Mankin

The producer commentary and a making-of featurette on the DVD turn out to be more compelling than anything we see in `Russian Ark.' It's basically a tour through the centuries at the Hermitage museum and winter palace at St. Petersburg conducted in one 90 minute take uninterrupted by cuts of any kind. A rather sardonic Marquis (sometimes referred to as `the stranger') guides us down the corridors as we see thousands of elaborately costumed extras standing stiffly around waiting for their turn to be photographed. In between we briefly watch Catherine the Great applauding a performance of one of her own plays before rushing off to the bathroom. We take note of the tyrannical Peter the Great abusing his staff. There are a few effective moments along the way: one of the doors opens onto a dark room during World War II and the siege of St. Petersburg, but the Marquis quickly closes it again in horror and off we go back to the Romanovs. There are also pretentiously obscure exchanges between the `stranger' and an offscreen voice, presumably the director, that don't really add anything much to our understanding of the various historical periods. You would think that in the frenetic age of `Chicago' and MTV, where no shot lasts longer than a split second, this approach would be kind of refreshing, but `Russian Ark' foregoes most of the customary pleasures we expect from a movie, such as a plot, characterizations, drama, etc., and substitutes empty cinematic stuntwork instead. The Hermitage/winter palace is certainly a spectacular manmade wonder, but a straightforward documentary tour or travelogue would have been more informative and satisfying in the long run. The most amazing thing about the whole enterprise is that the Russian government gave the filmmakers only one day to do their long take. Considering all the money that would have been lost on costumes, extras, and technical equipment if Sakarov and company had failed to get it, it's awfully hard to believe that they would not have been welcomed back for another try another day.

Emma Thompson certainly does give it her dedicated all as a professor who specializes in studying the sonnets of John Donne, poetry so dense and impenetrable that it's easy to believe that scholars like Dr. Vivian Bearing could spend their entire academic lives trying to get beneath it. I for one did not `get' a lot of the Donne poetry that's quoted in the film, although it certainly does elevate the tone of this high-flown tearjerker. Nor did I entirely sympathize with her plight, as she knowingly and quite willingly signs on as a guinea pig, with full knowledge that this treatment will not cure her advanced form of ovarian cancer and will in fact cause her lots of grief and pain. It's not too clear why she would subject herself to such an experience other than intellectual curiosity and this makes her a pretty chilly character to identify with. The scenes between Thompson and Audra McDonald as a sympathetic nurse come off best, perhaps because the professor seems more human in these than anywhere else. I didn't completely buy the coldness with which she's treated by her doctors, either. She did volunteer for this experiment, so she presumably would be prepared for some clinical detachment. I suppose one of the points of the play was that their behavior mirrored her own severity and aloofness with her students. Perhaps this was why she didn't put up more of a protestation over her treatment. She felt she was getting some of her own back. Still, it would have been nice to see her telling them off with a first class hissy fit every now and then. Mostly, however, she just suffers in silence, as do we.

In his commentary for the DVD of `Gentlemen's Agreement,' critic Richard Schickel spends some of it criticizing the flaws in the movie (something I wish more commentaries would do). Mostly I disagreed with him, especially about Dorothy McGuire's fine performance. She has by far the toughest role in the picture as Gregory Peck's conflicted fiancée, whose complacent belief that she doesn't have an anti-semitic bone in her body is severely tested when he decides to pretend to be Jewish for a newspaper article. I often think of prejudice as the act of automatically assuming something is fact about someone we don't know, based on stereotypical preconceived notions. Anti-semitism is the reference point for the movie, but what it really does is examine the subject of prejudice from many different angles, from its most virulent to its most subtle forms. It even explores the role played by Jewish self-hatred in exacerbating the problem. The only time the film begins to resemble an `After School Special' is in Ann Revere's preachy speech towards the end. On balance, however, `Agreement' is much more complex than it's been given credit for. (I may be too late, but in answer to the User Commenter who wanted to know the name of the main title theme: it's an Alfred Newman original that is only heard that one time in the film. He developed it more extensively a couple of years later in Kazan's "Pinky.")

