Category: Drama

THE BLUE ANGEL (Germany, 1930)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg
CAST: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron, Rosa Valetti
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An elderly professor’s ordered life spins dangerously out of control when he falls for a nightclub singer.


There are so many things I admire about The Blue Angel that I hardly know where to begin.  The cinematography, the story, the acting, the unbearably tragic arc, the dichotomy of the main character, the debut performance of Marlene Dietrich…just ridiculously top notch all around.  The final 20 minutes or so of the film are so searingly tragic and raw that there were times when I wanted to look away, not out of disgust, but out of social embarrassment.  I’m fully aware of Emil Jannings’s Nazi sympathies, but love him or hate him, this is one of the greatest performances I’ve seen from any film of this period.

[Fair warning, I’m about to really run off at the mouth about this one, so make yourselves comfortable.]

Jannings plays Professor Immanuel Rath, a fussy, stuffy little man who teaches at a local school in Germany somewhere around 1924.  Director von Sternberg directs Rath’s introductory scenes almost as if he were using sound only reluctantly.  With a bare minimum of dialogue, we watch Rath’s morning process as he prepares his clothes just so, eats his breakfast just so, carries his books just so, and arrives at his classroom like Gandalf: never late, never early, but precisely when he means to.  His upper-high school students, all male, respect him just enough to stand at attention upon his arrival, but are rebellious enough to write graffiti on his notebooks, turning his name from “Rath” to the German word for “trash.”

One day, he discovers that several of his male students are in possession of scandalous little postcards picturing a sensuous burlesque performer whose lower regions are covered by a little tuft of actual feathers pasted onto the card.  Blow on the card just right, and her little feather skirt rises to reveal – well, nothing terribly scandalous by today’s standards, but certainly not family friendly in 1924.  Rath is incensed.  How dare these students profane their minds with such affronts to decency?  (We get a brief glimpse of his hypocrisy as he experiments with the feather skirt himself when no one is watching.)

Rath discovers that some of his students have been frequenting a burlesque house called The Blue Angel to see the girl on the postcard.  Her name is Lola Lola, portrayed by Marlene Dietrich in the role that made her a star.  It’s all here: the skimpy outfits, those long legs, the pouty face, sitting backwards on a chair, and the singing voice that eventually led to concert hall appearances in later years when her acting career waned.

Enraged by the thought of his students attending something as inappropriate as a burlesque show, Rath storms to the Blue Angel that very night to try to catch them red-handed.  All his wrath evaporates, though, when he spies Lola in the flesh while she performs.  From that moment, he is doomed.  He winds up in Lola’s dressing room where Lola, seasoned performer that she is, treats him as if he were a rich patron, showering him with compliments and, daringly, gifting him with a pair of her underpants.  Talk about chutzpah.

Predictably, Rath’s students see him at the Blue Angel, and his authority in his classroom starts to wane.  He returns there to give Lola’s underwear back, winds up in a box seat, and watches as she trills the song (in German) “Falling in Love Again.”  She sings directly to him.  He is smitten.  He drunkenly stays the night in her boudoir (nothing happens) and is late to school the next day.  At this point his authority over his students utterly vanishes, he announces his plans to propose to Lola, and his superior essentially fires him from his post.

It’s here where we get one of the first real masterstrokes in von Sternberg’s direction.  Rath carefully empties his desk drawer, fussy as always, picks up a few books, stands, and then slowly looks over the empty classroom.  As he stands, the camera slowly dollies back away from him, increasing our awareness of how large the empty room is, and putting a visual exclamation point on just how momentous his decision is.  He’s throwing away his vocation, everything he’s ever known, and perhaps there’s a moment during this camera move when he is thinking to himself, “What the hell am I doing?”  I’m not doing it justice verbally, but it’s a sensational moment, reminding me of the famous moment in Taxi Driver when Scorsese’s camera tactfully dollies off Travis Bickle during an embarrassing phone call.

The second half of the film involves Rath’s rash proposal to Lola, her improbable acceptance, and his slow inevitable decline.  Up to now, von Sternberg’s direction has been impeccable, using dialogue only when necessary, relying on Emil Jannings’s imposing presence and impressive non-verbal acting, and on Marlene Dietrich’s inimitable beauty and sensuality to underscore their scenes together.  Now, in the tragic second half, von Sternberg REALLY impresses.

Without going into too much detail (you deserve to be as wowed by this movie as I was), let me just list some moments that stood out to me, moments that felt as fresh and moving as any other movie I can think of.

THE WEDDING RECEPTION: At Rath and Lola’s reception, a magician conjures eggs from under Rath’s nose.  The kittenish Lola playfully clucks like a hen.  Rath, besotted beyond reason, smiles and crows like a rooster.  The sight of him making such a ridiculous noise filled me with unease, a reaction I am still unable to completely unpack.  Did I feel sorry for Rath?  Maybe, but why?  He has brought this on himself.  Lola isn’t to blame for his unseemly behavior, though it is all too easy to see how she could be seen as the “villain” of the film.  That is wrongheaded, in my opinion.  If there is a villain in the movie, a person who brings about every bad thing that happens to Rath, it’s Rath himself.

THE EDITING: At one point, Rath discovers that Lola still carries large numbers of those feathery postcards to sell at her performances.  He is adamant: “While I have a penny to my name, you will never sell another one of these postcards!”  Lola’s response is simple, but both wise and somehow chilling: “Well, bring them with us anyway…you never know.”  The camera fades out, and in the very next scene, Rath is sitting at a table, watching Lola perform, and as her song ends, he carefully gathers up the postcards before him and goes table to table, hawking them.  With one single edit, von Sternberg captures not only how wrong Rath was, but also how quickly he has fallen from a place of petty pride to a lowly peddler.  The effect was startling and disheartening at the same time.

THE CALENDAR: Lola is preparing for another performance.  Rath is helping her with a primitive curling iron, but she complains that it’s too hot.  To cool it down, Rath turns to a small day-to-day calendar on the wall, pulls a sheet off, and touches it to the iron to, I guess, burn off some of the heat.  One isn’t enough, so he pulls another sheet off.  We watch as the calendar’s sheets disappear one by one, then in a montage of burning sheets and curling irons as March turns to April turns to November turns to December, and quick as a flash it’s suddenly 1930…four years later.  This astonishing sequence has as much impact as that moment in Cast Away when we fade out on Tom Hanks in the cave and fade back in with the title card FOUR YEARS LATER.

THE FINALE: Wow, I’m really going to have to tread carefully here, but the last 15-20 minutes seal the deal and make The Blue Angel one of the greatest classic films I’ve ever seen.  There is enough heartbreaking pathos and awkwardness and humiliation to satisfy any fan of melodrama.  It’s practically operatic, right down to the image of an anguished clown (long story, watch the movie and see what I mean).  Rath’s rooster crows make an encore appearance, but the circumstances under which he makes those noises are just…I’m having trouble finding the right words.  It’s genuinely hard to watch.  Lola’s portion of responsibility in this sequence is undeniable, but honestly, it’s like that fable about the scorpion and the frog that ends with, “What’d you expect me to do?  I’m a scorpion.”  She is no more evil or immoral than a shark or an earthquake.  In the end, Rath’s hypocrisy and intolerance are rewarded with a comeuppance that is richly deserved, but also pathetic and pitiful, in the most literal sense of those words.

