FORGOTTEN FORTUNE

By Marc S. Sanders

Forgotten Fortune is a welcome film that brings attention to the unwelcome ailments of dementia/Alzheimer’s disease. Yet, what writer/director Esteban “Stevie” Fernandez Jr demonstrates is that a diagnosis does not end the value of life.

Brian Franks (Brian Shoop)  is a retired mailman.  One morning during one of his dementia induced walks, dressed in full uniform, he comes upon the aftermath of what looks to be a murder, committed by two men.  It’s hard for the local police and his adult children to believe his story though, considering his age and condition.

Only when clues are uncovered following the unexpected death of his best friend, Leo (Lou Ferrigno), does the reality of seeing these two men Brian insists on witnessing appear to convince everyone else.  Now it is up to Brian and his pal, Larry (Jimmie JJ Walker), to solve the mystery and catch the culprits.

Forgotten Fortune is produced with simplicity, not a lot of aggressive beats in suspense or action.  The attempts at humor want to go no further than PG rated material, with the most risqué beat stemming from someone peeing loudly while wired by the cops. 

Fernandez is interested in sending a message about how to live a new normal with the elderly in the family and he spices up his message with some adventure.  I appreciate the sensitivity devoted to dementia and Brian Shoop plays it well.  He’s likable as the straight man to this trio partnered with Walker and Ferrigno.  I do wish the undertaking relied more on the recognizable strengths of these fellows. 

Ferrigno, who I had the pleasure of meeting in person, is still the muscle man and he’s got comedic chops (The King Of Queens).  Jimmie Walker with his “dyn-o-mite” personality still transcends generations long after Good Times ended.  He might be pigeonholed to that role, but he owns it all by himself and no one can take that away.  These three guys are such an odd match up that there is real promise in blending their career defining histories together.  I wish Fernandez would have depended more on why these guys are truly beloved within the world of pop culture and their devoted fans. 

Forgotten Fortune stands out among a crowded assembly of films because of its focus on a very real and likely fate for many people.  Aging is the one thing that none of us can escape, and a large percentage of the world population experience the side effects of that situation.  Yet Alzheimer’s and dementia should not make any of us or our loved ones feel any less than what we once were.  Intelligence and instinct can remain and therefore trust and faith should be upheld.  That’s the forgotten fortune of this film.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES (Japan, 1964)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Hiroshi Teshigahara
CAST: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: An entomologist on vacation is trapped by local villagers into living with a woman at the bottom of a sand pit that threatens to engulf them unless they shovel sand every night without fail.


Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, which plays like a modern-day existential horror film from A24, is laden with as much symbolism and metaphor as Pilgrim’s Progress or Animal Farm.  It’s remarkable how contemporary it feels, from the editing style to the storytelling to the boldly provocative plot twists involving sensuality and a potential rape-on-demand.  This is a movie designed to be argued about, in all the best ways.

After an unsettling credits sequence featuring music that would be right at home in The Shining or Shutter Island, we meet Niki Jumpei (whose name we don’t discover until the closing minutes of the film), an entomologist who has taken a 3-day leave to search the sand dunes of a local beach for a new variation of beetle in hopes of getting his name in the encyclopedia.  As evening starts to fall, a local man informs Niki he’s missed the last bus home and offers the hospitality of his village for the night.  Niki accepts, but the creepy, discordant music on the soundtrack tips us off that not all is as it seems.  It’s this juxtaposition of normalcy with weirdness that creates such a modern atmosphere of dread.  I was reminded of the great sci-fi puzzler Under the Skin, which features similar “normal” scenes underscored with nerve-jangling music.

The villager leads Niki to the edge of a vast pit dug into the sand.  A ramshackle house sits at the bottom.  The rear of the house is engulfed with sand that is seen in many cutaway shots as it shifts, crumbles, collapses, and threatens to swallow the whole house at any minute.  This is where Niki will spend the night along with the house’s single inhabitant, an unnamed Woman who goes out of her way to be as courteous as possible to her overnight guest, fixing dinner, making tea, but politely telling him it’s impossible to take a shower until the day after tomorrow.

Sand is ever-present in this story.  The Woman has to set up an umbrella over Niki’s head as he dines because sand leaks through the roof.  The teapot has a separate protective lid that goes over the spout.  Parts of the floor of the house are covered with rugs that are clearly covering bare patches of sand rather than any kind of wooden floor.  And that creepy score continues in the background…

It should be mentioned that the only way to GET to the house at the bottom of the pit is via a long rope ladder.  This is important, because the next morning Niki discovers the ladder is gone, and no one at the top of the pit will answer his calls to send it back down.  Then the Woman tells him the truth: he has been “drafted” to assist her with shoveling sand every single night to prevent it from consuming the entire house, because otherwise the sand will advance to the next house in the village, and the next, and the next.  But he can never leave.  This is his new home.

What follows is an expertly told story of a man whose entire self, not just the house, is in danger of being subsumed by the sand and by the Woman who has accepted her fate.  (There’s more to the Woman than that simplistic description, but I don’t want to give away more plot developments.) This is the kind of creepy story that would be right at home in Black Mirror.  It also offers the kind of symbology that lends itself to more interpretations than the Bible.

