Tag: Mig's Reviews

THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT (United Kingdom, 1982)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Peter Greenaway
CAST: Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Ann-Louise Lambert, Hugh Fraser
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Fresh

PLOT: An insouciant young artist is commissioned by the wife of a wealthy landowner to make a series of drawings of the estate while her husband is away.


The directorial debut film of Peter Greenaway at first feels like a mashup of earlier British period films, most notably Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones.  It contains much of the painterly beauty and some – not a lot – of the stateliness of Kubrick’s film, combined with the irreverence of Tom Jones, especially concerning sexual matters.  However, The Draughtsman’s Contract makes its own mark, particularly in the closing sequences when revelations occur throwing everything that has come before into a different light.  In behind-the-scenes interviews on the Blu-ray, multiple people say multiple times that the clues to the mystery that pops up unexpectedly are hidden in plain sight.  Well, kudos to the filmmakers, because I was fooled.

The story takes place in 1694 in one of the more beautiful portions of the English countryside.  A dimly-lit prologue establishes the particulars: Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins, whom you may recognize as Sherlock Holmes’s mentor in Young Sherlock Holmes [1985]) is a talented but arrogant draughtsman (pronounced “draftsman”), much in demand for the quality of his pencil drawings.  After much prodding from Mrs. Herbert (Janet Suzman) and her married daughter, Mrs. Talmann (Anne-Louise Lambert), he is persuaded to enter into a contract to produce twelve drawings of Mrs. Herbert’s country estate while Mr. Herbert is away on business.  But because Mr. Neville is abandoning a previous commitment, he insists that his payment be his regular fee, full room and board on the estate…and one private visit each day to Mrs. Herbert so that she may “comply with his requests concerning his pleasure.”  I would say that this may have influenced Jane Campion’s masterpiece The Piano, except the favors in The Piano evolve into something deeper, while the favors in Contract have no deeper level than satisfying Mr. Neville’s appetites.

Given the reputed over-the-top nature of Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (unseen by me so far), I expected the scenes depicting Mrs. Herbert’s contractual obligations to be far more explicit than what is shown.  This is not a criticism.  I think, for this film, that kind of attention-getting device would detract from the narrative momentum Greenaway achieves.  Since the movie is extremely dialogue-heavy, we are better served by short scenes leaving no question as to the liberties taken by Mr. Neville, so we may return expeditiously to the plot.

(I stand corrected: there is one brief but potentially stomach-churning shot of Mrs. Herbert dealing with the effects of eating something that perhaps did not entirely agree with her…eeyuck.)

Leaving those interludes aside, the film is essentially a series of deliberately wordy conversations among Mr. Neville, his servant, Mrs. Talmann, Mrs. Herbert, etcetera, while we also watch Mr. Neville practicing his craft.  Using an ingenious device I’ve never seen before, he sets up a framed grid of wires on a tripod so that the object he’s drawing is divided into multiple squares.  Then he simply draws an expanded version of the framed object onto his sketchpad, grid by grid.  (My girlfriend and I used a variation of this same process to draw Timon from The Lion King at Animal Kingdom.)

His one guiding rule is: “Draw what you see, not what you know.”  As such, if the view has changed in any way when he returns to each site, he immediately incorporates those changes into his drawing, whether the changes be as simple as the addition of a ladder on the side of a building or more complex, like adding a dog standing outside a greenhouse.  This credo will come back to haunt Mr. Neville in ways he cannot anticipate.

A mystery arises.  Mr. Herbert never returns from his business trip.  His horse is found wandering the estate.  No one can confirm his arrival at his destination.  Articles of Mr. Herbert’s clothing suddenly appear here and there around the estate…and as such, immediately become part of Neville’s drawings.

And what’s the story with the occasional appearance of a naked man whom we, the audience, can see, but which the movie characters cannot?  True, he’s not quite in anyone’s field of vision, except twice, when a child can clearly see him, but his guardian cannot, and when a steward shoos him away off a bridge.  I have gone over his scenes in my head multiple times, and I still cannot grasp the significance of this anomaly.  Director Greenaway was a painter before he became a filmmaker (indeed, it is his hands we see making Neville’s sketches), so presumably there’s a reason behind it.  Is this man a Fellini-esque or Lynchian sideshow, intended to raise questions without answering them?  Or is this man a visual representation of the “paint what you see, not what you know” philosophy?  If we extend that rule to our lives, are we being encouraged not to ignore the fanciful, the odd, the unusual, simply because they may not fit in the limited framework of our beliefs and/or prejudices?  Perhaps the child could see this man because he did not yet have any prejudices that would exclude him from his awareness, whereas his guardian simply sees a wall, or a statue, because that’s easier to deal with.  Discuss.

Whatever this naked man represents is secondary, at least during the film, to what happens among Mr. Neville, Mrs. Herbert, and her daughter Mrs. Tallman.  I especially enjoyed just listening to them talk.  In its own way, The Draughtsman’s Contract reminded me of the films of Tarantino, where outrageous incidents or conduct are always framed by characters who talk and talk.  What a treat it is sometimes to just listen to dialogue that doesn’t feel like it was generated at the cliché factory.  Some examples:

  • “Why is that Dutchman waving his arms about?  Is he homesick for windmills?”
  • “When your speech is as coarse as your face, Louis, then you sound as impotent by day as you perform by night.”
  • “He doesn’t like to see the fish.  Carp live too long…they remind him of Catholics.”
  • “Your inventory, Louis, is unlimited, like your long, clean, white breeches.  There is nothing of substance in either of them.”

And so on.  Full disclosure: before the eventual resolution of Mr. Herbert’s disappearance and the subtle change in relationship between Mr. Neville and Mrs. Herbert, I was resigned to the idea that the movie had nothing else to offer, plot-wise, and I was mentally giving the film a more mediocre score.  But good things come to those who wait.  Give The Draughtsman’s Contract a chance, and you will find, as I did, that Greenaway has a few surprises in store for anyone who thinks they know how this story will end.

GET CARTER (United Kingdom, 1971)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Mike Hodges
CAST: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, John Osborne
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 87% Fresh

PLOT: When his brother dies under mysterious circumstances, London gangster Jack Carter travels to Newcastle to investigate.


While watching 1971’s Get Carter (Caine, not Stallone), I was reminded of so many other later films that I began to wonder what gangster/crime films weren’t influenced by Get Carter.  Throughout the picture, I could see hints and whispers of Bugsy, Beverly Hills Cop, Carlito’s Way, and the John Wick franchise, among others.  I probably missed some.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe those films weren’t paying homage to the best British film ever made (according to a 2004 poll), at least not consciously.  But its DNA is there for anyone who knows where to look.