The Blue Angel is one of the most uncompromising depictions of a tragic arc that I’ve ever seen, but it also manages to make the tragic figure inexplicably sympathetic, despite his hypocrisy.  It is achingly, wonderfully sad and melodramatic and heartbreaking, tempered by the occasional song from Marlene Dietrich as well as just being able to gaze upon her from time to time.  Watching it for the first time is an experience I will not soon forget.  I hope I haven’t spoiled too much of it for you if you’ve never seen it, either.  If you haven’t, I urge you to seek it out immediately.  (The German version whenever possible…I’ve seen clips of the English version, and it simply does not carry the same weight as the German version.)

THE OUTSIDERS

By Marc S. Sanders

As we are about to embark on a trip to New York City to celebrate my wife’s half century milestone (wish her a Happy Birthday, please), we decided to watch the film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s celebrated novel The Outsiders, read by many high school juniors and seniors, and now a beloved Broadway musical.  The play has to be better than the movie.  It truly would not take much.

Francis Ford Coppola is the director of this very amateur piece that is best known for introducing a who’s who of the brightest actors that would go on to occupy some of the biggest films of the 1980s and 90s.  One of these guys, someone named Tom Cruise, is still a money maker elite. Ironically, he’s got one of the smallest roles in this film.

I can see the potential talent of C Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze (age 29 here), Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe and Matt Dillon.  Diane Lane is likely giving the best performance in a next to nothing role as a could’ve been puppy love interest.  However, I said potential.  Had they been directed with just a little bit of passion, it’d be nothing but apparent. Coppola didn’t put enough work into getting this cast into shape.

Hinton’s story focuses on two factions of kids from small town Oklahoma, the greasers dressed in jeans with slicked back hair and tough guy attitudes all portrayed by the gang listed above and the Socs (pronounced Sosh), who are the spoiled rich kids dressed in school letterman jackets and khakis.  Their leader is Leif Garrett, the only known celebrity name at the time of this film’s release.  The antagonism between the groups is as evident as the Jets and Sharks.  The greasers flash their switchblades, curse and strut, particularly Matt Dillon as the fearless tough guy leader Dallas. Yet, within this screenplay, and among the performances by the whole cast, Coppola often relies on hokey, cornball drama that is on par with an after school special.  This is a lousy, rejected Hallmark card come to life. I’ve cried more at “Deep Thoughts With Jack Handy.”

The edits of the picture hide much of the bloodshed until a climactic rumble in the pouring rain presents itself with many endless, overdramatized punches and kicks that clearly don’t make contact.  Yes.  I heard Tom Cruise broke his teeth from a slug to his jaw. Otherwise, the ballet boxing of West Side Story has much more threatening smacks and cracks. 

C Thomas Howell is Pony Boy and Ralph Macchio is Johnny – the sixteen-year-olds who are overtaken by the Socs in the middle of the night. One of the prep kids turns up dead as the two young greasers defend themselves.  They hop a freight train and hide out of town, only to be brought into the spotlight when they rescue a group of little kids from a burning church. Pictures are smack dab on the front page.

The Outsiders is a very brief ninety-minute film that does not do enough to establish relationships among these kids.  Howell has the most fleshed out role.  With his two older brothers (Swayze and Lowe), Pony Boy dresses the part but his appreciation for literature and poetry by Margaret Mitchell and Robert Frost says that his life as a greaser is not for him.  His current situation does not allow for any other opportunities, though. Howell is just mediocre in his performance.  I cannot say I related to his supposed anguish and conflict.  He’s a body saying the lines and standing on his mark for the camera.

Just as in The Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio is an annoying over actor.  His character has an abusive relationship with his parents. However, we never see the parents. Frustratingly speaking, I’d question if this kid Johnny is simply a storyteller looking for attention. Why would Coppola leave out this dimension of one the main character’s home life that is frequently mentioned? Macchio looks more concerned with making sure the collar on his jean jacket is popped up with his bangs hanging down just right for a cover photo on Seventeen Magazine.  The profile that has the cute scar imbedded in his tan complexion is front and center. He always looks like he’s posing for a still shot in front of Coppola’s movie camera.  Macchio delivers the final monologue of the piece, and it’s near impossible to believe the actor truly embraced any of the dialogue of the script.  His performance appears mechanically memorized. 

Matt Dillon looks like he was genuinely trying to turn in a tough guy performance, but his moments on film, especially his final scene, look terribly edited and off kilter.  The cutaways that Coppola uses are awful, like a TV movie that is interrupted by commercials.  Only someone axed the ads from the final print and did not tape the film reel properly together.  

The Outsiders is a coming-of-age story hinged on tragedy and the yearning for a better life, particularly for Pony Boy.  Hinton’s book remains essential reading for young adults needing to relate to characters their own age.  It also serves as an effective homework assignment.  Francis Ford Coppola’s film though offers little focus on what makes any character tick or why there’s a conflict between the rival groups.  Where’s the history and backstory?  Most of the actors, especially Estevez and Cruise, come off as if they are high on sugar with incomplete sentences for lines. What are you guys doing here if not to look anything but hyperactive?

West Side Story and Stand By Me quickly found their footing for adolescent boys with insecurities and uncertain futures.   The respective settings of those films knew these misfit kids, and they in turn interacted within the environments. Coppola went the wrong route because there is hardly any bond between the kids and the other folks who reside in this picture.

From a technical standpoint, The Outsiders is a muddled mess of poorly timed original scores, from Carmine Coppola, wedged into scenes that do not call for anything to enhance the emotional heft.  The director often puts one actor’s close up at a zoom in, while a buddy will be in the foreground. This technique looks like an Olan Mills family photograph you get in the mall.  It’s cringey.  It’s hard to take seriously as well.  

The Outsiders simply does not work to acquire an emotional punch of despair and loss.  These pretty boy tough guys have no effective humor even with Tom Cruise behaving like an ugly, incomprehensible wild man and Emilio Estevez donning a Mickey Mouse t-shirt with his signature cackle.  There’s just too little to relate to anything in this picture that S. E. Hinton magnetically achieved within her pages.  Her book was published when she was age seventeen by the way. What an amazing accomplishment!

Regrettably, the filmmaker who upped the scales of the war picture (Apocalypse Now) with terror and disillusionment, and successfully delivered two of the greatest, most operatic films of all time (The Godfather movies), not to mention his smaller but shocking films like The Conversation offered little attention to what S.E. Hinton captured and impressed upon young readers.  If anything, Coppola was more concerned with shooting picturesque, midwestern sunset landscapes that honestly have an artificial texture to the eye.  Nothing from the music to the photography to the editing to the overt contrivances or the acting seems natural here.

The Outsiders is equally regarded as assembling one of the most impressive groupings of eventual male box office stars, as it is for Francis Ford Coppola’s lazy and uninspired film work.

THE SWIMMER (1968)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Frank Perry [reshoots directed by an uncredited Sydney Pollack]
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Janet Landgard, Marge Champion, Kim Hunter, Joan Rivers (!)
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: A well-off ad man visiting friends in a suburban town impulsively decides to swim home via all his neighbors’ swimming pools.