Has anyone else but me ever noticed a major continuity glitch during the climactic beachhouse confrontation between all the principal cast members of `Murder, My Sweet'? After an embrace, Claire Trevor pulls a gun on Dick Powell. Although we don't actually see her do it, she says she retrieved it from his breast pocket (`You should never kiss a girl with a gun in your breastpocket. It leaves such a bruise.'). Yet minutes later, after the arrival of Anne Shirley and her father, Trevor tells the latter to go get Powell's gun from his breast pocket. Surely, he wasn't carrying two there! I do like `Murder, My Sweet' as well as anyone, even though it does get a little too talky, and the plot is complex enough without all the additional loose ends (just what did Moose do for Velma that put him in jail for 8 years?) and `cinemamistakes.' On the other hand, perhaps these are what keep the movie so fascinating upon repeat viewings. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen it over the years and on the new DVD release, it looks better than it ever has before.

In `Nuts,' Barbra Streisand throws her weight around while pretending to play a prostitute who has lost control of her life. There's no doubt, however, who is in control of this movie. In her commentary on the newly released DVD, Barbra smugly remarks that she has often gotten into trouble by bluntly speaking the `truth' just like her character in `Nuts.' Of course, when her character, `Claudia Draper,' screams `listen to me, listen to me' as she often does in the film, who's going to argue? Streisand is also the producer. Don't be fooled. Claudia is no more nuts than you or me. In fact, she's the smartest person in the movie. The members of an impressive supporting cast are nothing more than a bunch of sitting ducks in a shooting gallery, all lined up to be shot down by a domineering superstar. They all have their turn at being told off by Claudia. Not only that, she is not just an ordinary hooker. She's self-employed and, by her own account, the best in the business, doing well enough to rake in $100,000 a year. That's right, we're expected to believe that an older man in his 50's or 60's would pay $500 an hour for a woman in her mid-40's who looks like Barbra Streisand! No sweet young blond bimbo for him. On the DVD, Streisand only mentions the name of director Martin Ritt once and that's to say that theirs was a `collaborative effort.' I'd be interested to know just exactly what he did do. He was certainly powerless to prevent the spectacle of an actress airing the dirty linen of her own childhood in public and passing it off as something universal. Streisand-watchers know that she had a nasty stepfather who abused her mentally if not physically while she was growing up, and a mother who not only stood by and did nothing, but also sought to undermine her daughter's confidence in herself. (Even as late as 1993 and the famous `60 Minutes' interview with Mike Wallace, all it took to bring her to tears was Wallace mentioning a criticism of her mother's). It's pretty obvious that Barbra is still working out her anger over all this in `Nuts,' but I'm not sure why we should be paying to watch. This movie is a slideshow presentation for her analyst.

[Warning: this review is only for people who have seen this film. Possible spoilers] I've seen this movie at least 4 times over the years and it always leaves me scratching my head. It's a fascinating--even experimental--combination of western, film noir and psychological melodrama, with a murky and confusing story that often throws believable motivation to the winds. From the beginning it's told mostly in flashback, as Robert Mitchum recounts what he can remember of his turbulent and violent childhood to his new bride and foster sister (Teresa Wright). However, the movie often cheats by showing us scenes that he couldn't possibly have remembered because he wasn't there (e.g. the ones with Judith Anderson as his foster mother and Dean Jagger as his murderous nemesis). It all has something to do with a feud between two families that began when Mitchum's father had an affair with Anderson, the wife of Jagger's brother. During a violent shootout, which is witnessed mostly as flashing spurs by Mitchum as a boy while he's hiding, his entire family is slaughtered by Jagger and is men. Have I made myself clear? I didn't think so. At any rate, when Jagger finds out that not only did Mitchum escape, but that Anderson has adopted and raised him along with her own son and daughter, he is determined to finish the job, no matter what. He thereby spends the next 10 or 15 years harassing Mitchum with death threats and generally making his life miserable. Now why does Jagger go to all the trouble of stalking an innocent boy who had nothing to do with a situation that didn't even involve Jagger directly? How has he been able to get away with the murder of an entire family after all these years, even to the point of becoming a judge? Who knows? One of the most bizarre plot twists in the film occurs when Wright decides that she will marry Mitchum and then kill him on their wedding night because he shot her brother (in self defense, even though that doesn't seem to matter to her). Anyway, it doesn't help that the sleepily complacent Mitchum is too laid back to be convincing as someone who's tormented and haunted by bad dreams of a traumatic childhood. He never seems be suffering from anything more than a mild hangover. Paging Kirk Douglas! He would have had the right intensity and vulnerability for this part. On the plus side, James Wong Howe's photography is often stunning, and Max Steiner's boomingly symphonic score often enhances the drama. All-in-all, `Pursued' intrigues and frustrates in about equal measure.

