MARKETA LAZAROVÁ (Czechoslovakia, 1967)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: František Vláčil
CAST: Josef Kemr, Magda Vášáryová, Frantisek Velecký
MY RATING: 5/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: In medieval central Europe, a young virgin promised to God is kidnapped and raped by a marauder whom her religious father seeks to kill in return.


In an interview on the Criterion Blu-ray of Marketa Lazarová, a British scholar of Czech film history acknowledges the film’s density and purposely obscure/unclear editing.  In so many words, he says, “But it’s unique, and you don’t always have to understand something unique.”

I mean…maybe not, but it couldn’t hurt.  Marketa Lazarová was named the best Czech film of all time in 1998, sports a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and is included in the invaluable compendium 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.  It is loaded with visual style and inarguable beauty in widescreen black-and-white.  The production and costume designs are utterly convincing, placing us firmly in medieval Europe with a degree of authenticity I’ve rarely seen even in modern films set in that era.  But a model of storytelling it is not.  This movie further reinforces my tendency to shy away from “avant-garde” films of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

(And yet I really enjoyed watching Godard’s Weekend…go figure that one out.)

In broad strokes, the story begins with marauders raiding a traveling party and kidnapping the son of a nobleman.  The marauders are all the sons of a battle-scarred local lord, Kozlík, who rules his territory from a medieval castle and treats his sons barely better than he treats his prisoners.  Word of the kidnapping reaches the King, so Kozlík sends his eldest son, Mikolás, to pressure their neighbor, Lazar, to join forces with Kozlík in case the King decides to retaliate.  Lazar refuses, so Mikolás kidnaps Lazar’s virginal daughter, Marketa, just as she was about to join a convent.

Seems pretty straightforward, right?  “A” leads to “B”, “B” leads to “C”, and the gears of a bloody revenge story are set in motion.  But, man, I don’t know if I was in the wrong headspace or what, but I was unable to follow what was going in.  We’re presented with shots that, even with subtitles, don’t clue us in on who we’re looking at, or why.  Some of these shots are straight-up visions/dreams, intermixed with shots in the present, going to a flashback, then to a flashback IN the flashback, then back again and round and round.  Honestly, I felt like I was failing some kind of test.  I had to watch the special features to realize that one of the film’s sequences showed someone having sex with his sister…but even now, I’m not sure they meant with his OWN sister or someone ELSE’S sister.  When I need a flow-chart to follow a film’s progress, I’m not inclined to keep watching.

But I did.  Because, doggone it, there are striking cinematic flourishes that qualify this film as a visual tour de force.  The theme of hunting is referenced right from the start with a pack of wolves (or at least wild dogs) running through the snow toward an unseen quarry.  More than once, we see shots of antagonists and protagonists creeping stealthily through tall grass or tree branches either towards their prey or away from their tormentors.  Two particularly arresting shots look like they were taken from the Stanley Kubrick playbook; you’ll know them when you see them.

Which brings me to something I was thinking about while watching this movie: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  There is no denying 2001’s place in cinema history as a genuinely important film.  But show it to someone who’s never read the book or the infinite number of essays on the film, and give me odds on whether they will correctly interpret the last twenty minutes, at least in terms of the novel’s explanation.

Marketa Lazarová is not quite as cryptic as 2001, but it is definitely the same species.  In a movie that runs two hours forty-two minutes, I finally got a grasp on the basic nuts and bolts of who was who around the 90-minute mark.  The style and cinematography are stellar, but they were not enough to keep me as interested as I would have been had it been edited more conventionally.  I could go into more details about the story, about the girl Marketa’s plight, how she falls in love with her captor/rapist, the gritty battle scene, the film’s elaborate intertitles separating discrete sections of the film from one another, but it would feel false, because, ultimately, the film’s storytelling method left me not caring what happened one way or the other.

There are plenty of other films that broke new cinematic ground and still managed to be engaging and compelling, so many that I won’t even try to list any here…you know what they are.  One day, I will watch Marketa Lazarová again, perhaps with my Cinemaniac buddies, to maybe catch what I missed the first time around.  On that day, I will welcome a lively discussion of my rightness and/or wrongness of my first experience with this film.  For now, my opinion is that uniqueness alone is not enough to make a film enjoyable.

K-POP DEMON HUNTERS (2025)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang
CAST: Arden Cho, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo, Ayn Hyo-seop, Ken Jeong, Lee Byung-hun
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91% Certified Fresh [plus a resounding 99% on the new “Popcornmeter”, but who’s counting…]

PLOT: A world-renowned K-Pop girl group balance their lives in the spotlight with their secret identities as demon hunters.


For those living under a rock, K-Pop Demon Hunters is the movie that accomplished what no other movie has ever done: have four of its original songs in Billboard’s Top 10 rankings simultaneously.  (Even Saturday Night Fever had only three.)  Three hundred twenty-five million views on Netflix within 91 days.  The first Netflix film to open at #1 at the box office.  Recent winner of the Oscar for Best Animated Film.  Clearly, this is a movie with its finger on the pulse of the enormous global K-pop mania, and despite my general apathy towards K-pop in general (I can’t name one song by BTS, let alone a member – but I do know one of them was in Ready Player One), I figured it was time to give this phenomenon a day in court.

While it has not turned me into a K-pop “deokhu” – I had to look that up – K-Pop Demon Hunters was still great fun.  There were some questions that remained unanswered when the credits rolled, but I’m betting those will be addressed in the inevitable sequel.