The decidedly odd The Swimmer starts out like it’s going to be one of those pretentious mid-to-late ‘60s “art films” featuring attention-getting zooms, quick edits, and a kitschy/dreamy score that oozes “soap opera” from every note.  (Incidentally, this was Marvin Hamlisch’s first film score.)  It starts mundanely enough, but then it veers imperceptibly into vaguely Lynchian territory, until by the end we’re no longer sure what’s real.  If the payoff doesn’t quite live up to the build-up, I’m prepared to forgive it because of the film’s daring originality, Burt Lancaster’s nude scene notwithstanding.  Hope I didn’t spoil that for you.

Based on an acclaimed story by John Cheever, The Swimmer opens with those ostentatious zoom shots/quick edits of forests and woodland creatures before we meet Ned Merrill (Lancaster), visiting a friend and swimming in their pool.  The neighborhood is decidedly upper-middle class.  The conversation between Merrill and his friends is banal to the point of tedium.  “You ever see such a glorious day?”  “You old son of a gun!”  “Ned Merrill!  How are you, sport?”  Who talks like this?  The dialogue evokes the kind of vibe you’d get from reading a screenplay written by a moderately talented middle-schooler, or perhaps by an advertising executive with no sense of how people talk in the real world.

After some more boring pleasantries and treacly politeness and observations of how nice the weather is, Ned has a brainwave.  He and his wife and daughters live in a house on a hill a mile away.  Or two.  Or five.  It’s never really made clear.  Anyway, he realizes that his friends and neighbors, all of whom have pools, form a river that he can use to swim all the way home.  He never explains where this decision comes from, but whatever, off he goes, to the consternation of his neighbors.

That’s the plot in a nutshell.  For the rest of the film, Ned will visit his neighbors one by one, popping in unexpectedly, take a lap in their pool, and jog off to the next one.  Along the way, he’ll have encounters with his neighbors that will range from friendly to strained to flirty to outright hostility, and two unsavory encounters that involve borderline sexual harassment.  By the time he reaches his goal, everything we’ve seen before will be redefined in light of new information.  I had an idea of what would happen, but I was wrong.  Sort of.  See for yourself.

The Swimmer is a borderline one-trick-pony movie, like Primal Fear.  As good as that movie is, and as good as Edward Norton’s performance is, after watching it the first time, all the suspense is gone.  But The Swimmer is so much odder than anything I’ve ever seen that it gets some kind of award just because of its oddness.  We’re invited to simply watch a man swim in other peoples’ pools and talk to the owners.  At one such encounter, Ned marvels that their 20-year-old daughter, Julie, has grown up so much.  He mentions his own daughters, Ellen and Aggie, probably playing tennis at home.  Julie suggests driving to Ned’s home to meet them…but Ned changes the subject.  This will occur repeatedly.  Ned will mention his wife or daughters, someone will ask how they are, and Ned will abruptly move to the next topic.  (It’s this behavior that made me think I knew what was going on, but as I said, I was wrong.)

The encounter with Julie takes an odd turn: he invites her to join him on his swim, and she agrees.  After crashing a neighbor’s pool, and Ned hurts his leg jumping over a hurdle meant for horses (long story), Ned and Julie share an odd conversation where she confesses she used to like smelling his shirts when she was much younger.  Ned takes in this information and starts flirting with Julie, who is at least 30 years his junior, to the point where it looks as if something unsavory is about to happen.  Nothing does, but the scene itself is a very strange detour, even in the middle of this strange movie.

While Ned’s encounters with his neighbors are all different in one way or another, the first few all have the same thing in common: they’re all trite, by which I mean their dialogue with Ned is filled with lines and sentences that sound, well…scripted.  Not a word of it sounds or feels genuine.  I suppose one could interpret this triteness as an indictment of modern suburbia, where one house and one pool is so like the next as to be indistinguishable from each other.  The same could be said of the people.  One guy brags about his pool’s water filter: “It filters 99.99.99% of all solid matter out of the water.”  Another house features an enormous sliding roof so people can…go swimming while it rains, I guess?  We are treated to scenes of luxury that border on decadence.  At one party, caviar is served, and the guests scoop it up as if it were onion dip.  I was reminded of a line from The Philadelphia Story about “the privileged class enjoying its privileges.”  Is The Swimmer a clumsily disguised diatribe against consumerism?  Sure, why not.

At the end of the day, while The Swimmer does have a buried subtext that is not fully revealed right away, I’ll admit the subtext is not what compels me to recommend it.  I recommend it because it is a cleverly constructed “head-fake” movie, making me think it was about one thing when it was about something else altogether.  Viewers more astute than I may have guessed what was going on, and more power to them.  For myself, my theory was proven wrong at the finale.  The Swimmer gets points for originality, with deductions for the cheesy score and hammy acting.  The back of the Blu-ray describes the movie perfectly: “…a feature-length ‘Twilight Zone’ by way of The New Yorker.”

(P.S.  If you have “seeing Burt Lancaster’s bare ass” on your Movie-Watching Bingo card, this movie will help you fill it.  You’re welcome.)

THE COLOR OF MONEY

By Marc S. Sanders

The Color Of Money is the first and only time that director Martin Scorsese tackled a sequel of sorts.  Paul Newman returned to the screen as Fast Eddie Felson, the hustling pool shark from thirty years prior in The Hustler.  That movie established his career on a bigger scale going forward.

Fast Eddie is older now, and wiser.  He’s much more humbled as a bar owner with a conservative amount of cash on the table to stake younger pool players for small time wagers.  A young John Turturro is who he relies on and quickly loses faith in when a brash, cocky kid named Vincent Lauria (a perfectly cast Tom Cruise) easily undoes his opponent. 

Eddie sees the talent in the kid.  He’s got a helluva break and clears a game of nine ball with as much speed as he has conceit.  What he lacks for in brains and instinct is made up in Vincent’s cool and mature girlfriend Carmen (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in an Oscar nominated role).  It does not take long for Eddie to coach her into realizing that together they can make a lot of money off of what Vincent can do in pool halls across the country.  If only he’d listen to them and do what they tell him to do. Vincent can’t comprehend how sometimes you win a whole lot more, when you lose first.

Scorsese works his camera like a swinging Steadicam.  When he gets close ups of this trio of actors, it’s never just a close up.  He’ll position his lens in a northward direction and then swing around east.  Newman, Cruise and Mastrantonio trust the eye of the camera to follow their performances.  There’s an energy to this kind of shooting.  It makes for a great style.  Scorsese was doing this novel kind of filmmaking, going all the way back to 1971 with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.  The director is so favored because as typical as a script might seem by its title or its prose, he’s going to find an exhilaration to its narrative.

Along with the director’s resident editor Thelma Schoonmaker, there’s a crackle and quickness to the many variations of pool play – much more playing than I believe was featured in The Hustler.  Schoonmaker makes sure to cut in the cracks of the pool balls as they collide with one another.  The blue cue chalk snows off the tip of the cue sticks.  Reflections of the players appear in the shine of the balls.  Close up profiles of Cruise and Newman lower down into frame just before they take their shots.  Before the kinetic energy found in later films like Goodfellas and The Departed, Scorsese and Schoonmaker were already putting their tag team best at play in The Color Of Money.