The one that occurred to me as I watched it was fatalistic, and perhaps the simplest.  The sand is death.  The man and woman toil endlessly to keep the sand at bay, to keep it from ending their lives, while those outside of the pit might be a representation of God or whatever name you want to give to the engine of the universe that brought us into existence.  We are thrown into the pit and condemned to shovel uselessly against the marching sands of time; we can either rage against our lot, as Niki does, or accept it, as the Woman does.

Or, perhaps it’s a screed against religious indoctrination altogether.  The house and the pit might represent religion, and the villagers are the religious leaders who throw us into the pit and encourage us to dig and dig for the rest of our lives, so we always try and try to meet impossible standards while never questioning why we’re doing this in the first place.  Niki asks the Woman a crucial question at one point: “Are you shoveling sand to live?  Or are you living to shovel sand?”  The Woman, who has accepted her role in this folly, smiles, doesn’t answer, and keeps shoveling.

OR…if you really want to go out in left field…the pit is the entertainment industry.  The man and Woman are creators, toiling incessantly at the Sisyphean task of keeping the villagers (the public/audience) satisfied, and they can never stop because the villagers won’t let them.  There is a moment when Niki desperately asks the villagers if they’ll let him out for an hour a day just so he can see the ocean.  They confer and say they’ll grant him his wish…if he and the Woman copulate in front of them.  Is this the audience asking for more and more explicitness and freedom in their movies and TV shows and music, etc.?  Like I said, that interpretation is kind of out there, but I offer it as an example of how many different interpretations are possible in this story.

The ending is another head-scratcher, itself offering as many different interpretations as the rest of the story.  Is it a positive message about people finding happiness by accepting their fate?  Or a negative message about people who only BELIEVE they’ve found happiness when in fact the stress of their lives has driven them slightly around the bend?  I’m inclined towards the latter interpretation, but either variation works.

There’s a lot more to talk about in this film – the black-and-white cinematography, the dreamlike imagery of sand, sand on sand, sand on skin, sand in close-up, etc.  The two main actors whose individual performances are sensational.  I had read about Woman in the Dunes for years and was consumed with curiosity how such a simple plot could support a 2+ hour movie.  Now I know.  I encourage you to find out how they did it for yourself.

[Now available on home video or streaming for free on YouTube TV, the Criterion Channel, or TCM.  You can rent or buy it on Prime Video or Apple TV.]

THE BIG CITY (India, 1963)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Satyajit Ray
CAST: Anil Chatterjee, Madhavi Mukherjee, Jaya Bachchan, Haren Chatterjee
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 93% Fresh

PLOT: The housewife of a lower-middle-class home in Kolkata decides to find a job to supplement her family with much-needed income, battling age-old customs and her own anxieties the whole way.


Stop me if you’ve seen this movie before: a housewife battles deeply held beliefs and outright chauvinism and gets a job to help her family financially, despite resentment from in-laws and her out-of-work husband.  Frankly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were loosely describing the plot of Mr. Mom (1983) or parts of Nine to Five (1980).  But The Big City, directed by the legendary Satyajit Ray (The Apu Trilogy), transcends the sit-com tendencies of the story and presents us with real characters and circumstances that feel as relevant today as they did over sixty years ago.  This is a miracle of a movie.

Meet the Mazumder family: husband Subrata, wife Arati, and young son Pintu.  They live in three or four small rooms in what is described as the lower-middle-class, but to me it looks pretty close to the poverty line.  Living with them are Subrata’s father and mother, Priyogopal and Sarojini, and his younger sister, Bani.  Kinda crowded.  Priyogopal used to be a well-respected professor at a local school, but he was aged out and now must rely on Subrata’s single salary as a banker.

When it becomes clear that Subrata’s salary is no longer enough to support six people by himself, Arati suggests that she look for work herself.  Subrata is by no means a cruel or mean man, but it’s 1953, and his first instinct is to gently remind his wife of the natural order of things: the husband goes to work, and the wife takes care of the family.  “Remember what the English say: a woman’s place is in the home.”  It’s interesting how gentle and straightforward Subrata is.  He doesn’t browbeat his wife, but because this is how things have always been done, he believes they should just accept it.

But when Subrata’s father, the former professor, finds himself begging his former pupils for things like free eyeglasses or some spare cash – “You’re successful because of me, so you owe me,” he essentially says to them – Subrata changes his tune.  So, Arati finds a job as a door-to-door salesgirl for a local company selling household gadgets like the “Autonit”, a device to help with knitting.  (It’s never explained how this machine works, for the record.)  But when she develops an aptitude for it, and she starts bringing home the bacon…what will her husband think?  What about her father-in-law, who is so entrenched in his conservative values that he finds it impossible to speak with Arati directly when she comes home late from work?

We have all the makings of a been-there, done-that domestic melodrama, but The Big City lured me in somehow and made me really care about how these problems would resolve themselves.  There is a moment when Subrata convinces Arati to quit her job because he has a line on a second part-time job himself.  She is all ready to give her boss the letter, but the movie starts cross-cutting to Subrata discovering there has been a run on his bank and he’s suddenly out of a job.  As the movie cut between Subrata desperately trying to reach Arati, and Arati just on the verge of submitting her resignation, I found myself SUPER-involved in the story, muttering to myself and clutching the armrest of my sofa.  Very few movies work on me like that anymore.

