Tag: Mig's Reviews

BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone
CAST: Tom Cruise, Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley, Caroline Kava, Willem Dafoe
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 84% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A biography of Ron Kovic, a fiercely patriotic Marine who fights in Vietnam, is paralyzed in battle, and experiences a dramatic turnaround upon his return home.


I can already tell this is going to be a difficult review to write.

There is nothing overtly wrong with Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July.  It is expertly directed, and the pacing never flags.  Tom Cruise’s Oscar-nominated performance is deservedly legendary; he leaves nothing in the tank, a fierce rebuttal to critics who thought he was nothing but a pretty face.  But even though there is much to admire, when the closing credits rolled, I felt oddly detached.  The movie kept me at arm’s length from really engaging with the lead character.  Or maybe I kept the movie at arm’s length.

Could it be that I simply don’t care for Vietnam films anymore?  Not likely.  One of my absolute favorite films is Michael Cimino’s masterpiece The Deer Hunter.  In fact, the opening scenes of Born on the Fourth of July are reminiscent of that earlier film in that it takes its time establishing the main character, Ron Kovic, as a young man in the early-to-mid 1960s at the dawn of the Vietnam War.  Born and raised in Massapequa, New York, his strict Catholic upbringing and his devotion to high-school wrestling instill a strong sense of right and wrong in the world.  A point is made about how America had never lost a war up to that time.  Kovic’s wrestling coach exhorts him and his teammates as if he were a Marine drill instructor.  “I want you to kill!  You hear me?! …You got to pay the price for victory, and the price is sacrifice!!”  It’s not very subtle, but Stone is making it clear that, in those days leading up to the Vietnam quagmire, the American credo was, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing.”

Kovic enlists, sees combat, and during two horrific sequences, he experiences: an unintended massacre of Vietnamese civilians, the accidental shooting of a fellow soldier (with Kovic himself behind the trigger), and a fateful gun battle during which a bullet went through his right shoulder, collapsing a lung and severing his spinal cord, paralyzing him from the waist down.  These scenes are appropriately skittish and terrifying, putting us in Kovic’s boots and making us feel the unimaginable stress of fighting a war where half the time you weren’t sure who or what you were shooting at.  Kovic is shipped stateside…and here, as they say, is where his troubles REALLY began.

If the scenes set at the VA Hospital during Ron Kovic’s convalescence weren’t based on his actual experiences, I would denounce them as sensationalistic and manipulative.  Rats roam free among the beds.  (A nurse provides spectacularly unhelpful advice: “You don’t bother them, they ain’t gonna bother you.”)  Orderlies spend their down time getting high on marijuana or worse.  Unchecked catheters get backed up.  When a vital blood pump malfunctions, a doctor has to go to the basement to “rig up a substitute.”  And through it all, Ron Kovic does everything in his power to prove to the (correctly) pessimistic doctors that he will walk again, even re-injuring himself in the process.

(It’s futile, I know, to critique a film for what it’s not instead of what it is, but I can’t help wondering if I might have developed a more emotional reaction or attachment to the film if the entire film had focused on Kovic’s tenure at the VA hospital…although I will admit that would be a thoroughly depressing film.  Also, it might have developed some unintentional similarities to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Who knows.)

The rest of the film details Kovic’s return home to his family, his emotional swings between the lowest kind of depression (“Who’s going to love me, Dad?  Who’s ever going to love me?”) and angry shouting matches with his parents and occasional bar fights.  Eventually, Kovic has a revelation: he still loves his country, but he can’t stand the government that sent him and his friends halfway around the world for a cause he no longer understands.  After a short hiatus in Mexico (I won’t get into too many details about that plot point because it’s the one section of the film that borders on boring), he returns home and dedicates his life to speaking up for the men and women who returned from Vietnam to a country that, at worst, hated them, and at best, simply didn’t care about them.

Again, the film is a stirring portrait of a man and a life.  However, as much as I want to, I can’t pin down what it is about the movie that failed to reach me at the kind of emotional level that other biographies have done before.  I just recently watched My Left Foot, with Daniel Day-Lewis’s towering performance at its center.  Another film biography, another main character confined to a wheelchair, a character who comes to terms with himself and how the world responds to him and comes up with a way to respond to the world.  But My Left Foot made my heart soar in a way that Born on the Fourth of July never achieved.  I watched the movie intently, focusing on every plot development and every nuance.  But it just didn’t grab me.  I am at a loss to explain why.

