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A film with an interesting premise that never quite materializes, "Broken" presents a good cast of actors who are not allowed to realize their full talents. The opening quotation from Edgar Allen Poe remains an unfulfilled mystery. The shattered mirrors in various locations don't make sense. The heavy music designed to heighten our worry is overdone. Better to have left it away. There are elements of Hitchcock but they never come together to form a coherent story. Instead, we are led down various paths as the young woman protagonist tries to sort things out after being injured in an auto crash. And we are none the wiser for her attempts. The worst thing about the film as that it is boring and drags in places. The relationships between the different characters in the film are tenuous and often inexplicable. We are left to make assumptions about who they are and how they relate to one another. A waste of fine talent. In the end we are left holding the bag (of popcorn?) without a denouement that would help us understand what the author/director was driving at. In summary,"Broken" leaves us wondering what exactly the young woman experienced and whether she was able to overcome her apparent mental difficulties.At one point she undergoes a series of brain scans and when her doctors say these are inconclusive and she would need to submit to more tests, she refuses and leaves the hospital. So what? It's easy to assume that she's intimidated by a bunch of men in white smocks looking at scans of her brain, but there's got to be more to it. We cannot see the conclusions she draws from her experience. Instead, we are led on a wild goose chase. This is another film about women as victims. Very disappointing.

Rosa is a tall, young European woman who has come to Tokyo to learn from a master of filleting fish. She immediately stands out wherever she goes in the giant city. She is curious, inquisitive, and has a sense of humor that helps here to cope in a city where she is alone and "foreign." She shows an eagerness to learn about fish and how to prepare different kinds for customers who enjoy eating it raw. At first she has difficulty convincing the master to accept her but she perseveres. She begins working with a group of young Japanese men and a few women who are either silent or reticent about speaking to her, probably because they do not speak a foreign language.

She feels her isolation everywhere she goes. Very few people can speak or understand English or any other Western language. She stands a head above most people there. She has to find her way not only in her apprenticeship but also in her living arrangements. The one thing people understand is money, especially rent money. Eventually, she meets a young Japanese woman who speaks some English and helps her to feel more at home. They go out shopping and even enjoy some night life together.

As she is learning the art of filleting and makes a mistake, the master silently shows his displeasure. At one point she has to start over again. When she succeeds in filleting an especially difficult fish in his presence to the amazement of the other apprentices, he watches, then leaves without offering any comment. At another time, she inadvertently intrudes on a group of European tourists watching the master conduct a demonstration of filleting. She looks on from a doorway behind him. When he is finished the audience applauds. The filleted fish is placed on a small tray for the tourists to sample and a young Japanese woman takes it from person to person. Each of them spurns the fish. When she comes to Rosa, she immediately takes a piece and devours it with a smile. The master recognizes her and is not happy. She must continue to struggle with what appears to be a Sisyphean quest to acquire perfection in the art of filleting fish. Unlike Sisyphus, she has not been deceitful but nevertheless must constantly strive to prove herself to the master. This forms the backbone of the story.

It is a story of cultural identity and the difficulties a foreigner faces in Japan. I sympathized with the young woman; I once spent a few weeks in Tokyo on assignment and felt that it was the most foreign city I had ever visited. For one thing, no one spoke English (or as far as I could tell another Western language). I spoke several languages but none of them helped me. People in the city were always polite but also distant. After some time, I grew accustomed to this, especially when I used the subway or tried to shop. My experiences were similar to those of Rosa although she chose to engage the master and the other apprentices in their daily routine and I was on a different, more limited stay. A visit to a Buddhist temple and the purchase of a book in English (and Japanese) of Buddha's teachings helped me to understand better the behavior and values of many people I encountered. Rosa took a different yet similar path – learning to appreciate fish and the intricate and correct way of addressing a fish and cutting into it and filleting it. In doing so she grew through her experiences and acquired a greater understanding of herself and the strange world she had chosen to live in.