Yet, all of this is style with not so much substance.  What kind of story does this next installment in the legacy of Fast Eddie Felson have to say?  Not much really.  While the three actors are doing top notch work, the conversations run very repetitive and do not build toward higher stakes or developments.  Time and again they argue over Vincent’s refusal or naivety to understand the hustling strategies that Eddie has in mind.  Carmen gets it but she goes her own way more often than cooperating with Eddie.  Simply, this is a story of the protégé not grasping what the mentor is trying to teach, and it never evolves from that problem.  It gets stagnant.

What changes within the second half of the film is the introduction of a championship pool tournament in Atlantic City.  Therefore, it’s easy to expect a showdown between Vincent and Eddie.  It happens and there is a twist of a dagger included, but then when the real competition is about to begin, Scorsese concludes his film.  Does it matter who is the better player?  I don’t know, but as the film is wrapping itself up, one character gets short changed.  When that’s discovered, the film opts to also shortchange the audience.  I didn’t think that was very fair.

I think about the notorious ending to the HBO series The Sopranos.  Sure, it’s an ending no one will ever forget but for all the wrong reasons, and I defiantly believe it is because the storyteller ran out of imagination or lost his confidence in upholding an ending that he really wanted.  I feel the same way with The Color Of Money.  The film establishes the skills, intelligence and capabilities of these characters.  Yet, when you take the tool kits away from them, the building never gets completed; only left abandoned.

I’m drawn to watch The Color Of Money.  Michael Ballhaus’ photography is smokey and colorful. I can’t get enough of Paul Newman’s gravelly vocal inflections or even how he unfolds hundred dollar bills from the roll in his pocket.  Tom Cruise humbles himself to look like an idiotic jerk and it works well against the maturity of his scene partners.  Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio oozes sexual appeal with a lot of brains to uphold the cons.  She has sensational scenes with Paul Newman.  There’s a coolness to the picture because of the cast, the settings, the sounds, the visuals, the editing and the direction. 

This film arrived in 1986 with rock music from the likes of Eric Clapton and Phil Collins.  Beyond Miami Vice and an assortment of John Hughes teen flicks, these artists were making for effective needle drops of atmosphere in films from the 1980s.  Scorsese’s use of the camera keeps me engaged, but when I look at what the characters are anchored to only do, and never rise above, the film does not hold the weight of other character studies that several of Newman’s and Scorsese’s pictures were so astute at achieving.

One scene transcends the arc of Newman’s character and it works beautifully within or out of the context of the picture.  A relatively unknown Forest Whittaker portrays an unlikely kid who goes up against Fast Eddie. As the long scene evolves over their pool competition, the writing hearkens back to the weaknesses and torment that defined Eddie Felson’s character in The Hustler.  If you watch the first film and then jump over to this scene, you recognize a connection for the protagonist of both pictures.  Beyond that The Hustler and The Color Of Money stand a long distance apart from each other.  This scene though is always a favorite of mine for the eventual Oscar winner, Forest Whittaker.  Watch how Whitaker holds his cue stick when he exits the scene.  Think about how he picks the cash up from the table after Newman drops it.  Consider, what his character Amos really means when he asks Eddie: “Do you think I need to lose some weight?”

Had The Color Of Money used more of Whitaker’s character in the film along with the other three, there might have been something more solid to say and introduce within the world of pool hustling with a 1980s barroom vibe.  Same could be said if John Turturro’s character was utilized more.

Paul Newman received the Oscar for this picture.  The actor was nominated seven times before, having never won and the irony is by the time this nomination arrived, Newman opted not to attend the ceremony.  Roles in films like The Verdict (for which he should have won the award) and Cool Hand Luke were much more memorable and fleshed out.  I’d argue Newman likely knew this was not his best performance because it was not the best written of his long-established career, and so he genuinely did not expect to win.  Because he won, it became a celebration of his legendary status as an actor who should have been taken much more seriously, much sooner.   (Two more nominations would follow in Newman’s career.)

THE TWO OF US (France, 1967)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Claude Berri
CAST: Michel Simon, Roger Carel, Paul Préboist, Alain Cohen
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Fresh

PLOT: In German-occupied France during World War II, a Jewish child is sent away from his family and conceals his religious affiliation from the anti-Semitic elderly man that takes care of him.


What are we to make of Pépé Dupont, the grandfatherly old man at the center of Claude Berri’s film The Two of Us?  Here is the kind of craggy, crotchety, yet endearing old man we’d like to turn into when we get to be his age.  He loves his 15-year-old dog almost as much as he loves his wife, if not more.  He’s a vegetarian who doesn’t like it when his wife cooks rabbit for dinner.  “Cannibal!” he exclaims.  He makes friends easily with Claude, the little 9-year-old boy who comes to live with him and his wife in the French countryside in late 1943, sent away by his Jewish parents who feared for his safety during the German occupation of Paris.

But Dupont makes some comments at the dinner table about Jews that makes it very clear: he is anti-Semitic.  He quotes statistics about how the percentage of Jews in political office is vastly higher than the percentage of Jews in France.  The little boy, Claude, is instantly cautious and tentatively asks Dupont, how can you tell if someone is a Jew?  “Why, by their smell, and their large noses, and their flat feet that keeps them out of the army, but look how fast they run to make money!”

These scenes and others like them are intentionally jarring because they emerge from a man who is utterly unaware he’s talking to a Jewish child.  Dupont’s deep-seated bigotry is as much a part of him as his beloved dog, Kinou, but it is so blindingly wrongheaded that he completely overlooks the fact that Claude is Jewish himself.  It’s a situation that is both funny and heartbreaking at the same time: funny because we laugh at the ignorance of someone blinkered by his prejudices, and heartbreaking that such attitudes are harbored by a man who would otherwise be the perfect picture of a loving grandfather.  (Or surrogate grandfather in this case, but you get the idea.)

The Two of Us is based on the actual experiences of director Claude Berri, which makes the film even more poignant.  Over the course of the film, little Claude will cautiously befriend Dupont, but he is careful to never let Dupont’s wife wash him (it wouldn’t do for her to see he has been circumcised).  He memorizes the Lord’s prayer.  He assumes a new last name – Longuet instead of the more Jewish “Langmann.”  Over time, he even becomes bold enough to tweak Dupont’s ignorance.  When Dupont says all Jews have large noses and curly hair, Claude gleefully points out Dupont’s own bulbous nose and frazzled hair and runs away in mock terror: “You’re a Jew!”

Perhaps I’m making this film sound like a dreary exercise in pointing out the obvious – anti-Semitism is wrong, DUH – but it’s far more than that.  Berri’s film is very careful to never, ever include a scene in which Dupont is shown the error of his ways.  The closest we get is when Dupont’s son refuses to enter his house because Dupont supports the Vichy (pro-German) Prime Minister Pétain as opposed to Charles de Gaulle.  Aside from that, we are simply allowed to observe Dupont’s behavior and Claude’s reactions.  Berri is smart enough to realize that people (generally) know right from wrong on an instinctive level and do not need to be preached at.  So few films dare to assume their audiences have a brain that it’s a relief when one is discovered, waiting in some long-forgotten corner of cinema history.