How did this movie from India get under my skin so well?  For one thing, the movie never rushes.  Even in the sequence described above, the cutting is moderately paced, not like an action sequence at all.  We get a good long look at the family’s dynamics before Arati finds a job so we have an excellent idea of how everyone will react, and why.  The pacing allowed me fall into the story without boring me in any way.  This surprised me.  I did not expect this foreign film to be as engrossing as anything by Villeneuve or Hitchcock.

For another, even though I disagreed fundamentally with the chauvinistic attitudes from Subrata and his father (and even his mother, too set in her ways to congratulate her daughter-in-law), I didn’t dislike them the same way I disliked the villains in other similar films, because they’re not exactly villains.  They’re not evil, they’re just misguided and, to be honest, a little brainwashed by years of being told the wife stays home and that’s that.  Because there was no one for me to dislike (except maybe Arati’s boss, but that’s another story), I was rooting for the entire family as a whole.

But especially for Arati.  In her society, for a woman of her class to even wear lipstick was considered a disgrace…but it helps with her sales numbers, so she wears it.  On her first payday, she retreats to the ladies’ room with her cash and just holds it in her hands while looking in the mirror.  You can see the pride of accomplishment in her face without a word spoken.  This is mine…I did this.  That’s something everyone can identify with, no matter your race, color, creed, or gender.  During the course of the movie, Arati experiences some ups and downs, as well as telling a crucial lie for the sake of a sale, and I was rooting for her every step of the way.

A quick internet search tells me The Big City is streaming on the Criterion Channel and on HBO Max.  If you’re feeling a little adventurous, give this movie a look.  It’s a wonderful movie…not just a “film.”

SORCERER

By Marc S. Sanders

William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is that diamond in the rough kind of movie.  In 1977, it was overshadowed by something called Star Wars.  It had a no name cast with Roy Scheider as the headliner, but look, he was no Bruce The Shark.  The movie lacked any confidence from two of the biggest studios in Hollywood.  Universal likely thought they’d schlep the hassle of marketing this movie over to Paramount.  Paramount likely had the same idea as Universal.  Mom and dad wanted nothing to do with this red headed stepchild.  Even Friedkin, a craftsman director, did a disservice to this outstanding adventure by labeling the film with the irrelevant and puzzling title of Sorcerer.  This is not a story of witches and wizards.  It’s not even a cousin of The Exorcist.  Yet the director saw fit to bestow this odd moniker as a means to imply the imminent fate of those who face a sorcerer.  Something like that?!?!?!? I dunno.

It took me a while to get into this film because just like Friedkin’s Oscar winning The French Connection and later his scary screener The Exorcist, Sorcerer leaps off into far off trajectories of exposition – four different stories to be precise, all of which occupy the first forty-five minutes of the film.  In four different corners of the world, four kinds of criminals, a terrorist, an Irish mobster, an assassin and a bank embezzler, see their respective careers of violation fall apart.  Their paths collide as they are each hiding from their pasts in a Latin American country. Feels like a precursor to a Tarantino formula.

An American company’s oil geyser has ignited into an uncontrollable blaze.  To contain the inferno will require a supply of nitroglycerin that is found leaking from delicate crates of dynamite.  The safest way to transport the material down a rain forest mountain is by trucks where the boxes can be encased in soft sand.  The slightest tremble could cause the boxes to explode.  So, expert drivers are recruited to apply for maximum risk with a hefty paycheck if they can survive the mission.

I will not deny that a lot of fat could have been trimmed from this retread of the classic movie The Wages Of Fear.  I was getting a little tired of trying to piece all these stories together.  Thankfully the road smooths out as the lanes merge together, and then the trip gets rocky and rough for heightened suspense that does not let up.  

To watch two junky trucks ride over uneven grounds through dense South American jungle foliage while these drivers endure squelching humidity and harsh rain will leave you on edge.  The film chooses wisely when to cut to the back of the trucks to see how well these fragile containers are holding up.  Swamp roads sink the tires while dry ground crumbles apart underneath the vehicles.  

One of the most effective scenarios occurs when the trucks have to cross a rickety old suspension bridge over a bottomless chasm with harsh rain attacking their skills and senses.  One poor bastard has to get in front of each vehicle to serve as a guide.  Though I wouldn’t qualify their responsibilities as the easier and safer position to be in.  

Four years ahead of what Steven Spielberg would do with Indiana Jones, so many scenes from Sorcerer hold so impressively with mounting tension and realistic chance and dangerous risk.  The trucks look heavy, the cargo feels delicate, the men seem drained, nervous and scared, and the outer elements are unforgiving.  The bad guys who occupy this story are antagonized by the vehicles they ride in and what they are transporting, along with the harsh environments they have no choice but to endure.

The smaller ingredients built into this story heighten the tension exponentially with an, at the time, new kind of symphonic soundtrack from would be musician prophets of the eventual 1980s, Tangerine Dream (Risky Business, Thief).  The copy I have is the Criterion Edition on 4K.  On my 9.0 sound system, the audio of music and explosive sound effects is awesome.  Absolutely surrounding and jarring. This feels like a newly made film.

Despite my misgivings mentioned earlier, Sorcerer is a huge crowd pleaser by the time its conclusion arrives and you sum up all its individual parts.  I have no doubt on a repeat viewing I’ll discover a better appreciation for those moments that I could not realize were part of a grander picture.