The plot sounds preposterous because, well, it kind of is.  Rumi, Mira, and Zoey are members of a wildly successful K-pop girl group called Huntr/x…when they’re not busy hunting and killing the demons that constantly prowl the city’s population looking for souls to capture for their dark master, Gwi-ma, an amorphous soul-devouring demon voiced by Lee Byung-hun, star of No Other Choice and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, which I actually liked, but moving on.

The story, interrupted only occasionally, but effectively, by musical numbers, involves a shield – I’m just going to call it a “demon shield” – that blankets the city, protecting its inhabitants from the nefarious demons as long as the girls of Huntr/x can use their voices to strengthen/power it.  If some demon butt-kicking is needed, they have that covered, too, showing off some cool-ass weapons and moves that would make certain radioactive reptiles green, or green-ER, with envy.  Jinu, an enterprising and musically-oriented demon in the underworld, comes up with a plan to defeat Huntr/x indirectly…through their fans.  And how do you sway fans of a kick-ass K-pop girl group?  Why, with an even more kick-ass K-pop BOY group, obviously.

But really, this is all just a clothesline from which to hang some truly creative visual stylings that owe their existence to the success of the recent Spider-Verse animated films.  Demon Hunters builds on that already-unique style by bringing in some even more unique Korean aeni (the Korean version of “anime”) flourishes.  The girls’ faces reflect intense emotions by turning into almost literal emojis.  When angry, their faces turn into something out of Dragon Ball Z.  When sad, their eyes turn huge and watery, the ultimate puppy-dog eyes.  When they see a hunky guy, their eyes first turn into cartoon hearts, then into, ahem, ears of corn when they behold the hunk’s washboard abs.  (The corn later turns into popcorn.)

Out of context (such as it is), this must all sound absurdly infantile, but, after a few minutes of culture shock, I found myself caving in to the absurdity.  And there is a deeper message to be found here, concerning concepts of self-worth vs. self-deprecation, and how self-doubt only wins when you cut yourself off from people who love you.  (I’m simplifying; the movie does a much better job of fleshing it out.)  While it’s not really a movie made for my generation, I nevertheless had a lot of fun with it.

And…yes, dammit, the songs are really catchy.  Even the “Soda Pop” one.

That’s right.  I said it.

SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Vincente Minnelli
CAST: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Kennedy
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 78% Fresh

PLOT: A war veteran returns home to deal with family secrets and small-town scandals in his small Indiana hometown.


Before getting into the nuts and bolts of Some Came Running, let’s just take a second to admire its pedigree.  It’s based on a novel by James Jones, author of the novel From Here to Eternity; that film adaptation won eight Oscars in 1953.  It was helmed by acclaimed director Vincente Minnelli, whose prior credits included The Bad and the Beautiful, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris, and Meet Me in St. Louis, among many others.  In fact, his film Gigi, released the same year as Some Came Running, would go on to win an astonishing NINE Oscars.

It stars Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, two of Hollywood’s most bankable stars of the day, along with an adorable 21-year-old Shirley MacLaine as a pixie-faced gamine, among the first in a long string of memorable roles and Oscar nominations.  The supporting cast is headed by 5-time-Oscar-nominee Arthur Kennedy, who may be unfamiliar to the casual moviegoer, but whom I recognize from memorable turns in Lawrence of Arabia and Elmer Gantry.

With all of that going for it, Some Came Running looks like it should hit a home run in all categories.  The story is edgy, the characters are not all totally lovable (no, not even Shirley MacLaine’s), and the ending definitely does NOT cave in to sentimentality…which is all very appealing to me when done right.  However, while I am definitely not calling it a failure, I have to say that I was not moved by the plight of these characters.  The fact that it dares to show the hypocrisy of polite small-town society in the ‘40s and ‘50s was interesting to me, but I never got into a lather over it.  (By contrast, a movie like The Big City from India, with a no-name cast and a modest budget, also centering on a family’s plight, made me genuinely care about the characters.)  But I must acknowledge the daring nature of the film’s story, some of its uncompromising language (to a degree), and its chutzpah to cast Dean Martin as a lovable, comic character who nevertheless refers to women as “pigs.”

The story does take a little while to get rolling.  It’s 1948.  Dave Hirsh (Sinatra) is a military vet who arrives by bus to his small hometown of Parkman, Indiana.  He’s astonished when Ginnie Moorehead (MacLaine) gets out with him, wearing too much makeup, a disheveled pink dress, and a purse made out of a stuffed dog doll.  She has followed him from Chicago based on a drunken invitation, but he wants nothing to do with her, so he gives her $50 and sends her on her way.

That’s not chump change, equivalent to over $650 in today’s money…what’s a military vet doing splashing out that kind of cash?  Turns out Dave is also a published author, but he’s given up writing at the moment.  He’s come home because…well, we never get a real answer to that question.  Maybe he has nowhere else to go.  But he doesn’t exactly get a hero’s welcome.  His brother, Frank (Kennedy), runs a jewelry store and is also on the board of a local bank.  When he learns that Dave has deposited $5,500 in a COMPETITOR’S bank, that raises eyebrows around town and earns Dave a mild reprimand.  Frank’s wife, Agnes, vows not to be home if Dave visits because of something he wrote in one of his books.

