her hair down and takes off her glasses to reveal the uniquely talented beauty underneath” trope to play, and I guess it’s fun to watch if you’re a fan of hers. I found the two of them to be the weakest aspects of these films, and they’re typically the leads.

But all is forgiven when the leashes come off and Berkeley gets to go buckwild in his hallucinatory geometric sequences. “Honeymoon Hotel” is saucy in parts but largely has to be endured to get to the far better “By a Waterfall.” Berkeley would be responsible for Esther Williams’ aquatic musicals in a few years, and “By a Waterfall” is a trial run for the insane kitsch of those things. A grass knoll gives way to a fairy tale idyll where you half expect a Disney princess to sing her love ballad. Instead we get an abstraction of shapely female legs and water spouting everywhere. Subtle? Not at all, and a delightful piece of camp for it.

Shame this is followed-up with “Shanghai Lil,” where Keller is in yellowface as a China doll vamp. The whole number is an excuse to alternately slut shame and rise the patriotic flag, sometimes both at the same time if you catch my drift. Sure, it’s nice to see Cagney tap dance away in the number, but the ugliness of the Chinese stereotype at play undercuts a lot of the enjoyment.

There’s plenty of Pre-Code sauciness, including Blondell’s epic tell-off to a former roommate, and Cagney’s live-wire performance to keep it all going. Lloyd Bacon’s not exactly a stylist so the dramatic scenes are efficient and a nice blank canvas for Berkeley to go big and weird. Your endearment to this one will depend squarely on how you will feel about Keeler and Powell as juvenile leads. I like my showbiz types with a little more personality.

Not only had Jean Harlow learned to act by 1936’s Riffraff, but her hair wasn’t the aggressive platinum blonde of her ribald days. She was at the height of her beauty here, and in the middle of another change of screen persona. The softening of Harlow’s bad girl act was one of trying to find a proper outlet for her zany sexuality. The uneasy combination of melodrama and comedy in Riffraff is not quite a successful outlet, but there’s glimpses of where she could find continued success if things hadn’t ended so tragically.

This finds Harlow in working girl mode as a cannery worker stuck between her union leader beau (Spencer Tracy) and rich suitor (Joseph Calleia). Harlow and Tracy had a pleasing, fiery chemistry together and managed to project a hardedge in their least glamorous parts. You see what drives them together as much as what pulls them apart. But I wouldn’t rank him amongst the best of Harlow’s leading men, not with the roguish Clark Gable, playboy Franchot Tone, and sly sophisticate William Powell right there.

The best parts of Riffraff are the lighter ones, like Mickey Rooney’s hyperactive nephew and Una Merkel as Harlow’s sarcastic sister. When it transforms into a dramatic film it throws too much at the screen without properly developing any of it. There’s a labor dispute, a hobo camp, a prison birth, escape through the sewage system, and even more than that. It’s a case of too much and the kitchen sink.

Riffraff is a curiosity, a fascinating mess that deserves to be seen at least once. Harlow is very good, and Tracy was at his naturalistic best in the 30s before an obvious phoniness set in with his later work. The script lets them flounder, but their personalities shine through. 

What a curio 1935’s Reckless is. Not just for the backstage dynamics involved in its making but the morbid bits of autobiography and uneasy tonal switches between screwball musical comedy and torrid melodrama. With the Pre-Code years behind them, MGM sought to turn Jean Harlow’s rounded figure into a square leading lady type. Reckless was one of many attempts at softening and desexing the blonde bombshell’s screen image.

Producer David O. Selznick based this story loosely on the true-life tale of the Libby Holman murder scandal. Holman was a torch singer who married a tobacco heir named Zachary Smith Reynolds. He died of a gunshot wound to the head under questionable circumstances during a party in 1932. The scandal was huge news until the Reynolds family dropped its legal actions against Holman in 1933. Whether or not he committed suicide or is murder is a bit muddled, but the basic framework of the story remains the same in Reckless, released just two years after that scandal’s closure.

Original conceived as a film for Joan Crawford, and the part seems tailor-made for her combination of hard scrabble dame and sexually empowered tough cookie. She was eventually replaced by Jean Harlow as the studio wanted to build off her real-life romance with star William Powell, here playing supportive friend that nurses a not-so-secret love for her, but there was also something in Harlow’s past that bled into this film’s premise. Her second husband, Paul Bern, also died of a gunshot to the head under mysterious circumstances. Harlow was understandably reluctant to take the part but Powell convinced her so she would not get suspended.