(To be sure, Get Carter was itself influenced by earlier authors and films.  In very broad strokes, the plot of Get Carter resembles The Big Sleep.  In both films, a hard, cynical man tries to get to the bottom of a mystery that no one else is particularly interested in solving.  They both even involve pornography, though to be sure that was more implied in the older film, while in Get Carter we are left in no doubt.)

The tone of Get Carter matches its protagonist: cold, flat, uninflected, violent only when it has to be.  Michael Caine’s performance is a masterpiece of understated, simmering viciousness.  He only gets really angry a few times in the film, and he doesn’t smile, not genuinely, until the very end.  I read on IMDb that Caine’s intention was to show a more realistic, less sensational kind of violence than had been seen in earlier gangster films, “never using thirty punches when one would do.”

This is also an echo of a French film, Le samouraï, in which a professional killer shows absolutely no expressions the entire film, even with a gun in his face.  Carter is equally cool under pressure, as in the scene when he is surprised in the act of “lovemaking” (love has nothing to do with it) by two gangsters.  He registers surprise and little else, pulling a double-barreled shotgun from under the bed and, while stark naked, marching his would-be attackers out of the flat at gunpoint.  In a movie with little to no humor, there is a welcome double-take from the nosey next-door neighbor, not to mention the children’s parade taking place down the street.  (In this scene, there is something very Bond-like about Carter, mixing deadly danger with borderline slapstick.)

1971 was not a year for shrinking violets at the movies.  It saw the release of Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, and The French Connection, among others.  Into this mix comes Get Carter with its casual violence and frequent female nudity, profanity, and so on.  Even so, there were a couple of moments that got a little shock out of me.  One was when a car is disposed of while Carter knows what precious cargo is in the trunk, but the bad guys do not.  Watch Carter’s utter impassiveness; he could have raised a warning, but he doesn’t.  There’s cold, and then there’s cold.  Another shocking moment is when Carter absentmindedly turns on a film projector and watches the amateur porn film displayed on the wall.  Watch his face again as he slowly realizes the identity of one of the actresses in this tawdry film.  A tear rolls down his face.  Because of what we already know about Carter, that tear doesn’t just mean he’s grieving.  He’s so boiling mad that I feared for the life of the woman in the next room.  It’s a great moment because of how rarely we see emotion on his face.

Get Carter is classic noir, just in color and with more adult situations.  Carter may not be a cop, but he has a code, nonetheless.  He absolutely will not stop digging until he solves the question of his brother’s death.  He defies his own bosses in London, ignores many warnings, survives several attempts on his life, but he just can’t help himself.  His obsession trumps everything else, just like Bogey in The Big Sleep or William Hurt in Body Heat.  There are hints of tragedy at every turn, but Carter presses on, whatever the cost, even if he thinks he might not like what he finds.  These are the qualities of any great noir hero, and Carter exemplifies them all.

***SPOILER ALERT AHEAD, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED:***

I feel obligated to mention my reaction, at least briefly, to the film’s ending.  At first, I threw my hands in the air, much as I did at the ending of…well, another very different film from the late ‘60s.  But as I thought back to the events of the film leading to this moment, I had to shrug and say to myself, “Well…it’s not like they didn’t warn him.”  At least it’s motivated by something, and not just random fate.  I can accept it.  It’s not something you would see in a conventional Hollywood film today, that’s for sure.  Look at John Wick.

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Howard Hawks
CAST: Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Coburn
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A couple of showgirls on a cruise to France get themselves involved in a plot involving a private detective, a diamond tiara, and the occasional musical number.


Why did I watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical from 1953 featuring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe?  Well, it happens to be listed in the movie compendium 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, for one thing.  And there’s the uber-famous production number “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” performed by Marilyn Monroe in that iconic pink dress that showcased her shimmy like nothing else I can think of.  And it’s directed by Howard Hawks, one of my favorite directors from Hollywood’s golden years (His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, Bringing Up Baby, many others).

While the song and the actors and the direction are competent, I didn’t quite get involved in the story as much as I hoped I would.  There’s no denying the wattage generated by Monroe whenever she’s on screen, and the screenplay by Charles Lederer provides some amazing little zingers, some of which I’m shocked got past the 1953 censors.  (When a man is asked which girl he would save from drowning first, Russell or Monroe, the man replies in admiration, “Those girls couldn’t drown.”)  But the plot, which I won’t even bother describing here, is merely a nail on which to hang those visuals of Jane and Marilyn strutting their stuff in exuberant Technicolor dresses and the occasional song or three.  Make no mistake, from a narrative standpoint, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is pure farce, top to bottom.  (And no wonder, it’s based on a stage musical.)  You either give in to the formula or you don’t.  And I’ll admit, there were times when I didn’t.  There’s a song and dance number at a Parisian café which I thought was unnecessary, and the tortuous route traveled by the tiara, especially its final hiding place, stretched the logical part of my brain to the limit.

But, on the other hand…yeah, it was fun.  Set logic aside and surrender to the sights and sounds, and Gentlemen provides substantial eye and ear candy.  And there are some genuine laughs.  Like the subplot about Monroe looking through the passenger manifest looking for gentlemen traveling “with valets”, who must therefore be rich.  She finds one, Henry Spofford III, and arranges for him to be seated at her dinner table.  The revelation of Mr. Spofford’s true nature is one of the comic high points.

Or the bit towards the end where Jane Russell gets to have her cake and eat it, too.  Thanks to the machinations of the plot, Russell not only gets top billing for the movie, but she also gets to lampoon her sexy costar by impersonating Marilyn Monroe.  (In fact, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say that her appearance in a courtroom wearing a fur coat that conceals all until she crosses her fishnet-clad legs may have provided at least SOME inspiration to that one scene in Basic Instinct.  YOU know which scene I’m talking about, perv.)