Despite the small-town hominess of Parkman, the only place that welcomes Dave with open arms is the local bar, Smitty’s.  It’s here that Dave meets Bama Dillert (Martin), a slick talker in a cowboy hat, a loose-fitting suit, and a tumbler seemingly permanently attached to his hand.  The chemistry between Sinatra and Martin is instant, fueled by the fact they were fast friends offscreen, and their friendship drives some of the major plot developments later on.

The rest of the movie does an excellent job of deconstructing the mythology of small-town life.  Dave meets an underage cad who tries to get him to buy a bottle of liquor for him.  We later learn he’s dating Frank’s daughter, Dawn, and no one seems to be aware of his fondness for liquor.  Agnes relents and agrees to host a dinner for Dave, but does nothing but snipe about him behind his back.  Dave meets Gwen French, a schoolteacher who has read his books, but who rebuffs his romantic advances until a peculiar later scene where she seems to turn on a dime because she simply lets her hair down.  When Dave gets in a scrap with a drunk outside of Smitty’s, the incident is reported in the small-town paper, and Agnes worries about what that will do to her reputation at the country club…not to mention that Dave has been spotted with Ginnie hanging on his arm, a woman who looks anything but reputable…

I think you get the idea.  Some Came Running does for small-town Americana what American Beauty and Blue Velvet did for white suburbia, perhaps not as intensely, but still pulling no punches.  I was also reminded of Rebel Without a Cause, and it occurred to me that they might make an interesting double feature, since there are more than a few scenes in Some Came Running featuring gaggles of teenagers in the background loitering on street corners, or even “parking” on a remote dirt road.  The feeling I got was that these problems exist, whether you paint over them with a centennial celebration or not.

I just wish it had grabbed me by the collar more than it did.  I never got tired of watching Shirley MacLaine’s performance – she outguns everyone, even Sinatra, in my opinion.  Dean Martin’s acting looks deceptively simple – just Martin being himself – until a plot twist late in the film gives it a deeper dimension.  But the movie, as a whole, never achieved liftoff.  Or, maybe it achieved liftoff, but never got into orbit before splashing down.  Some Came Running has an enviable pedigree, but it’s an example of how even the most sensational casting and directing isn’t enough to carry a movie all by themselves.  Whatever the “X” factor is, I didn’t find it in Some Came Running.

BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: John Sturges
CAST: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Fresh

PLOT: Shortly after the end of World War II, a one-armed stranger arrives in a tiny desert town whose residents, for no apparent reason, behave in a hostile way towards him.


A stranger arrives by train at a small desert town.  The conductor tells him it’s the first time the train has stopped there in four years.  The stranger carries a briefcase in his one good arm.  The residents are apprehensive about him, hostile towards him, and do everything short of pointing a gun at him to force him back wherever he came from.  Who is he?  Why is he here?  And why does everyone get nervous when he asks how to get to a place called Adobe Flat?

This sounds like the setup for one of Clint Eastwood’s “Man-with-No-Name” spaghetti westerns, and if those films weren’t at least subtly influenced by this one, I’d be extremely surprised.  John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock is a mystery-thriller as lean and mean as you can possibly get.  With a running time of a scant eighty-one minutes, this is one of the best examples of a film that wastes no time on side-plots or unnecessary filler.  Get in, get out, nobody gets hurt.  Well…in this case, that’s not entirely true…

The story takes place in October, 1945.  Spencer Tracy plays John J. Macreedy, a military veteran – he lost the use of his left arm in Italy – even though he looks a bit old to have been a combat soldier.  But I’m willing to believe he was an officer of some kind.  The locals, including Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) and his heavies, Coley (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector (Lee Marvin), wheedle and needle him non-stop, trying to get a rise out of him.  At first, I wrote this off to the Hollywood convention of the backwater burg whose citizens simply don’t like strangers for no reason at all.  As the movie plays out, the reason for their behavior becomes clear…a depressingly relevant reason still today.

Because the movie is so short, and because the plot turns so decisively on the revelation of what Macreedy is doing in Black Rock, I can’t divulge any more plot details.  But I admire the movie’s methodology.  Enemies become allies, and vice versa.  Some of the dialogue is reminiscent of Mamet.  Some examples:

  • “I’m half-horse, half-alligator – you mess with me and I’ll kick a lung outta ya!”
  • “She must have strained every muscle in her head to get so stupid.”
  • “You’re not only wrong.  You’re wrong at the top of your voice.”

There’s a kind of poetry there that I usually only find in films-noir.  I don’t think Bad Day at Black Rock qualifies as noir, but I guess someone forgot to tell the screenwriter.  I have no problem with that.

I also admired the plot revelation concerning Macreedy’s business in Black Rock.  I’m no film historian, but I’m willing to bet there weren’t very many movies in the years immediately following World War II that dealt specifically with this issue.  The fact that this one was made by a top-tier director with such a powerhouse leading man surrounded by a talented ensemble, in CinemaScope…I’d love to do some more research to learn the general public’s reaction to the picture and its message.  I know it’s critically acclaimed now, but I just wonder…

Bad Day at Black Rock is best experienced in a vacuum.  If you’ve read this far, don’t read anything else about it before seeing it.  Let the story come to you organically with no pre-conceived notions.  This is a great film.

THE SECRET AGENT (PORTUGUESE, 2025)

By Marc S. Sanders

I’m not going to pretend I understand all of the dynamics of the Portuguese film The Secret Agent.  Most of the events occur in Brazil, dating back to 1977 – apparently a time of “mischief,” as the opening text describes.  Mischief is not the term I would use, but perhaps it is how a totalitarian regime dismisses their fearful and harsh dominance over its people.  Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho drives home the message that it is unwise to rebel against the government.  Still, it may be a necessary evil to welcome an independent future, unchained from a fascist government.