The dichotomy between Dupont’s beliefs and his obvious affection for Claude define the word “provocative.”  It forces us to realize that not all bigots are loud-mouthed blowhards.  They can be just as charming and effusive and loving as your best friend’s favorite uncle or aunt.  Is Dupont evil in The Two of Us?  Some of his core beliefs are rotten, for sure, but I started to take pity on him a little bit.  Like so many other racists, his attitudes were probably taught to him by his own parents, and he simply accepts them as reality without realizing how deeply wrong he is.  The phrase “the banality of evil” has perhaps been overused of late (especially in the wake of Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant film The Zone of Interest), but it occurred to me time and again during scenes showing Dupont playing with Claude, doing chores with Claude, helping Claude with his first crush, and so on.  We get lulled into the idea of a wonderfully jolly fellow…and then he says something anti-Semitic, and it all comes crashing down again.

Not only that, but we get hints and omens of what is occurring on the wider world stage during the war.  At Claude’s new school, children’s heads are checked for lice.  When they are discovered on another boy’s head, the teacher immediately sits him down and shaves his head, right then and there, using a pair of uncomfortable-looking clippers, to the amusement of the other schoolchildren.  As the boy’s hair falls to his feet in clumps, and the other kids are laughing, Berri cuts to Claude, who observes the process without a trace of emotion.  What is he thinking?  Is he aware of the concentration camps?  Or were they still just rumors to everyone else in France in 1943?

The Two of Us feels like a Fellini film (poignant reminiscences of childhood) cross-bred with a Stanley Kramer message picture, minus the sermonizing.  It shifts between delight and solemnity with no warning, making each shift stand out that much more, and enhancing the storytelling by making us passive observers, letting us make our own judgements without guidance from an overanxious screenplay.  This movie was made to be discussed around the water cooler, or on a podcast, or in a movie chat room, just so we can try to wrap our heads around exactly what this film is trying to say by making the kindly old man at the center of the film the source of all of its moral and ethical conflict.

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (Italy, 1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luchino Visconti
CAST: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Claudia Cardinale
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90% Fresh

PLOT: An impoverished family from rural southern Italy moves north in search of a better life in Milan, a “big city” that puts their familial bonds to the test.


Movies like Visconti’s celebrated Rocco and His Brothers are much-needed reminders that films need not provide explosions or alien invasions to be interesting or exciting.  I won’t say it’s perfect (several scenes could have been trimmed and still been effective), but I was as absorbed in the story as I am when reading a particularly good novel.  (For some reason, I was reminded of my headspace while reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch; the story and style grabbed hold of me and had me riveted the whole time, despite the fact my preferred tastes run to Crichton, Clancy, and King.)

Since I make no claims to be a historian, filmic or otherwise, I cannot vouch for the verisimilitude of Rocco and His Brothers in terms of Italy’s social and demographic picture in the late 1950s/early 1960s.  I seem to remember reading something somewhere about how this period reflected to some degree the Dust Bowl era in the United States when displaced midwestern families flocked to the West coast in search of better lives.  In the world of this film, we are led to understand that families like the Parondis, faced with financial hardships, were migrating north to Milan and other larger, modernized cities.  Some folks were able to adjust, others were not, and that was that.  The Parondis – Mamma Parondi and her five sons – are determined to make the move work no matter what.

The tone of constant struggle is set near the beginning when the Parondis arrive in Milan and, ominously, no one meets them at the station.  The eldest brother, Vincenzo, was supposed to be there, but he was distracted by a gathering of his girlfriend’s family.  When the Parondis arrive unannounced to the gathering, they are initially met with open arms, but innate prejudices about “country folk” get the better of everyone and they leave in a huff.  They find cheap lodging and the brothers make their first bits of money by shoveling snow.  A revealing scene shows the mother rousing her sons out of bed in the middle of the night at the first sign of snowfall so they can beat everyone else to the jobs.  Rocco and his brothers are reluctant at first, but they rally together and stay positive because, well, they must.  These strong ties will be tested as never before by the time the credits roll.

The film is broken up into sections, one for each brother.  The first section, “Vincenzo”, shows how his life seems to have changed for the better after relocating himself to Milan some months before the rest of his family, but their sudden arrival puts a crimp in his personal life when he is obliged to move in with them.  The next, very lengthy chapter focuses on Simone, a handsome, outgoing fellow who is spotted by a boxing coach and achieves local fame by winning a high-profile match soon after he begins training.

Shortly after this win, the family gets entwined with a local prostitute named Nadia who arrives unexpectedly on their doorstep in need of some clothes.  Before long, she becomes involved romantically with Simone, but tells him outright that she’s not interested in anything long-term, despite his obvious desire to be near her whenever possible.  The affair ends, and Nadia leaves town after having a crucial conversation with Rocco.

The third chapter, “Rocco”, follows Rocco after he serves a brief tour of duty in the military, after which he fatefully reconnects with Nadia after over a year.  They fall in love, and Nadia surprises herself by truly falling for Rocco despite her previous wishes not to be involved in anything permanent.  But when Simone discovers their relationship, events are set in motion that are as devastating as they are unexpected.

(The last two chapters, “Ciro” and “Luca”, focus on the fallout of the previous three sections.)

Rocco and His Brothers feels like it was adapted from an Italian opera.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if I learned that someone had turned it into an opera.  There are emotions and reversals and shocks and tragedies on display here that rival anything on American daytime television, but it rarely feels like soap opera.  Yes, there are some moments when the characters and the filmmakers take the time to deliver speeches that don’t seem to spring out of any true motivation other than to pound home the point the director is trying to make at that stage in the film.  (I’m thinking especially of Ciro’s final scene.)  But I am inclined to forgive these momentary lapses in momentum because, in retrospect, they lend emotional weight to the characters.  Novels can achieve this with a paragraph or two detailing the inner thoughts of their characters, but in film, the characters have to tell you what they’re thinking, verbally or nonverbally, or the audience gets lost.

I have hinted only vaguely about certain tragic aspects of the story.  This is because Visconti and his editor took great pains to allow them to arrive organically in a way that took me completely by surprise, so it would be wrong of me to give those surprises away.  For those of you who have seen the film, you know what I’m talking about.  It’s these moments that elevate Rocco and His Brothers into something more than a mere soap opera.  Some of the acting will strike modern audiences as exercises in histrionics, especially as exhibited by Mamma Parondi and Nadia.  To that I would say: “What do you want from opera, subtlety?”

Rocco and His Brothers is one of those elusive films that I’d heard and read about for some time now, and I’m grateful that I’ve finally seen it.  I’ll be honest, it’s not exactly a film I’ll take down and rewatch multiple times in a year, but it’s worth seeking out if you’re looking for a good old-fashioned family drama that’s not quite a tear-jerker, but it’s certainly no bed of roses, either.  Martin Scorsese once deemed it one of 39 foreign films every moviegoer should see before they die.  And if you can’t trust Marty, who can you trust?