I highly recommend you seek out Sorcerer.  Uphold your patience initially because the payoff is definitely worth it.

Trivia: As a kid, long before I was ever aware of this movie, there was a favorite cartoon episode of G.I. Joe that adopted a very similar scenario as the “Greatest American Heroes” attempt to transport some delicate crystal MacGuffins across treacherous terrain while the vile armies of Cobra attempt to thwart the mission.  Whatta know!?!? The influence of this film and The Wages Of Fear carried on for generations. 

AN ACTOR’S REVENGE (Japan, 1963)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Kon Ichikawa
CAST: Kazuo Hasegawa, Fujiko Yamamoto, Ayako Wakao
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Fresh

PLOT: A kabuki actor exacts a bloody revenge after he encounters the wealthy businessman who destroyed his family.


In terms of good old-fashioned melodrama, Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge pulls no punches, utilizing a highly stylized, kabuki-esque visual language to tell a story that was old when it was first made into a movie in 1935, starring the same actor in the same lead/dual roles.  But I am obliged to report that I never quite got a thrill of excitement when it came to the story.  (…well, that’s not exactly true, there was ONE moment that genuinely thrilled me when it occurred.)  I found that mildly disappointing because, as an amateur actor myself, finding a movie that combines two of my favorite plot devices – revenge and theatre – gave me high hopes.  Perhaps I was expecting too much?  But I thoroughly enjoyed the film’s style, celebrating artifice as much as any live stage production.

Kazuo Hasegawa plays two roles that he originated nearly 30 years earlier: a female-impersonating kabuki actor named Yukinojo, and a Robin-Hood-like bandit named Yamitaro.  Director Ichikawa sets the visual tone immediately as we open on a kabuki performance with Yukinojo as the lead.  While in character onstage, he spies three people in the audience, and we not only get his internal monologue about who they are and how urgently he seeks revenge on them, but we also get some cool visual tricks to reinforce his POV.  First, the stagey set – fake snow falling, painted backdrops – is unexpectedly replaced with a “real” set.  That is, it’s still obviously fake (the entire film was shot on studio sets), but it’s more realistic than before.  Then, as Yukinojo looks out to where the audience used to be, we see what he sees with a kind of variation of the iris shot that opens up, almost as if he were looking through a solid wall with X-Ray vision.

For me, this had the effect of creating an almost Shakespearian vibe.  It’s like Ichikawa said, “Okay, you want melodrama?  Let’s go all the way with it.”  This kind of stylistic flair pops up through the entire film; there are too many examples to mention, but you’ll just have to trust me.  It’s really cool to look at.

(Scorsese utilized similar throwback visual devices in films like Hugo and even The Departed.)

Story-wise, after that striking opening sequence, we get some filler about various audience members, some of whom we’ll see again later, before settling into your standard revenge story a la The Count of Monte Cristo or even Ben-Hur, where the wronged party bides their time until the moment is right.  But it’s not enough for Yukinojo to just kill his targets in cold blood.  First, he has to make them suffer.

I should note that this movie’s visual style repeatedly reminded me of another Japanese film, Onibaba, released a year later in 1964.  Also shot in widescreen, Onibaba’s story is even older than An Actor’s Revenge, but it uses arresting widescreen compositions that evoke, not kabuki theatre, but comic books.  I wonder if An Actor’s Revenge influenced that later film to any degree.  Visually, it feels like it, but I’m not a Japanese film scholar, so…there you have it.

There is an interesting gender-bending aspect to the story throughout the film, as well.  The character of Yukinojo is, of course, a man, but he never once breaks character as a woman.  He speaks in a high, falsetto voice and keeps his movements soft and feminine at all times.  There are odd moments when two different women confess their love to him, always referring to him as a man or a husband, while he is in drag the whole time.  There’s a message there somewhere about pronouns and gender fluidity, but I’m not the one to explicate it.

This movie is on the list of 1,001 Movies to See Before You Die, but not for the reasons I was expecting.  I will concede that my expectations were raised due to the subject matter, but while I can’t say my socks were blown off from a story perspective, I did love the visual approach to the storytelling, especially considering the year it was made.

LA DOLCE VITA (Italy, 1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Federico Fellini
CAST: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Certified Fresh

PLOT: In episodic fashion, we follow the life of a philandering tabloid journalist in Rome as he chases stories and skirts with equal enthusiasm.


Fellini’s La dolce vita is easily one of the most critically acclaimed movies ever made.  Roger Ebert counted it as one of his favorite movies of all time, second only to Citizen Kane, perhaps.  In a video introduction to the Blu-ray disc, Martin Scorsese calls it “the movie that changed the world.”  It won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for its costume design.

But I gotta be honest: for most of its nearly 3-hour running time, I found myself wondering what the fuss is all about.  It’s only when a pivotal event occurs around the 2.5-hour mark that I was shocked out of my stupor and began to reflect on everything I had seen before and what came after.  This is a movie that lulls you along and doesn’t reveal what it’s REALLY about until it’s ready to.