Celebrated Brazilian star and Oscar nominee Wagner Moura is Armando Alves.  The story begins as he pulls into a gas station only to see a corpse covered by cardboard lying a few yards away in the dirt.  Rabid dogs are wanting to sniff and feed off the remains.  Seeing a dead body may alarm any of one of us, but Armando seems personally concerned at that random sight.  Filho’s story will eventually make us understand why his protagonist returns to his hometown of Recife with an enormous amount of dread.

Elsewhere, back where he worked as a technology expert, there’s a gruesome and unforgettable discovery.  A severed human leg is wedged within the maw of a dead shark resting upon an operating table.  The local constable, Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his sons have been summoned to investigate.  It’s gruesome but the Sheriff and his cohorts find amusement in this gore.

The Secret Agent is hardly anything of what its title implies, but it’s biting with suspense.  Kleber Mendonça Filho constructs scenes that honor American classics like Goodfellas, The Bourne Ultimatum, another actual film called Secret Agent, and especially The Godfather and Jaws.  The latter operating as a driving element that bonds Armando to his young son Fernando (Enzo Nunes).  The story operates like a chase film, though there’s not much running to be had.  It’s all about how this man can remain hidden with only his deceased wife’s parents knowing specifically why he’s in town.  

By the way, rhetorically speaking, why is his wife deceased?  

Armando is hiding along with others considered to be rebellious against the government.  Go against the doctrine and risk being apprehended or executed.  The best that this man can do is hide in plain sight as someone else under a different identity.  He’s now known as Marcelo.

As I noted earlier, I have no knowledge of Brazilian history.  So initially it was challenging to understand the circumstances of the time and setting.  Portraits of Brazil’s President are hung everywhere.  Kleber Mendonça Filho makes sure to get push in shots repeatedly of this imposing, uniformed figurehead.  So, wherever you go, you will be found.  It’s interesting to see the big bad of this piece limited to a photograph that repeatedly appears.  Otherwise, the antagonists consist of a pair of smart and ruthless father/son assassins, the wealthy industrialist with a personal vendetta who hires these men to hunt down Armando, and a local corrupt police captain, Euclides. 

The Secret Agent requires an aggressive exercise in reading the English subtitles of this fast-talking Portuguese film.  There are also moments that weigh down the pace of the film.  For example, when Armando arrives at his hideaway, the seventy-seven year old woman who keeps the domicile has to introduce the other refugees he will be living with, while walking us through the vast labyrinth of this apartment building.  It’s a drawn out scene that mostly feels pointless as many of these characters have no major significance to the story.  

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s technique often reminded me of Quentin Tarantino.  It’s clear he is a lover of movies by drawing inspiration from favorite sequences in other celebrated films.  There’s even an incredibly odd sort of nightmare involving a terrorizing—well…I’m not going to spoil that.  See for yourself what comes out of nowhere.  

Still, many scenes occur in the back room of a local cinema adjacent to the projection booth where Armando’s father-in-law works.  What’s playing? The Omen.  A resistance leader, named Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido) archives recordings of Armando’s testimonies but admits she and her partner nearly shit themselves watching the horror piece.  Imagine the power of film.  Amid all of this real life, bloody turmoil, and still The Omen and Jaws can scare the living crap out of you.

The Secret Agent surprised me with its tension.  I believe I am typically challenged to connect with films and characters that speak a language that I’m unfamiliar with while occupying a locale I have little knowledge of.  It’s often frustrating.  Yet, I feel wiser for having watched Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film.  An interesting dimension presents itself midway through as suddenly we see laptops and cell phones enter the piece.  Like the film taught me, archived recordings of Armando and other refugees are played on cassette to lend a first person point of view to what was happening fifty years earlier.  The need to know more and uncover what ultimately happened to Armando is absorbed by a young student named Flavia (Laura Lufési) who is motivated to explore beyond the recordings and go out into the modern world of Recife.

This story recollects a frightening time in Brazil’s late twentieth century history with dangerous threats coming from all sides.  It’s fascinating to see this man, Armando, try to uphold a sense of normalcy for the sake of his young son.  From Fernando’s perspective, his father and grandparents try to shelter him from seeing the scary movie phenomenon, Jaws.  At his age, it’s better he only knows how terrifying Jaws is compared to what’s occurring on the streets of his hometown and within his country.  

The Secret Agent is an excellent film.  One of the best of 2025’s Oscar nominated pictures.

THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (1954)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
CAST: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien, Marius Goring, Rossano Brazzi
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: The life of a Hollywood star whose candle burned briefly and brightly is told (mostly) by the writer/director who helped discover her.


Towards the beginning of The Barefoot Contessa, I let my expectations get the best of me, as I tend to do.  There were scenes between movie producers and directors and conversations about actors and the movie business and dialogue about bad dialogue at the movies, and I settled myself in for another scorching “behind-the-scenes” movie like Sunset Blvd. or The Bad and the Beautiful.  Heck, it was written and directed by All About Eve’s Joseph L. Mankiewicz, so how could I NOT expect something similar?  But I was wrong.  True, the film takes potshots at the industry, but later on it all feels incidental, a necessary sideshow to lead us to the main attraction.