I can't believe all the raves for this aggressive attempt to bring back the musical (I skipped `Moulin Rouge'). It appears to have been spliced together out of millions of shots that don't last much longer than 3 seconds at the most. "Chicago" is the MTV-ization of the movies at its most blatant. The credits at the end say the stars did all their own singing and dancing, but who can tell after their efforts have been chopped up into little bits and pieces? In the "good old days," you knew that Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, etc. (or even performers not noted for being hoofers, like Frank Sinatra) were really dancing because the camera stayed on them for long takes and photographed them from head to toe. (It's true that dubbed singing was not unheard of even then.) Under these frenetic circumstances, it's a wonder that Renee Zellweger actually manages to establish a character and give a halfway decent performance. She does a good job of blending kewpie-doll innocence and tough-as-nails cynicism. The satiric points the show makes about the way people exploit the media for their own ends (and vice versa) are still relevant, of course, but it gets lost in the relentless roar of the Dolby surround sound. I found that putting tissue in my ears to muffle it during the showing was a big help, as I would have been deafened otherwise.

Critics often refer to Jean-Luc Godard as a `filmmaker' rather than a `director.' That may be true. A director would pay attention to matters of pacing, tone, and characterization when shooting a picture. Godard is too busy making `cinema' to do any of these mundane things. The result is this excruciatingly boring arthouse favorite, which has a reputation for being more influential than it really merits, unless those little jump cuts in the editing count. Back in the old revival house days, we usually attributed hops and skips like these to the worn out print the theater was showing. The middle 30 minutes or so are devoted to Seberg and Belmondo lolling about in a small hotel room mouthing vacuous, pseudo-intellectual banalities, which they seem to be saying more to themselves than to each other. (E.g., Seberg: `I don't know if I'm unhappy because I'm free, or if I'm not free because I'm unhappy.' Honey, if you don't know, I sure can't help you!) Seberg also participates in another time-wasting sequence: a press conference with smug-windbag real-life director Jean-Pierre Melville, who is given to such pronouncements as a desire `to become immortal, and then to die.' Belmondo plays a thoroughly obnoxious thug who likes to make faces in the mirror like Bogart. When he's not out robbing people or stealing their cars, he casually shoots a policeman who is pursuing him. You could care less when he's eventually killed, since Godard seems to be more interested in arcane references to old movies than in telling a story. He's dedicated `Breathless' to the old Monogram studios, which made ultra-low-budget quickies during the 30's and 40's. Sitting through one of them would be infinitely more entertaining than suffering through this overrated dud.

[Possible spoilers] Poor Al Pacino as a beleaguered defense lawyer just can't seem to win for losing. One of his clients is a transvestite who hangs himself in his cell after Pacino fails to make a court date that would save him from a jail term; another client who is innocent of all charges takes hostages and is shot by the police after Pacino fails to get him released. Because he could be disbarred as a result of a professional indiscretion in his past, he is blackmailed into defending a monstrously corrupt (and guilty) judge on a rape and assault charge. And to top it all off, he is sleeping with a woman from a government commission charged with investigating bad lawyers! He should be number 1 on its list. A more inept and ineffectual attorney has never been seen in the movies (with the possible exception of Paul Newman in `The Verdict'). Director Norman Jewison has billed this as a satire, but it plays more like some sort of angry, over-the-top tabloid melodrama that gets too carried away by its own zeal. There's probably a good movie to be made about the ethical dilemma faced by a defense attorney who gets a guilty defendant off on a technicality and then has to stand by helpless while he commits a new crime, but this one isn't it. Despite Pacino's likable bravura, you can't help thinking that this is one defense attorney who would have been far better off working for the prosecution.

