Who’d you think of?

Gregory Hines and Billy Crystal? Hey, me too!

Thank you, the 1980s, for being completely insane. Thank you also for the sequence where they go to Florida, fish topless, and then apply (AND GET APPROVED!) for a bank loan while wearing cutoffs and roller skates while Michael McDonald’s “Sweet Freedom” plays in the background:

I can’t even use the ATM in my bank with roller skates on. These guys take out a mortgage! Honestly, even after renting and watching this movie, I’m not entirely convinced it’s real. It’s just too good (or maybe just too endearingly homoerotic) to be true.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

We meet Night and the City‘s protagonist Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) in his natural state: on the run from his creditors.

Things are bad for Harry before the movie begins and they will only get worse. He spends most of the movie on the run, robbing Peter to pay Paul. In scenes where no one is currently on his tail, he paces or fidgets or smooths his hair. During Night and the City‘s sad final scene, Widmark collapses exhausted in a heap in a boathouse. “I’m so tired of running,” he sighs. We know how he feels.

Harry’s last stab at “the big time” is a scheme managing wrestlers. But he needs more money to get the idea off the ground; and when they sleazy club owner who promises to bankroll him demands half the money upfront, he has to borrow that money too, which makes him indebted to the owner’s unfaithful wife. But the owner quickly realizes his wife’s infidelity and plans Harry’s demise (he eventually reveals his plan to Harry by announcing “No, my dear boy, I am not giving you 200 quid. I am giving you the sharp edge of the knife.”) Harry is like a magician tossed into one of those Chinese water torture cabinets that’s slowly filling with water from a faucet that cannot be turned off, only he’s forgotten how the trick works. So the movie is like watching a man slowly run out of air, struggling against his straitjacket.

Widmark is amazing this movie. He plays lowlifes and underworld types in most of his famous roles, but it’s remarkable to see just how dissimilar all these characters are beyond the superficial connection between their vocations. His Harry is almost the exact opposite of his Skip McCoy in 1953′s Pickup on South Street. Skip is the ultimate operator, cool under pressure even in the tightest of spots. Harry, on the other hand, is so vulnerable and Widmark captures the character’s feral desperation with an intensity and a commitment that is heart-breaking. We don’t particularly like Harry but thanks to Widmark, we feel awfully sorry for him. His portrayal reminds me of another desperate and impossible struggle against the quicksand of self-inflicted disaster I’ve always been a big fan of, that of Hayden Christensen in 2003′s Shattered Glass. Perhaps there’s something I identify with in these characters who know their disgrace is inevitable but who fight against it all the same.

Director Jules Dassin, a few years removed from his awesome prison drama Brute Force, made Night and the City in London immediately after fleeing the United States to avoid losing his career to the Hollywood blacklist. No wonder then that the movie is steeped in a pervasive mood of paranoia and persecution; when Harry’s final stab at the big time fails, a gangster puts a price on his head so great that practically all of London begins to hunt him. Dassin’s mood at the time was understandably bleak, and that’s reflected in the fates of the main characters, all of which are tragic, and there’s a ferocity to the action sequences, particularly a brutal wrestling match shot in a purely visual style that marks it as a predecessor to the famous heist sequence in Rififi, that sets the film apart from its contemporaries. Dassin isn’t playing around. When the water’s rising all around you, there’s no time for that sort of thing.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Brute Force is a robust, testosterone-soaked action picture.

It’s about as manly as movies get, and yet it paints such a different picture of masculinity than the one seen in the robust, testosterone-soaked action pictures of my youth. Those were movies like Commando or Bloodsport, where men were measured primarily by how they filled out a birthday suit while kicking people in the neck. Heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme were such bad actors, it almost seemed like that was the point; that to even attempt realistic human emotion was not appropriate male behavior. Though I have a soft spot for those sorts of movies, I found the men of Brute Force refreshing. These guys are tough, no doubt about it, but they’re not afraid to actually present a few emotions other than deadly assertiveness and assertive deadliness. And when we do need a little I-will-kill-you-with-my-gaze-style smouldering, we’ve got Burt Lancster giving the stink eye and he does it about as good as anyone in history.