But when it comes down to it, if for nothing else, you’ve got to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes just to see Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”  She may play ditzy and dumb for the whole rest of the movie, but in this number, Monroe is totally and fully in command of her body, the camera, and the audience in that strapless pink dress which looks like it’s held up by sheer willpower.  For several minutes, she coos, struts, bumps, shimmies and shakes, and there’s nothing you can do but just watch in awe.  Almost as much as she did in Some Like It Hot, she simply embodies sexual…sexual…you know what, she just embodies sex.  I suppose there’s a more literary way to describe it, but I’m too tired to think of it.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may not feature the dancing feet of Gwen Verdon or Gene Kelly, or the vocal stylings of Debbie Reynolds or, well, Gene Kelly, or the literary complexity of West Side Story or A Star Is Born.  But when you have a song and dance number that is literally inimitable (sorry, Madonna, nice try), who cares?  I can think of plenty of worse ways to spend an evening than watching Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe for 90 minutes.

[Side note: Penni was NOT a fan of how Monroe’s character constantly called her fiancé “daddy.”  Not sure why I’m mentioning that, but it just made it funnier to me every time Monroe said it.]

LOCAL HERO (United Kingdom, 1983)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Bill Forsyth
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Peter Riegert, Fulton Mackay, Denis Lawson, Peter Capaldi
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An American oil company has plans for a new refinery and sends someone to Scotland to buy up an entire village, but things don’t go as expected.


Local Hero is not normally the kind of movie I gravitate to.  It’s not slow, but it’s deliberate.  It’s not hilarious, but it’s funny.  It’s not plotless, but it meanders and skips around.  It’s not flashy, it’s not glossy, and it’s not kinetic.  I can easily remember a version of myself that might have turned this movie off after the first thirty minutes.

But today, at this time in my life, for whatever reason, something made me look at this movie in a different way than I might have once upon a time.  The movie started to resemble a memory.  Not one of my memories, but like someone else’s memory, like I was listening to someone tell a story about this one time when he went to Scotland and something happened that didn’t exactly change his life, but it made him look at the world differently.  Fiction or not, Local Hero plays not as a movie, but as a recollection.  Its charm carried me through the entire film.

And I’m not talking about the kind of charm you might see in any 2 or 3 movies set in Scotland or Ireland.  Normally, in films set in and around the British Isles, the villages one might find there are laid back, yes, but filled with eccentric characters who know each other’s business, are friendly but cautious around outsiders, and who are loud and boisterous at the local pub.  In Local Hero, the most eccentric characters are the Americans, and the village pub might fill up, but you’ll never have to raise your voice to be heard.  It’s an interesting switch.

The story: A Texas oil company wants to buy the entire village of Ferness in Scotland so it can turn the surrounding area into a giant oil refinery.  The company’s CEO, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), sends a junior executive, Mac (Peter Riegert), to Scotland to facilitate the deal.  When Mac arrives, he gets his first taste of culture shock, not due to all the eccentricities he finds, but due to how quiet this town is.  He is checked into the local hotel by Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson, aka “Wedge Antilles” in the Star Wars films), who also turns out to be the town’s bartender, the town treasurer, and the head chef in the hotel’s kitchen.  Mac is accompanied by an eager Scottish assistant, Oldsen (an impossibly young Peter Capaldi), who develops a crush on a local scientist and runs from one assignment to another as if his arms were on fire.

Local Hero throws curveballs every chance it gets.  You’d expect the citizenry to get indignant at the idea of an American mega-corporation wanting to buy their town.  But when the locals get an idea of how much each person would get, they become instant supporters.  When they all convene at the local church, the Reverend is not an inexperienced youth or a crusty old soul, but an African gentleman who, according to the story he tells Mac, came to Scotland to learn the ministry and just…never left.  Happer, the CEO, insists on periodic updates from Mac, and since this is 1983, Mac has to call Texas from a red phone booth just outside the hotel.  But Happer seems less interested in the deal than in the potential discovery of a comet, somewhere in the constellation Virgo.

All of this is told in the laid-back manner of someone telling a story around a campfire.  There are little jumps forward that omit what might seem to be key information, but we pick up on it right away.  Little details emerge, like the motorcyclist who always seems to be roaring down the town boulevard just in time to nearly run Mac over.  There’s a moment when Mac encounters a group of men near the beach, has a pleasant conversation, then notices a baby in a stroller.  “Whose baby?”  His question is met with an uncomfortable silence as the men slowly look at each other, and Mac wonders what just happened.  And the beautiful thing is, that’s it.  That’s the end of the scene.  No one ever answers the question, and we never find out why not.

That kind of thing would normally infuriate me, but in this movie, it reinforced the idea of a fond memory.  I can easily imagine someone telling the story and saying, “And that was it!  No one ever said whose baby it was!  I still don’t know whose baby it was!”  It has the ring of real life, it’s not played up for laughs, and there’s no punchline at the end.  The punchline is that there IS no punchline.

There is a nice moment when Mac has had one or two whiskeys too many one night, and he gets on the phone with Happer in that red phone booth.  Suddenly, the sky starts to glow and glisten – the aurora borealis.  Mac gets excited and tries to explain to Happer what’s going on, but he lacks the vocabulary.  “I wish I could describe it to you like I’m seeing it!”  I know how he feels.  It’s how I felt when I went to Alaska for the first time in decades and traveled on a cruise ship through a narrow fjord and saw towering cliffs covered in trees and intermittent waterfalls cascading over rocks so everything looked primeval, like something out of The Lord of the Rings.  Just describing it doesn’t convey how it felt.  It’s a short moment in the movie, but I felt the reality of it in my bones.

In an interview on the Criterion Blu-ray, the film’s producer, David Puttnam, talks about how, when this movie was made, the general public’s idea of comedy was Airplane! and Blazing Saddles.  If it wasn’t zany, it wasn’t considered a comedy.  He wanted to help make a film that tried to remind audiences that comedy doesn’t automatically mean pratfalls and fart jokes.  Comedy can be gentle.  Local Hero is as gentle as they come.  It’s marvelous closing shot speaks volumes, and it wouldn’t have had the same impact if the story had been told any other way.

NIMONA (2023)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: Nick Bruno, Troy Quane
CAST: Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, Frances Conroy
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Framed for a crime he didn’t commit, a knight in a futuristic world reluctantly accepts the help of a shapeshifting teenager to prove his innocence.


Just when I thought the Spider-Verse animated films held the current monopoly on creating cool futuristic worlds, along comes Nimona with its delirious fusion of medieval pageantry with flying cars, cellphones, and annoying TV jingles.  Put aside what some will no doubt call its “woke” agenda/storyline and just drink in the amazing visuals, as knights in shining armor wield swords as they ride hoverbikes into battle.  (There is the occasional horse, naturally…some traditions apparently die hard in this version of the future.)