In episodic fashion, La dolce vita [rough translation: “The sweet life”] follows the life of Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a philandering tabloid journalist who lives in Rome and chases stories and skirts with equal enthusiasm.  He has a fiancé, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), but that might be too strong a word for it.  She tells everyone they meet that Marcello is her fiancé, and he seems to care for her occasionally, but he seems to fall instantly in love with every beautiful woman who crosses his path.  In the movie’s famous opening, with a statue of Jesus suspended underneath a helicopter flying over the city, Marcello even tries to get the numbers of several bikini-clad rooftop sunbathers, but they can’t hear him over the noisy helicopter.

As a tabloid journalist, Marcello has made friends with some of the city’s famous, or infamous, higher-ups.  Along with his photographer friend, Paparazzo, he contrives situations where a candid photo or two can be snapped of, say, a prince dining with someone he really shouldn’t be dining with.  (Indeed, this movie provides the origin of the word “paparazzi”, so named after the group of rude, pesky, pushy photographers jostling each other for a good celebrity photo, the tawdrier the better.)

In no particular order, Marcello interacts with an old flame, an old madame, a stunning but airheaded Swedish movie star and her jealous actor boyfriend, a mob chasing two children who claim to have seen the Madonna, another old flame, a teenaged waitress, his own father, a rowdy group of actors and dancers, and a group of intellectuals who fill about 20 minutes of screen time with endless philosophizing.  (I’m sure I left something out.)  The only person in that last group with anything interesting to say is a man named Steiner, who worries about his two children growing up in a world that can be obliterated with a phone call.

I’m sure there is a LOT of subtext going on in this first long section, but God forgive me, I was waiting for a story.  There is, of course, the famous sequence where Marcello follows Sylvia, the Swedish actress played by the zaftig Anita Ekberg, into the Trevi Fountain in the middle of the night.  He is bewitched by her, indeed by all women, even by his so-called fiancé, Emma, whom he berates mercilessly one night and throws out of his car…but the next morning he dutifully drives back to the same spot where he left her, where she apparently spent the night, and takes her back home.

I guess the idea we’re supposed to get is that Marcello is the living embodiment of the male gaze.  It doesn’t seem as if he will ever be happy with any woman he meets because there is always another one waiting around the next corner, or in the next bar, or at the scene of the next tabloid story.  I’ve read that the film can be interpreted as an excoriating satire of Rome’s upper class, whom we mostly see as vapid, self-absorbed free spirits with lots of money and nothing of real value to contribute to the human condition.  That’s a good interpretation, but that kind of leaves Marcello out of the equation, unless we’re supposed to believe that he’s also part of the upper class?  I never got that impression.  If he were, what’s he doing chasing rumors and gossip for a living?

This is all well and good, but to beat that dead horse a little more, I was waiting for a story.  We’re getting a fully drawn character in Marcello, but he wasn’t doing much of anything, except watching him listen to the people either clamoring for his attention or warning him to beat it.

But THEN…something utterly unexpected occurs, an event that I can’t even really hint at because it works so well.  When it does, Marcello goes into an existential tailspin, questioning his values, his morals, and his profession.  It’s this event, and Marcello’s reaction to it, that finally gave me some clarity of what this movie was really about.

There’s a sensational closing sequence that takes place an indeterminate amount of time after this unexpected incident.  Marcello leads a rowdy group of actors and dancers to a friend’s empty house.  Nobody home?  No problem – he just shatters a sliding glass door and lets everybody in.  This kind of behavior is interesting because, before “the incident”, you might have noticed Marcello trying to exit a party gracefully, or gracefully decline an invitation to somewhere or other, or politely keeping quiet in his chair or in a corner.  That Marcello is gone.  This NEW Marcello wants to party like there’s no tomorrow.  (This leads to a genuinely ugly moment when he bullies a drunk actress into getting on all fours as he rides her back like a pony and slaps her bottom, then later covers her in feathers ripped out of a sofa pillow…that moment felt to me as raw as watching Nicolas Cage self-destruct in Leaving Las Vegas.)

The film’s coda may also provide a clue to what the movie’s about, or at least partially about.  We opened with Marcello unable to talk to the sunbathers over the noise of the helicopter.  In the final scene, on a beach after the drunken party, Marcello is hailed from afar by this teenaged waitress he encountered earlier in the film.  She motions to him and tries to yell to him, but the crashing surf is too loud for either of them to understand the other.  Rather than walk closer to each other and try to reach some mutual understanding, he ruefully smiles and waves goodbye.  Marcello was never able to truly connect with anyone for the entire film, not even his own father, and despite the changes brought about by external circumstances, he finds himself even more unable to do so than before.

I guess, if there’s a message here somewhere, it’s that we should try to connect, find some kind of common ground with those around us as much as we can.  Life has much to offer, but how sweet can it be when we shut ourselves off from those who just want to love us for who we are?

DIABOLIQUE (France, 1955)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Henri-Georges Clouzot
CAST: Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, Paul Meurisse, Charles Vanel
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The wife and mistress of a loathsome school principal plan to murder him with what they believe is the perfect alibi.

[NOTE: If you have not yet seen Diabolique, READ NO FURTHER.  I will try not to give spoilers, but discussion of the story may give unwanted hints or clues.  Beware.]


Am I giving Diabolique, Clouzot’s classic of French suspense, a perfect rating because it fooled me?  No.  Is it because of the acting?  Not quite, although Véra Clouzot is an obvious standout.  In my mind, the lion’s share of the credit for my perfect rating goes to the impeccable screenplay and the masterful direction from H.G. Clouzot, director of other French classics like Wages of Fear (1953) and Le corbeau (1943).  The story is so good that Hitchcock famously regretted not grabbing the movie rights from the novel on which the movie is based, so he made sure he purchased the rights to the author’s next novel almost immediately.  [Fun fact: the movie of THAT book yielded Hitchcock’s legendary Vertigo (1958).]