Could it be because of the presence of Tom Cruise in the lead role?  He showed these kinds of acting chops again ten years later in Magnolia, giving another Oscar-nominated performance.  In that movie, he completely disappeared into the role, despite having one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.  Perhaps the younger Tom Cruise (only 27 at the time) emits the kind of wattage that overshadows those around him?  So that you’re aware of the face first and the character second?  Maybe.  So why doesn’t the same thing happen in Magnolia or even The Last Samurai?  Perhaps it took him ten years to find a way to modulate or customize his performance so that, when it counts, the character comes first and the Cruise persona second.

I’m speculating.  The bottom line is, Born on the Fourth of July is a worthy addition to the resumes of both Oliver Stone and Tom Cruise.  It knows the story it wants to tell and resolutely sticks with it the whole way.  There are no sidetracks at any time, not even when he becomes an activist.  The focus is always on Ron Kovic, not the cause.  Stone and his screenwriters trusted that the story of Ron Kovic would draw enough attention to the cause on its own.  That approach would work with just about any other film.  This time, it had the effect of diluting the emotional experience while still holding my attention all the way through.  I would still recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it, if for nothing else to see Cruise play a role where he gets to sound notes he rarely got to play in his early career.  Would I watch it again?  Maybe.  I think the story is important enough for me to try to see what I might have missed this time around.

DEKALOG (Poland, 1989-1990)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Krzysztof Kieslowski
CAST: A host of Polish actors unknown to me
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: Not Rated

PLOT: Director Krzysztof Kieslowski presents ten short films, each related in one way or another with one or more of the biblical Ten Commandments.


Nearly every review or description I’ve ever read of Kieslowski’s Dekalog states that the ten 1-hour films in this ambitious cycle are each based on one of the biblical Ten Commandments.  Not so.  I also assumed that each film would somehow be a moral tale ending with an unequivocal statement about right and wrong.  Also not true.  These films are the most mature and literate explorations, not of morals, but of ethics, that I’ve ever seen.  We believe we know what’s right and what’s wrong, and that we would have the ethical fortitude to do what’s right, given the option.  Dekalog argues that, in today’s world, whether it’s late-1980s Poland or present-day America, the moral absolutes dictated by the Ten Commandments are unachievable.  All we can do is choose what we believe is the right thing and hope for the best.

Kieslowski, much better known perhaps for his Three Colors trilogy, seems to have written these films, along with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, as case studies or thought experiments for ethical quandaries.  In Dekalog Two, a woman has a semi-comatose husband.  She approaches the doctor with a dilemma: she is pregnant with another man’s child, so she must know whether her husband will recover or if he is beyond hope.  If the doctor says he will recover, she will get an abortion.  If the doctor says he will die, she’ll keep the baby.  Now the doctor has two lives in his hands.

In Dekalog Four, a young woman’s father is away on business.  She discovers a letter, hidden by her father, from her dead mother, that says, “Open after my death.”  She opens it (dishonoring her father’s obvious wish that it not be found), and what she finds could radically redefine her relationship with her father, along with resolving some sexually ambiguous feelings she’s been having lately.

I could go on and on.  For the curious, a full synopsis of each film in the cycle can be found online.  But you get the idea.  Each self-contained story is a “what would you do” scenario where your answer may tell you more about yourself than you anticipated.  They seem more inspired by the format of Jesus’ parables instead of Moses’ tablets, just without the neat and tidy ending.  (Well, Dekalog Ten’s ending is cut-and-dried, but that’s all you’ll get out of me in terms of endings.)

For me, the weakest of the ten films was Dekalog Two, despite its sensational premise.  It gets a little too mystical for its own good at one point.  But setting that one aside, I was amazed at how enthralled I was while watching each chapter.  Kieslowski begins each film almost as if you were walking into the middle of the story instead of starting cleanly at the beginning.  Characters are introduced who appear to have no connection whatsoever, and you must be a little patient as the story develops.  At first, I found this approach a little discombobulating, but as I got more accustomed to it, I thought I could see its purpose.  This is real life, not the kind of storytelling we are accustomed to from Hollywood and (let it be said) elsewhere.  The stories we remember and retell from our lives don’t begin with a lovely credit sequence and stirring music.  It’s usually something like, “So there I was, at the doctor’s office, and he told me I was impotent…”