The pre-requisite prologue explains how a brave warrior queen, Gloreth, defeated a vile monster a thousand years ago.  To maintain vigilance against any future attacks, Gloreth’s subjects erected a wall around their magnificent city and created the Institute, a sort of school-for-knights, to train their protectors from generation to generation.

One thousand years later, the city prepares to matriculate its current class of knights, including, for the first time in their history, a commoner, Ballister (Riz Ahmed), championed by the current Queen Valerin as a symbol of progress.  What matters a knight’s lineage if his heart is brave, and his spirit is bold?  This choice has not gone over well unanimously in the queendom, unfortunately, but she is confident in her choice.  However, in a twist of fate, Ballister’s sword malfunctions during the knighthood ceremony, resulting in the Queen’s death, and Ballister, minus an arm, finds himself a fugitive.

He has exactly two allies.  One is his romantic partner and fellow knight candidate, Ambrosius Goldenloin, a direct descendant of Gloreth herself, who spearheads the search for Ballister in an attempt to keep someone else from killing him outright.  The other is a flighty, impetuous teenager who tracks Ballister down the following night and offers her services as sidekick to what she thinks is the newest villain in town, Ballister the Queen Slayer.  This is Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), a shapeshifter who can assume any form she desires, although her favorites appear to be a pink rhinoceros and a giant pink whale.  She likes pink.  And punk, as it turns out.

I imagine one could be cynical and say that what follows story-wise is nothing new: our heroes overcome initial adversities and suspicions of each other, they track down clues, deal with one or two serious crises, and eventually expose the truth of what really happened the day the Queen was killed.  But that’s like saying The Stand is about a bunch of people who survive the end of the world and eventually defeat the bad guy.  Well, duh.  Nimona doesn’t offer anything outrageously subversive in the story department.  What it offers is a fresh new imagination and perspective in how it tells this story, especially when it comes to the character of Nimona herself, the very definition of the rebel outsider who literally doesn’t fit in anywhere.

What makes great kids films work – what makes MOST films work – is how it invites the juvenile audience to identify with the main character.  In Pinocchio, what little kid doesn’t know what it’s like when a lie grows out of control?  In The Wizard of Oz, what little kid has never felt homesick?  In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, what kid has never dreamed that they were special, not really meant for everyday life?

In Nimona, what kid has never felt alienated at some point in their life because of something that makes them different?  They’re not as old as the grown-ups.  They’re not as young as little babies anymore.  They’re in an in-between world where they’re only as strong as the friends they make, if they’re lucky enough to make friends.  What if there is something inherently different about them?  Nimona has tried shapeshifting before, tried to explain her gift, but people immediately think of her as a monster instead of someone who’s gifted.  There are echoes of the X-Men films here, too, but those mutants were lucky enough to find a home at Xavier’s mansion.  Nimona is not so lucky.  So, she decides to embrace the monstrous role society thrusts upon her.  I imagine there are lots of people out there who feel the same to one degree or another.  I’m not a sociologist, but it seems logical.

The real villain of the story (I won’t reveal their identity) does everything in their power to manipulate the narrative in the eyes of the public.  At one point, their scheme is all but exposed, but they discover yet another way to maintain power: turn society on itself.  They reveal the existence of the shapeshifter, explaining to the city that the real monster could be sitting next to you, or playing with your child, or living in your house.  The sinister nature of this ploy made me genuinely angry, mostly because of how effective it is, both in the film and in real life.  When you’re too busy fighting each other, the true villains win.

Enough philosophy.  Nimona stands among the best animated films yet produced by Netflix (Klaus, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio).  There is plenty of humor to go around to leaven the moments when the film goes deep into territories unexplored even in the best Pixar movies.  (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t recall a Pixar film where a character contemplates suicide as an alternative to grief.)  The end credits inform me that Nimona is based on a graphic novel.  Guess what I’m looking for on Amazon in a few minutes.

SMASH PALACE (New Zealand, 1981)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Roger Donaldson
CAST: Bruno Lawrence, Anna Maria Monticelli, Greer Robson-Kirk, Keith Aberdein, Desmond Kelly
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100%

PLOT: After the break-up of his marriage, a racing driver sets out to get back his daughter – at any cost.


Since last night, I’ve been trying to figure out what to compare Smash Palace to, and I finally came up with something: John Sayles.  Smash Palace resembles the best films of John Sayles, in that they are concerned with nothing more than character and plot.  The performances and camerawork do not strive for effect or bias, and the plot, while it proceeds with perfect logic, remained a mystery to me right up to the final scene.  I can’t quite vouch for its re-watch value, but any movie that can keep me guessing until the credits roll gets its due in my book.

Alan (Bruno Lawrence) is a once-famous Grand Prix racer who has semi-retired to a sprawling auto junkyard, the titular Smash Palace, with his fragrant wife, Jacqui (Anna Maria Monticelli), and their 7-year-old daughter, Georgie (Greer Robson-Kirk).  The fact that these actors were all unknown to me created an atmosphere of reality that would have been more difficult to reproduce with established names and faces.  The movie opens with a spectacular single-car crash on a lonely road and establishes Alan’s job: to haul away totaled cars to his junkyard for scrap.  The size and scope of his automotive graveyard is shown in a shot that astonished me.  (I was even more astonished when I learned in the Blu Ray special features that this graveyard is an actual location that still operates today.)

We watch as Alan tinkers in his garage with a racing car he plans to drive in an upcoming race.  He’s also restoring an older car (from the ‘20s, maybe?  I’m not an expert) for his best mate, Ray (Keith Aberdein), a local policeman.  These opening scenes establish everyone’s relationship: Alan loves his wife and daughter, Jacqui loves their daughter but has become exasperated with Alan’s unwillingness to sell Smash Palace and move out of the sticks, and Georgie loves her mum and dad and enjoys helping Dad with his repair jobs.  When Jacqui wants to go to a party, Alan demurs, citing work.  Jacqui then says she won’t go at all, and Alan does what he thinks is the right thing: offers to drive her to the party, and Ray can drive her home.  Alan’s perfect logic completely ignores the crumbling state of his marriage, much to Jacqui’s dismay.  Even young Georgie questions his decision-making when Alan tucks her in that night.