The story of Diabolique will come as no great surprise to any modern moviegoer.  As soon as key facts about the major players were revealed, my mind immediately went to Ira Levin’s Deathtrap (1982), which was CLEARLY inspired by Diabolique, as were many others.  What makes Diabolique such a standout is that it was first.  Before Psycho, before Peeping Tom (both 1960), before Don’t Look Now (1973), Diabolique wowed and shocked audiences in equal measure.

Diabolique’s method is deceptively simple.  With admirably economic storytelling, Clouzot presents us with the three main players: the headstrong mistress, Nicole (Simone Signoret); the timid, sickly wife, Christina (Véra Clouzot, the director’s real-life spouse); and the detestable man they both share, Michel (Paul Meurisse).  The three of them run a boys’ boarding school, with Michel as the headmaster.  Michel is immediately set up as despicable.  The first time we see Nicole, she is sporting a black eye behind some shades, already seeming to plot with Christina.  A little later, Michel forces Christina to choke down some rotten fish served for their meal (he got a bargain at the market for day-old fish…eeyuck).  When she loudly wishes she were dead, Michel evokes Ebenezer Scrooge: “Hurry up, then.  We’ll arrange a nice funeral and be well rid of you.  The school won’t notice, and I’ll feel much better.”  Charming.

So, when the two women hatch a plot to get rid of Michel, we’re on board, because who WOULDN’T want to get rid of this jackass?  But in classic fashion, nothing goes down the way it’s supposed to.  First, there’s a problem with noisy plumbing (I’m being purposefully vague here).  Then there’s the broken handle on the large trunk.  Then there’s the pesky body that simply won’t behave the way a dead body should.  Then there’s the empty hotel room, and the Prince-of-Wales suit, and the schoolchild who claims he saw the headmaster at a time and place where he ABSOLUTELY should not have been…and so on.

Despite the fact that I kind of called what was happening and why, I still thoroughly enjoyed Diabolique, the same way that I enjoy watching some of my favorite films over and over again.  Here’s a plot that we’ve all seen repeatedly, but it’s done so well that you just have to sit back and admire its audacity.  Nothing is overdone, no one strains for any kind of effect, the characters are who they are, simple without being simplistic, if that means anything.  They’re intelligent people, not placeholders, so when they can’t figure out what’s going on, we believe it.

I loved the fact there was no musical score except for the opening and end credits.  That was amazingly effective, especially in scenes toward the end that relied heavily on the kind of shots and editing that reminded me of movies like M and Nosferatu.  And I haven’t seen water used so atmospherically since Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002).

Depending on how you define “twist”, it could be argued that Diabolique was the first movie to contain a full-on twist ending, one that redefines everything you saw previously and compels you to go back and watch the movie again to pick up on clues you missed the first time around.  (A case might be made for Mildred Pierce [1945] being first, but that film’s ending is not quite as insane as Diabolique’s.)  For that reason alone, and because it accomplishes it so well, this movie is worth seeking out.  Just don’t let anyone spoil it for you.

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Nicholas Ray
CAST: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Jim Backus
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After moving to a new town, a troublemaking teen forms a bond with a troubled classmate and falls for a local girl who is the girlfriend of a neighborhood tough. When the new kid is challenged to a dangerous game of “chicken,” his real troubles begin.


To begin with, yes, Rebel Without a Cause is dated.  It is lurid, obvious, and heavy-handed, leaving very little to the audience’s imagination when it comes to the film’s message.  On the other hand, there are some not-so-subtle references to even deeper issues at play that make this dated, hammy film still relevant today.  I had always thought Rebel was simply about a troubled teenager pleading for compassion from an uncaring society.  Who knew it also dealt with a forbidden homosexual attraction and implied incest?  For a movie made when the Production Code was still being enforced, that is a LOT of subtext to unpack.

Jim Stark (James Dean) opens the film being hustled into a police station for public drunkenness in the wee hours of the morning.  Here, he will cross paths with two other teenagers: Judy (Natalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo).  Over the next 24 hours, Jim will change their lives irrevocably just by trying to stay out of trouble, which has no problem finding him.

It’s here, when Jim’s parents arrive to bail him out, that Dean delivers his immortal line, “You’re tearing me APAAART!!!”  I’m kinda glad we got that out of the way so early so I didn’t have to anticipate it for the rest of the movie.  We also get the first of the film’s heavy-handedness, as Jim converses with a sympathetic cop, Ray (Edward Platt), who asks him the kinds of probing questions that only a psychiatrist would ask.  They become unlikely friends as they bond over the foolishness of Jim’s parents, who are so clearly out of touch with his inner turmoil.

During a field trip to the Griffith Observatory (the movie takes place in Los Angeles), Jim winds up in a knife fight with a local tough guy, Buzz, whom he eventually overpowers.  (The reason: Buzz called him “chicken,” just like Marty McFly…just throwing that in there.)  Buzz wants another chance, so he challenges Jim to a “chickie-run.”  That night, the two of them will drive a couple of stolen cars at high speed towards a high cliff drop; first one to bail out of their car is a chicken.