This method also had the effect of sharpening my attention as each film began.  Since I wasn’t being spoon-fed the story, I paid close attention to each shot, trying to memorize a face or recall a name.  And each story had this remarkable ability to lure me into complacency or banality, and suddenly BANG, a monkey gets thrown into the wrench, reshaping everything you just saw, or what you thought you were going to see.  I’m thinking especially of Dekalog Four, with the dead mother’s letter; Dekalog Seven with the ostensible kidnapping with hidden motives; and Dekalog Ten where a father’s death brings two estranged brothers together for one last surprise in his heavily secured apartment.

Because I was watching so carefully, there were several things I noticed that carried over from one seemingly unrelated tale to the next:

  • REFLECTIONS: Every film makes liberal use of reflections for some compositions, whether it’s a scene shot in a mirror or a pane of glass or a puddle or even just reflections on the lens of the camera.  I am not enough of a film scholar to elaborate what that could mean, aside from the obvious: these films are intended to elicit self-reflection from the viewer.  Passive viewing of these films simply will not do.
  • CAMEOS: All ten films take place mostly in or around the same imposing apartment complex in Warsaw.  (Look closely at the structures and the beams for the outside porches resemble church crosses.)  As such, characters from one chapter will “bleed” into at least one of the others.  The father in Dekalog One appears near the beginning of Dekalog Three.  The pregnant wife in Dekalog Two is trying to catch a cab in Dekalog Five.  The impotent husband in Dekalog Nine shows up in reverse order as a bike rider in Dekalog Six.
  • EXTERIORS: I cannot recall more than two or three shots in all ten films that showed an unambiguously sunny day.  Daytimes in Dekalog are invariably overcast and gloomy.  If we are meant to interpret that as a symbol, and the apartment complex is the world we all inhabit, then Kieslowski seems to be saying that the world is a dark and dreary place, indeed.  Is there any hope at all in this gray cycle of films?  I think so.  Many of the films end on, if not exactly a happy note, then at least a hopeful note.  For myself, I watch the credits roll on each one and I imagine the characters making peace with their choices, because…well, that’s what I have to do daily.  If I can do it, they can do it.  Or vice versa.
  • THE WATCHER: There is one actor who appears in nine of the ten films in Dekalog.  He never speaks, is never named (on IMDb, he is credited simply as “Young Man”), and never directly interacts with any other character.  I took to calling him The Watcher, after the Marvel Comics character who is doomed to spend eternity witnessing human history without the ability to help in any way.  What does he represent?  Is he an angel, in keeping with the cycle’s biblical name?  He seems to appear whenever a main character is about to make a choice of some kind; in one instance, he gives an almost imperceptible shake of the head as if to say, “Don’t do this.”  If you ask me, I would say the Young Man is the embodiment of guilt, a warning stare from some cosmic force that is saying, “Can you live with what you’re about to do?”  The main characters make their own choices, deciding what they can or can’t live with.  Discuss.

I hope all this mumbo jumbo hasn’t deterred you from seeking out this series and giving it a go.  All the same, as much as I do recommend Dekalog, I’m a little stuck on who exactly I would recommend it to.  All told, it’s a 9-hour-34-minute excursion into the kind of ethical dilemmas that could occupy an entire semester at a film school…and probably has.  On the other hand, with streaming popularity at an all-time high (depending on who you ask), one can think of it as a 10-part HBO miniseries…in Polish.  After all, that’s how it was originally envisioned anyway, as a limited series for Polish television. Take a chance.  Find a copy to buy online.  Or stream it if anyone is offering it.  I promise, you will be mulling over these films long after the latest Venom movie has faded from memory.  (Sorry, cheap shot, couldn’t resist, but you know I’m right.)

MY LEFT FOOT (Ireland, 1989)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jim Sheridan
CAST: Daniel Day-Lewis, Brenda Fricker, Fiona Shaw
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Christy Brown, born in 1932 with cerebral palsy, learns to paint and write with the only limb under his full control – his left foot.