Jacqui winds up driving herself to the party.  At the party, Ray, Alan’s cop friend, finds it necessary to drive Jacqui home when she is drunk and claims her car won’t start.  On the way home, a moment passes between Ray and Jacqui.  We are teased with the possibility that either something or nothing happened.  The next morning when Ray drives out to pick up the stranded car, he finds no trouble and the car starts with no problem.  Curious…

As the song says, one thing leads to another.  Alan and Jacqui get into a quasi-violent argument at home while Georgie retreats to her room, sucks her thumb, and turns a flashlight on and off, on and off, a precisely observed scene that brought back strong memories of when my own parents had their fair share of arguments leading up to their eventual divorce.  We get a deeper sense of Alan’s emotional depth, or lack thereof, when his idea of making everything all right is apologizing to his wife while she cries on the bed, then having rough makeup sex.  In the afterglow of their “lovemaking”, Jacqui calmly informs Alan she’s leaving him.  His nearly wordless response is worth the ticket price.

I don’t want to reveal too much of what happens next, because while it may seem like we’re heading into soap opera territory, and we kind of are, it’s important that I convey a peculiar emotional tug-of-war that occurred as I watched.  There are scenes of violent emotions getting the best of Alan.  I’m not talking about physical violence or beating his wife or anything like that; this movie is too smart to tip its hand in that direction so quickly and obviously.  But, for example, at one point, Alan points a shotgun at someone while he yells at his daughter to “get in the truck!”  Now, speaking as a rational person, there is obviously no situation, ever, in which pointing a shotgun and essentially kidnapping your own daughter would ever be justified.  I think we can all agree there.  But the subtle genius of Smash Palace is that, while the scene unfolded, I could so clearly see why Alan was doing what he did that, yes, in the moment, I sided with him.  It wasn’t until the scene was over that I found myself wondering, wait, that’s not cool what he did.

But then, was it “cool” for Jacqui to file the New Zealand equivalent of a restraining order against Alan when he had taken her hunting without informing her after they were separated?  Was it “cool” for her to almost immediately take up a relationship with Ray, Alan’s best mate, a move that would almost certainly enrage Ray even further?  Well, what difference does “cool” make?  Jacqui is doing what she feels is best for her and her daughter in the face of a loveless marriage to a man who would rather bury himself in the hood of a car than face up to his responsibilities as a husband.

That’s the beauty of Smash Palace.  We may not agree with what these people do, but we can clearly see the why at every turn.  The movie takes the trappings of a soap opera and turns it into a crystallized character study that explains why a man with limited emotional resources would point a shotgun at someone’s face because he believes that’s his last remaining option.  Alan’s shortcomings have trapped him, and while we audience members know he’s in the wrong, we sigh and commiserate with him: “That poor, dumb bastard.”  And the same applies to Jacqui.  We know she’s doing the right things by moving out and taking Georgie with her, but because we know how shortsighted Alan is, and we know SHE knows it, too, we feel the same kind of regret when her actions force Alan’s hand.  An old family friend, Tiny, even tries to warn her of the consequences of her actions, but she will not be deterred.  Poor, dumb bastard.

Smash Palace may infuriate some viewers who have been programmed by Hollywood convention to see clearly defined boundaries between heroes and villains, especially in domestic dramas involving custody of a child.  This movie denies them that.  Instead, it invites viewers to probe their own psyches and wonder about themselves: what would I do to get my daughter back?  What would I do to keep her safe?  How far am I prepared to go to be happy in this world?  The characters in Smash Palace supply their own answers to those questions in ways that had me rooting for both sides simultaneously.  Now that’s hard.

THE SNAKE PIT (1948)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Anatole Litvak
CAST: Olivia de Havilland, Leo Genn, Celeste Holm, Natalie Schafer [aka Mrs. Howell on Gilligan’s Island…how about that?]
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100%

PLOT: A young woman’s life is torn apart when she suffers a mental breakdown and is admitted to an institution.


For much of its running time, The Snake Pit remains firmly in the realm of reality without succumbing to melodrama, as was symptomatic of so many film dramas of the 1940s.  That’s what makes it mildly disappointing when, in the last reel, we get a nice little summation of the origins of our heroine’s dilemma, and she bravely makes a series of decisions that result in a happy ending.  Naturally, that was the case in real life, as well.  The film is based an autobiographical novel by Mary Jane Ward, who spent eight months in a mental institution after a nervous breakdown.  I don’t begrudge the happy ending, you understand.  I just wish it didn’t feel as rushed as it does.

But I’m quibbling.  This is a fine film.  The Snake Pit was another in a series of Daryl F. Zanuck productions intended as “message pictures”, movies that addressed real issues in contemporary society.  The Grapes of Wrath (1940) dealt with the Dust Bowl and harsh labor conditions.  Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) was one of the first films, if not THE first, to openly condemn casual anti-Semitism in “polite” society.  The Snake Pit is said to be the first mainstream film to realistically depict conditions in America’s mental institutions at the time.  If so, the filmmakers really went for the jugular in their first at-bat.  In its own way, this is as harsh and unforgiving a film as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  There’s even a sequence involving shock treatments that are as effective as anything else I’ve seen along those lines.

The story begins intriguingly, as we open on the lovely open face of Virginia (a deliberately un-made-up Olivia de Havilland) as she wonders mentally what she’s doing outside on this bench.  A man we don’t see asks her a series of questions, and she has little mental conversations with herself before she answers.  Then the camera pulls out, and there is no man, just another woman telling her it’s time to go back inside.  Inside where, she wonders?  Then she’s herded with a bunch of other women back into the main hall of the Juniper Hill State Hospital.  She starts to panic.  What is she doing here?  Is she crazy?  She doesn’t feel crazy.  The reasons for her stay provide the central mystery to the film.

(Incidentally, Stephen King apparently saw this film on TV as a youngster…which may account for the numerous appearances of the Juniper Hills psychiatric facility that appears in many of his novels and stories, including It, The Dark Half, and Needful Things.  When you win on “Jeopardy”, I’ll let you know where to mail my half of the winnings.)

De Havilland’s performance is extraordinary.  Her talent is undeniable, but it’s notable that one of the silver screen’s great beauties went without makeup, wore clothes two sizes to big, and even dropped some weight to make her look more fragile.  This was my first time watching the movie, and I was astonished at her appearance.  When she flies into rages, or pleads for mercy, or desperately tries to remember her past, you really believe it.

