heartfield-1 Reviews

The Pale Horse (2020)

Cultural Terrorism, or Brand Sabotage?

[1/10 · 12 May 2024]

The mystery is, why should the BBC, for whom Christie has made so much dough, scupper its own house brand? Why should serial abuser Sarah Phelps be well-paid to deface, mutilate, abridge, and perversely repurpose Christie's beloved plots, characters, and most importantly, her legacy of sanity throughout the changing fortunes of Britain from 1920 to 1970 and beyond?

Rufus Sewell was such a beautiful young man. Remember him in Cold Comfort Farm? What a lark! Okay, well, now he's taut, grim, and twitchy, perfect for innumerable close-ups of his sour inscrutability.

Nothing happens in these two pretentious dim-witted posturing episodes. Everything is withheld, nothing is revealed, we're meant to expect cake all the dull afternoon waiting, but cake comes there none. This is sadism.

Watch the 1997 version, it catches the spirit of the original.

I blame Rufus Sewell for lending his name to this bait'n'switch operation more merciless than the machinations of Britain's most cold-hearted killers.

Could even Agatha Christie, in all her ponderings of the evil human brain, have concocted a murder of cultural treasures? Remember when terrorists were smashing ancient sculptures of Buddha? Well, here's cultural terrorism on a similar scale.

Why must Agatha Christie be killed inch by inch, book by book, character by character? What's the point? Aren't the British already sufficiently demoralized? I know we Americans are.

Shun Sarah Phelps. Boycott. Denounce.

The Story on Page One (1959)

Great Playwright Loses the Plot

[6/10 · 29 April 2024]

Clifford Odets was the golden boy of the New York stage as resident playwright of the Group Theater, the company that put the Method on the map. Odets' plays were also embraced by Hollywood, connecting two disparate cultures - stage and screen - and exerting a lasting influence on realistic portrayals of contemporary life.

"The Story on Page One" is chiefly of interest for the spirited performances by New York stage actors, who outshine their Hollywood colleagues. The storyline involves a painstaking analysis of the suffering of a momma's boy - a case not often aired in public - which was perhaps Odets' own cross to bear.

Mildred Dunnock as the domineering mom is simply exquisite. Gig Young as her feeble son is interesting. Rita Hayworth is dragged in as a love interest tied to a bullying husband, who manages to get himself killed. Thus, the takedown of the matriarch occurs at great length during a murder trial, without much dramatic tension or climax.

Since Odets chose to direct his own script, he didn't get any input from a film director, who would surely have cut the script and found ways to spice up the visuals. The film at 1h58m is half an hour too long, and becomes visually tedious as soon as they enter the courtroom.

Undercurrent (1946)

Hepburn Bravely Tracks The Undercurrent

[10/10 · 20 April 2024]

1946, the year after WW2 ended, was the year of peak noir, and this film's a good example. Everyone's on edge. Corruption, paranoia, anxiety evoked in sumptious decors rendered in elegant black and white, heavy on the shadows. This gothic fairy tale with its roots in Bronte is equal parts psychological investigation and political thriller.

Defense contractors made a killing during WW2, a theme at the heart of Noir consciousness subtly depicted here.

Katherine Hepburn turns private detective when she falls in love with Robert Taylor, a successful businessman with unresolved brother issues. Hepburn's character is compelled by love to solve Taylor's mystery for him in a kind of slow chase that hops from the Washington DC party circuit, to Virginia horse country, to San Francisco. Here, she stumbles across Robert Mitchum, as the counter-culture man of integrity.

You won't be disappointed by the high melodrama of the horsey climax.

The Lady Gambles (1949)

Stanwyck as Mrs Jeckyll and Gambler Hyde

[10/10 · 4 April 2024]

I'd never heard of A LADY GAMBLES (1949) but took a chance on mid-career Stanwyck, expecting a victimized female to be preyed on by shell-shocked men in a torporous domestic setting. I was pleasantly surprised by this dynamic panorama of existential terror. Stanwyck does play the hysterical victim but her perverse pursuer is her own inner demon... who drives her to... gamble.

Director Michael Gordon was to be a victim of Senator Joseph McCarthy's blacklist before coming back to direct fluffy things like Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959). Through his handling of the material we glimpse the systemic desperation that blossomed into Las Vegas, that desert oasis of crime-based entertainment.

Robert Preston is the straight-arrow husband dismayed to discover his stylish wife Joan (Stanwyck) is an impulsive trickster who can't be trusted with their life savings. Her passion for gambling is the film's nerve-wracking through-line, as she throws off respectability to indulge her passion for roulette, poker, craps, pawn shops, gangsters, horse races, dark alleys, and loaded dice.