Frank Capra was a brilliant filmmaker but his movies sure bring out the cynic in me. In `It's A Wonderful Life,' are we really meant to believe that the whole town and everyone in it would have fallen apart if James Stewart had never been born? Please! In the ever so tolerant household of Grandpa Vanderhoff, everyone is encouraged to be happy and live out their dream, but no one with the exception of Jean Arthur seems to be gainfully employed, so how do they keep enough food on the table to feed everyone? Most of the drudge work seems to be done by two black servants, but I notice that you don't see them eating at the same table with the white folks. And how come the IRS hasn't clamped down on Grandpa long ago for his refusal to pay taxes? And how would a real neighborhood feel if some nut had enough fireworks in the basement to disrupt the entire block when they go off? The movie's class-baiting, anti-capitalist subtext is so virulent you might almost suspect Capra of being a closet Red (could this household be a Socialist commune in disguise?). The sermonizing under the whimsy can get pretty thick. (I understand that the whole subplot with Arnold evicting everyone on the block to make room for a shady business deal was not in the original play.) So what's still good about this movie? The very funny nightclub scene with Arthur and Stewart is 30's screwball humor at its best, and the whole sequence in which the Kirbys arrive for dinner one night too early is exquisite comedy of embarrassment. Finally, the performances are so engaging that the fairy tail sentimentalism often persuades you against your better judgment.

The AFI keeps giving premature Life Achievement Awards to stars who either are getting it too soon (Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson) or who don't really deserve it (Barbra Streisand). I know it's mostly a fundraising event: the award is usually given to anyone who is still alive and will show up with lots of celebrities to testify on their behalf. However, I can't think of anyone currently living who deserves it more than Glenn Ford. Although consistently taken for granted, here is an actor who has made scores of films in virtually every genre and played a wide variety of parts in all of them. In `3:10 to Yuma,' he's on the wrong side of the law for a change as a smooth talking outlaw leader who is captured by deceptively mild-mannered farmer Van Heflin. Heflin has to get Ford out of town on the 3:10 train before his gang can rescue him. The situation strains credulity on several points. 1. I would think a jail cell would be a safer place to keep Ford than a hotel room, where he can look out the window and wave to a cohort. 2. Heflin is always telling the manipulative Ford to shut up. Why doesn't he just put a gag on his mouth? Oh that's right, then there wouldn't have been a movie. 3. The ending is unsatisfying. [POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT] What I would like to have seen happen: Ford is accidentally shot by his own gang, while Heflin escapes on the train. (This is not what actually does happen.) Despite all these weaknesses, Delmer Daves' adroit direction (he was a master of the crane shot), and the excellent performances of Heflin and Ford manage to build up a lot of tension. `Yuma' just misses being a classic.

I totally disagree with those critics who say that the ending of "Losing Isaiah" is `wishy-washy' or a `cowardly compromise' (to quote IMDB reviewers). I found it very satisfying and the only one that has a chance of working for this situation. [POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW] Biological mother Halle Berry makes a very intelligent decision when she enlists the help of Jessica Lange (as the boy's foster mother) in raising the child. It was monstrous to simply wrench the 4 year old boy out of the only home he's ever known and plunk him down in a totally alien environment. No wonder he totally shuts down and withdraws. I believe that what the two women do is something that should be tried in more cases of this type. The judge should have given them joint custody, allowing the child to be kept with the foster mother, but also allowing the biological mother visitation rights, perhaps babysitting him and taking care of him while the other mother is busy. This would give the child an opportunity to get to know his real mother and vice versa, since the boy is a stranger to her as well. As he grows older, he will probably become more curious about his racial heritage, and may eventually grow as close to his real mother as he was to his foster mother in the beginning. At any rate, this is a strong, compelling drama, beautifully acted all around.

