Reviews by JxSxPx

Richard Quine is an odd choice for a marital infidelity soap opera. This material feels better suited to numerous other directors, not Quine’s more comedic strengths. Instead of bringing any energy into the material, Quine plays everything straight, and Strangers When We Meet is a bit of a pretty-but-empty slog about two neighbors engaged in an affair.

I wonder what acerbic undertones and bits of humor a director like Douglas Sirk could inject into the proceedings, because there’s only surface-level introspection here. There’s no deeper examination of suburban ennui or the culture at large here, just a sudsy story of a beautiful, frigid blonde goddess trapped in a sexless marriage who engages in an affair with an older man who isn’t unhappy at home, but adrift in his career. That’s about it for narrative depth and conviction.

Thank god then that Quine assembled such a strong group of actors, as they energize as best they can such a somnambulistic-paced film. Kirk Douglas, in the prime of his epic leading man days, feels slightly out of place at first, and we keep waiting for him to give a rousing speech or charge into battle. As the film goes on, Douglas tries valiantly to make us care, keeping his megawatt intensity on a low simmer throughout, and nearly succeeds even as the film’s artificiality keeps us at a remove from the characters and their emotions.

Kim Novak and Barbara Rush fare much better. Novak’s best performance use her frosty exterior to hide a neurotic, yearning inner life, and Strangers When We Meet taps into that quality repeatedly. Novak was never a highly demonstrative actress, preferring more interior and quiet work, but she’s strong here even if the material is fairly routine for her by this point. Rush is equally good, more hardheaded and tenacious in a role that easily could have dipped towards shrill housewife. Compared to her Bigger Than Life role, she’s not given much to do, but she plays her big scenes with grit and commitment.

The glossiness of its presentation keeps Strangers When We Meet in cellophane wrapping free from fingerprints and stains. Yet that messiness is what it needed to feel more alive, real, and emotionally honest, to truly engage with the audience and the characters a little less polish could do wonders. It’s worth a watch for the work of the stellar leading players, but it’s all empty melodramatics designed for maximum cheap sentiment.

If you want to know what staring at cinematic nirvana looks like, there’s a few films I could recommend: Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, and this warped tale of romantic obsession from Alfred Hitchcock. That the film is a never-ending bounty of self-reflexive nature, a deeply strange beast in which a multitude of readings could be engaged, is part of the strength of its enduring legacy and perverse power.

The other part is quite simple, Alfred Hitchcock was simultaneously one of cinema’s greatest entertainers, a perfectionist able to conjure one masterpiece after another, and one of its greatest experimental artists. In-between beautiful movie stars striking poses in immaculate composed frames, Hitchcock could sneak a lot of subterranean text into his works. Rear Window functions as both an explosive thriller and a deep examination of voyeurism and the movies. And then there’s Marnie, a chilly psychological thriller that also works as a master laying bare his obsessions, exposing the entrapment of the male gaze, with its leading lady rebelling against the notion of being an unwilling object of desire.

Vertigo has no shortage of strangeness to unpack, but it’s the disturbing autobiographical elements that are most fascinating. Hitchcock’s obsession with frigid blonde beauty is no secret, and the master could coax shatteringly complex and deep performances out of a number of otherwise limited love goddesses (Grace Kelly, Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren). Much of Vertigo is concerned with one man’s obsession with a blonde specter, a woman who never existed but haunts his inflamed erotic fantasies and subsumes his waking life. The parallels to the director write themselves here, and the second half’s narrative propulsion, in which our hero transforms an earthly woman into the ghost of his blonde bombshell, feels uncomfortably close to truth. Not only for the director, but for Hollywood in general, and Novak in particular.

Many of Kim Novak’s greatest roles and performances used her perfectly ethereal, emotionally opaque persona to create tension within the narrative. Perhaps it’s inevitably a modern reading, but there was always something spectral about Novak. Knowing she walked away from Hollywood, withheld her public appearances, and forced us to only view her through her studio photo shoots and movies means she remains a captivating smokescreen. This unknowable quality makes for a perfect marriage with Hitchcock and the role, giving the actress not only the role of her career, but one of the essential performances in any Hitchcock film.