From Chicago to Las Vegas, from Hoover Dam to Mexico, and back again - like a series of PR postcards from the post-war boom - tightly edited vignettes track Joan's downward spiral of degradation. How long will the huband keep bailing her out? Does she really prefer heavy-lidded gangster Steve McNally? What set her on this self-destructive path? And why does her creepy sister blame Joan for their mother's death?

I really enjoyed the technical, aesthetic prowess of this go-for-broke Hollywood melodrama. The savvy script by prolific Roy Huggins (I Love Trouble) is fleshed out with moody cinematography, snappy sets and clothes, expert art direction, and a whirlwind score. In classic Noir style, a hospital sequence precedes a flashback that lasts 80 minutes, before we're jolted back to the present for a no-holds-barred finish.

There are at least three levels to watch for. One: post-war marriage, uneasy power dynamic between the sexes, with the lure of a bohemian idyll, against the background of a national wave of corruption and easy money. Two: the relentless twitching of a Freudian guilt complex over the death-in-childbirth of Joan's mother. Three: a woman's need for adventure outside the prescribed roles of a conformist culture, a positive existential need for freedom.

And maybe a fourth: what is this thing called money?

The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949)

Vintage Psychopath in Paris

[10/10 · 20 February 2024]

Franchot Tone plays Radek, a polymath psychopath who dresses like Charles Beaudelaire in post-WW2 Paris. He sits in the Deux Magots café eating yoghurt until the day he's inspired to murder-for-profit. When he pins the crime on hapless Burgess Meredith (Heurtin), Charles Laughton (Inspector Maigret) battles to save the innocent man.

Adapted from Georges Simenon's 1931 novel, A Battle of Nerves (La Tête d'un homme), the 1948 film showcases a post-Nazi Paris, all of its splendid architecture intact, resuming its passion for fashion, art, food, and love. The location-shooting feels like a mini-travelogue and hints at the Nouvelle Vague just around the corner. Our attention is split between vintage Paris hotspots and a slow-chase bromance between two of Hollywood's greatest actors.

The film is of interest both as an historical document and an unsettling portrait of a murderer obsessed with the cop on his trail. There is so much authentic detail in every frame, so much nuance in the performances. Viewers expecting an action film, or the Hitchcock treatment, might be bored by this war of attrition between Maigret and Radek, but fans of Paris will relish the vicarious thrill of immersion in the city.

Dr. Watson and the Darkwater Hall Mystery (1974 TV Movie)

Classy Sherlock Holmes Pastiche

[10/10 · 19 February 2024]

English novelist Kingsley Amis wrote a BBC script in 1974 that's as reverent as any self-respecting parody dare be, teetering on craven nostalgia and hero worship. Even with sly Edward Fox leading a solid ensemble, one's patience with the enterprise is tested.

The whole tone of the production is uppercrust, understated, its relentless tongue-in-cheek all but imperceptible. Maybe that's why I'm the first to review? Or, it's simply been out of circulation - because it doesn't stoop to conquer.

The high-comedy premise is that dull Dr Watson solves a case when Sherlock Holmes is laid up off-screen on a rest cure. All the hypnotic Holmesian elements are re-deployed as variations on a theme, revealing secrets (cowardice, absinthe, conjugal cos play) in the redoubtable country house. Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) more ably dissects bourgeois hypocrisy.

James Cellan Jones, having directed episodes of The Forsythe Saga, could be counted on for a restrained melodramatic style. But this, being a parody of that dryness, might strike some viewers as mere dust. (If only Ken Russell had gotten his hands on it! That would've been a show.)

The costumes, however, are worth 70 minutes of your time. The settings, personnel, decor are all spot on. The subtle, cumulative archness cries out for a firmer comic grasp of the tiller, but that was not to be. By the end, one is bemused by this quasi-Victorian exercise in aesthetic parallelism.

Four years after the 1974 Christmas broadcast, the story appeared in Playboy, and then in a limited hand-printed edition now going for a silly price. So it's a bit of an oddity., a rarity.

Terror House (1942)

Bronte-inflected Yorkshire Moor cozy

[8/10 · 30 December 2023]

Brooding cinematography by Günther Krampf elevates this wartime fairy tale to first-rate derivative divertissement. Evoking the legendarily moody, misty moors is an excellent use of atmospheric Noir effects.

The capricious bogs beside his cottage suit raven-haired male object of desire (James Mason), whose experience fighting fascists in the Spanish Civil War has squelched his piano playing. But is he as depraved as he is demoralized?

Cloyingly faithful nurse (Mary Clare) and drink-addled handyman (Wilfrid Lawson) appear to keep him from going thoroughly 'round the bend, despite their Dickensian dreadfulness.

Into this stormy landscape flits a stunning blonde schoolteacher (Joyce Howard) vaguely searching for traces of a friend lost on the moors a year past. Instead, she finds a love object, but is he to be trusted?