Before that can happen, we get the first of two surprising plot devices.  Jim runs into Plato at school, and it becomes instantly clear that Plato is attracted to him.  I promise I’m not reading too much into it.  The fact this wasn’t toned down even more in a movie from the mid-‘50s is a little shocking to me.  Plato looks at and hangs around Jim the way a girl with a crush latches on to the object of her desire.  Plato even has a fan-photo of Alan Ladd in Shane hanging in his locker.  It’s so obvious that I found myself wondering whether the movie would go so far as to let Plato try to kiss Jim.  Later, the screenplay makes it clear that Plato was just looking for a father figure, but dude.

Later that night, after the fateful “chickie-run”, Jim tries to explain to his parents what happened, but they’re unable to respond with anything but disbelief, and his mother even threaten to move again.  It’s abundantly clear that Jim’s parents are out of touch, a point that his hammered home again and again.  This approach at first seems overpowering, but director Nicholas Ray apparently was trying to lend the film an emotional, operatic sensibility to give the lead characters more of a mythic stature.

This is also conveyed through the film’s use of color Cinemascope, creating a frame that is just begging to be seen on the big screen where the colors and figures wouldn’t just pop, they’d EXPLODE.  If this was not a popular drive-in movie, it should have been.  That might actually be the best way to watch this movie, if at all possible.

There’s also a curious scene involving Judy’s home life that implies something unsavory is going on.  Judy approaches her father at the dinner table and tries to give him a kiss hello, but he rebuffs her: “Aren’t you getting a little old for that kind of thing?”  She feels hurt and tries again and gets a slap on the face for her trouble.  She runs out of the house and the father says something like, “She used to be so nice, now she’s nothing but trouble!”  A father who can’t accept an innocent kiss from his daughter has more going on underneath than the daughter, I can tell you that.  It’s an eyebrow-raising moment that does more to shed light on Judy’s behavior than anything else in the film.

The message of the film is simple, and it’s directed squarely at the parents: listen to your kids.  The parents in this movie do nothing but express sadness and dismay at their kids’ behavior, and never once do we see any real compassion, except when Jim’s dad (wearing his wife’s apron – more subtle coding?) tries to comfort him before the “chickie-run.”  But his words are hollow and meaningless, because he doesn’t take the time to ask the real questions that need to be asked.  Rebel Without a Cause was released at a time when popular opinion said that juvenile delinquency was largely a product of kids raised in slums or ghettos.  Rebel demonstrated that it didn’t matter where the kids were raised, it’s HOW they were raised that caused their problems.

I give the movie a 7 out of 10 because, while I acknowledge its place in film history, especially with regard to its star, I do feel the dated qualities hard.  But I give it props for delivering an important message, in a film that was powerful enough to lead some communities to ban screenings at local theaters for fear it would give the youth community bad ideas.  Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees…

TRAIN DREAMS

By Marc S. Sanders

Clint Bentley directs a script he co-wrote with Greg Kwedar, based on Denis Johnson’s novella, Train Dreams.  It’s a gorgeous looking picture that covers an early 20th century logger and railroad worker within the dense woods of Washington state.

Joel Edgerton is Robert Grenier, a bearded logger with an unknown background. The soothing voiceover narration from Will Patton tells us that Robert never knew his parents and is unsure of his exact age.  

Unexpectedly, he quickly falls in love with Gladys (Felicity Jones).  They envision an idyllic life together in a log cabin next to a peaceful lakeside.  They have a daughter and could not be happier.  Yet, during logging season, Robert must leave his family behind to cut down trees for industry supply of a quickly evolving western civilization.  He takes other jobs laying down railroad tracks that lend to the conveniences of transportation and shipping (before the reliance of air travel), including the logs he cuts down. His purpose is circular to a thriving country.

His committed work is not always pleasant.  As a means of revenge, a friend is gunned down right in front of him.  The casualness of the act is the most shocking element of this moment.  Still, there is no time to grieve.  

When he’s working on the railroad, he bears witness to the cruel treatment that others deliver to a Chinese immigrant.  He can not stand up to these behaviors.  He has money that needs to be earned.  So the work takes precedence.

A mentor and demolition expert (William H Macy) meets an unfortunate fate, as well.

Tragedy personally befalls Robert upon his return home following a job. Now, the man is left to resort to isolation where little human interaction exists among the wooded areas.

It’s hard to take your eyes off Train Dreams, now playing on Netflix, and one of ten films Oscar nominated for Best Picture.  The screenplay speaks like a Robert Frost poem.  That’s a compliment and a shortcoming for me.  Will Patton says so much when there’s not much to be said.  Rather, Bentley’s film works visually as you watch a concentrated Edgerton focus on his character’s hallucinations and especially the loneliness he endures in the second part of the film.  

Regrettably, this movie is also a little boring.  Sometimes it feels like I’m watching one of those short nature films you look at while in a museum that a documentarian provided.  When I’m a tourist, a ten minute film like this can show the trees getting chopped as they make their slow tumble to ground.  Frankly, when it’s too hot outside is when I go into these theaters to get some air conditioning and a quick snooze.  Train Dreams teeters on that experience.  