The Barefoot Contessa is a character study about a woman named Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), who is discovered dancing in a Madrid café by B-movie writer/director Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart) and kajillionaire producer Kirk Edwards…whose resemblance to Howard Hughes had to be toned down under threat of legal action from Mr. Hughes himself.  They are scouting for new talent along with Edwards’s gofer, Oscar Muldoon, played by Edward O’Brien, who won an Oscar himself for the role.

Maria is convinced to do a screen test, not by Oscar or Edwards, whose wealth has turned him into a spoiled child, but by the gentle persuasion of Harry Dawes, who quickly sizes Maria up as someone who is not to be bullied or cajoled.  One thing leads to another, and she makes three films in America, all directed by Dawes, and she becomes an enormously popular star, beloved by millions…and three weeks after her fairy-tale wedding to an Italian count, she’s dead.  (That’s not a spoiler; the film opens at her funeral.)

There are so many stories of Hollywood stars who achieve overnight success only to die young for one reason or another.  The Barefoot Contessa tries to get into the mindset of one such actress, but only from the outside, as the public knew her.  Not her friends, because she really only had one: Harry Dawes, the only person who really knew what made her tick, thanks to a heartfelt conversation outside her impoverished Spain apartment.  How much of this conversation reflects what really goes in any actor’s head?  Probably a lot.  She talks about childhood fears, a desire to be loved, her unhappy home life with her parents, insecurities, superstitions (she refuses to wear shoes whenever possible)…there isn’t an actor walking this earth who couldn’t identify with at least two of those issues.

We follow Maria as she moves to Hollywood, changes her last name to D’Amata because it’s more exotic, and becomes a superstar almost against her will.  Ava Gardner plays Maria as someone for whom acting is not a dream job, it’s just a job.  If the by-product is fame and fortune, well, that’s just a lucky break.  Maria is looking for the fairy tale, but it doesn’t involve limos and red carpets, nor does it involve finding a prince who’ll put the slippers back on Cinderella’s feet.

The Barefoot Contessa shifts narrators a couple of times, but it all leads to her fateful meeting with, and eventual wedding to, the dashing Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini, an Italian nobleman who “rescues” her from a verbally abusive paramour.  The Count, though, harbors a secret that Dawes, with his “number six sense”, is bothered by, but can’t quite pin down…and since I knew Maria would be dead soon, I thought I knew what that problem was, but boy, was I wrong…

This film may not spark and crackle like All About Eve, but it’s chock full of ideas.  There were times when it felt like it was trying just a little too hard to be a “great” movie, and I know that’s vague, but it’s the best way I can think of to describe it.  I think I need to watch it again, now that I know more or less what’s going to happen, and appreciate what it’s trying to say in the context of stars like Jean Harlow, or Heath Ledger, or Marilyn Monroe, or James Dean.

This movie isn’t so much a “at-what-price-fame” kind of story, though, like Walk the Line or [insert title of musical biopic here].  It’s more like a portrait of someone who beat the system, who was able to reap the benefits of stardom without being consumed by it, much to the consternation of everyone around her.  (But it’s not what killed her; write that up to her desire for the fairy tale.)

THE BIG PARADE (1925)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: King Vidor
CAST: John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Tom O’Brien, Karl Dane
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: Wealthy James Apperson deploys as a soldier in World War I France and grows from a naive kid into a battle-hardened veteran as he and his two buddies are paraded to the front.


Films that incorporate tonal shift had better know what they’re doing, lest they become a thematic mess.  King Vidor’s The Big Parade toes that line by shifting from a nearly Keaton-esque “you’re-in-the-Army-now” military comedy to a terrifying war thriller almost on a dime, anticipating and surely influencing future war films like M*A*S*H, The Boys of Company C, and Three Kings.  I’m compelled to forgive the Hallmark Channel ending because, doggone it, I found myself rooting for it like a 1970’s housewife watching her soaps.

It’s 1917, and James Apperson (John Gilbert) is the layabout son of a wealthy family.  He’s engaged to a lovely girl, Justyn, but we don’t see too much of their relationship before the news breaks: America has officially entered World War I.  Justyn has a revealing line when she tells James how much more she’ll love him when he’s in uniform.

An effective scene shows an impromptu parade going down a city street, with flags flying, bands playing, and people holding banners and signs with things like, “GIVE ‘EM ‘L’ IN BERLIN”.  James starts to get carried away with the patriotic fervor on display and joins a carload of his buddies on their way to enlist.  James’s stern father is delighted that his laid-back son is doing something important, but his mother is naturally dismayed, Jim’s fiancé swears she’ll wait for him, and so on.

In Army basic training, Jim connects with two men whom we saw in an earlier prologue: Bull, a no-nonsense bartender, and Slim, a country-boy construction worker with a long, expressive face and a fondness for chewin’ tobacky.  This trio forms the framework for most of the rest of the film.  In fact, for about the first 90 minutes, even after they get shipped to France, the movie is more or less a military-themed comedy.  Jim’s squad is forced to de-manure a farmhouse before they can sack out, and they do so while singing “You’re in the Army Now.”  Bull, with his two stripes, bosses everyone around and cheerfully leads the singing without doing any of the work himself.  And so on.

There’s even the obligatory encounter with the local women, including a farmgirl named Melisande, with whom James is instantly smitten.  His first clumsy overtures are rebuffed, but she takes a shine to him when he somehow finds himself walking through her farmyard with a barrel over his head and body, looking for all the world like an ultra-primitive droid from Star Wars.  A charming scene where Jim teaches her the fine art of chewing gum was supposedly improvised on the spot by the two actors, and has an incredibly effective payoff much later in the film.