Vestiges of Beauty and the Beast, Jane and Rochester, and Freud's theory of neurosis cobble together a teeter-totter of Romantic passion vs. Paranoid migivings. Despite a few too many flip-flops..

The thrilling climax on the moors is beautifully evoked in a triumph of art direction over budget. We see all too clearly how quick is quicksand, and how a guilty conscience can betray the steeliest of fiends.

The Woman from Monte Carlo (1932)

European sophistication at sea

[10/10 · 11 December 2023]

Fascinating German film star Lil Dagover - in her one Hollywood vehicle - plays a "woman of the world" whose stock-in-trade is an ability to see through men and she puts her heart into her work.

Dagover has poise and oomph and easy emotional range transcending the film's rather old-hat menage-a-trois intrigue. She's a pleasure to watch, an exotic glimpse of past feminine glamour and Viennese charm.

Walter Huston is good but unbudgingly stolid. Warren William is the romantic lead who later descends into delirium without ever receiving Dagover's go-ahead. The men wear splendid naval uniforms and struggle mightily with the call of duty. This is the film's antique theme: Love vs. Valor.

Director Michael Curtiz seems to enjoy filming Dagover, although he can't do for her what von Sternberg did for Dietrich: he doesn't build the film around her. He spends too much time on shipboard maneuvers and the action scenes of a naval battle. Much salt water is spewed.

The ending does have a fantastic Monte Carlo tilt, neatly dispensing with the entire melodrama we've just sat through as just another notch in the woman of the world's cigarette holder.

Either there wasn't room in Hollywood, or Dagover decided she prefered life in Germany, but she never made another film here.

Something to Live For (1952)

Milland & Fontaine, subtle complex pairing

[10/10 · 8 January 2022]

Sophisticated tale of a married alcoholic who strays in order to rekindle his own inner fire, SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR (1952) has an almost un-American delicacy. A mere advertising man wasting creative talents on shoe campaigns, Ray Milland comes to the rescue of a fellow alcoholic who happens to be a talented actress recovering from an abusive relationship with a narcissistic director. Joan Fontaine gives arguably her best performance as a sensitive soul saved by her love for a married man who's fighting similar demons. Their impossible love nonetheless strengthnes both of them.

Director George Stevens paints an intimate portrait of Manhattan work life and night life, including a beautiful evocation of what Broadway theater used to be. He makes space for Fontaine's vulnerability without going maudlin, and gets Milland to let down his guard as the most skewered of lovers. There's so much to love in the framing and lighting, above all a spontaneity thrillingly incarnated by Fontaine.

The script by Dwight. Taylor is stunning - Romantic but not unrealistic, capturing aspects of the artistic temperament and the human need for love that will inspire artists of all ages.

All This, and Heaven Too (1940)

Bette Davis cannot save this longwinded claptrap

[7/10 · 7 August 2019]

Davis is unquestionably the greatest american film actress of the sound period in the 20th century. however, she never wrote or directed. in ALL THIS, she is at the mercy of a "prestige production" into which tons of dough were poured. director Anatole Litvak takes the rap for transcribing Rachel Field's earnest novel to the screen without a scriptwrtier's necessary streamlining. it goes on and on, repeating the same scenes of (1) love of children, (2) no hanky panky with the governess, (3) charmless hysterical wife he can't divorce. yes, this is a man's story, from the patriarchal point-of-view, even though seemingly everyone involved was capable of a more nuanced version of events.

the key problem is that the hero ends up murdering his wife. this isn't a spoiler but the historical fact on which the Choiseul-Praslin legend is based, the only justification for sculpting such a sordid cardboard romance. the hero, however charismatic, commits a crime indefensible. indeed, he ends up a suicide to avoid trial. murder is always fascinating, because we're curious to see if it can be justified. and yet, after 140 minutes, the only insight we gain is that the self-centered duchess nagged the duke until he blew a fuse and beat her to a pulp.

people who give this film 10 stars are understandably swept away by Warner Brothers' costumes, music, and Litvak's painstaking reproduction of 1846 France. Davis and Boyer are astute, glamorous, lovable actors and they give it their all, nearly. Davis objected to her director's heavy hand, and one comes to feel her straining at an invisible bit in her mouth. she is not wholeheartedly present. the script is creaky, disjointed, meandering, overlong, implausible, and shot through with a self-promoting virtue that cloys more than the malevolent wife's more believable impatience with a husband who has ceased to love her.