Elvis Presley as a hell-raising juvenile delinquent? I don't think so. That's what `Wild in the Country' would have us believe, but in reality he's the only honest and decent male in the movie. He plays a misunderstood young man from a poor white trash background who is sent to a psychologist as part of his parole after he gets into trouble (which he often does through no real fault of his own, naturally). Hope Lange plays the `older woman,' who discovers a budding literary talent in her charge. However, according to director Philip Dunne's memoirs the part was originally offered to Simone Signoret (!). Contemplating this pairing is more exciting than anything that happens in this movie. Miss Lange gives it a good try, but she was only about 3 years older than Elvis. Signoret would have made a man out of him in no time! This was supposed to be Presley's big dramatic breakthrough in a non-singing role, but according to Dunne, the bosses at Fox insisted upon interpolating songs. The movie also suffers from the Production Code censorship of the time (no actual going to bed with Lange, thank you), and Elvis was too nice to be really bad. Considering all the strikes against it, it's surprising that `Country' is still as watchable as it is. Presley is as good as he's allowed to be, and Tuesday Weld also spices things up as the requisite `bad girl' who tempts him. Call this one a `bad movie to love.'

I had some big problems with this movie, especially the mind-boggling plot turns that afflict its second half. It struck me that by far the most sympathetic character in the film was Annie Girardot as the prostitute who has the extreme bad luck to become involved with both of the brothers played by Alain Delon and Renato Salvatore. She rejects the bad brother (Salvatore), because he doesn't respect her and gives her stolen jewelry. She then begins a new and more fulfilling relationship with the good one (Delon), and they fall genuinely in love. When Salvatore finds out, he rapes her in a fit of jealousy and beats his brother for taking up with her. Now get this: Delon dumps her and tells her that she must go back to Salvatore because his reprehensible actions prove that he's the one who really needs her the most! Now some have interpreted Delon's sacrifice as a saintly one, but personally I thought it was just as cruel to her in its own way as anything his loathsome brother did. Incredibly, Girardot does attempt to begin another relationship with Salvatore, but it is, of course, doomed to failure and predictable tragedy. If she had any sense, she would have left both of them! Ultimately, my impatience with the increasingly irrational and unbelievable actions of these three characters overrode my enjoyment of the film.

Scene from `A Night at the Opera': In a nightclub Groucho says `would you like to rumba?' to a society dowager. As she stands up expectantly and exclaims `why yes,' he says, `well pick a rumba from 1 to 5.' Now aside from this being only one out of a whole series of incredibly lame jokes that pepper a script that was supposedly co-authored by George S. Kaufman (on a very bad day, apparently), what further kills the humor here is the woman's mingled expression of hurt, bewilderment and anger as she sits down again. This is indicative of Marx Brothers' comedy in general: juvenile anarchy with a total disregard for anyone else's feelings. I suppose a lot of their popularity is based on their rebellion against authority and societal convention, but while watching `Opera' I found myself in the strange position of identifying with the stony and irritated reactions of those who are the butt of the brothers' disruptive pranks and insults. It's like sitting in a schoolroom trying to learn something while the class clowns behind you are doing their best to make damn sure you don't. Producer Irving Thalberg tried to soften their abrasive style with an insipid plot in which the brothers try to browbeat an opera house into giving two lovers a chance to sing in `Il Trovatore' by making a shambles of the production. However, it doesn't really help and when Chico and Harpo perform a mini-concert for a group of happy, laughing children, the results are cloying and tiresome in the extreme. In short, I did not laugh once during this movie.

[Some possible spoilers ahead...] The thing I enjoyed most about `American Beauty' (**) was that it gives an experienced moviegoer an opportunity to play the game of pointing out all the cliches, stereotypes and caricatures contained in it by naming some of the (usually better) old movies that could have inspired it. For example(s): (1) the middle-aged executive who drops out of his job and marriage and reverts back to his adolescence (`The Arrangement,' `The Swimmer,' `All Night Long'); 2) the discontented , anal-retentive housewife (`Harriet Craig,' `Ordinary People,' `Diary of a Mad Housewife'); 3) the rigidly disciplined military man who turns out to be a closet homosexual (`The Sergeant,' `Reflections in a Golden Eye'); 4) the flirty teenage sexpot who turns out to be a virgin (`Lolita,' `The Last Picture Show'); 5) the rebellious son/daughter who hates his/her parents (too many youth-slanted teenflix to name); 6) the voyeuristic drug dealing boy next door, who seems to have stepped out of a David Lynch movie; 7) the gay male couple next door, who seem to be the happiest and best-adjusted characters in the film (a new politically correct cliché); and last but hardly least, let us not forget 8) the supposed horror of affluent living in the suburbs ("Loving," "The Graduate," "The Chase," "No Down Payment," "The Ice Storm," etc. etc.). Kevin Spacey is fun to watch in the scenes in which he makes some drastic changes in his life, but Annette Bening is much too hysterically shrill as his wife (the only character in the script who isn't given any slack whatsoever). I hated the coy and unnecessary way in which the director plays games with the audience over the demise of the Spacey character, and I couldn't help but think that if everyone in the household had just kept their blinds closed at night, this contrived story wouldn't have been made at all. And then finally, after all the snide cynicism we've endured, comes a conclusion that would be right at home on a Hallmark card: we should all be more aware of the beauty in the world. My favorite scene: Annette Bening giving Thora Birch as her sullen, `ungrateful brat' of a daughter a resounding slap, something I had been wanting to do for quite some time.