After watching this very amusing comedy on disk, I watched the interview with three of the actors - Eli Wallach, Carol Baker, and Karl Maulden, plus some additional footage about the controversy over the film at the time of its release in the Christmas season of 1956. Special attention was paid to the comments of Cardinal Spellman in St. Patrick's Cathedral who said that any Catholics who would watch the film would commit a sin. The Legion of Decency is also quoted in condemning the film. Warner Brothers eventually withdrew the film from circulation. By today's standards of bare skin and profanity, "Baby Doll" is tame. The irony of Cardinal Spellman's declaration is that as he uttered his condemnation priests were molesting youngsters and getting away with their sexual abuse for years. There is no sexual abuse in the film. No children are involved. Spellman was riding a wave of orthodox opposition to the liberalization of sex in films as Elvis Presley began to reshape teens' views about sexual behavior.

Tennessee Williams wrote a screen play that poked fun at various aspects of Southern culture without being blatant about it. His drama focuses on two men, one of whom accuses the other of setting his new cotton gin on fire to protect his own failing ginning business. The young, naive wife of the supposed arsonist becomes the target of the outsider whose gin has been destroyed. He spends an afternoon trying to persuade her to sign a statement that her husband burned down the new ginning mill. His advances are suave but not so overtly sexual as Spellman and the League of Decency proclaimed. In fact, the film is often very funny, but its comedic nature was totally ignored by Spellman and his supporters.

It may be difficult for today's audiences to comprehend the censorship that obtained during the 1950s, but it was strong and sustained by the hearings of Senator McCarthy who was hunting commies in Hollywood. Tennessee Williams also wrote screenplays for "A Streetcar Names Desire," "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," and "Suddenly Last Summer," all films in the 1950s with sexual themes. The last of the three involved homosexuality and an effort to cover it up by having a young woman committed to a mental institution. Yes, those were the days when women could be declared "hysterical," and committed. Unlike these three films "Baby Doll" is a comedy and a satire.

Fortunately, "Baby Doll" has survived and stood the test of time and is still a very entertaining film to watch. Carol Baker's performance is superb. She won an Oscar nomination. Only a playwright like Tennessee Williams could end it with such poignant lines, reminiscent of Scarlet O'Hara. You will have to watch it to see what Carol Baker's character says in the closing moment.

One wonders why such violent films are made and for whom they are intended. Will some adolescent viewers see messages in the film that can be used to justify future acts of violence against innocent people in schools or shopping malls? No one doubts that in the drug trafficking world there is a great deal of intentional and gratuitous violence. Perhaps this was Ridley Scott's objective. Yet, the slick presentation of violence and the disconnects between various characters involved in its commission lead me to think that Scott was trying combine elements from some of Luis Bunuel's surreal films with some of the hard-core "noir" films of the 1940s and 50s. "Los Olvidados" meets "The Big Sleep".

A film like "No Country for Old Men" had a great deal of violence but it also had a point that audiences could grasp. Ditto for a much older film "Kiss Me Deadly," with Ralph Meeker or Costa Gravas's 1969 film "Z". Even Scott's first major opus "Aliens" had a point.

"The Counselor" leaves us quaking as the counselor reacts to the delivery of the disk entitled "Hola!" The "philosophical" phone conversation between the counselor and the cold, emotionless boss of the cartel is supposed to deliver the "message" of the film, but really it is almost incidental to the blood and guts spilled on the screen whether its the counselor's girl friend being dumped in a land fill or the confident American financier strangled by a device placed on his neck by a passing jogger on a London street. What's the point?

The film deals with a difficult family situation brought about by the death of the patriarch. The fine cast assembles as in the stage play to sort out different problems, some very long-standing. I regretted that so many of the arguments were laced with four-letter invectives and that only one of the family members (by marriage) showed respect and dignity when speaking with different family members. The women in the family bullied and belittled each other as though they were still sorting out adolescent grievances.

Surely, many families suffer the trauma of loss, but in this film the family matriarch wears her resentments openly and spitefully stirs up old tensions among her daughters to a degree that seems senseless. The men in the family seem to be too passive and willing to obey the matriarch as though she held a special power over them. This is evident in the scene where the matriarch tells the men to put their suit jackets back on at the dinner table in the hot August heat. They all comply like Sunday School pupils. Meanwhile she continues her spiteful comments. The film dragged in certain parts. There were loose ends that were never resolved. There might have been more "back story" to fill the audience in on the origins of some of the tensions. In the end family members parted with tensions still festering and without really resolving their misunderstandings. We found the film a waste of time.