In a series of flashbacks, we discover that Virginia Stuart was a frustrated author who met her future husband in Chicago, in the offices of the company that had just rejected her manuscript.  There was a whirlwind romance that ended when she simply ran out on him and disappeared, only to show up six months later in New York, where he had moved…six months previously.  (I don’t know about you, but that’s red flag territory in my mind, but whatever.)  Their romance picked up where it left off, there was a ceremony at City Hall, and they enjoyed married life…for about a week.  At which point Virginia behaved erratically, declaring that she will never love any man, that no man can love her, and flatly denying that today is May 12th, no matter what it says on the newspaper.  Virginia’s husband admits her to Juniper Hill, and it’s here where her troubles REALLY begin.

The film’s depictions of life on the various wards of the asylum are tame by today’s standards, but they are no less disturbing.  There are the usual cast of off-kilter characters wandering the halls, mumbling to themselves or being unreasonable, but there is something indefinably…I don’t know, squirmy about seeing this kind of behavior in such an old movie.  At least for me.  When it’s played for real and not for laughs, in black and white, in 1948, something about that place and those people became much more real to me, at least as real as McMurphy’s fellow travelers, or maybe even more so.  I’m unable to put it into words.  When someone in Cuckoo’s Nest dances by themselves in a corner or wants his cigarettes, it’s kinda funny.  In The Snake Pit, when a woman dances by herself, or another covers her face with her hair and paces around muttering that it’s her right to cover her face…it was creepy.  Is it the black-and-white cinematography?  Is it the shortage of comic relief?  Is it because they’re women instead of men?  Discuss.

(There’s even a head nurse who seems like the prototype for Nurse Ratched: a no-nonsense, by-the-book authoritarian who makes no bones about disliking Virginia.  When Virginia is given a typewriter for therapeutic reasons, the nurse reminds her: “Don’t go thinking you’re better than the rest of us just because you’re a writer.”  Talk about terrible bedside manner, geez…)

Interestingly, I didn’t find Virginia’s behavior all that “crazy.”  She has problems with her memory, she tends to fly off the handle at trivial matters, and she once bit the finger of an arrogant doctor who was waving it in her face unnecessarily.  Frankly, that sounds like something I would do on a bad day.  Virginia’s conversations with her doctor, Doctor Kik (Leo Genn), are the only things that keep her tethered to reality.  These conversations are handled extremely well.  I found myself thinking of another famous movie about psychiatry in the ‘40s: Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), which was not so concerned with legitimate psychiatry as it was with making sure Bergman and Peck wound up together at the end.  In that film, the conversations between doctor and patient are full of double-speak and heavy-handed metaphors.  In The Snake Pit, I found it interesting that, whenever Dr. Kik makes a small breakthrough with Virginia, he never pushes the matter.  He simply calls it a day and picks it up tomorrow, armed with new information.  I’m no doctor, but that seems way more realistic to me.

I went into The Snake Pit expecting a semi-watered drown treatment of insanity and mental institutions.  Instead, I got a film that is remarkably effective and powerful, containing a performance from Olivia de Havilland that might seem like a lot of histrionics at first, but which is the very definition of someone completely at the mercy of mood swings beyond her comprehension.  They say that only the insane never wonder if they’re crazy.  If that’s the case, Virginia is as sane as they come, wondering over and over again why she does what she does, why she’s been thrown into this place.  She comes across as someone who desperately wants someone to listen to her.  Thankfully for her, someone does.  If everyone were as lucky as she is, maybe there’d be a lot more happy endings in the world.

LA GRANDE ILLUSION (France, 1937)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jean Renoir
CAST: Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, Marcel Dalio
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Certified Fresh

PLOT: During WWI, two French soldiers are captured and imprisoned in a German P.O.W. camp. Several escape attempts follow until they are eventually sent to a seemingly inescapable fortress.


What a pleasure it is sometimes to be proven wrong.  Years ago, back when Netflix was still sending physical DVDs to subscribers, I watched Jean Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece La grande illusion.  Unfortunately, I either could not or would not appreciate it for what it was, and I returned it after giving it a mediocre rating.  Flash forward to today, and even in the midst of suffering through my second Covid infection (thank YOU so much, [establishment name redacted]), I rewatched La grande illusion and found it charming, delightful, poignant, and full of (for me) unexpected comedy and ominous foreshadowing, especially because it’s a World War I film made two years before Hitler invaded Poland and ignited World War II.  Turns out this is one of the best war films ever made, whose influences are clearly seen in later classics like Stalag 17, Casablanca, and The Great Escape.  Who knew?

The film centers around two French soldiers in particular, Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay).  They are captured after being shot down during a reconnaissance mission and are taken to a German prison camp…camp number 17, because of course it is.  There they meet the paradoxical camp commander, Captain von Rauffenstein, portrayed by Erich von Stroheim as a man who knows the rules of war, but is willing to bend them – slightly – when it comes to imprisoned officers.  He invites them to dine at his table and even offers de Boeldieu a private cell because, wouldn’t you know it, he knew de Boeldieu’s brother before the war.  It’s almost like he’s saying, yes, we’re enemies, but we’re not savages.

There’s another reason for von Rauffenstein’s behavior that has nothing to do with chivalry.  It’s very clear that de Boeldieu and von Rauffenstein are both aristocrats.  They demonstrate this class affiliation by occasionally holding brief conversations in English, which the other soldiers, being mostly of working class, would not have understood.  It’s fascinating to watch the German and the Frenchman interacting with each other, stubbornly maintaining an air of sophistication and bonhomie required of their class, when de Boeldieu knows he must attempt escape, von Rauffenstein knows it, and de Boeldieu knows he knows it.  This might be considered the first and most obvious level of meaning in the film’s title: the grand illusion that we can still be friends, despite the war, because we’re both members of aristocracy.

Ironically, de Boeldieu doesn’t share this same kind of camaraderie with his own countrymen.  Maréchal, the man he was imprisoned with, is clearly a working-class soldier, a bit less refined, and doesn’t know a lick of English or German.  He makes one escape attempt too many and is put in solitary.  Interestingly, de Boeldieu makes similar escape attempts (we learn later), but we never see him having to experience solitary confinement for his actions.  Double standards?

The fourth major player in this drama is another fellow prisoner, Lieutenant Rosenthal, a French Jew played by Marcel Dalio.  He and several other prisoners are in the process of digging an escape tunnel under the barracks, using gear and methods that are directly quoted in The Great Escape, especially the problem of soil disposal.  It was fascinating to see so many elements in this 1937 film featured so prominently in later films.  I never realized just how influential this movie was, and probably still is.  (There’s even a scene – I won’t spoil the setup – that features a small orchestra spontaneously breaking out into La Marseillaise at a key moment…tell me the Casablanca screenwriters didn’t have this movie in mind when writing their script.)