The tension in the role comes about in the second half, when the earthy Judy, Novak in a brown wig with eyebrows that look like commas that got misplaced, gets forced into a transformation. The character does this willingly, all for the love of her man, and there’s something alarmingly honest about Novak as a star in these scenes where she becomes a pliable cipher for another man’s obsessions. Cinematic sex sirens are frequently the creations of a studio, and Novak was not entirely different, with the lavender wash put in her hair, the name change, and the limited roles in which they placed her. Her rebellion against these roles fires up her best ones, like Picnic’s small town beauty who longs to be viewed for something other than her appearance, or here in which Novak basically gets to both pare down her beauty and use it as a weapon.

As fabulous as Novak is here in her dual role, without James Stewart’s career-best leading work Vertigo would flounder. Stewart was famous for his “everyman” quality, but the best directors used that quality to explore darker and desperate colors lurking underneath. Frank Capra broke him down in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, then drives him to the edge in It’s a Wonderful Life, while Hitchcock turned him into a kinky voyeur in Rear Window. None of those darker roles prepares you for the psychodrama on display here.

Stewart drives not towards the edge of madness, but deep into its dark heart. He is Hitchcock’s more handsome proxy, exacting control of a beautiful woman, turning her into his idealized image of feminine beauty, and displaying troubling layers of obsession and fetishistic glee. Stewart’s enviable career is littered with stellar roles and performances, I’ve already listed three and didn’t even mention The Shop Around the Corner for instance, but there’s something extra special about his work in Vertigo. The way that the Stewart persona gets broken down, crushed into a fine powder, then thrown into the breeze has much to do with it. We’re a long way from the “aw, shucks” homespun goodness of his star quality, and it’s shocking just how believable and honest he makes his character engaging in mock necrophilia feel.

Vertigo often has the vague unease of an inescapable fever dream. The narrative is a long way from naturalistic, even by Hitchcock’s standards, and its obtuse nature drives its oft-kilter energy. Color-coding also goes a long way towards selling us on the uneasy themes on display here. The easiest scene to analyze if the justifiably famous nightmare sequence, where Stewart is bathed in angry, vibrant splashes of blue, red, and green.

Green in particular is a color we must pay attention to. When Stewart’s obsessed lover finishes remaking plain-jane Judy into his porcelain, withholding dream she emerges from a green light as though she were a specter taking form. Prior to this scene, Madeline was dressed in ghostly colors, all grey, white, and black, a color palette that gives her the illusion of being in monochrome in a world of bright VistaVision color. When Stewart first sees Novak’s blonde goddess it’s in a red room where she’s attired in black and green, already a haunting presence, and when she reappears as Judy she’s once more in green, but this time a plain working girl. Green takes on the symbolic heft of obsession and dreams, as this idealized woman emerges and re-emerges in it throughout.

As Vertigo swirls towards its climax, further tragedy becomes inevitable. Novak’s dual-role is a trapped victim, agreeing to play whatever role the man she loves demands of her, and Stewart’s mistaking an image for a reality, then becoming both the exacting master and entrapped participant of it. There’s no possibility for a happy romance for either of these characters, only worlds of pain. This is love as sepulchral ritual, an arresting two hours of a cinematic maestro destroying his altars and fetishes, and one of cinema’s towering, elliptical masterpieces.

A typical biography of a popular musician in the studio era was all scrubbed clean, high-gloss, highly-fictional biographical bits in-between popular stars belting out the greatest hits of the artist(s) depicted. It can make for entertaining spectacle, and several great musical stars gave their greatest moments in them. Think of Lena Horne’s one-two punch of “The Lady is a Tramp” and “Where or When” in Words and Music, Judy Garland’s elegiac “Look for the Silver Lining” in Till the Clouds Roll By, and so much of Yankee Doodle Dandy is memorable thanks to James Cagney’s high-energy performance.