This is all handled nicely and even gently at times.  I could have done with a LITTLE less of the scenes involving Bull and Slim also trying to put the moves on Melisande.  The comic point is made early and then beaten into us a couple of times later, and I just wanted the movie to get on with the rest of the story.

Where The Big Parade really shines is in the next half/phase of the film, when the doughboys finally get their orders to the front.  They’re driven out to a forest somewhere as part of a massive truck convoy…another parade with a vastly different connotation.  The battle scenes that follow are as horrifying as anything from Platoon.  Jim’s squad is ordered into a forest reported to be full of snipers and machine gun nests.  The brilliant tactical strategy is for the men to simply walk slowly into the forest and let the German snipers pick them off until they give their positions away, at which point they can be killed by the Americans.

These scenes had me leaning forward in my seat.  The Americans are marching forward, and every so often one of them simply drops to the ground.  Then another, and another.  And still they march.  The soldiers in front don’t look behind them, and if anyone drops in front of them, they simply step over or around the bodies.

(Wasn’t this the kind of thing the British redcoats did in the Revolutionary War, marching in straight lines while the colonials made mincemeat of them?  I seem to remember reading that somewhere.)

Jim and his two buddies survive this death march (let’s call it what it was) only to arrive in a vast no-man’s land defended by German machine guns and artillery mortars.  I won’t go into great detail about this extended sequence, but it involves two things I didn’t expect from a movie made in 1925.  There’s a censored title card which conveys even more of an impact than if it had been spelled out: “Let’s get those b – – – – – – s!”  And also, in one scene, it’s absolutely clear that one soldier evades gunfire and mouths, “Son of a BITCH!”  We don’t get a title card for that one, but it’s unmistakable.  Such is the intensity of this sequence.  The Big Parade is worth watching for many reasons, but I would recommend that one sequence to any fans of modern war films.  There are some physical effects that are clearly more primitive than what we’re used to, but it captures all the horrors of war just as efficiently.

The last arc of the film involves Jim’s attempts to reconnect with Melisande and his eventual return home.  As I said before, these last scenes are overflowing with melodramatic flourishes – especially concerning Jim’s fiancé – but the movie has earned them, and I was on board with it all the way to the final fadeout.

The Big Parade made stars of its director and its lead actors, and it was the first big hit for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  Indeed, it was MGM’s highest-grossing film until the colossal success of Gone with the Wind.  I can see why.

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1965)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Orson Welles
CAST: Orson Welles, Jeanne Moreau, Margaret Rutherford, John Gielgud, Keith Baxter, Fernando Rey (!), Ralph Richardson
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: King Henry IV’s heir, the Prince of Wales, is befriended by Sir John Falstaff, an old, overweight, fun-loving habitual liar. Through Falstaff’s eyes we see the reign of King Henry IV and eventual ascendancy of Henry V.


[This review contains mild spoilers.]

There are so many layers to Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight that I had trouble figuring out how to start this review.

For starters, putting aside the significance of this film’s subject matter and where it falls in its legendary director’s body of work, it’s Shakespeare, and I have a spotty record when it comes to enjoying films of Shakespeare’s plays.  The only ones I’ve every been truly entertained by were the semi-recent The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, and – God help me – Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996).  With the Macbeth film, I was transfixed by the performances from two of the best actors of their generation, and with Luhrmann’s film, what can I say?  The deliriously over-the-top visual style frames the over-the-top performances perfectly.

With every other Shakespeare film I’ve seen, the language has very nearly put me to sleep, not because it was delivered poorly, but because it has always been difficult for me wrap my brain around the Bard’s syntax, occasionally so tortured and roundabout that even Yoda would ask, “Say what did he?”  Such is the case with quite a bit of Chimes at Midnight.  Watching Welles and Gielgud act are the highlights of the film, but after about 15-20 minutes, I had to put on the subtitles so I could pick up on the nuances of the language.

Can you follow the plot of the film without subtitles?  Yes, to a degree, but it was difficult for me to keep track of the numerous side characters: Hotspur, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Worcester, Percy (who is also Hotspur, didn’t put that together until late in the film), etc.  But I concede that, yes, without understanding every single word, it is possible to follow the broad strokes of the story, much like you might be able to follow E.T. with the sound off.  Don’t know why that’s the comparison my mind jumped to, but I’m sticking to it.

So, as pure entertainment, Chimes at Midnight suffers, through no fault of its own, from a lack of comprehension on my part, except for the extensive battle scene at about midpoint and the emotionally shattering finale, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Now.  If we set aside the pure entertainment value and look at Chimes at Midnight a little more analytically, there is a gold mine of information here, especially for dedicated Wellesians like my good friend, Anthony…hope you’re reading, bro.

First, there’s the production itself.  Chimes was the last non-documentary film Welles completed in his lifetime.  On the Blu-ray Criterion disc, Simon Callow, himself a Welles fan and biographer, makes the observation that, prior to Citizen Kane, Welles had nothing but a string of great good luck, and nothing but atrociously bad luck afterwards, almost as if Welles had struck some kind of Faustian bargain to get Kane made.  The lost footage and criminal re-editing of The Magnificent Ambersons, studio interference with Touch of Evil…the list goes on.  To get funding for this film, which had been a passion project of his for years, he had to go to Spain, and even then, he had to pinch pennies.  (The film is officially a Franco-Swiss production and never received a full American release due to the film’s ownership that was bought and sold, or something like that…watch the interviews on the Blu-ray for the whole story.)