For so many years, I have admired Daniel Day-Lewis as an actor, especially his performance in There Will Be Blood, which is the only performance I’ve seen on screen that has ever really motivated me to be a better actor myself.  However, I never got around to seeing his breakout movie, My Left Foot, until just recently.  All I can say is: WOW.  I had always assumed (big mistake) that this film would be a long, dark journey of the soul leading finally to an uplifting climax, but not after a lot of scenes of heartbreak and pathos and general gloom.  I could not have been more wrong.  There is as much heartwarming joy in My Left Foot as it’s possible to contain in any film, and it’s balanced by acknowledgement of Christy Brown’s condition and his down days and his struggles.  It’s a brilliant high-wire act, flawlessly performed both in front of and behind the camera.

Christy Brown is born with cerebral palsy in Ireland in 1932 to a Catholic family that grows in number almost through the entire film.  In a day and age that was simply not equipped to handle disabled children, Christy’s father is blunt: “He’ll go in a coffin before any son of mine will go in a home.”  While his motives were probably more about saving face in his community than anything altruistic, it’s this attitude that most likely saved Christy’s life.  Christy is brought home where his parents and his many sisters and brothers acknowledge and learn to work around his condition, but they refuse to treat him as anything other than a “normal” playmate and sibling.  Some of the happiest scenes in the film are when the children push Christy around in a wheelbarrow, racing up and down their street, as much for his enjoyment as for theirs.

Christy’s mother (Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker) patiently learns how to interpret young Christy’s unintelligible grunts and constantly shifting facial expressions, so it seems as if they’re communicating with each other in a secret language.  When young Christy shocks the family by picking up a piece of chalk with his left foot and writing “MOTHER” on the floor, the father’s response made me smile and smile: he carries Christy to the local pub and announces, “This is Christy Brown!  My son!  Genius!”  If this didn’t happen in real life, it bloody well should have.

(I also loved the bit where the older Christy plays soccer with his friends.  As a very capable goalie, no less.  When the time comes to take a penalty kick, his brothers line him up carefully on the ground so he can use his deadly left foot to rip the back of the net.  Or storage shed, whatever.)

I mention all these moments and interactions between Christy and his family because they are at the core of what makes this movie special.  Yes, Day-Lewis’s performance is the stuff of legend, there’s no denying that.  But the screenwriters are very careful to let us see that, despite his literally crippling affliction, Christy never lacked an unshakeable support structure.  I found myself wondering if I had the kind of fortitude, not to persevere like Christy, but to go all in on supporting a sibling or any loved one, loving them, and always being there for them.  It’s easy enough to say I am willing to do things like that.  I only hope, if I were ever faced with that kind of challenge, that I would meet it with the same kind of unconditional grace and love exhibited by the family of Christy Brown.  Here endeth the introspective portion of this review.

I can’t tell you enough how enthralling and well-balanced this film is.  In my experience, most movies about characters with terminal illnesses tend to wallow too deeply in the grief and sorrow associated with that illness.  My Left Foot makes a conscious decision to establish the illness, lay down the boundaries, and then move forward as if the main character weren’t ill at all.  In a sense, that is the case with Christy Brown in the first place.  As brilliantly portrayed by Day-Lewis, you can always see the mind at work behind the uncontrollable gestures.  There is nothing at all wrong with his mind, only his body, which betrays him and frustrates him.

There is one specific scene that seems to stick in the mind of everyone who sees the film.  Christy has been taken under the wing of a doctor, Eileen Cole (Fiona Shaw) who specializes in treating his condition.  His speech improves, his painting improves.  He falls in love with her.  In an agonizing scene, he confesses his love to her in a restaurant while several other associates look on.  She mistakes his declaration of affection and informs him of her engagement to another man at the table.  After a stunned silence, Christy uses his loudest speaking voice and carefully and very slowly says, “Congratulations.”  Director Jim Sheridan points the camera, not at Christy, but at the horrified and embarrassed dinner guests at the table, and at the other restaurant patrons who stop and stare in disbelief at the noises Christy is forcing into the air.  He has some other choice words regarding platonic love, and the scene ends with him pulling the tablecloth off the table with his teeth.

The emotions on display in this scene were so raw and honest and painful that I found myself covering my eyes a bit.  I felt every bit as embarrassed as those dinner guests.  But I also felt enormous empathy for Christy.  He is raging, not only at Dr. Cole and her rejection of his affection, but at the fates that locked his soul away in a body that was a constant reminder of his “differentness.”  Later scenes show us that he was able to make peace to a much greater degree in later life, but these scenes and others reveal the unimaginable conflict in his sharp mind.