Shame then that The Eddy Duchin Story cannot muster up as much energy or memorable performances to go along with the inert dramatics and creaky story telling. There’s a large aftertaste of fiction in telling this story, and wouldn’t you know it, Peter Duchin hates the film for crafting more fiction than fact.

If The Eddy Duchin Story were entertaining in all aspects, then this highly speculative aspect would go down easier. No such luck, as the story is routine, and delivered in as perfunctory and unimaginative a manner as possible. You know exactly where the story is going from the first frame, and as each new revelation comes about, you’ll just roll your eyes because it knew it was coming twenty minutes prior.

Perhaps a better leading man would have helped. Tyrone Power is overeager in too much of the film and grossly miscast in general. He’s far too old for the earlier scenes, and generates no chemistry with either Kim Novak or Victoria Shaw. I suppose, since Power was never much of an actor, he does as well as can be expected, but his bitterness in the latter half is as deeply unappealing as the first half’s desperate mover.

Much of The Eddy Duchin Story could have better served Kim Novak, but the film is immeasurably aided by her ethereal, moody presence wandering New York and being a general clotheshorse. The part never requires much from her, and she’s purely the high society girl, but Novak is blossoming as a movie star here. While Victoria Shaw as the second wife is too arch and theatrical here, standing in contrast to Novak’s more subdued work and Power’s movie star posing.

But Novak is quickly introduced and taken out of the film, with less than forty minutes of screen time before a glamorous death bed scene. Once she leaves, so does much of the interest in the plot. The next hour is a sinking ship of boredom and tedium, with Duchin reuniting with his estranged son, enlisting in the military, trying to make right, then dying at a young age. The Eddy Duchin Story is a handsome vehicle with no power under the hood. Even worse, it's just plain boring and distinctly lacking in entertainment value aside from the shiny surfaces. 

The Man with the Golden Arm has seen its reputation mellow in comparison to other addiction dramas from the era, namely The Lost Weekend. I suppose falling into the public domain and an avalanche of poor home video releases can do that to a movie. Shame as The Man with the Golden Arm has a lot to offer the viewer on all fronts, not just as historical trivia as the first major release to tackle drug addiction.

Loosely based on the Nelson Algren novel, shining more light and injecting more hope into the proceedings (this was the heyday of the Hays Code and strict censorship, after all), but don’t ever mistake this for an easy viewing experience. From the first frame, in which Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) returns to his neighborhood after a stint in a prison hospital to kick his heroin habit, a sustained dread and anxiety ensnares both the characters and viewers.

This is not an environment conductive to a recovering addict. We know his relapse is a matter of when and how bad, never if. Frankie returns hopefully and optimistic about his recovery. He learned to play the drums while in the hospital, and figures if he can keep his mind focused on getting a career going, stay away from the poker games and shady dealers lurking around, he can do all right. This optimism is ground out of him by his wife (Eleanor Parker) who is manipulative and abusive, along with two nefarious men, Schwiefka (Robert Strauss), who runs the illegal card games, and Louie (Darren McGavin), the dealer.  

The only people rooting for Frankie’s recovery, and Frankie as a person, are Sparrow (Arnold Stang) and Molly (Kim Novak), an old flame with unresolved romantic tension. Eventually, Frankie’s relapse and destructive behavior pushes everyone away, everyone except for Molly who nurses him through a cold turkey withdrawal. In a film of numerous intense, disturbing scenes, Frankie’s cold turkey withdrawal is the zenith, the film’s moment of highest artistic achievement.

Throughout the film, Sinatra has delivered a performance that shakes off the typical Rat Pack persona that many of his most enjoyable films are built upon. Sinatra is not the cool player here, but a broken man trying to rebuild. He’s uncommonly anxious and vulnerable here. A scene where he’s in prison and witnesses a junkie’s hysterical fits and contortions is a marvel of empathy for him as an actor. The camera lingers in on his face, and his eyes mist, and a noticeable amount of fear clouds his features. No swinging braggadocio here like in Pal Joey.