Lancaster is Joe Collins, a prisoner desperate to escape from Westgate Penitentiary Island, which is ruled over by brutal head guard Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn). Brute Force is obstensibly about Collins’ escape plan, but those form relatively late in the film; much of the rest is given over to the horrific milieu of 1940s prison life, where the only voice of sanity is an disgraced, alcoholic doctor and snitches get a lot worse than stitches (specifically they get flattened to death inside an enormous press in the prison metal shop).

If Cronyn sounds like an unusual choice for a despotic prison guard, he is. But it’s also emblematic of movie itself; he doesn’t necessarily look the part, but man can he act it. And if it might be tough to initially buy Cronyn as the kind of guy who might be able to intimidate men around him into toeing the line, Capt. Munsey’s Gitmo-ready control techniques (and the disturbingly casual nature with which Cronyn enacts them) quickly change our impression. This is one of the great “a good actor can convince you of anything” type roles. I thought of Hume Cronyn before this as a grandfatherly onscreen presence. But as Munsey he is a truly despicable villain.

When I say this movie is packed with guys (a male-female ratio we might term dude density or, simply, “dudensity”) I mean it. The movie is set entirely within the walls of Westgate; the opening credits slowly bring us inside, and end with the doors shutting and its bridge rising, symbolically indicating that the audience is now stuck inside with the inmates. As such, there aren’t too many women on the grounds, so a feminine touch comes via an interesting device. Collins’ cell R17 has an absurdly tame calendar girl pinup on the wall, and each cellmate in turn gives it a flashback-trigger look that returns them to a time before their imprisonment. Each shows how the significant woman in each of their lives was responsible for their incarceration.

Now that could play as misogynistic, but it doesn’t. In all but one case these women are not the femme fatales we’d expect. They’re not sending their men out to steal or kill for them. Most of their stories are a good deal more tragic; one inmate is a soldier who got busted for stealing food from the U.S. Army to feed his Italian lover and her cruel father. These scenes add a melancholic dimension to the film, and while it doesn’t always excuse the criminal’s behavior, it sometimes add a humanizing dimension (and permits some of the best examples of the more complex acting that I was so impressed by). I read on Wikipedia that director Jules Dassin, who later dismissed this film as “stupid,” fought against the use of the flashbacks because they “watered down the film.”

With respect to the very talented man who made this superb film, I disagree. They don’t water down the film so much as they leaven it. Brute Force is, true to its title, absolutely brutal (the ending is particularly intense for a studio film of the era). The flashbacks provide the audience their only respites from its harrowing realities and show that a real man doesn’t use brute force because he enjoys it but because feels that has no other choice.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

When Clint Eastwood made Play Misty for Me he was a cowboy. He got his start on television with Rawhide and of course became an international star in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns.

In the six years between the final Leone movie and Misty, Eastwood played four more cowboys (Hang ‘Em High, Paint Your Wagon, Two Mules for Sister Sara, The Beguiled), a couple soldiers from World War II (Where Eagles Dare, Coogan’s Bluff) and a cop out of the west who wore a cowboy hat (Coogan’s Bluff). Interesting, then, that when he got his first opportunity to direct one of his own pictures, he made something so different and so contemporary as Misty.

The picture is a romantic horror film. Eastwood plays Dave Garver, the night disc jockey at a jazz radio station in Carmel, California. Each night he gives his listeners “a little verse, a little talk, and five hours of music to be very, very nice to each other by” and every night an anonymous caller rings him and coos “Play ‘Misty’ for me.” One evening at a bar, Dave picks up a woman named Evelyn (Jessica Walter) who turns out to be his loyal fan. He thinks he’s had a fun one night stand but Evelyn isn’t so quick to let go and she’s quickly worming her way into his every nook and cranny of his life. When Dave tries to distance himself so he can reconcile with an old flame (Donna Mills), Evelyn’s attraction turns fatal. I love the way Roger Ebert described Evelyn in his original review of Misty from 1971: “She is something like flypaper; the more you struggle against her personality, the more tightly you’re held.”