What emerges from all this complicated blurry of fact and fiction is a confused movie that is fascinating for all its messiness. Harlow gives a credible dramatic performance that proves she had a real future as a more respectable leading lady as she matured away from the laughing vamp roles of the early-30s. What the film can’t disguise is her inability to dance and sing. Sure, the dubbing is pretty good as they matched her throatier vocals, but there’s no mistaking the creative editing to hide the doubles and her limited movements.

She’s far better in the romantic bits involving Franchot Tone, her frequent leading man and one of the era’s handsomest stars, and playful banter with Powell, or in verbally dressing down the high society types that look down upon her. This is the tough, ribald Harlow that we all know and love shining through in a different genre and doing a commendable job of it. She’s quite fun opposite Rosalind Russell in full rounded vowels mode as the woman Tone left behind to marry Harlow. It’s one of Russell’s many thankless roles before films like Craig’s Wife, The Woman, and His Girl Friday demonstrated her greatest attributes and versatility as an actress.

But it was clear that Selznick and director Victor Fleming didn’t really know what do with a script that was purely a hodgepodge of musical interludes, a subplot involving Harlow’s starlet trying to make good by marrying a rich boy, the rich boy feeling shamed for marrying an entertainer and committing suicide, and her eventual romantic rescue with Powell, and a custody battle. It’s crazy stuff that never coheres into a neat script, but it’s compulsively watchable for being so damn odd.

Sidney Poitier’s third film as a director, Uptown Saturday Night, is a delightful, rowdy minor work. His work as a director is still a bit too stuffy and heavy-handed for what is essentially a situation comedy blown to feature-length, but it’s still enjoyable. He counterbalances this stiff direction with a performance that is fleet-footed and refreshingly loose threatening to lose his control as the failures pile up.

Uptown Saturday Night follows Poitier’s factory worker and best friend (Bill Cosby) sneak away to underground gambling club where they get robbed and lose a winning lottery ticket. The rest of the plot involves their various setbacks and adventures in trying to get $50,000 ticket back, including Harry Belafonte’s raspy-voiced parody of Vito Corleone and Richard Pryor as PI on the take. There’s an overall pleasing vibe to Uptown even as some episodes divert and drain away the energy necessary for comedy. (I’m thinking of Flip Wilson’s extended bit as a preacher that never successfully builds tension as it clearly intended to do.)

The whole thing is just so… pleasant. Although, the presence of Bill Cosby does render enjoyment a hurdle to jump through in the beginning given recent events. Having said that, Poitier and Cosby generate a buddy-comedy chemistry that works like gangbusters.

But a more focused story structure would’ve made it better. There’s the underground club, crooked politicians, an extended church sequence, kung fu (‘cause 70s), and seemingly everything else that screenwriter Richard Wesley can think up. Still, it’s nice to see Poitier in clown mode after spending so much time being in respectable message movies.     

Much like 1965’s A Patch of Blue, 1973’s A Warm December finds Sidney Poitier as healing presence for a woman. The major difference is that A Warm December plays like a combination of Roman Holiday and Love Story, but with an all-black cast. Poitier is a widower who travels to London and meets Catherine (Ester Anderson), a mysterious woman who asks for his help in eluding a man following her. Turns out she’s the daughter of an African diplomat. We quickly dissolve into numerous montages of the couple mooing about London until faster than you can say “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” she comes down with a fictional movie illness. Poitier also directed this mildly laughable romantic melodrama and his unwavering sophistication and class means A Warm December continually avoids any campy excess that might’ve saved it. Or, at least, given a discernible personality. Call me heartless, but this predictable tearjerker just proved that the races are equal when it comes to making bad, schmaltzy art.

Sidney Poitier’s directorial debut is a western that continually threatens to be more interesting than it is. The story concerns Buck (Poitier) leading a wagon train of newly freed slaves westward, Preacher (Harry Belafonte), a greedy ex-con posing as a man of the word, and Deshay (Cameron Mitchell) and his crew of night riders in hot pursuit. There’s brief glimpses of racial tensions and the realities of the newly freed slaves, including their tense peace with the indigenous people whose land they’ll be traveling through, but they’re quickly dosed off for an uneasy combination of well-worn clichés and flip-flopping between comedy and drama.

A largely black version of a western buddy movie sounds like a winning prospect on paper, but you must give us action and payoff. A slow burn isn’t a problem, but one that fails to eventually ignite is a problem. Instead we just get a traversal through the greatest hits of the western, a genre that was experiencing more than a little rust around the joints by 1972. At least we get to watch Poitier and Belafonte act opposite each other. By turns teasing, antagonistic, and brotherly, they bring their off-screen friendship and chemistry to the big screen and prove that sometimes merely watching movie stars existing is a good enough excuse to stick a camera in the room.