Which leads us back to his cold turkey scene, where Sinatra is not only vulnerable, but wildly unpredictable. There’s a danger here, like Sinatra may drop dead from his exertions or hurt Kim Novak in his manic state. His commitment goes beyond Method acting, and into the realm of the uncomfortably real. The Man with the Golden Arm belongs in large part to Sinatra, and much of the film’s grand success rests upon his career-best performance.

But he’s matched every step of the way by his two leading ladies. Parker was one of the finest, underappreciated character actors of her era. She was a truly chameleon-like presence on screen. If you only know her for her cold, glamorous Baroness in The Sound of Music, you’ll be in for a shock when you see her as a dowdy, damaged, manipulative aggressor. Her passive-aggressive treatment of Frankie keeps him in a constant state of shame and guilt about her accident, and the more revelations about her character we glimpse the more pitiable and sick she becomes. It’s a tour de force for Parker, and a reminder of what a great actress she truly was.

Released the same year as her star-making role in Picnic, Kim Novak retains much of that enigmatic, clinical detachment and sadness that electrified her best work. She’s still wounded and deeply sad here, but she’s also the bright light in the film, the symbol of hope in the darkness. Many scenes between her and Sinatra are tender and vulnerable, particularly one early in the film where they talk around their unresolved attraction and feelings for each other. Novak was still a bit green here, but with Otto Preminger guiding her and Sinatra working with her, she turns in remarkably strong and solid work. Her role isn’t as flashy as Parker’s, but she’s the film’s wounded soul.

While I firmly believe that this is a true standout in everyone’s filmographies, especially director Preminger, the three leads, Saul Bass for his jittery, angular main titles and poster designs, and Elmer Bernstein’s thundering jazz score, there are a few drawbacks. The most obvious flaw is the instance, probably by the Hays Code, that only so much censorship could be broken. We never see Frankie shooting up, Molly works in a surprisingly sterile strip club, and the rundown neighborhood is an obvious soundstage creation. These concessions, even as the film slowly tries to break the Code’s back, take some of the sting and realism out of the piece.

The rot of the story is also compromised by the happy ending, one that finds Frankie running off with Molly for a fresh start. These scrubbed clean portions have never marred the film for me. I still find it a stellar piece of character study, a claustrophobic, deeply tense study of addiction. If modern films have rendered it dated by their shock factors and grittiness, many of them have also forgotten to attach the haunted, fatalistic dread, committed performances, and moxie. The Man with the Golden Arm is a classic in dire need of reappraisal.

Comedies of remarriage are a backbone of the screwball genre, and there’s several classics to be mined from the material (The Philadelphia Story and The Awful Truth come to mind immediately). Phffft is not one of these films, as it takes a couple amusing gags, strong comedic actors, and then sticks interminable pieces in-between.

The title’s high-concept is more thoughtful than much of the writing. The title comes from a newspaper article describing the noise made when a marriage ends in divorce. It’s a little ridiculous, and the title is more than a little stupid, but that’s the level of commitment we’re working with here.

Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon play the couple whose marriage goes belly up, find it difficult to readjust to married life, and eventual come back together. Much of the film is humorous interludes of their single adventures, readjusting to dating and dealing with overly involved family and friends. Jack Carson plays Lemmon’s best friend, while Kim Novak has two scenes as a sad, desperate party girl.

There’s not a lot of meat to Phffft, and many of the setups are more interminable than hilarious, but Holliday and Lemmon make several clunkers into amusing bits. Holliday plays a soap opera writer, and she gets a lot of mileage out of jokes about her work. She does even better in a lunchtime drunk scene where she spots her ex-husband, stops at his table, slathers butter all over her ring finger, removes her ring, and throws it at him. Her manic glee in the act is charming and hilarious, she’s so spiteful while smiling cutely, and we remember just how solid an actress she was.