But even on such a limited budget, Chimes at Midnight looks like a million bucks.  There’s nothing overly flashy about the camerawork, and there is a low-budget vibe to some of the scenes that reminded me of Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which I mean as a compliment to both films.  I specifically noticed scenes shot with Gielgud as King Henry IV in his castle, with cathedral ceilings and high windows casting shafts of sunlight into the vast space like an Ansel Adams photograph.  The battle at the center of the film looks and feels like something out of Kurosawa, but even more chaotic, which was Welles’s intention.  He specifically wanted a non-glamourous battle to evoke the passing of English history from an age of gentility to one of barbarism.

It’s the towering performance by Welles as Falstaff, though, that elevates this film past my issues with its entertainment value.  I know relatively little of Shakespeare’s plays, but I knew the name of Falstaff before going in.  I knew that he was a larger-than-life figure…I always pictured Brian Blessed or Robbie Coltrane when I pictured him in my head.  After seeing Chimes at Midnight, I will only see Welles’s version.  Wearing a fat suit to give him even more girth, until he looks like a caricature, Welles brings a sense of nobility to Falstaff’s shenanigans.  He is utterly devoted to young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), whom he knows will one day be king.  He spins tall tales, sometimes it seems just to give Hal pleasure in catching him out in a lie.  There is a charming scene where they do a little playacting: Falstaff pretends to be Hal’s father, sitting on a makeshift throne and using a cooking pot as a crown.  He makes solemn proclamations with a sour face and a twinkling eye, like a soused Santa Claus indulging his elves at the North Pole.

But it’s the film’s climactic scene at Hal’s coronation that really makes my quibbles with the language seem superfluous.  Up till now, Hal has spent virtually all of the preceding film carousing with Falstaff and his cronies, faking robberies, wooing women, thumbing his nose at his father, and so on.  But by this time, Hal has stood at his father’s side as he watched him die, and the awesome responsibilities of the kingdom have settled on his shoulders, willing or not, and he has become a changed man.

So, when aged, corpulent Falstaff more or less crashes the coronation and cries out, “My king!  My Jove!  I speak to thee my heart!”…and Hal, now King Henry V, faces away from his former mentor and says, “I know thee not, old man.” … I mean, I was devastated.  And watch Falstaff’s face, as Welles displays a succession of emotions, each individually definable, each one lasting for just a second or two: surprise, disbelief, shame, puzzlement, and finally realization.  I won’t lay out the rest of Hal’s rebuke to Falstaff here, but it contains some of the most cutting language that Shakespeare ever wrote.

Added to all this is the fact that Welles was in the last phase of his career, that he perhaps realized it, and he was playing a character who, towards the end of his life, was being shut out by a man who once loved him like an uncle, perhaps even a father.  Much like the Hollywood industry, after giving him his big break, had essentially shut Welles out after Kane?  That might be an oversimplification, but it feels accurate.

Welles was always full of ideas, always experimenting.  What if…we made a movie about the life of a media mogul, told backwards, then forwards, then backwards again, with a mysterious code word that the characters never solve?  What if…we open this crime thriller with a long uncut take following a car bomb through a Mexican border town?  What if…we adapted Shakespeare to follow just Falstaff through all the different plays he appears in?

Welles was never content with the conventional.  Chimes at Midnight may feel conventional at first – and if you’re not a fan of Shakespeare to begin with, it might even seem a little boring.  But there is treasure to be found here for those willing to take a chance on it.

THE HAUNTING (1963)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Wise
CAST: Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Russ Tamblyn, Lois Maxwell
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A paranormal researcher assembles a motley crew of assistants to spend a night or two inside a gothic manor estate to prove whether it’s truly haunted or not.


If I had seen The Haunting when I was a bit younger, I might have told everyone I knew that this was the scariest movie I had ever seen…if I had not already seen The Shining, Alien, and Jaws, to name a few.  As it is, the short version of my opinion is that, while director Robert Wise successfully creates a genuinely creepy atmosphere in and around Hill House, I was only rarely truly scared.  (That first scene with the pounding noises outside the door was very effective.)  I’m not saying The Haunting isn’t worth watching, though.  It’s a giant step forward in the haunted house movie, bringing artistic and cerebral respectability to a cheesy sub-genre.

(It’s a credit to how effective it was in its day that Walt Disney’s imagineers cribbed several ideas from the film for the Haunted Mansion attractions in Orlando and California, most notably the bending or “breathing” doorway.)

The Haunting is, like most horror films, an ensemble piece with one clear leading role.  In this case, it’s Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris), a flighty, nervous woman with an unhappy home life.  She received an invitation from a paranormal specialist, Dr. Markway (Richard Johnson), to spend the night in a famously creepy mansion, Hill House.  Joining them will be Theodora (Claire Bloom), who can apparently read minds, although not much is done with that plot thread; and Luke Sannerson (Russ Tamblyn), an insouciant young man who possibly stands to inherit Hill House for his own.

Hill House itself, like the Overlook Hotel, becomes a character of its own, even more so.  A quick prologue tells us all we need to know: every previous resident of Hill House has come to a sticky end one way or another, from runaway horse carriages to a disturbing suicide by hanging.  Director Wise used a ton of stylistic choices for the interior of Hill House.  Wide-angle lenses, images that are “stretched” too far, tilts, extreme close-ups…everything combines to give the house itself an identity beyond its name.