Watching "Baraka" is a little like receiving a package of picture postcards with beautiful scenery and striking imagery, but with no greeting from the sender and no location information on the back. I was able to identify some of the places in the film, but there was no narration or subtitles to provide information and/or context on what we were seeing. It was like watching a whole series of nothing but establishing shots - the kind you get in a regular narrative film that helps to introduce the viewer to the characters and the story. Unfortunately, there was no story in "Baraka" and no characters, either, unless you count all the people who stare expressionlessly and motionlessly into Jon Fricke's 70 MM camera. We get speeded-up time-lapse photography of hectic big city life with its sweatshops and homelessness and squalor, juxtaposed with scenic vistas of nature's wonders, with mountain ranges, lakes and imposing ancient ruins - images that seem to imply the following simplistic message: "modern civilization - bad"; "primitive societies and lands untouched by modern man" - good. After awhile, tedium sets in. The widescreen DVD looked great, but I found myself enjoying the short behind-the-scenes documentary more than the feature. It detailed a little about the difficulty of filming in so many different locations and it was a relief to see something that puts you into contact with real life.

The groundbreaking "The Mark" has now been released on a splendidly restored widescreen DVD with commentary by director Guy Green and star Stuart Whitman. Green admits that if the Whitman character had actually followed through on his child molesting tendencies and attacked the little girl he takes for a drive, the film would never have been made, as it would have been too difficult to keep the audience caring and sympathetic to such a man. While Whitman has fantasies and comes close to acting them out, he recognizes that he has a problem and turns himself in for psychiatric treatment, which is largely successful. The focus then shifts from his attempts to reintegrate himself back into society to the misunderstanding and persecution he experiences from those around him once they hear of his arrest. Thus the film can congratulate itself on being daring while staying well within the "safe zone." It's one of those movies that can pretend to be controversial while carefully editing out all the elements in it that would really make it so. This may be why it has been largely forgotten today. "The Mark" is engrossing as far as it goes, and avoids overt titillation (other than the kind that comes from dealing with such a story at all). It's expertly directed and acted by a fine cast. However, for a film that deals with the psychology of a child molester with complete honesty and candor, you would have to turn to Todd Solandz's heartbreaking, yet brilliantly funny and insightful "Happiness."

It's great to see "Pussycat" in widescreen at last. Streisand and Siegel make a good team and the movie is still pretty racy, even by today's standards, although it would have been racier still if some bluenose hadn't removed one of Barbra's more notorious expletives from the soundtrack. Fans of the original well remember the scene in which she tells a bunch of hooligans that are harassing her and Siegel to "F---- off!" Amazingly, this line has now been dropped from the DVD version so that the two scenes that come next make little sense, including her follow-up line, "people are so touchy these days, you have to watch every word." The cropped VHS tape may have looked terrible but at least it did retain the line with the F-word, probably the first time it was ever uttered by a big female star in a major motion picture. (Of course, now screenwriters have over-used it to such an extent that you suspect they wouldn't be able to get along without it if it were ever banned from use.) Some aspects of the film would probably be politically incorrect today, such as certain homophobic slurs the hooker screams at the writer, and it's pretty hard to imagine this relationship lasting too much longer after the fadeout. Still the stars are compulsively watchable.