Lemmon pairs well with her, always managing to find pathos in his frenzy, a trademark of his work. His double takes can make some moments shine where others wouldn’t have saved them. His befuddlement pairs well with Holliday’s neurosis, sympathetic next to Carson’s oily sleaze, and strangely tender with Novak’s superfluous and desperate good-time girl. A dance scene between Lemmon and Holliday is the clear high point of the film. They begin on separate dates, combative and antagonistic with each other, before winding up in each other’s arms, filled with a comfort and joy, flirtation and surprise. It’s also two actors in clear enjoyment of each other’s company, and one wishes that Holliday and Lemmon had gone on to become one of the great cinematic pairings, but we’ll always have the two films they made.

In 1954, Kim Novak made her debut onscreen in this forgettable minor noir. The running time is short, but the story still feels bloated and stretched out, and none of the beats feel shocking or anything more than routine. It’s fine, but there’s nothing here worth a repeat visit.

Pushover plays like lukewarm leftovers of Double Indemnity, complete with Fred MacMurray going from good guy to rogue cop over a pretty dame. Where Pushover really stumbles is in its inability to generate chemistry between Novak and MacMurray. The central conceit is that Novak’s a gangster’s moll seduces his cop into bumping off her hoodlum boyfriend, stealing his recent robbery earnings, and running off into the sunset. Novak’s beauty goes a long way towards selling the premise, but she seems awkward and unsure here, refusing to play icy seductress or convincing bad girl, and the eventual revelation that she’s merely naïve and secretly sweet.

Pulp dialog requires a delicate balance, which authors like Dashiell Hammett and James Ellroy excel at, while Pushover does not. The erotic dialog in the early scenes between MacMurray and Novak are groan worthy in their stilted, awkward flirtations. There’s no heat here, nor is there much heat in the secondary romance between nurse Dorothy Malone and good cop Phil Carey. Carey’s penchant for spying on Malone’s nurse is just creepy, and the continual circling back to this point only makes the valiant Carey appear as unseemly and disturbed as MacMurray’s later scenes.

At least Pushover has some pleasing images and a solid score to back it up. MacMurray’s central performance is nicely done, even if it feels like something that we’ve seen him do before with greater results. This is the crux of the film, at only 88 minutes, there’s not enough here to truly keep you enthralled, and its repetitious story beats wear thin as it marches on. It’s not a bottom of the barrel pick, but it’s a middling effort that distinctly lacks much in inspiration. 

Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is a five star performance in a three star vehicle. Audra McDonald, the reigning grand dame of American theater, gets to reprise her history making role, and her work is wondrous. Electrifying, terrifying, defiant, wounded, broken, and heartbreakingly fragile, McDonald expresses an entire life in two hours.

Billie Holiday is a tall order for any actress to tackle, as it can be hard to find any entryway into her complicated emotional life, and to render that as an actual person. It would be easier to play her as a doomed icon, but McDonald never goes for the easiest route. Her Lady Day feels emotionally true, from her joys in performing, drinking and swearing to her drug withdrawal breakdown late in the play that’s distressingly candid in its honesty.

Even better is how McDonald contorts her sumptuous and golden voice into Holiday’s cramped, pinched, but evocative vocal technique. It’s not mere mimicry, but something else entirely. It’s like a spiritual channeling is happening whenever McDonald opens her mouth to sing. And sing she does, as Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill is a two-fold play, part info-dump monologues between songs disguised as banter, and part revue of Holiday’s greatest hits.

McDonald does what she can to make these long monologues interesting, which is a lot given her talents, but even her mighty gifts succumb in the end. There’s just so much information she’s forced to recite, and the playwright never successfully wraps it up as confessional banter between artist and audience. By the end, it feels like an encyclopedia entry has been vomited back at you rather than an artist in full breakdown confessing their sins and tragedies.