There are some Hitchcockian elements, some themes that call to mind Eastwood’s previous picture as an actor, Don Siegel’s The Beguiled, and a couple good scares, but beyond the slasher elements, Play Misty For Me is sort of a love letter to Clint Eastwood by Clint Eastwood. This is a movie in which a woman paints a portrait of Eastwood that wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a romance novel, and a totally different woman would rather die than live without Clint.

As we’d eventually come to expect from Eastwood’s work, the technique is strong and unfussy. In the murder scenes the camera gets very close to the victims; technically speaking it’s probably too close for clarity’s sake. But the effect is a disquieting one, as if Eastwood is quite literally rubbing our noses in the gore (the fine documentary that comes on the Misty DVD describes how Eastwood’s special effects man came to the set with an eyedropper full of fake blood and Clint told him not to come back until he had a couple gallon jugs worth of the stuff). My favorite moment comes at the climax, when Dave realizes where Evelyn is and races off to stop her and Eastwood cuts back and forth between oddly angled shots of Dave motoring down the highway and Evelyn taking a pair of scissors to the painting of his face, a nice way of heightening the tension before the finale while simultaneously suggesting the fragile nature of Dave’s mental state.

Watching Misty, I wondered why I never read Eastwood’s name in articles about the New Hollywood period of the early 1970s. To my mind, Misty fits in well with the films associated with that term: like them, it’s shot on a low budget, entirely on location, with no sets and very limited art direction. The extended sequence with Dave and his buddies wandering the Monterey Jazz Festival feels like a direct descendant (albeit a very sober descendant) of the Mardi Gras scenes from Easy Rider. With Leone, Eastwood even made a couple of the European movies that influenced the New Hollywood movement.

His exclusion probably has more to do with his personality than his work: unlike so many of the New Hollywood directors, Eastwood wasn’t prone to wild flights of druggy inspiration and always brought his productions in on time and on budget. The fact that Eastwood was a huge movie star, and thus seen as an actor first and a director second, certainly hurt his perception as a “young artist.” His politics, or at least his presumed politics, after appearing in movies like Siegel’s Dirty Harry no doubt distanced him as well. It’s worked out in the end; while so many New Hollywood directors crashed and burned along with the linings of their nasal cavities, Eastwood’s matured into a director the equal or superior of those who hogged all the early acclaim.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

“Rock and roll’s never ever stood dissecting and inspecting it at close range. It doesn’t stand up. So shut up.”

Jeff Stein’s documentary, The Kids are Alright, lives up to that statement from The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, who shares it near the climax of the film in a chapter the DVD calls “Final Words.”

There isn’t much interview footage in Kids, and what there is is mostly rather silly – the band standing on their hands, or taking the piss out of each other, or joking about their “medicine” with Ringo Starr. The rest of the movie is a collection of the band’s live performances. The combination of tracks is nonchronological, which fits The Who’s style: wild, haphazard, reckless and, above all, exciting because you’re never sure quite what will come next.

I say “The Who’s style” like I’ve got a great idea what that is when, in fact, I don’t own a single Who album even though my iPod is littered with all the other great lost gods of classic rock. Renting this movie, and discovering this band in full for the first time is due to a performance included in the film, from The Who’s appearance in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. That film went unreleased for decades because, rumor has it, the Stones didn’t appreciate getting upstaged in their own movie; as a result, no one ever saw The Who doing “A Quick One While He’s Away” until it appeared in Stein’s documentary. The performance lived up to the legend and a little research on the song pushed me to this doc, which is about to push me headlong into the band’s discography.