The 1967 Academy Awards is widely considered one of the turning points and a viable symbol of the movie industry in full-blown identity crisis. Even the Wikipedia page for the event states: “The Best Picture nominees were an eclectic group of films reflecting the chaos of the era.” You had the white elephant social message movie (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), the requisite musical (Doctor Dolittle), and two daring, ambitious classics-in-the-making that reflected the upcoming voices and faces of the New Hollywood (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate). Situated in-between them was the mutant film that featured all the outward appearances of classic studio making but spoke its themes with more truth and honesty (In the Heat of the Night).

The eventual winner was the film that situated itself between the old and the new. What does that mean for coming to In the Heat of the Night through modern eyes? Well, it holds up surprisingly well as a study of two different personalities learning to deal with each other while investigating a crime. It offers Sidney Poitier one of the richest roles of his career and provides a series of great character actors the opportunity to shine.

Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), a Philadelphia police detective specializing in homicides, get picked-up as a suspect for the murder of a wealthy resident of a small southern town. Watching Tibbs comply with the prejudicial cops is nerve-wracking knowing that if he does the smallest incorrect choice it’ll end badly for him. His compliance masks a barely concealed rage until his eventual identity is revealed and he goes about demanding equitable treatment and respect from the white officers who wrongly picked him up.

Every actor has a year where they go full supernova, and 1967 was that year for Poitier. To Sir, With Love and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were well liked and big moneymakers for their studios, yet his best work that year was in this movie where he was allowed to be a man and not a symbol. Not only does he exhibit grace under pressure but an assertiveness that shakes off the marble statue he was becoming and reveals the flesh underneath.

He's also dynamite with Rod Steiger as Gillespie, the casually racist chief of police in the small town of Sparta, Mississippi. But Steiger more than holds his own against Poitier’s career-defining work. The bulk of the film is about the two career lawmen learning to rely on each other to solve the crime while slowly unpacking their cultural baggage. Steiger’s drunken explication of “Now, don’t you get smart with me, boy” to Poitier is loaded with the nation’s racial history and it comes off a moment of alleged bonding and understanding.

In the Heat of the Night does not offer soothing balm for the country’s tense relations between the races, it is far too pragmatic and smart for that. The ending goodbye at the train station tries to be a portent of hope but coming so soon after the drunken outburst, it positions that Steiger’s chief of police will revert to his old racist ways soon after the train pulls away. People don’t change as cleanly or easily as they do in the movies. They’re more likely to single out one person as the exception, a symbol of the race, that functions as a cudgel to bash the rest. That is the emotional undercurrent of not only the scene, but much of their interactions.

While the murder-mystery is merely window dressing for an exploration of social issues, In the Heat of the Night retains a curious power. Not quite New Hollywood, not quite a studio system product, but an intelligent, nuanced take on the social problem movie. In the Heat of the Night deserved that Oscar. One of the few times when the Academy awarded a movie about racism that isn’t goopy white savior hokum.  

Based on a short story by Marvin H. Albert called “Apache Rising,” Duel at Diablo throws a lot of big ideas and big stars at the screen hoping something will stick. Not a lot does as it feels both overwhelmed and underthought. As beautiful as the backdrops are, as thrilling as the two major set pieces are, they cannot save the slapdash feeling of the overall film.

There’s James Garner, Sidney Poitier, Bibi Andersson as the three main pillars of the plot, but I struggle to tell you their character names or major motivations. Andersson’s a woman who married an Apache and constantly tries to run back to the tribe causing racial and cultural conflict, but that’s buried beneath a film trying to add in numerous calvary members and a truckload of cowboys vs Indians clichés. There is no clear protagonist as everyone is undercooked and we don’t develop much sympathy or understanding for anybody.

A more nuanced take of the Old West and the duality some of its inhabitants discovered themselves occupying is rich and fertile territory, but Duel at Diablo is a case of blue balls. For all the flirtation with these themes it coyly titillates at it then goes about throwing a bucket of ice-cold water upon. An emotionally complex depiction of the Apache tribe in 1966? Perish the thought. We need simplistic white hats vs black hats here along with dehumanizing depictions of indigenous peoples.

Ambition isn’t Duel at Diablo’s problem – censorship is. 1967 would be the final deadly blows to the Hays Code, but plenty of films did exhibited these relic-like images and mindsets right through that year. For all of the valiant efforts on the part of the actors to bring some oomph, the screenplay routinely undercuts such attempts at forward-thinking and sophisticated representation. This renders Duel at Diablo a curio in the work of all the major players involved.