I’m rambling, I think.  I don’t feel I have successfully conveyed how joyous My Left Foot truly is.  I had a goofy smile on my face for the first half hour of the movie.  I laughed out loud many times, especially at Christy’s father’s wake, a scene I vividly remember seeing at the Oscars that year.  Christy Brown was not a perfect man, and the movie does not pretend that he is.  But the movie does end on a wonderful high note that would be crushingly melodramatic in almost any other film.  My Left Foot earns it by showing us his journey, completely, concisely, and with enormous understanding.

DOWN BY LAW (1986)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jim Jarmusch
CAST: Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Ellen Barkin
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88% Fresh

PLOT: A disc jockey, a pimp, and an Italian tourist escape from jail in New Orleans.


The bare-bones plot description above sounds to me like a challenge from some bizarre reality show for screenwriters.  “Here’s your plot, aaaaand GO!”  The opening sequences of Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law look and feel like an ambitious student film, down to its use of music and the black-and-white cinematography and the artsy montage of Bourbon Street and Orleans Parish, where the film takes place.  Having never seen a Jarmusch film before, as I watched these scenes, I was prepared to sit through a dense character study in which nothing much happens but a lot of talking is involved.  In a weird way, I found myself thinking of Clerks, but I despaired that Down by Law would come anywhere near Smith’s film in terms of getting me engaged in the story.

And then…a funny thing happened…

The film introduces us to two characters.  The first one we meet in great detail is Zack (Tom Waits), a gravelly-voiced former deejay living in near squalor with his girlfriend, Laurette, played by Ellen Barkin on the cusp of major stardom.  Their one scene together reveals the strategy for the rest of the film.  As I suspected, not much happens aside from a lot of talking or, in the case of this first scene, a lot of yelling, but there is a vibe or a sensation or something to the dialogue and the crisp black-and-white images that made their scene more immediate.  I am at a loss to explain exactly what it was.  I got the sense that I wasn’t watching two actors playing a scene.  I felt as if I was looking through a crack in the back wall at two real people having a real conversation.

The next character we meet, Jack (John Lurie), is not as savory as Zack.  Jack is a pimp whom we get to know during a conversation with one of his girls, Bobbie (Billie Neal).  Jack is a small-timer who dreams of hitting it big, but we know, as Bobbie does, that Jack’s big talk will never amount to much.  Jack walks and talks like he’s the man, addressing other hookers and pimps by name, and maybe he even sounds a little dangerous.  But his eagerness to expand his operation leads to some questionable decision-making that lands him in jail, to the great surprise of no one.

I just have to mention again the peculiar power of the direction and the dialogue.  The characters sometimes tend to ramble, but there’s never a second that feels superfluous.  There’s a scene where Zack, the deejay, is approached by an old acquaintance who offers him $1,000 just to drive a car from point A to point B.  The little verbal ballet between the two men, performed in mostly one shot as I recall, could have gone wrong any number of ways, as Zack demurs and his friend persists and round and round they go.  Perhaps because the dialogue is a little circular, it feels more natural than the kind of “punchy” dialogue you might get in a film noir.  The style, the camera placement, the acting, everything just sort of comes together and turns potentially boring dialogue into small windows into Zack’s psyche, and everyone else’s, for that matter.  (I think my online colleague, Marc, would enjoy this film very much, because it uses everyday language to illuminate precisely observed and defined characters.)

Zack winds up sharing Jack’s cell in jail for reasons I won’t get into.  It’s here that the story takes a unique turn.  I’ve read Down by Law described elsewhere as dreamlike or even like a fairy tale.  If so, Roberto Benigni is a benign Rumpelstiltskin.  Benigni plays Roberto (of course), an Italian tourist who has landed in jail for…well, let’s just say his offense is a little more severe than what Zack and Jack are in for, which is funny because Roberto speaks mostly broken English and walks and talks like an Italian Charlie Chaplin.  He doesn’t look like he would hurt a fly, much less commit the crime he supposedly committed.