In honor of Mr. Daltrey I’ll stop myself there except to add that the movie ends with a rendition of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” which may be the greatest rock performance I’ve ever seen on screen. It’s conventionally — even a little boringly — shot, intentionally, I suspect, to best appreciate The Who’s flamboyant stagecraft. Then, a flurry of inventiveness at the song’s famous climax: during the extended synth break, the band disappears completely into a fog of psychedelic laser lights that practically scream “Hey! You know that last joint you were saving for the best part of the movie? Hit it NOW!” The camera swoops down just as a spotlight picks up Moon for his drum solo, then pulls back to show Daltrey in shadow thrusting his arms to the beat. Just as he lets loose with that famous vocal chord shredding yell we cut to a shot from the side of the stage in super-slo-mo — the only shot of the whole movie, I think, that’s not played at normal-or-faster frame rate — of Townshend sliding on his knees as he strikes a chord to match Dalrey’s howl. For my money, it’s got all I want from a band: big sound, utterly pointless — and therefore utterly cool — physical theatrics, a little self-deprecating humor, and enough sloppiness to remind you that it’s really live and not a bunch of guys lip synching to a prerecorded track. Plus there isn’t even a whiff of self-consciousness or analysis. I just watched it four times in a row. Think I’ll go once more.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Footsteps in the Dark is just so wonderfully absurd; there’s maybe eight minutes in this movie that could exist in the real world: they rest is pure poppycock.

It concerns a wealthy married banker (played by Errol Flynn) who moonlights as popular mystery novelist, F.X. Pettijohn, whose latest novel, “Footsteps in the Dark,” is a runaway bestseller. Only in the movies could a banker take six to eight hour lunch breaks and not fall behind in his work. Only in the movies would a wife not notice the ladder her husband keeps perched under her window so he can sneak in undetected at night. And only in the movies would the police let a mystery novelist follow them around on real cases, which is what Flynn’s Frances Warren (or Pettijohn, as the cops call him) does when an acquaintance of his never shows up for a meeting and winds up dead on a yacht.

The “only in the movies” continue to pile up, right down to the climax, one of the most absurd and hilarious talkative villain endings I have ever seen. (Here’s your SPOILER WARNING, should you care. I’m about to make fun of the ending.) Eventually Warren realizes that a dentist he’d recently visited for a cleaning (Ralph Bellamy) is behind everything, and he goes to his office, fakes a toothache and worms his way into the dentist chair. While the dentist preps to yank the tooth, Warren suggests he knows who killed the murder victim, and the dentist, sensing he’s in trouble, pulls out the “special” anesthetic. Then while the dentist yammers on, he turns his back on Warren, who has enough time to pour the entire bottle of poison down the drain and refill it with water, so when the dentist injects it, it’s totally harmless. Not smart. Attention movie villains: keep your poison within reach at all times. Only in the movies is someone smart enough to poison someone but dumb enough to leave the stuff lying around willy nilly. (Best interaction in the scene: Bellamy: “Well, what’s your final conclusion?” Flynn: “That your conduct’s been very unprofessional!”)

Most of the plot’s right out of The Thin Man, but Flynn’s as his charming best, and really ideal for the role, even if Robin Hood would have robbed this guy blind. For such an airy movie, the story’s awfully complex, with more than its share of dead ends (If there was a payoff to murder victim’s manservant’s enigmatic scowling I missed it). But I’d almost always rather be behind a movie rather than ahead of it — what’s the point of watching a mystery if you know how it’s going to turn out?

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Surrogates feels like the least interesting film you could possibly make out of some very interesting material. It presents a world, adapted from the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, full of bold ideas and rich thematic possibilities, then ignores that world completely for an hour and a half to tell an off-the-shelf hard-boiled mystery story.

This is one of those movies that makes you angry, not because of anything it does, but for all the things it doesn’t do and could have if only it had taken some risks. If you’re going to go to a casino, you might as well place some bets.