After some months (perhaps longer, it’s unclear), Maréchal, de Boeldieu, Rosenthal, and several other prisoners are unexpectedly transferred to another camp before they can finish their tunnel.  Their new digs are at an enormous gothic castle, also run by von Rauffenstein, who by now has sustained injuries from some kind of airplane crash which require him to wear a neck brace.  He is still exceedingly friendly to de Boeldieu but assures him escape is impossible from this new “camp.”

What happens from there, I’ll leave for you to discover.  What I will repeat is that this movie covers some heavy territory with a deceptively light touch.  There is a scene where a prisoner receives a parcel from home, a large box containing nothing but women’s clothing, so the men decide to hold a mock “revue” with the male prisoners doubling for the showgirls.  One of the soldiers tries on a dress and wig and walks out and asks, “Don’t I look foolish?”  Au contraire.  The men are struck dumb in a moment that is at first hilarious, then poignant, as they feast their eyes on the first thing even resembling a woman for the first time in forever.  Another parcel arrives for some Russian prisoners in another barracks, a large box which they are sure contains food, but instead it contains – well, I won’t spoil it, but to say they are disappointed would be an understatement.

La grande illusion is brilliant at balancing profound ideas of men at war with the occasional humor in the everyday rhythm of life in a prison camp.  It even gets into the ingrained prejudices of so many people against Jews, views that in 1937 were sweeping across Germany like a plague.  (Nazi Germany banned the film, of course.)  This dichotomy is a little hard for me to describe without just giving a play-by-play of the film in its entirety.  Watching it again today, it’s impossible for me to remember what I didn’t like about this movie the first time around.  It has everything: drama, suspense, comedy, daring escape attempts, a showdown between friendship and duty, men in drag…I mean, everything.  This is one time I’m happy to admit: yes, I was wrong.  La grande illusion is not mediocre.  It’s a masterpiece.

KAGEMUSHA (Japan, 1980)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Akira Kurosawa
CAST: Tatsuya Nakadai, Tsotumo Yamazaki, Ken’ichi Hagawara
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88%

PLOT: A petty thief with an utter resemblance to a samurai warlord is hired as the lord’s double. When the warlord later dies, the thief is forced to take up arms in his place.


Kagemusha is a double-edged sword for me, no pun intended.  On the one hand, its visual beauty is virtually peerless.  Only the films of Kubrick, Lean, and those shot by Vittorio Storaro are even in the same league as Kurosawa.  There are shots in Kagemusha that will remain in my mind long after the details of the story have been purged by old age.  In particular, there’s a shot with Japanese soldiers crossing a ridgeline in the background, more soldiers in the foreground, and the setting sun positioned perfectly, so the shadows of the soldiers in the background reach out towards the viewer and interact with the foreground soldiers.  It’s a masterpiece.

On the other hand, the pacing is so sedate that newcomers to Kurosawa or foreign films in general might wonder, my god, when is something going to happen?  At one point, a key figure is taken out by musket fire from an enemy soldier.  This happens so early that we haven’t been introduced to all the main characters just yet, so the conversations surrounding the gunshot were a mystery to me until later in the film.

On the other hand, Kurosawa proves himself over and over again to be a master of the visual aspects of cinema.  In addition to the shot I mentioned above, there is a trippy dream sequence that looks as if it were painted with an explosion at the paint factory (I mean that in the best possible sense), a wonderful camera move that reveals two characters who are conversing in a plain room are actually overlooking a stormy lake, and an eerie moment when the contents of a large vase are revealed after a lengthy burglary attempt.  There are way too many other examples, you simply have to see the film to appreciate what I’m talking about.  I suppose the way to get the most out of the Kagemusha experience is to surrender to the visuals, much like I do with Barry Lyndon or Doctor Zhivago.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to completely ignore the story, though.  There is immense food for thought here.  A condemned thief is conscripted to act as a warlord’s double.  We never learn the thief’s real name.  He is credited only as “Kagemusha”, aka “The Shadow Warrior.”  He must present an outward face to the other generals, friends and foe, in the event that the real warlord is injured or killed, which (SPOILER ALERT) inevitably happens.  There is portentous dialogue about how a shadow only exists if the man is alive.  Remove the man, and how can a shadow remain?

There are several close calls where Kagemusha’s secret is almost revealed.  His grandson – well, sort of his grandson, it’s a long story – immediately yells, “THAT’S not my grandfather!” when he sees him after a long absence.  The real warlord, Shingen, had a huge black horse that only he could ride.  The inner circle who knows Kagemusha’s secret agrees immediately that he should never try to ride it; you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can never fool a horse.  Shingen’s mistresses present a real danger.  Kagemusha squirms for a few moments as they slowly start to question his identity during tea, but he brilliantly defuses the situation by telling them the one thing they would never believe: the truth.

There’s also a much larger issue at work in Kagemusha.  Shingen’s own generals (the ones outside of the inner circle), and the opposing warlords, all believe Shingen is still alive when they see him on the battlefield.  They have no reason to think he’s an impostor.  There are some skeptics, but their spies are helpless to discover the ruse.  For all intents and purposes, that is Shingen, and they behave accordingly.

There is one battle at night where this, I don’t know, philosophy becomes all too real for Kagemusha.  In the darkness, Shingen’s forces can hear enemy armies approaching, and then musket fire breaks out.  Instinctively, Shingen’s bodyguards leap to shield Shingen/Kagemusha from enemy bullets.  Some are killed.  The look of horror on Kagemusha’s face as the dead bodyguards are piled on top of other bodies is indescribable.  They gave their lives for him.  Or, more importantly, they gave their lives for the idea of Shingen, their belief that he was the most important person on the battlefield.  I was reminded of a bit of dialogue from American Sniper, of all things, when the lead character, an accomplished sniper, is asked to cover some soldiers on a raid.  He is told that the soldiers feel invincible with him up there.  He says they’re not, and the reply is eye-opening: “They are if they think they are.”  Just like the soldiers in American Sniper, the soldiers in Kagemusha are prepared to lay down their lives for a concept.  The man is nothing, a thief.  They don’t know that, though.

This took me down a little bit of a rabbit hole.  I thought of Secret Service agents whose literal job is to protect our President and take a bullet for him if necessary.  It doesn’t matter whether he (or she) agrees with the President’s policies.  That is secondary.  Their job boils down to one thing: I will die to protect this person if that’s what it takes.  The dedication on display by these men and women humbles me, and it makes me think.  Surely, they have opinions about world and national policies.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s not part of the job.