Benigni’s presence in the film brings a lightness to the movie’s center section as the three men stew in their jail cell for weeks and months.  Zack and Jack are world-weary, anxious to tough out their time with minimal connection to each other, much less to Roberto, who is about as different from Zack and Jack as it’s possible to be without being an actual Muppet.  Is there some kind of deeper commentary being made here about how important it is to just connect with each other to make our lives easier to cope with?  How we would all be better off if we were more like Roberto, who delights in the phrase, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ICE cream” so much that he almost starts a prison riot with it?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  I just know I felt a warm little glow watching Benigni’s performance, and how well he contrasted with Zack and Jack.

Eventually, the three men escape from prison; Jarmusch makes a bold move by never revealing exactly how they escape, because the how isn’t as important as the fact that they escape, period.  Here is where the movie really evokes fairy tales as the three men trudge through the Louisiana swamps, slowly starving, wary of alligators, working together but getting on each other’s nerves.  Even Roberto’s bubbly personality takes a brief hiatus when his comrades appear to desert him…twice.

I would rather not synopsize the plot any further.  The movie isn’t concerned with a Hollywood-style plot as it is with showing the interplay of these three very specific characters under extraordinary circumstances.  When it’s done as well as this, it’s a pleasure to experience a film that seems completely free from cliches and predictability.  As I said, I’ve never seen a Jarmusch film, but even without knowing much about his filmography, I’m glad I started with this one.  When the closing credits rolled, it strangely didn’t feel like the movie was over.  Instead, it felt as if everything I just saw was the prologue for the rest of their lives.  I envisioned a future where each character is sitting in a bar or on a park bench and spinning a yarn to whomever will listen.  “Hey, I ever tell you about the time I escaped from a New Orleans prison with two other guys?”  Maybe that’s not quite realistic, but when you’re dealing with a seriocomic neo-noir fairy tale, anything’s possible.

[Note: there is a late sequence featuring an Italian actress named Nicoletta Braschi.  Roberto falls in love with her, and she with him, and says they will spend the rest of their lives together.  In real life, Braschi and Benigni were married five years after the film was released, and they are still married today.  Fairy tale, indeed…]

SILENT RUNNING (1972)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Douglas Trumbull
CAST: Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint
MY RATING: 5/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 71% Fresh

PLOT: In a future where all plant life on Earth is extinct, an astronaut works to preserve the last of Earth’s flora, kept in domed greenhouses aboard a spacecraft.


Silent Running was directed by Douglas Trumbull, a visual effects specialist whose VFX credits include Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Blade Runner.  In 1968, he worked with Stanley Kubrick as the Special Photographic Effects Supervisor on 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Shortly thereafter, he was given the opportunity to direct his own film.  With a script by Michael Cimino and Deric Washburn (who would both later go on to fame with The Deer Hunter), Universal Studios offered him a limited budget and final cut (!) as part of a project to encourage independent filmmakers in the wake of the success of Easy Rider in 1969.

With a crew of mostly college students as modelmakers, and with no directing experience whatsoever, Trumbull created a sci-fi parable that has some grand ideas, but it never quite achieves liftoff.  I don’t know how Silent Running reads at the screenplay level, but on its feet and on the screen, it slogs.

In an unspecified future, Bruce Dern plays Freeman Lowell, one of four astronauts living semi-permanently on a massive, mobile space station, the Valley Forge.  It’s part of a small fleet of similar spacecraft, each bearing several greenhouse domes housing the last remnants of Earth’s botanical ecosystem, including plants, trees, and small forest animals like squirrels, rabbits, frogs, etc.  The astronauts are tasked with protecting these greenhouses until the eventual call back to Earth (they’re currently in the vicinity of Saturn).

[Note: there is more than a passing resemblance between this plotline and that of Pixar’s Wall*E, but I’m sure that’s homage, not plagiarism.]

When the call comes, however, it’s not what they expect.  They’re ordered to detach the greenhouse domes from their ship, detonate them, and return home immediately.  No explanation is given.  These orders do not sit well with Lowell, and before long he’s alone on the Valley Forge with one dome left and only the ship’s waddling repair drones for company as he heads for the dark side of Saturn.

That’s about it for story.  Once he’s alone, there’s not much left for Bruce Dern to say or do except have one-sided conversations with the repair drones while he tries to teach them to play poker.  It’s clear that Trumbull’s focus was on putting his visual effect concepts on the screen in a way that would evoke 2001, but he did not appear to lose much sleep over pacing or plotting.  For a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, there are endless shots of Lowell tending to plant and animal life, programming and reprogramming the drones, staring at the stars while confronting his guilt over his actions.  It’s almost a relief when he is forced to administer mechanical first aid to a drone that gets accidentally run over by an offroad go-cart.  (You read that right.)