This is all well and good, extremely well-done.  But the sinister mood of the place is occasionally derailed by the overacting on display, as well as some overly cheesy dialogue.  I can see how a lot of these things would work on paper (in fact, the movie is based on a famous story by Shirley Jackson [The Lottery]), but when it comes to the execution, there are a lot of dialogue scenes that feel ripe for parody by those guys from Rifftrax.

For me, when I watched it, I adopted a kind of “take-the-bad-with-the-good” attitude.  I marveled at the superb imagery and expert evocation of tension and terror, but when the characters opened their mouths to talk, I paid a little less attention.  I was especially taken aback by Eleanor’s occasional fit of hysterics, which is all in character, but sometimes it felt like just a little too much.

Am I being too hard on a haunted house film from over sixty years ago?  I’m willing to concede that possibility.  But I want to make clear how much I admire the production design of Hill House itself, and how effective are the scares that do work.  Much like some earlier horror films (and more than a few later ones), the chills are a direct result of what we don’t see.  We hear the sounds and see doorknobs turning, but we never see who or what is doing it.  Do it right, and it saves quite a lot of money in the budget while still delivering great fright value.

IMDb states that Robert Wise took quite a bit of inspiration from one of his heroes, Val Lewton, producer of low-budget horror classics like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, movies that cut corners, not for artistic reasons, but because they HAD to, and the results were more effective than they would have been with a bigger budget.  Wise took that method and ran with it, creating a movie that may be cheesy at times, but its influence can be clearly felt in any modern horror movie in which things go bump in the night.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET (Czechoslovakia, 1965)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos
CAST: Ida Kaminska, Jozek Kroner
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: During World War II, a carpenter in the Fascist Slovak State is appointed “Aryan controller” of a Jewish widow’s store.


The first hour or so of the 1983 TV movie The Day After features some of the tensest filmmaking I’ve ever seen.  There is something terrifying about how these people go about their normal lives as their world spirals towards Armageddon.  As the sirens begin, the tension reaches a breaking point when you realize it’s only a matter of a few unstoppable minutes before the literal apocalypse.

Oddly enough, that movie came to mind as I watched the Czech film The Shop on Main Street from 1965.  Set around the year 1942, it takes place in a small town in Fascist-controlled Slovakia.  Tono Brtko is a poor, timid carpenter with a nagging, avaricious wife whose sister is married to a high-ranking official in the local Fascist government.  Tono is not a fan of the Fascists, not for any overtly political reasons, but because he doesn’t like his brother-in-law, who has always treated him as a peasant, even before he was a local bigwig.

One drunken night, the brother-in-law, Markus, gives him some news: as part of a new law, Tono has been appointed as the “Aryan controller” of a small shop owned and operated by an elderly Jewish woman, Rozalia.  It’s now Tono’s job to take over the shop until the government figures out exactly what to do with Rozalia and the other local Jews.

(Interestingly, the Nazi swastika is not seen until the film’s closing sequences, but the Third Reich crouches just out of sight.)

What happens next is a curiously effective combination of suspenseful drama and outright comedy, approaching farce.  In that sense, it’s tempting to compare this movie to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, but the tones are very different from each other.  In Benigni’s film, the main character was impish and clownish, an Italian Marx brother.  In The Shop on Main Street, Tono’s dimwittedness leads more organically to scenes of comic misunderstanding between him and the hard-of-hearing Rozalia.  When he tries to explain the situation to her, she believes he’s been hired to be her assistant.  When he arrives to the shop on Saturday morning, he can’t understand why the shutters are still closed well past opening hours.  “It’s the Sabbath,” she says simply as she potters around the back room where she lives.

The comedy of these situations made me laugh, but the underlying seriousness of the plot snuffed it out.  Tono’s wife is constantly nagging him to find out where the old lady has hidden her wealth, since everyone knows Jews are miserly and stingy.  Tono and some of his friends talk about being careful not to be branded as a “Jew lover.”  Tono, to his partial credit, is not as gung-ho as some of his other friends or his wife.  He even mocks Hitler in a strangely tense scene, using a comb as the infamous moustache.  But his conscience only goes so far, and he does his best to just stay under the radar.

Meanwhile, a tower is being built at the center of town to celebrate the Fascist government, and Tono’s Jewish friends can see where this is going and have started packing.  Tono remains certain that, surely, things won’t get TOO bad.  A loudspeaker is installed near the town square.  And then every Jewish citizen receives a notice in the mail…

Beneath the comic personalities and situations, the looming threat of something even worse than run-of-the-mill fascism hovers over the town.  Tono wages a constant war with his conscience.  He’s unable to flout the law by simply refusing to take over Rozalia’s shop because that would mean possible arrest.  But he has no interest in forcing this elderly woman out on the street.  (He’s like me in the early days of Covid: things just can’t POSSIBLY get THAT bad…can they?)

I was riveted by this film.  It felt shorter than its 2-hour-plus running time because of the tension running under everything like a thrumming power line.  In that way, it’s almost Hitchcockian.  And to top it off, this movie had to pass Soviet censors before being released, which absolutely blows my mind for some reason.  The Shop on Main Street plays like a scaled-down version of Schindler’s List, or maybe more like a prologue.  By focusing on a tree instead of the forest, this small-scale movie makes its point just as eloquently and as powerfully as Spielberg’s masterpiece.