Still, it’s absolutely essential viewing just to watch one of our greatest performers in full bloom of their gifts and strengths. Problems with the script aren’t fatal, but the pacing does veer off towards the end, since it’s been entrusted in McDonald’s mighty hands. She’s dynamic, exciting, and vulnerable, she’s singing and screaming, and she’s crying and shooting up heroin. It’s one hell of a role, and McDonald milks all of the truth and artistry from it that she can.

Political Animals wants to act like a distaff West Wing, a thinly veiled account of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential bid. A great foundation for a juicy story about politics, journalism, and family legacies in the public sector is laid, but then it veers off course. Wildly off course, in fact, dipping into Dynasty-style soap opera gimmicks.

Thankfully, Sigourney Weaver, Carla Gugino, Ellen Burstyn, and Sebastian Stan are involved to keep things moving and (generally) working. Weaver and Gugino in particular tear into their monologues and scenes together, beginning as adversaries and slowly coming to begrudgingly respect and support each other. These actresses deserve a script as smart and tough as their work.

Unfortunately, the creative team decided that the beautifully broken angst of Stan and the drunken, no-filter sass of Burstyn’s respective characters was a more fertile territory. We quickly swerve off into long buried secrets, ridiculous in-fighting, and a series of subplots that take away from the central political discourse and behind-the-scenes expose. It doesn’t add up to much in the end, but it gives some strong actors a chance to spin gold from straw.

Lowered expectations will be your friend if you decide to watch the small handful of episodes comprising Political Animals. Part satire, part deep dive, part kitsch – Political Animals wants to be all of these things, and any individual strain followed through to a logical conclusion would have produced a better, more consistent and engaging show. Who knows, perhaps someone will take a look at the disparate parts and try to assemble them again to something better. Lord knows, Weaver deserves a better showcase.  

Positively lovely to look at, blissfully quiet for long stretches, and wonderfully feminist, Princess Arete should have been a slam dunk, an underrated classic just waiting for rediscovery. It was not to be, as the pacing drags all over the place, like a theme park ride that comes to a screaming halt before whiplashing you this way and that along the track before coming to a slightly unsatisfying end.

For a long stretch in the opening, Princess Arete is arresting in its slow unraveling. We meet the young princess, held captive in the castle by a neurotic father after her mother’s death. His overprotective nature has made his daughter an inadvertent prisoner, and she feels like she’s slowly suffocating with her lone escape being in the books she cherishes. The princess becomes the smartest person in the room, capable of calling her potential suitors on their lies and exaggerations to win her favor.

Her perceptive nature and belief in her worth beyond marriageability and book smarts mark her as a rebel, and when a wizard turns her into a somnambulist princess many in the royal court declare her a proper royal now. Everything up to her transformation and kidnapping by the wizard is intriguing, especially a scene of the magic gifts the king has requested to win her hand. The pacing is deliberate but never boring.

This slow unfurling makes promises of grander things that never come to fruition, and once we’re transported to the wizard’s castle the pacing grinds to an agonizing halt. It’s here that the 105 minutes of the running time become interminable as the film cannot decide what it wants to do with the magic in the story, whether the wizard should be feared, pitied, or a combination of the two, and the stakes are mentioned being elevated but quickly deflate as time goes on.

The wizard fears that Arete is the chosen one of the prophecy to kill him, and his transformation of her into a simple-minded princess is a way to take out her threat. Except Arete is not interested in revenge once she switches back, only escape. Not just from the wizard’s child-like tyranny, but from the oppressive patriarchy of her royal station and forced marriage as she refuses to be a commodity. Even a magic ring promising three wishes, something of a Chekov’s gun that never fires, is routinely brought up only to be tossed aside.

When the transformed princess tells herself a story, the origin story of her original/true form it turns out, she mentions that a fairy tale without a witch or a dragon is boring. This becomes an unintentional bit of self-appraisal. It’s not that Princess Arete needed a witch or a dragon to be interesting, but it needed something larger at play, some semblance of narrative and emotional stakes that will eventually pay off. As it is, it plays like a slightly, frustratingly limp variation of Hayao Miyazaki’s work.