There’s no denying how solid the film is considering the subject matter.  Technically it’s very impressive with expansive forest fires and artificial trees masked as tall pines to demonstrate the sawing of hundreds year old barks.  When the camera is pointing up through the green leafed branches into the wide blue expanse of sky, you want to freeze frame and perhaps paint a scenic skyline.  Adolpho Voleso’s cinematography is rich in color.  Definitely worthy of recognition.

I found it interesting how much I took Robert’s perspective for granted.  He uses a floppy aluminum saw that is pulled and pushed to cut through the wood.  As he gets older, a fellow woodsman relies on an battery powered chainsaw, thus making Robert’s skills more obsolete.  

Later, he meets a woman (Kerry Condon) who has been recruited to oversee the treatment of the forests from a high-rise lookout post; she just might the coming of the forest rangers.  Robert only knew of trees from what was way over his head.  Now he can look down upon them.  The ending goes even further and demonstrates how Robert’s self-absorbed isolation held him back from keeping up with a developing age of technology like automobiles and airplanes, far beyond the trains that had been the faster way to travel along the tracks that he built.

Train Dreams is an interesting issue of a National Geographic that I’d never have picked up had the Oscars not given it some recognition.  Now that I’ve seen it, it’ll go back on top of the tall stacks of magazines in my grandmother’s basement.

GILDA (1946)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Charles Vidor
CAST: Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Joseph Calleia
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A small-time gambler hired to work in a Buenos Aires casino discovers his employer’s new wife is his former lover.


Admit it: we’ve all known a couple like these two: Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Gilda (Rita Hayworth).  They’re the kind of couple that inspire lifelong celibacy.  You see them together, and you think one of two things: “Why is SHE/HE with HIM/HER?”  Or, “Well, at least they’re saving two other people.”

The irony of Gilda is that they’re not even a legitimate couple, at least not for very long.  The fact that the movie sees fit to give them a semi-happy ending fits more with the period when it was made than with the characters themselves.  Watching them go off together at the end feels…off.  I know there are exceptions to this rule (see Bound [1996], spoiler alert), but this film noir fairly screams for a tragic ending of some kind, appropriate to the genre.  Instead, the two leads get off the hook just a little too easily, for my money.

But I’m jumping ahead.  In case you didn’t know, Gilda is the 1946 seamy/steamy film noir that forever turned Rita Hayworth into a Hollywood sex symbol.  Humphrey Bogart turned down the lead role (that went to Glenn Ford instead) because he figured, with Hayworth on the screen, no one would be looking at anyone or anything else.  He wasn’t kidding.  From the moment of her iconic entrance to the film (hair flip…“Me?”), Hayworth dominates every moment she’s onscreen, as effortlessly as Monroe, Dandridge, or Loren, assisted by those legendary Jean Louis gowns and costumes.  Especially the famous “Put the Blame on Mame” number, with the slinky black strapless “sleeve” dress, and those long black elbow-length gloves that she peels off ever so slowly…

The story!  Right, the story…

Johnny Farrell is a low-rent gambler in Buenos Aires who is hired by casino owner Ballin Mundson – one of the weirdest character names ever – to watch over his operations while he tends to other business in and around post-war Argentina.  One day Mundson returns from a business trip with a new wife: Gilda, whom he married after a whirlwind one-day romance.  Gilda is as tempestuous as they come, brazenly flirting with Johnny in front of her new husband, who can’t help but wonder why Johnny seems so icy towards her…

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Johnny and Gilda knew each other a lifetime ago.  Their chance meeting in a foreign country ranks right up there with Ilsa wandering into Rick’s Café Américain in North Africa: unlikely, but it makes for a helluva story.

Glenn Ford holds his own in the film as the scruffy, no-nonsense enforcer who can more than hold his own in a fistfight, but whose physical prowess can’t compete with the psychic hold Gilda still has on him.  Of course, the fact that Gilda mercilessly pokes and teases Johnny indicates she’s just as fixated on him.  It’s easy to see how this material could almost become a standard-issue rom-com, but Gilda is made of darker stuff.  Look at it from a certain angle, and there are hints that Johnny and his boss, Mundson, might share a relationship that goes beyond employer/employee, that Gilda knows this, and is using that knowledge to stick the knife even deeper into Johnny’s stomach, just to watch him squirm.

So, Gilda becomes a psychological battle of the sexes, evoking The War of the Roses at times.  Gilda tosses off some zingers that would have made Mae West blush.  (“If I’d been a ranch, they would’ve named me the Bar Nothing.”)  Johnny gets off a couple of his own.  (“Pardon me, but your husband is showing.”  …and, “Statistics show that there are more women in the world than anything else.  Except insects.”)  In between zingers, the plot moves on in the background, but it’s only a clothesline on which to hang the arguments between Gilda and Johnny.  In that respect, it’s like a John Wick film: you’re not there for the plot, you’re there for the action.  It’s entertaining as hell, don’t get me wrong, but they are so good at being despicable to each other that I found myself hoping they DIDN’T wind up together.  Talk about a match made in hell.  Do they deserve each other?  Discuss.

Gilda robustly lives up to the film noir tradition, in style, substance, and story, RIGHT up until the last two or three minutes, when the darkness gives way to the major-chord strings of “happily ever after.”  For that, I personally can’t call it perfect.  But holy black strapless gown, Batman…as they say at Passover, for that alone we should be grateful.