THE HUSTLER

By Marc S. Sanders

To get inside the turmoil that Fast Eddie Felson feels requires witnessing his highs and lows, all within a forty-hour time span, which equates to about thirty minutes in movie time.  Fast Eddie is The Hustler, and he was famously portrayed by Paul Newman, arguably his breakthrough role as a top billing super star.

Felson is a cocky, hard drinking pool player.  He’s got talent, but no matter how much he wins he’s always the loser because he has no discipline.  Eddie and his partner Charlie (Myron McCormick) travel from town to town, entering pool halls and setting up a bait and catch for some quick cash.  Charlie keeps his cool and treats the act like a profession.  Eddie has no subtlety.  Because he’s so how high on his expertise and what it earns him, he now only has his eye on dethroning the best in the country.  Eddie wants to take on Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason, in his only Oscar nominated role).

Fats sure looks intimidating.  Gleason handled his extra weight beautifully throughout his whole career, whether it be with his outrageous Ralph Kramden comedy, or when he was just being stand up Gleason for a live audience.  As well, his large frame appears kingly when he enters the pool hall.  He’s dressed to the nines with his hat, overcoat, silk tie, cuffs and studs, a cigarette in his hand, and the red carnation confidently tucked in his lapel.  The movie is in black and white, but that little flower had to be red if adorned by Minnesota Fats.  No question about it.

Newman versus Gleason in the first section of Robert Rosen’s drama is stunning to witness.  Like the actors who portray these characters, the antagonist was already a legend, while the up and comer was on the brink of higher class.  Both are the best of the best at pool, but as this scene progresses, with the regulars at Ames Pool Hall watching with their burning cigarettes and stained whiskey glasses in hand, the competition becomes a fierce and eerily quiet test of endurance.  Fast Eddie can keep on winning and winning, round after round, hour after hour, taking thousands of dollars out of Fats’ pockets, but if the fat man doesn’t surrender, has anyone really won or lost?

The Hustler isn’t so much about pool playing as it is about being a hustler or a con man who has no way to be genuine with himself or others in his life.  After the showdown between the two has finally concluded, Eddie gets acquainted with a woman who frequents the nearby bus depot.  Her name is Sarah (Piper Laurie), another hard drinker and someone who is not looking for love or companionship but will get trapped in Eddie’s charm.  What’s at play though is if their relationship, based initially on sex and booze, has anything more substantial to uphold their quick connection.  That is about to get tested by another member of this cast.

Bert Gordon (George C Scott) is the high stakes investor ready to front Eddie with a lot of money to go on the road and clean up on other wealthy players at the table.  Bert recognized a thoroughbred when Eddie went against Fats.  Now he wants to use him, but will Sarah serve a purpose or become a distraction in Bert’s plans for himself first, and Eddie second?

There’s a lot to think about when summing up The Hustler.  It’s not a typical sports film with the standard training montages.  The protagonist doesn’t necessarily get a beat down, only to triumph by the end.  Rosen’s film goes deeper than the pool playing that rests on the felt table surfaces.  Rosen co-wrote this script based on a novel by Walter Tevis, about a man overcoming the demons pecking at his attributes and skills.  When he’s not the trickster, he must ensure that he’s not getting tricked.

I was first introduced to Fast Eddie Felson with Martin Scorsese’s follow up picture called The Color Of Money, released twenty-five years after this film.  I like the coolness and rhythm of that film, but it’s mostly an exercise in Tom Cruise machismo.  It was only later that I saw The Hustler per my dad’s advice.  I didn’t care for it the first time I saw it.  Once the first act was over between Newman and Gleason, I found the picture to be slow moving and devoid of much energy.  I could not relate to the long sequence of Eddie getting involved with Sarah.  Unlike Scorsese’s film, Rosen does not rely on much music and quick edits to keep you alert.  It felt more like a movie drowning in the characters’ own drunken stupors.

Now that I have seen the film for a second time though, many years later, I can’t help but recognize the themes that carry over to The Color Of Money.  The Hustler works better than its sequel because it functions as a character study in maturity and endurance.  The Color Of Money sets itself up that way for the Cruise character. Yet, I’m not sure it reaches a conclusion to any of the arcs or transitions for either an older Eddie Felson or for the hot shot 1980s kid, Vincent, the Tom Cruise character that Eddie mentors.

The Hustler has triumphs, but it has some shocking heartache for several characters as well.  Eddie has much to overcome internally as well as physically throughout the course of its narrative.  This fictional story had to be captured within this certain section of time (six months to a year, I think) to show how these appealing, yet cursed, individuals forever change one another.  After the film has closed, Rosen brings up the closing credits in the quiet pool hall allowing his characters to pack themselves up and walk out of frame.  There is something open ended to when the film chooses to stop. The viewer may think for a while after it’s over.  Rosen allows the viewer to take his last gulp of whiskey or bourbon and put out his cigarette and throw on his overcoat before stepping out into the cold late hours on the wet sidewalk below.

There are many impressive pool shots on display, thanks especially to the professional Willie Mosconi.  Shots are also done beautifully by Newman and Gleason.  Absolutely amazing to watch what they accomplish with a cue stick.  However, you don’t watch The Hustler for just trick billiard shots.  Rather you look at this intense drama to see a man struggling to be a winner or remain a loser.  What you realize very early on is that the outcome is never measured by how much money is wagered or what lines a man’s pockets.  Instead, The Hustler is assessed by what these people choose to do next.  Play or not play.  Bet or not bet.  Hustled or not get hustled.

THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1932)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Frank Capra
CAST: Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Toshia Mori, Walter Connolly
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: During the Chinese Civil War, an American missionary is gradually seduced by a courtly Chinese warlord holding her captive in Shanghai.


When I hear people talking about the “pre-Hays-Code era” of Hollywood, I conjure up seldom-seen images of nearly-nude starlets bathing or swimming or dancing in unison, as filmmakers and studios took advantage of the proven formula: Sex Sells.  But it never really occurred to me that some filmmakers would be able to use that freedom to make films that not only showed a little bit of skin, but also took the time to tell a story that appealed to mature adults in ways that seem fresh and alive nearly a century later.

Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a contemporary “Beauty-and-the-Beast” tale of an American missionary, Megan (Barbara Stanwyck), who travels halfway around the world to Shanghai to marry her childhood sweetheart, Bob (Gavin Gordon), also a missionary.  It’s set in an unspecified year during the Chinese Civil War [1927-1949] when turmoil rocked the city and hundreds of thousands of refugees filled the streets.  A remarkable opening shot shows hundreds of extras flowing past the camera as Shanghai burns in the background, while a houseful of Americans prepares for Megan’s wedding, untouched and unbothered by the human misery thirty feet from their doorway.  (I was reminded of the idyllic family scenes in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun where English families held birthday parties oblivious to the impending chaos in Japan leading to World War II.)

Bob insists on postponing his wedding to Megan so he can help rescue some orphans stranded in a burning section of the city.  During the rescue effort, they are separated; in a surprisingly violent scene, Megan is struck on the head by an angry civilian and is knocked unconscious.  She wakes up on a train and finds herself under the care of General Yen (Nils Asther), a famous warlord, reputed to be more bandit than soldier, but who is unfailingly courteous and polite to Megan, even as he informs her that he is unable to return her to Shanghai for security reasons, effectively making her his prisoner.