Trap for Cinderella (2013)

blurred boundaries between female friends in arty London

[8/10 · 4 August 2019]

Plastic surgery restores a burn victim's face, but amnesia thwarts her attempts to remember who she is. Slowly, flashback fragments coalesce in a story. Two young English women who shared childhood holidays in the South of France meet as adults in swinging London. Bank clerk "Do" (Alexandra Roach) seems needier than Goth photographer "Mickey" (Tuppence Middleton), whose old aunt will die sooner-than-later and leave her a fortune. Dowdy Do quits her job, moves in, and starts to style herself on her wilder friend, in a borderline siamese-twin neurosis recalling Bergman's classic "Persona" (1966).

Source material Sébastien Japrisot's novel of the same name, filmed in French in 1965, paints a crisis-of-identity and voyage-to-the-self with a Noir twist. Psychological pay-off takes a backseat to arson, betrayal, blackmail, con artistry, mind control, and murder. And yet, these baser instincts are filmed with a light touch and the focus correctly stays on two disparate personalities in complex closeness. Middleton and Roach are up to the challenge. After a slow start, "Trap" finds its groove, but a meddlesome soundtrack distracts, lackluster camerawork diffuses, hyperactive edits undermine, and too many bared breasts suggest someone lost confidence in the story.

Don't blame virtuoso storyteller Japrisot for this Cinderella's wobbly script. Director Iain Softley has rearranged the intrigue as imitation Cronenberg. Hamstrung by secondrate production values, he also soft-pedals the class difference between Mickey and Do. "Her mother was your aunt's housekeeper," a throw-away line by the film's villainess (Kerry Fox), is the only clue that Do is the Cinderella of the title. And yet that is the key to the mystery.

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (1970)

existential road trip in the boss's car to the South of France

[9/10 · 1 August 2019]

A devilishly twisty plot from Sebastien Japrisot's novel curtly abridged for its transfer to the screen by director Anatole Litvak who's filmed a trippy hommage to late-60s France. it took me forever to figure out wth was going on. I was so hypnotized by the big white American convertible, picturesque French cafés, service stations, truck drivers, general joie de vivre, as Samantha Eggar goes awol with her boss's (Oliver Reed) car after accompanying him and wife Stéphane Audran to the airport. rather than return the car to their Paris mansion, she heads for the Riviera... while Petulia Clark belts a ballad celebrating the open road.

but soon Samantha starts being déjà-viewed along her improvised route as shopkeepers swear she passed this way earlier in the day. but that's impossible, isn't it? does she have a döppelganger, or could this capable ad agency secretary be losing her mind? or, is she being framed? Japrisot sprinkles in plenty of narrative surprises, keeping you distracted and misdirected. some reviewers have objected to a gratuitous fling with cheeky, scruffy, rough-trade John McEnery, but he's just what uptight Eggar needs to unwind over the Bastille Day holiday weekend.

***SPOILER ALERT*****

after trying to steal the car, he stands by her when a body turns up, before storming off because she doesn't love him. left alone, she hangs tough, coming face to face with her intangible pursuer. around 30 minutes before the end, a sudden series of flashbacks illustrates Reed's narration of the backstory neither you nor Samantha had any way of knowing. it's not the most graceful dénouement, but it doesn't detract from the enjoyably inscrutable adventure Eggar's just had. and despite the explanation, a deeper mystery abides: how do people reconcile their libidos with the constraints of respectability?

Shades of Darkness: The Lady's Maid's Bell (1983) Season 1, Episode 1

crisp taut upstairs-downstairsy ghoster lacks closure

[8/10 · 14 November 2017]

do you need closure or not? if there's a riddle, do you need an Agatha Christie to spell the answer out for you? if so, this otherwise well-produced ghost story might leave you anxious. maybe there's no harm in that.

famous US lady author Edith Wharton wrote the original short story in 1902, and thank the producers for not rewriting the vague finish. the hero is a young woman who goes into service as a lady's maid for a nice woman in a big house in the country, and a husband she doesn't like. she likes a male neighbor better, he's less masculiney and more poetic, and they hang out together when her annoying hub is away in London-or-somewhere on weekdays.

the fly in the ointment is the ghost of the previous lady's maid, who died a year ago, whose former room is kept locked, and who materializes to haunt her replacement. you decide what this ghost is after: avenging her own death, hinting she's been murdered, trying to save her lady and poetic pal, warning the husband of their treachery?

don't ask me! i assume the title gives the answer and one must look to the bell. the lady tells her maid it won't ring, the housemaid will fetch her if need arises. but it does ring one night and there's the husband, in his wife's room bothering her, which he leaves when the maid knocks in answer to the bell. if the lady didn't ring the bell, who did? the ghost? why? (see above) good luck.

although the story, performances, costumes, landscape are lovely, the director fails to conjure an atmosphere that supports the blurry ending. everything's laid out so clearly, it's not a good surprise when no resolution is forthcoming. prepare yourself for ambiguity.