Most movies go out of their way to pander to audience expectations, but every now and then you see one that goes in the exact opposite direction. A case in point is "French Connection II," a perversely woebegone sequel to the classic academy award winner. The trumped-up plot is a non-starter. The script would have us believe that Popeye Doyle is being used as bait by the hostile French police without him knowing it. (We find this out rather early in the film, so I'm not giving too much away.) This makes no sense. I suspect Doyle wouldn't have minded at all if he had known, and the authorities might have gotten more cooperation out of him too. As it is, he remains a frustrated pain in the neck for them (and us) throughout much of the film. The pace sags noticeably while director John Frankenheimer indulges Gene Hackman in too many semi-improvised acting exercises. A grim and overlong sequence in which he is captured by the drug dealers, pumped up with heroin and then forced to go cold turkey does give the star a flashy drunken breakdown scene, but it stops the movie dead. We don't much care anyway because the character is even more consistently boorish and obnoxious here than he was in the first "Connection," even during the drug addition scenes, which were apparently designed to make him more vulnerable--an exercise in self-defeating futility. The excitement level finally picks up during the last half hour, but by then it's almost too late, and the final abrupt shot cheats the audience of any satisfaction it may get out of a moment for which it has been waiting the entire movie.

Juliette Binoche plays the wife of a military officer in a remote island town in 1849 Newfoundland who becomes devoted to the cause of saving the life of a condemned murderer. I was torn between admiring `The Widow of Saint-Pierre' for not taking the obvious route of having the captain's wife fall in love with her protege and run off with him (e.g., `Mrs. Soffel"), and a feeling of letdown that it was avoiding opportunities for more vivid and realistic drama. That there is an attraction between the two is made clear, especially in the highly charged, yet muted eroticism of the reading lesson scene. This film was based on a true story, but I couldn't help wondering if the actual killer was as saintly and devoid of guile as he seems in this movie. Among other things, he resists his attraction to his benefactress, although she would probably be more than willing to sleep with him, saves the life of a village woman whose house has slipped its moorings, and passes up an excellent chance to escape because he doesn't want to get anybody in trouble. He impregnates another woman, although it appears to be true love, and he then does the decent thing and marries her. One could accept that a criminal could be redeemed, but here he's a little too good to be true, reinforcing my suspicion that the characterization was meant more to reinforce the filmakers' anti-capital punishment stance than as a reflection of his actual personality. Daniel Auteil as her husband is stuck playing a character whose emotions remain largely inscrutable. The film would have us believe that there is no jealousy or resentment in the husband as his wife dedicates her life to rehabilitating and saving the condemned man under his charge. Ultimately, the captain gives up his own life for both of them, but I kept waiting for a significant sign that he had some inner conflict about doing so. After all, he is a career military officer sworn to uphold the law as it is. Who knew that underneath he was a bleeding heart liberal! This film is interesting and absorbing up to a point, but ultimately, it's also bland and overly complacent dramatically.

This movie puts the viewer in the awkward position of sympathizing with a character who is probably a terrorist. James Mason plays the leader of a group that's part of "The Organization," apparently the film's euphemism for the IRA. They are planning to hold up the payroll office of a local business in a city probably modeled on Belfast, although this city is not actually named. Neither do we find out why the "organization" needs the money, but I think we can safely assume that they are involved in the anti-British underground. These waffling ambiguities weaken a movie that becomes more rambling and pointless as it goes along. After Mason is wounded and separated from his compatriots, he encounters a variety of people, most of whom appear to be Irish, who either consider turning him in for the reward but hesitate because they fear that members of the "Organization" will seek them out for revenge, or just want to get rid of him as quickly as possible. Ironically, this man appears to be more feared than revered by the Irish people. At any rate, he staggers around town so openly, and lands in so many different places, you wonder why he isn't caught by the authorities much sooner! Towards the end, in one of the more contrived and expendable episodes in the movie, he even lands at the domicile of deranged artist Robert Newton, who desperately wants to paint the haunted look in his eyes! The picture attempts to turn Mason into a sort of persecuted Christ figure, but it doesn't work because we never really know how sorry we are supposed to be for this man. The film is extremely well made. The cinematography and music score are tops, and the first hour or so is quite gripping. The highly changeable Irish weather almost becomes another character, adding greatly to the picture's surreal atmosphere. Eventually, however, the makers of "Odd Man Out" seem to become almost as puzzled over what to do with the wounded man as the characters in their film.