In the world of the film, advances in robotics now allow humanity to live their lives without ever getting out of bed. Instead of venturing outside and running the risk of bodily harm or illness, people remotely pilot these cyborgs called surrogates. These surrogates look better than regular humans, and have enhanced strength and durability, which is particularly handy should you find yourself in the middle of a rote movie chase scene and have to leap from car to car to escape Bruce Willis. Surrogates seem foolproof — harm inflicted upon them isn’t passed along to their operator, sending violent crime rates plummeting downwards — until one winds up severely fried in an alley and its operator is discovered dead along with it. Enter Willis’ FBI Agent Tom Greer to figure out how such a thing could happen and to ensure that nothing even remotely interesting is done with Surrogates’ premise.

I mean, think about the possibilities here. Obviously, the idea of living vicariously through artificial creations or virtual reality helmets invites comparisons to video games. But surrogacy also works as a metaphor for voyeurism in general and for moviegoing specifically, for living vicariously through the eyes of another person for as long as the film runs. The surrogates drive a wedge between Greer and his miserable but gorgeous wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike); that could be used in the service of a story that explores the way people allow technology to mediate intimacy, and how it often offers the promise of freedom at the price of dependence. Director Jonathan Mostow visualizes the surrogates’ physical perfection by airbrushing out the wrinkles and blemishes of the actors playing them; most of the surrogate extras look like underwear and swimsuit models, an invitation to some pointed commentary on the unrealistic body images presented in most Hollywood fare.

If any of these ideas were truly explored in Surrogates it would be a movie worth seeing, but really, these are just the things your mind wanders to when it becomes disengaged from what is an utterly mechanical tech-noir thriller. It is competently directed by Jonathan Mostow and well cast with watchable actors like Ving Rhames, Radha Mitchell, and James Cromwell, but it takes some really juicy ideas and and turns them into just another sausage from the Hollywood meat grinder. At just 88 minutes long, Surrogates doesn’t even have enough time to properly tell its main story, much less explore the myriad possibilities of its setup. As Willis tracks one lead after another with the same blank stare on his face (appropriate when he’s playing a robot, less so when he’s walking around in the flesh), I kept hoping the camera would stop following him and just wander into any of the buildings he passes. What would a gym look like in a world of surrogates? Or a movie theater? Or an airport? Or a grocery store? Or a pro football game? All the movie cares to show us are laboratories, FBI offices, apartments, and laboratories.

With a much better script than the one by John Brancato and Michael Ferris (who wrote the last two Terminator films and apparently are the only people in Hollywood qualified to write movies about lifelike robots), Surrogates had the chance, I think, to be a truly great sci-fi movie. Instead, Surrogates almost becomes a surrogate itself, a blandly attractive surface designed to obscure the depth and complexity that exists underneath.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Though its final act revolves around a thoroughly aggravating plot contrivance (“Just tell him Deborah Kerr! TELL HIM!”) and there’s two dopey musical numbers by children’s choirs for no reasons whatsoever, An Affair to Remember is, without question, one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen. If that last scene doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, it’s time to get the ducts checked by your optometrist.

Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr are each engaged to be married to others (to be picky, Kerr’s just in a long-term relationship, but whatever) when they meet by chance aboard a transatlantic cruise liner. As wonderful in her masochistic longing as Kerr is, this must be one of Grant’s best and most subtle performances. Typically my favorite Cary Grant roles are the big, bawdy ones, I Was A Male War Bride or Monkey Business or The Awful Truth. An Affair to Remember‘s Grant is a bit more subdued; still witty, but dryer. He does a lot of the work with his eyes, which look upon Deborah Kerr as if she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Truth be told she isn’t, but there’s something about the way Grant looks at her that convinces you she might be.

The characters’ affair is filled with tiny moments of authenticity; the screenplay by Delmer Daves, Donald Ogden Stewart and director (and director of the original incarnation of this story, Love Affair)Leo McCarey, is light on one-liners and heavy on true observation: Grant and Kerr’s characters finish each other’s sentences, think the other’s speaking when they’re not, reads the thoughts of the other. Supplements on the DVD say Grant and Kerr improvised some of their scenes to increase the sense of familiarity and they did a marvelous job. The pair’s chemistry is undeniable, intellectually as much as sexually.