Thankfully things pick back up once she reverts back to her normal form, destroys his castle, and helps the denizens of the neighboring village. Arete’s deep empathy and yearning for adventure are finally given full bloom in these moments, and you want to scream in frustration for the interminable nature of the second act for sinking the strengths of the beginning and climax. Then the final moments show Arete out in the world, ending on an ellipsis when a period would better served the story. That’s the problem with Princess Arete, she’s a fascinating character stranded in a narrative that doesn’t deserve correctly service her.

Borrowing liberally from the Disney Renaissance template, Anastasia plays as fast and loose with historical figures and events as the Mouse House’s own Pocahontas or Mulan. There’s the basics of names, a few historically accurate trivia tidbits thrown in, some musical numbers, and cutesy sidekicks (both rotund human and anthropomorphic animals). All of the correct parts are there, and it is solidly entertaining, but it never soars. It is merely good enough, with a few glaring problems.

Weird choices abound in Anastasia, beginning with an inconsistency in the vocal work. Meg Ryan and John Cusack speak with their normal voices, while Christopher Lloyd, Angela Lansbury, Kelsey Grammer, Bernadette Peters, and Andrea Martin do their best to perform in a slight Russian accent. The longer the film goes on, the more distracting it becomes that every other Russian speaks with the appropriate accent (or close enough approximation), but the two leads, one of whom is the long presumed dead princess, speak in their normal vocal cadences.

Then there’s the animation, which is uniformly strong for many of the more cartoonish supporting players, but the two leads frequently go off model. Cusack’s Dimitri is the worst offender of this problem, with his face obtaining extra lines and creases or generally looking “off” in several shots. Luckily the rest of the movie is strong enough to submerge this problem for long periods of time, with some lively character work for Rasputin being a particular highlight, especially his reemergence in the narrative as a figure living in a limbo state with a penchant for limbs falling off.

Although the two worst marks against Anastasia are the musical numbers and the insistence on Bartok, a quirky albino bat with a Midwestern accent that plays sidekick to Rasputin. Bartok’s presence in the film is clearly an aping of Disney’s style, but the choice to stick him with a strange voice that wouldn’t sound out of place in Fargo makes him stick out in stark contrast. Giving the villain a sidekick is not a bad choice, but it’s better if they’re more appropriately villainous or able to merge in with the general style and tone of the piece.

Then there’s the musical numbers, two of which are incredibly strong (“Journey to the Past,” “Once Upon a December”) and the rest are of a range between merely adequate to instantly forgettable. Rasputin’s big musical number is a low-light, with the churning, sub-par metal guitars and obnoxious keyboards feeling fairly laughable. If only more of the film had put as much time and effort into its musical numbers as they did in “December,” a simply gorgeous daydream/memory play with Anastasia dancing with the ghosts of her family and the royal court.  

Having gotten all of the problems out of the way, what works in Anastasia? Everything else, honestly. For the most part, the animation is strong, the pacing is solid, the vocal work is uniformly strong even if some choices are odd, and it uses the Ingrid Bergman film’s template as a solid foundation to build off into stranger territory.

Oh, didn’t you know? Yes, this version of the story is based upon Bergman’s triumphant (and Oscar winning) 1956 film of the same name, with the same basic premise: amnesic woman meets two con artists looking to cash in on the money offered for anyone proving Anastasia is still alive, only for the amnesic woman to really be the long-lost royal. Of course, Bergman’s film didn’t feature a zombie Rasputin and dark magic as primary antagonists, and nothing in it is as frightening or nightmarish as a few dream sequences.

Don Bluth was one of the few animators giving Disney a run for his money for a long period of time. His movies are frequently messy, many of them don’t hold up without the blinders of nostalgia, but a few of them are oddball gems. The Land Before Time and Anastasia being the most obvious examples of solid, if messy, works that hold up relatively well. Nothing here to rival peak Disney, but it’s certainly better than some of the Renaissance’s later years, and definitely better than much of the post-Renaissance years.