This scene on the train is a masterpiece of visual storytelling.  Yen sits in a chair and is tended to by Mah-Li (Toshia Mori) who seems to be more than just Yen’s servant.  In an unspoken passage, Mah-Li puts a pillow under Yen’s head, covers his legs with a blanket, and reclines on a chaise.  Megan, with her head bandaged, observes this ritual, then notices Yen staring intently at her.  She becomes acutely aware that she is showing a small patch of bare leg through her covers.  As slowly as possible, she gently pulls the covers up to cover her leg.  Mah-Li observes all of this, Megan watches Mah-Li, and they all go to sleep, each one of them knowing exactly what has been stated without saying a word.  Brilliant.

In a bold move, once Megan is under Yen’s care/protection/whatever, the film never cuts back to her fiancé or to any of the missionaries.  In fact, Yen refers to a Chinese newspaper article which states that Megan is missing and presumed dead.  So that takes care of that.

In another scene of startling violence for its time, Megan wakes up one morning in her private room to the sound of gunfire.  Yen’s soldiers are executing prisoners in a courtyard across the way.  Megan is horrified and complains to General Yen, who promptly orders the soldiers away: “They are taking the rest of them down the road, out of earshot.”  Megan calls him cold-blooded, but he reasonably says he has no rice to feed any prisoners: “…isn’t it better to shoot them quickly than let them starve to death slowly?”

The theme of the film establishes itself in this and other scenes.  Megan, a Christian missionary who believes that people can and must be good for the sake of their souls and their fellow man, finds herself at odds with (and strangely attracted to) a soldier who is brutal by necessity and has no illusions about any innate goodness to be found in any man during a time of war.  There is a powerful scene when she argues with Yen, and in a heated moment utters a racial slur, and as soon as she says it Yen goes silent and squints at her, and she realizes she has crossed a line.

This is not the kind of moral and ethical complexity I expected from a melodrama made only five years after the advent of sound.  I saw the name of Frank Capra and the weirdly evocative title, and I imagined a potboiler with outdated attitudes and cheesy dialogue and racial stereotypes galore.  I could not have been more wrong.  Yes, the title character is played by Nils Asther, a Swedish actor in “yellowface,” but I had to remind myself that, in the time the film was made, this was de rigueur for most films dealing with Asian characters (the highly popular Charlie Chan films starred white actors in the role for years).  I don’t endorse the practice, but it is a fact that must be acknowledged.  And, it must also be said, Nils Asther’s performance as a Chinese man is quite convincing.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen gives us espionage, intrigue, forbidden romance, high melodrama that teeters on the verge of soap opera but never gives in to that temptation (not like Gone with the Wind would do in 1939 with, let’s face it, a rather similar character arc for the two romantic leads).  It’s a film that could be remade today, almost word-for-word, and I have no doubt it would feel right at home with today’s hip audiences.  So many other films of that era feel obviously dated by their dialogue or their performances.  The Bitter Tea of General Yen suffers none of those drawbacks.  It’s a modern classic that just happens to be over 90 years old, that’s all.

[Author’s Note: there is, in fact, one sequence which I’ll call “The Dream Sequence” that feels uncomfortably over-the-top in its depiction of the vilest racial stereotypes associated with Asians.  However, given the context of the scene, who’s having the dream, why they’re having it, and the dream’s resolution, it fits perfectly with the story.  I can’t find it in myself to “cancel” this film based on this sequence.  Just in case anyone was wondering.]

TUESDAY (2023)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Daina Oniunas-Pusic
CAST: Julia Louis-Drefyus, Lola Petticrew, Arinzé Kene (voice)
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 82% Fresh

PLOT: A mother and her teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of an astonishing talking bird.


Movies about death are a dime a dozen.  Movies about “Death” with a capital D, as a character, are a bit rarer, and for a movie to make its mark in this subgenre, the personification of Death incarnate must be something interesting or unusual.  Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen portrayed Death in the expected way, a skeletal figure cloaked in black and carrying a scythe, but it could also disguise itself.  Meet Joe Black dressed Death in a tux and gave it Brad Pitt’s face and body – perhaps unlikely, but good for ticket sales.  And in the most famous movie version of Death, it was a pale man in black who played chess with Max von Sydow in Ingmar Bergman’s uber-classic, The Seventh Seal.

But no movie that I’ve ever seen has ever approached the character of Death itself the way Tuesday does.  In this film, Death is a bird.  A parrot with dirty gray feathers.  A parrot that can change size at will, sometimes as tall as a house, sometimes as tiny as a toad (or smaller), and sometimes just parrot-sized.  And, as we eventually discover, it can talk and mimic voices.

Tuesday looks and feels like an early Spike Jonze film, back in the days of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.  It is filled with imagination and unexpected plot turns and laden with meaning, but it never feels pretentious or preachy.  It tells a familiar story – we must make peace with Death one way or the other – but the uniqueness of Death’s form and what happens after it reveals itself had me riveted for the entire running time of the film.

In this film, Tuesday is a 15-year-old girl (Lola Petticrew) who is dying of an unspecified disease that has relegated her to home-hospice care with an attentive, if slightly impersonal, nurse (Leah Harvey) and her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, giving the performance of her career).  Zora has not seemed to get past the first stage of grief, denial.  She literally sneaks past Tuesday’s room so she can leave the house just as the nurse arrives, without having to speak to her.  Instead of going to work, Zora spends her day going to pawn shops and coffee shops and sleeping on park benches.

On one such day, Tuesday looks up and sees…this parrot.  The overall vibe of this parrot is hard to describe.  It looks beat up, it’s dingy, it’s blind in one eye, but there is a sense of menace to it.  Tuesday immediately intuits what the parrot is and why it’s there.  As it approaches her to perform its duty, Tuesday stops it by telling a joke.  (It’s the one about the cop who stops a guy who has twelve penguins in his car.)  The parrot takes it in and…laughs.  I’ve never been in the same room with a laughing psychotic, but I would imagine it would sound pretty much the same as when Death laughs.

And then the parrot opens its mouth and talks to Tuesday.  They have a conversation.  And suddenly Death seems to suffer some kind of panic attack, as the voices of all the creatures on Earth whose time has come assault Death’s ears.  Tuesday instinctively coaches it through a breathing exercise.  The voices go away.  She recommends a bath.  They bond.  She pages through a history book and gets Death’s commentary on dead historical figures.  Stalin: “An absolute prick!”  Jesus: “Oh, He LOVED irony.”  It mimics Jesus’ voice.  Whatever you think Jesus’ voice really sounded like, I promise you will be surprised.

Also, don’t get the idea that this is an all-out comedy because of the above dialogue.  Keep in mind that this is Death we’re talking about.  Death’s voice, when it speaks, is low, gravelly and menacing, even when it’s cracking jokes.  At one point, Tuesday plays an old song on her computer, and Death, being eternal, is familiar with it.  It even sings along and dances.  At least, as far as any parrot CAN dance.  Yet even in this moment of levity, there is still that sense of menace in the offing because of that brilliantly chosen voice, provided by an actor named Arinzé Kene, who is unknown to me, but if I ever see that he recorded an audiobook, I’m buying it.