I haven’t seen the original Love Affair but I’d be curious to see whether it’s as well filmed as An Affair to Remember, of if McCarey’s fine directorial choices reflect the knowledge he accrued over a long career. When the cruise ship lands in New York, Grant and Kerr agree to meet in six months on the top of the Empire State Building, and once they go their separate ways, the building starts to creep into backgrounds, out windows or, in one sublime shot, in a reflection just as Kerr leaves her man for good.

One shot in particular knocked my socks off: Grant’s character is something of a celebrity, so everyone on the boat is watching him like a hawk. As his attraction to Kerr deepens, he can’t do anything about it because everyone is watching and snapping photographs. Desperate for privacy, their feelings too powerful to ignore, the pair finally kiss, on a staircase between decks, and McCarey shoots the clinch from the waist down. For one moment, they are finally alone, free from everyone’s probing eyes, including our own.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

They mean it’s more realistic than 1983′s Octopussy, which makes Casino Royale look like it was directed by D.A. Pennebaker. All Bond movies are, to varying degrees male fantasies. Octopussy is, by far, the most fantastic.

The movie, directed by John Glen (who also directed my beloved The Living Daylights), plays like the dream of a boy on the cusp of puberty. James Bond is not a spy, he’s a globe-trotting super-hero. He’s got his own mini super-plane, a robot alligator disguise, a hot air balloon, he saves the world, and winds up on an island populated solely by foxy jewel thieves. I’d say you can’t make this stuff up but, apparently someone did.

Look, I’m a careful observer of movies. I watch a lot of them. Generally, it takes a hell of a lot for a movie to confuse me — it better be Memento-complex to get me scratching my head. And, for the life of me, I haven’t the foggiest idea what James Bond’s doing in Octopussy. He starts off on the trail of a priceless Fabrege egg, which he’s got a perfect copy of (don’t know why) and which he swaps with the original at an auction (don’t know why) where he forces the movie’s villain to reveal himself by bidding up the price of the egg to a point that no one would reasonably play. The villain, Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) simply must have the egg (don’t know why) to placate a rogue Russian general (don’t know why) who dreams of conquering Europe (don’t know why) and to appease the Bond girl Octopussy (who’s a jewel thief, I know that much). The island of sexy thieves belongs to Octopussy, who also runs a circus (don’t know why), which winds up as the hiding place for the nuclear bomb the Russian general wants to detonate (as established earlier, don’t know why). If you can succinctly and clearly explain Octopussy you deserve a medal, or at least a degree in advanced literature studies.

I’ve left out one crucial part of Octopussy‘s general lack of lucidity, and that’s Roger Moore’s performance as James Bond. Every Bond has things they do particularly well, aspects of the character they like to emphasize. Typically, people believe Moore’s was comedy, but there was something that his Bond enjoyed even more than a double entendre: playing dress-up.

James Bond was and always will be a clothes horse: the tuxedos and custom suits he wears are part of the character’s enduring image. Moore took the clothes fetish to a whole new place. He wears way more outfits, changes many more times, than his five other counter-parts, and Octopussy is probably the most outrageous. In his very first scene, Bond changes suits via the old inside-out-coat-and-hat gag, even though he has no reason to. That’s just silly, but some of his later quick changes are downright reckless. At the film’s climax, Bond sneaks aboard Octopussy’s circus train as it makes its way from Russian to the west with the big nuclear MacGuffin. He quickly gets into a fight with one half of a knife-throwing circus act, after he knocks him unconscious he decides to steal his clothes, I guess in the interest of disguise. Of course, even in the knife-thrower’s Russian cossack outfit, Bond looks nothing like the shorter, darker man (who also has a twin who Bond looks nothing like). When Bond again springs into action his cunning ruse lasts exactly two seconds before the villains go “Uh, you’re Bond.”