There are too many other movies out there about castaways and solo adventures that were way more successful for me to give Silent Running a pass just because of its cult status.  There was never one exterior shot of the spacecraft that did not look like a model.  Explosions in space consist of a bright flare of light that dissipates quickly.  Bruce Dern’s acting is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s put to no good use.  It’s clear that Trumbull was counting on the effects to do a lot of the heavy lifting from a story-telling perspective, but they looked so fake that I was taken out of the story whenever they took front and center…which is a lot.

As a bookmark in VFX history between 2001 and the game-changing Star Wars, I suppose Silent Running does have some historical significance.  It’s clear the movie was made with tender loving care.  But from a cinematic perspective, it’s dull, dull, dull.

[Second Note: the film’s score was composed by Peter Schickele, a rather brilliant musician/comedian who is better known as P.D.Q. Bach.  The score is nothing memorable, but it includes two original songs sung by Joan Baez.  Yes, Joan Baez.  It’s a VFX-heavy sci-fi parable with two musical montages.  It takes all kinds…]

THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR (1942)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Billy Wilder
CAST: Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: A frustrated city woman disguises herself as a 12-year-old girl to get a cheaper train ticket, but her plan backfires when she winds up befriending a very adult Major on the train.  Risqué hilarity ensues.


Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor, contains big laughs, true love, and comic/cosmic misunderstandings – in other words, it’s a classic farce from the fledgling career of one of Hollywood’s true legends.  However, there are certain plot elements that I suspect would make this movie virtually unfilmable today, at least not without tinkering with the structure here and there.  I think the plot points in question will be glaringly apparent to any reasonable viewer, so if I acknowledge them with only the occasional eye roll in my review, I hope readers will forgive me.  It is not my intention to prepare a compare/contrast treatise on prevailing attitudes towards women during the 1940s versus today.  You don’t need me to tell you that the very concept of an adult male bunk-bedding with a strange 12-year-old girl he just met (among other plot devices) raised my eyebrows.  It is firmly a product of its more innocent time. But the whole endeavor is so breezy and carefree that I think it would be a shame to give this film a pass without hearing more about it.  So, here goes.

Ginger Rogers plays the lead, Susan Applegate.  Having only seen Rogers in the occasional dance film with Fred Astaire, I was bowled over by how naturally comic she is.  Based on this movie alone, she could have given Lucille Ball or Rosalind Russell a run for their money.  Anyway, Susan Applegate is fed up with living in NYC.  Tired of being besieged by lechers at every turn, she quits her job – her 25th in a year! – and tries to buy a train ticket back home to Iowa.  When she finds herself short on cash, she dresses up as a 12-year-old girl to get a ticket at half price.  Her real troubles begin when the train gets underway, as the conductors are not movie-dumb enough to fall for her act.

She winds up hiding in the compartment belonging to Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland in a mildly uncommon comic role).  Because he has a bum right eye, he falls for Susan’s story (she calls herself Su-Su to complete the façade) and takes it upon himself to be her impromptu guardian.  Through an unfortunate series of events – a blocked train track, the unexpected arrival of Kirby’s beautiful fiancé, Pamela, and some ill-timed misunderstandings – “Su-Su” finds herself being whisked away to a military school with Major Kirby promising to get her on the next available train back to Iowa.  Trust me, it all makes sense, I’m leaving a lot of details out, otherwise we’d be here all night.

The rest of the film involves Su-Su’s misadventures on the military school campus, surrounded by three hundred school-age boys who are inexplicably attracted to this girl who somehow has the presence of an adult woman.  They like her, but they’re not quite sure why.  The same phenomenon begins to afflict the Major himself, which makes him extremely uncomfortable (understandably so), which makes things more complicated for Susan because SHE’S beginning to fall in love with HIM, and meanwhile Kirby’s future sister-in-law sees right through Susan’s disguise and wants Susan to help her break up the impending marriage, and 20 different cadets show up to escort Su-Su to the school dance, and so on and so on and so on.