To the best of my knowledge it was the late great Pauline Kael who first advanced the theory that "A Place in the Sun" would have been much more interesting if Shelley Winters had played the rich girl and E. Taylor had played the poor girl. She was so right. Despite the arty cinematic flourishes and the pleasure we get from watching the camera worship Clift and Taylor during their love scenes (plus I've always been partial to Franz Waxman's moody, stirring score), the film's impact is blunted by its overly romantic approach. If Winters had played the rich girl in the same drab way she played the poor girl, Clift's interest in her would have been much more suspect. And if Taylor had played the poor girl in the same vivacious way she played the rich girl, then Clift's dumping of her would have been much more agonizingly poignant. As it is, the contrast between the two women is so obvious and heavy-handed we never seriously question the choices Clift has to make in this movie. I haven't read the Dreiser novel, but I'm certain that the hero must have been portrayed much more unsympathetically there than he is in this movie. As for poor Shelley Winters, she's not even allowed to look attractive or have a personality, so we can't even see why he would want to have a one-night stand with her much less consider marrying her! By implying that poor girls don't even have any natural assets, this movie seems to be an unintentionally glorifying the class system American style. The film's striking black and white photography looks splendid on the newly released DVD, but an audio commentary by George Stevens, Jr. and Ivan Moffat is disappointingly bland and uncritical.

Christopher Nolan and company must be having a good laugh over the effort we poor fools have been expending in trying to understand "Memento." I watched this on DVD once from the beginning to the end and then back again, and I have come to the conclusion that trying to put together a coherent linear narrative with a beginning, middle and end from the jumbled fragments we are given to work with here would be an exercise in futility. The truth is that by the time each revelation has finished contradicting the one that comes after it (or before it?), you are ultimately left with nothing but thin air. Some have said that "Memento" tells its story in reverse order from the end to the beginning, but this is one thing that it does not do. If that were the case, then the final scene at the tattoo parlor would be the beginning of the story, which, of course, it is not. In fact, trying to pinpoint just when the story begins is impossible. I think the filmakers have made us all the victims of a fiendish prank, but I for one do not think "Memento" is nearly as clever as it thinks it is. Oh, and Guy Pearce's rapid-fire monotone almost put me to sleep!

My feelings about "House of Mirth" (**1/2) and Lily Bart, the leading character were decidedly mixed. I wanted to be sympathetic to her plight as a single, independent woman in a hypocritical society hidebound by artificial notions of propriety, but her own actions kept getting in the way. First, she makes the huge mistake of offending her aunt, her primary source of income, by losing money at cards, then makes it worse by naively entering into a dubious scheme with a caddish married man to pay her debts. Then she turns down a young lawyer, the only man she really loves, because he's not rich or socially prominent enough (and also because he's oddly unwilling to make a definite commitment). When she stumbles upon a treasure trove of compromising letters written by the very married Mrs. Dorset to the lawyer, she refuses to make use of them after her arch rival maneuvers Lily into a compromising position with her husband in order to hide her own indiscretions. You might say that Lily takes this stand at least partly to protect the reputation of the man she loves, but when he offers to help her after she has been reduced to working as a companion/secretary to a rich biddy, she stubbornly turns him down and never tells him about the letters she has in her possession. Why is this woman so stupid and passive? Why is she so reluctant to take good advice and help when it's offered, even in good faith? Why doesn't she fight back with the weapons at her disposal? Writer-director Terrence Davies seems to be more interested in making Lily a martyr than a true heroine, but by the end, I couldn't help feeling that she had mostly herself to blame for her downfall. Despite my exasperation with the leading character, I was quite engrossed by the film. I love dialogue in which the characters speak in trivialities when you know that there's a whirlwind of suppressed emotions going on underneath. The movie was beautifully mounted and acted, especially by Gillian Anderson, but ultimately it's a frustrating downer.