This whole time, I’m watching the movie thinking to myself, WHERE is this GOING.  I was fascinated by this exceedingly odd couple.  The direction by first-timer Daina Oniunas-Pusic is just as assured and risky as anything by Spike Jonze or Sofia Coppola.  I was worried that it was going to veer off into a weird tangent where Death falls in love with Tuesday, but nothing like that happens.  Death knows its function, and so does Tuesday, so the problem now is how to deal with Tuesday’s mother, who is clearly not prepared to deal with Tuesday’s death, imminent or otherwise.

…and from here on out, I am going to give no more story specifics.  To say that I went into this movie cold is an understatement.  Trust me, the colder you are, the better it will be.  The ultimate message of the film, as I said, is not that far removed from any number of other films.  I would even compare it to the first Inside Out from Pixar, which demonstrated that sadness is an ultimately necessary part of becoming who we are.  Tuesday also uses a CG character (in the real world) to remind us that the only way to make peace with who we are is to make peace with where we’ll all be in 100 years.  The final words of the film are a call to action to everyone watching.

[Ed. Note: Tuesday is one of those so-called rarities, a completely original studio film, released in movie theaters before heading to a streamer, that’s not a sequel or insanely high-budget.  It’s intelligent, compelling, and non-stop surprising.  And it had absolutely zero publicity, at least in my area.  I saw no trailers, no posters, no internet hype.  According to boxofficemojo.com, it has grossed a little over $320,000 since its domestic release on June 7th.  Not exactly setting attendance records.  If you’re interested in seeing it in theaters, I’d say your window is extremely limited at this point.]

THE RIVER

By Marc S. Sanders

A film like Mark Rydell’s The River only thrives on witnessing the misery of people living with the misery of others.  That’s not to say this is not how ordinary people are often forced to live.  There’s too much suffering in the world.  I can never deny that.  A homeless shelter or a prison are settings of great misfortune, hardship and sadness.  Yet for a movie, sometimes you must ask what the point is, especially when it is apparent that the heroes are destined to lose against the forces of nature while the villain is entirely correct in his own cause.  Sometimes in a no-win situation it is honorable to just give up.  I wish Tom Garvey, the corn farmer, would have just quit being a farmer and sought a better life for his wife Mae and their two young children.

Tom and Mae are played by Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek.  He is the current generation who owns the Tennessee corn crop farm that his family lineage has passed down.  The first twenty minutes of The River depict the harshness of terrible rainstorms that flood the nearby river and wash away the family’s prized crops and land.  Tom, Mae and the children do everything in their power to recede the water as the rain continues to come down in buckets.  Mae fills up sacks of mud and water with their daughter Beth.  Their son Lewis works with Tom on the beat-up tractor against a never-ending battle of plowing the flood waters away from the land.  There’s no way to overcome this terrible plague of weather that comes at least twice every year.  As I watch the sopping wet struggle that opens the picture in the middle of a stormy night, shot very well by Rydell and his crew, I already ask myself what’s the point?  Get out of this situation Tom!!!!! Take up babysitting, tutor, become a fireman, go back to school.  Relocate for heaven’s sakes!!!!

What recuses the Garvey family and the farm, one more time, is when the rain finally stops.

Scott Glenn is Joe Wade.  He is a wealthy industrialist, who also grew up in these parts under a family legacy.  Joe is on the good side of the state politicians and is aggressive in buying out the farmers’ land so that he can flood the valley, build a dam and use the overabundance of water to power the utilities of the area in a more efficient and much less costly way for everyone.  And he’s the villain of the story????????

Joe makes sense.  Tom’s passion for holding on to what his family has owned does not.  I get the idea of grasping on to family heirlooms like my grandfather’s watch that he maybe kept hidden in an uncomfortable orifice while being held captive by the Nazis, or the prized jewel that survived a shipwreck generations ago.  I also understand the desire to carry the torch of the harsh labor a father and a father before endured and died for while allowing a farm to thrive.  Yet, there are children to feed and debts to pay. The ruin that comes from the acts of God do not empathize.  Therefore, I say again, sometimes the bravest and most sensible thing a person can do is actually quit.

Tom, along with most of the neighboring farmers, are adamant about not selling their land to Joe.  When auctions occur to sell off the equipment and leftover supplies of the few that do surrender, it is practically considered a gross violation of a sacred code in these parts.  I look at the stubborn folks who frown upon their peers as terribly disrespectful.  The script is expecting me to empathize with Tom and those who stand with him though. 

Midway through, The River takes a detour as Tom leaves to do hard labor elsewhere to earn much needed cash.  This is where misery does not love company.   He is one of many men selected to do factory work as an inexpensive replacement for the union workers on strike.  Tom, along with the other recruits, are threatened, called scabs, and in a glaring scene spit directly in the face.  A fellow worker is beat up in the middle of the night.  All of this is powerful footage and yet who am I supposed to empathize with?  These workers on strike are demanding better benefits and rights.  A guy like Tom, who values the survival of the Garvey farm, interferes in someone else’s just cause for his own welfare. 

I think about films like Schindler’s List and even The Lord Of The Rings fantasies and I witness the hardships and suffering of a collective people.  Those stories never expect me to value the misery of a select few over others.  I take stock in a whole populace.  In Mark Rydell’s film, however, I feel like I’m only asked to cry for Tom Garvey’s relief, the stubborn father who is defiant for an unlikely future of promise for the area he occupies while also ignoring the welfare of his family against the forces of nature.  Joe is offering Tom and Mae hundreds of thousands of dollars for their land so that he can enhance the state.  Joe’s bounty will rescue the family from insurmountable debt and the unforgiving floods that repeatedly destroy their crops.  Still, I’m supposed to believe that Joe is the asshole.

Sissy Spacek was nominated for Best Actress for her performance.  She competed against Sally Field (who won) and Jessica Lange.  Both were ironically featured in their own “farm life films” in 1984.  Spacek remains one of Hollywood’s finest actors.  However, I did not think there was much for her to do here.  A drawn-out sequence has Mae caught under a tractor with a nasty wound while the blistering heat bears down with no one around to help.  It has its moment of suspense because this film could go in many different directions of tragedy, but a development like this is more circumstantial than performance based.  If Katherine Hepburn or Laurence Olivier were under that tractor, the scene would not play out much differently.  It’s just a standard farmer accident destined to be included in a standard farmer picture.

The possibility of a love triangle is also implied during the film.  As soon as I saw the opening credits (Sissy Spacek, Mel Gibson, Scott Glenn), I hoped against all hope that the story would not go there, and yet…

Having hardly even used a rake or a shovel, I know that farming is a grueling life and still so necessary for our world consumption to survive.  The River attempts to demonstrate this message. I empathize with people like Tom.  I really do.  However, I empathize with the sacrifice they may need to take, not with their with their foolhardy stubbornness or their intrusion upon others’ challenges for gain.  If a doctor told me that no matter what efforts he performs he will not be able to save my arm or my leg, I’m going to have to believe him and accept that the limb must be amputated.  If an overflowing river and an unbearably long rainstorm affects my home, my farm, my family and my livelihood at least twice a year, eventually I’m going to come to my senses and tell myself that the bad guy is probably right. 

Contrary to the well-known slogan, sometimes money is everything.