Watching those bodyguards fall in front of the imposter warlord made me think really hard about those kinds of jobs, about anyone in any branch of the armed forces.  Ready to kill and die for what they believe in.  In the case of Kagemusha, these people died for a fake.  It makes their deaths sad, but are they any less honorable?  Like I said, food for thought.

The film ends with a massive battle where, curiously, we are not shown any deaths, only the aftermath.  (The opposing general is especially cruel: “Shoot the horses first.”)  Then there is a dreamlike coda that recalls that philosophy of dying for the right cause.

To recap, though, the movie is slow going, at least as slow, if not slower, than Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.  I can see that Kurosawa has a lot to say with this movie.  He employed thousands of extras and lavish costumes (financed thanks to the involvement of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, which is this whole OTHER thing).  It’s not my favorite Kurosawa film.  That spot is reserved for Ran (1985), which I consider his career-capping masterpiece.  Kagemusha sort of lays the groundwork for that movie, in my opinion.  It was one of his first films in color (I think) and it shows a natural talent for the medium.  Like I said before, surrender to the visuals and contemplate the story, and the slow pacing will take care of itself.  (That doesn’t make much sense, but I’m sticking to it.)

THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT (United Kingdom, 1951)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Alexander Mackendrick
CAST: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Michael Gough
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100%

PLOT: An altruistic chemist invents a fabric which resists wear and dirt as a boon to humanity, but both big business and labor realize it must be suppressed for economic reasons.


First, a brief history lesson:

“The Ealing comedies is an informal name for a series of comedy films produced by the London-based Ealing Studios during a ten-year period from 1947 to 1957. Often considered to reflect Britain’s post-war spirit, the most celebrated films in the sequence include Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Whisky Galore! (1949), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955)… Many of the Ealing comedies are ranked among the greatest British films, and they also received international acclaim.” – from Wikipedia

There.  That summarizes it way better than I could.  Watch enough British films and the term “Ealing Studios” will invariably come up.  Their comedy films have a breezy, economical quality, sometimes combined with dark humor and almost always with something to say about the conditions in Britain at the time.

The Man in the White Suit is a prime example of the Ealing comedies (although Kind Hearts and Coronets is my personal favorite).  In this film, the versatile Alec Guinness portrays Sidney Stratton, an unemployed inventor with a head for chemistry and textiles.  He stumbles upon a formula that he believes will create the ultimate cloth: impervious to stains and virtually unbreakable.  After a series of pyrotechnic failures, he cracks the code and makes a white suit out of his miracle material.

The storytelling for this whole first half of the film is quick as lightning.  Director Mackendrick wisely realizes that lengthy exposition is the enemy of good pacing, so we get a lot of quick scenes that linger only long enough to make their point before we fade into the next one.  While watching it, I began to worry that this rapid rhythm would hinder my investment in the story, but in retrospect, it almost feels like we’re inside Sidney’s head.  On film, he’s almost always running, rarely strolling except when he’s trying to fool any casual observers.  When he makes his breakthrough, his speech becomes a rattling string of syllables that might require subtitles to decipher, his excitement nearly derailing his ability to talk.

Once he creates this magical cloth and fashions a suit out of it (resorting to blowtorches to cut the suit patterns), he beams.  What a boon to mankind!  You can’t damage it, you can’t get it dirty…it’s the only suit you’ll ever have to buy!  What a windfall!  Well, not so fast.  He immediately encounters resistance from both sides of the textile supply chain.  The laborers who work in the textile mills don’t like it because they envision making only one set of clothes per person and that’s it; it never needs replacing.  Competing companies (management) don’t like it because no one will buy anything else, and it will put them out of business.  Sidney becomes caught in this tug of war, and the whole second half of the film becomes a variation of chase scenes as Sidney struggles to publicize his invention while labor and management fight to suppress it.

There’s an interesting subplot when management tries to persuade Daphne, the daughter of the company’s owner, to seduce Sidney into signing away his rights to his invention.  In an era when most women’s roles were relegated to love interests, her reaction to this offer is unique: she calmly asks, in so many words, “How much is this worth to you?”  She negotiates her fee much the same way as a high-priced escort might.  The board members are scandalized when they realize exactly what they’re asking her to do, and what is being negotiated.  But instead of shying away from it, Daphne embraces it.  Neat.  (Her “seduction” of Sidney has a clever resolution that I did not see coming.)

Like other great films, The Man in the White Suit offers a lot to chew over after the credits roll.  Sure, the last half of the film offers lots of comedy and chase scenes and farcical situations to satisfy any film lover.  But the underlying concept is more interesting the more I think about it.  It’s not exactly a NEW idea, but interesting, nevertheless.  One of the workers at the textile mill tells Sidney: “The razor blade that never gets blunt.  And the car that runs on water with a pinch of something in it.  No.  They’ll never let your stuff on the market in a million years.”  We’ve all heard the urban myths of rubber tires that never wear out, or even the cars that run on water (just saw that one on the internet the other day).  Are they real?  Probably not.  But it’s fun to think so, to imagine the shadowy forces suppressing brilliant inventions for the purpose of commerce.

But there’s a flip side to the story.  During Sidney’s pursuit, he runs into an old washer woman and asks for a coat to cover his suit (the material’s properties make it practically luminous at night).  She happens to know about Sidney and his invention, and she tells him, “Why can’t you scientists leave things alone?  What about my bit of washing when there’s no washing to do?”  More than anything else, this gives Sidney pause, and I can almost hear him thinking, in the back of his head, the immortal words of Ian Malcolm: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

In this way, The Man in the White Suit offers more food for thought than I would have expected.  It’s making a statement about the inevitability of scientific progress, pleading with the responsible parties to be more, well, responsible with their actions.  This film was released only six short years after America ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on Japan, so the question resonates more dramatically than you might expect from such a breezy comedy.

I can almost hear you asking, “Yeah, but is it funny?”  Yes, this delightful Ealing comedy is in the best traditions of the form.  It’s not too heavy, asking the big questions but wisely not answering them.  It has plenty of smiles and laughs.  And for those who have never seen Alec Guinness as a young man in the movies, it’s a treat to watch a very young Ben Kenobi cavorting on the screen with his eyes bugged out and a silly grin on his face.  And if it offers food for discussion afterwards, all the better.

P.S. Look for a very young Michael Gough in the cast, aka “Alfred” in Tim Burton’s Batman.