Now think about this. Bond is aboard a train filled with evil terrorists and a deadly bomb. He could go and try to stop the train or derail it. He could try to kill all the people on board. He could even try to disarm the bomb before it reaches its destination. Instead he gets naked and puts on a stranger’s clothes. WHY?!? With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance should he really be taking the time to try things on? Aren’t there more pressing matters? And think about how much time he must be wasting taking off and putting on all those clothes. That Russian cossack outfit isn’t simple either, he’s got to tie the sash just so and try on those pointy boots and make sure they fit just right.

In part because of Bond’s complete fashion obsession, the bomb makes its way to an American air force base in Europe, where it is set to blow in the middle of the circus. Moore, still dressed as a Slavic peasant, steals a car and breaks into the air force base, so he’s got half of Germany on his tail looking for a man matching his description. Okay so now he has to change. What does he do?

Oy. A nuclear bomb that has the potential to start a catastrophic, civilization-ending war is set to go off in mere minutes. Bond chooses to put on a clown outfit, along with that intricate makeup that can take professionals hours to properly apply. How can Bond do it? I will accept that Bond is a master fighter, marksman, pilot, driver, fencer, and lover. But make-up artist?

AND YET! I kinda liked it in a so-bad-it’s-good sort of way. It totally commits to its stupidity — its sincerity in the face outright implausibility is charming, if not inspiring. And Glen could really direct fun action sequences, and I love the scene where Bond chases the train via car, blows his tires out and jumps his car onto the train tracks and keeps right on chugging along. This is pure popcorn fantasy, generations removed from Daniel Craig and the “serious” Casino Royale. But fantasy is fun too sometimes.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

What a pleasure to find an old Hollywood movie whose primary conflict is the battle of its two leads to get laid.

I don’t mean it in the lovey-dovey romantic ideal sort of way, I mean I Was A War Bride is about the impossible logistics of two people knocking boots in the middle of an armed conflict. In 1949 this was certainly a cheeky topic. Nowadays, it’s downright scandalous.

Frenchman Henri (Cary Grant) and American Catherine (Ann Sheridan) work together on a mission, fall in love, and get married. But on their wedding night, just before magic time, Catherine is ordered to return to the United States. Not only do they lose their wedding night, they end up shacking up at a friend’s where Henri has to sleep in the bathtub (“What an awful place for a faucet!” “Where?” “My back!”). Even worse, with Henri yet to get an American passport, there seems no way the two lovebirds can remain together. Ah but an obscure congressional law allows travel permits for war brides. “It says spouses, it doesn’t mention sex,” says the officer advising Henri and Catherine. “I’m convinced the American army doesn’t believe in it!” replies Henri.

War Bride is basically a 105 minute emasculation session for poor Cary Grant, and, sincerely, there’s no one I’d rather see in the role. The entire movie builds to the moment when Henri will have to stop saying he’s a bride and start dressing like one, and it’s still an enormous laugh when we see Grant in a horse hair wig and stockings.

The movie makes fun of sexism without ever becoming sexist itself. For 1949, it’s practically progressive, since the scenes before the couple’s marriage show Henri, rather than Catherine, to be the incompetent. She’s the one who can drive a motorcycle, and it’s she who finds their mission target, a black market dealer named (interestingly enough) Schindler. Grant’s character even addresses the topic during an endless night spent searching for a place to sleep. He comes upon yet another women-only dormitory, and the guard outside apologetically denies him entry. “Have you ever noticed that women always get a place to sleep? I wonder why that is,” Henri asks. The guard replies, “Well I suppose it’s because they’re the weaker sex.” “I don’t believe it. They’re stronger,” Henri says, “and do you know why? Because they get enough sleep, that’s why.”

I Was A Male War Bride is one of dozens of romantic comedies predicated on the tension that arises when the two leads can’t figure out how to get together. These days, the devices employed to keep cinematic lovers apart are so forced they frustrate audiences instead of delighting them. War Bride is from different stock: Henri and Catherine’s struggles are never less than completely organic and their heroic clinch in the film’s final shot produces a sensation in the viewer that can only be described as orgasmic.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…