This was only Wilder’s second film, but already we can see ideas and situations that he would return to in some of his future films.  The woman disguising herself as a girl is a funhouse-mirror version of the men disguising themselves as women in Some Like It Hot.  We get the reverse situation, a girl becoming a woman, in Sabrina.  The idea of how tough it is to live in the big bad city is echoed in The Apartment.  And if you really squint, you might even see an early forerunner of Norma Desmond in Major Kirby’s beautiful but devious and controlling fiancé…it’s a stretch, but I think it’s valid.

The performance by Ginger Rogers in this movie was a revelation to me.  I had absolutely no idea she could play this kind of character.  She plays everything so believably, whether she’s Susan or “Su-Su.”  In scenes where she’s near Major Kirby, her longing for him is palpable, but her outward reactions are perfectly subtle: a slight pause before a reply, a constant gaze, only occasionally a little mugging when he’s not looking at her, and always making sure to keep her brassy voice in a higher register to sound more girly.  I learn from IMDb that she was anxious to play this role because she was able to draw from her own experiences: as a younger woman, when she toured vaudeville halls with her mother, she would often make herself appear younger to get cheaper train tickets.  Who knew?

Ray Milland had a trickier time of it in this movie.  He manages to pull it off, but imagine the minefields he had to navigate.  He plays a grown man who is the self-appointed guardian of a 12-year-old girl who, by his own admission at one point, looks like a full-grown woman in the right light.  There’s a scene where he feels compelled to at least try to explain the facts of life to Su-Su so she’ll understand why all the cadets are attracted to her like a moth to a light bulb.  (In one of the less-enlightened moments of the film, he advises her: “Maybe if you made yourself a little less attractive…”  HUGE eye-roll.)  Now, we as audience members know there’s really no problem with his mild flirtations because, of course, Su-Su is really Susan.  But HE doesn’t know that.  Wilder has the good sense to pull everything back from the brink before anything unsavory occurs.  It’s one of the best high-wire acts I can think of in a comedy.

(I’m itching to relate all the hilarious Wilder-esque bits peppered throughout the movie, like finding the occasional burnt end in a delicious brisket, but I am anxious to avoid spoilers.  There’s the tap dance, the Veronica Lake look-alikes, “the Maginot Line”, the cigarette on the train…oh, too many to list.  They’re wonderful.)

As with the best farces, a crisis occurs and it seems as if all is lost, but fear not.  Wilder is not known as a genius for nothing.  If you think this romantic comedy from the early forties is not going to have a happy ending, you need to see more movies.  The Major and the Minor is a delight from start to finish.  And if the last line doesn’t quite come up to the standards of “Well, nobody’s perfect!”…well, I mean, what does?

[Note: It’s also interesting to know that The Major and the Minor was filmed and released in 1942, it’s set very specifically in May of 1941, before Pearl Harbor.  Here and there are in the movie are references to Kirby’s desire to be stationed abroad in case war breaks out.  There’s a moment when he confesses that no woman would want to marry a military man stationed overseas, only getting a letter from him once every two weeks.  The reply he gets is very direct, clearly indicating where Wilder stood on the matter: “I think you underestimate us, Mr. Kirby.  Perhaps all a woman wants is to be a photograph a soldier tacks above his bunk or a stupid lock of hair in the back of his watch.”  Sexist?  Or patriotic?  Discuss.]

LACOMBE, LUCIEN (France, 1974)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Louis Malle
CAST: Pierre Blaise, Aurore Clément, Holger Löwenadler
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: In 1944, an 18-year-old boy from a small French village collaborates with the Gestapo and subsequently falls in love with a Jewish girl.


The effectiveness of Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien may depend partially on how much you know about cinema history after World War II.  It’s a historical fact that there were French countrymen who sided with the invading Nazis, going so far as to infiltrate the French Resistance and inform on their neighbors to the Gestapo.  When the war ended, that fact was politely and discreetly avoided in war films for decades.  No one wanted to spoil the notion that the whole of France united with each other to harass the Nazis at every opportunity, and that the Resistance fighters were unambiguously, morally pure.  In France, surviving collaborators went about their business, some more anonymously than others.

In 1974, Lacombe, Lucien became one of the first, if not THE first, French film to not only broach the topic of Nazi collaborators, but also to depict the French Resistance as employing guerilla tactics and carrying out assassinations that were just as morally questionable as any other similar attacks in history.  It was a bold move, to be sure.  Even when you remove that context from the film, when you watch it as a stand-alone piece of cinema, it is still makes for compelling viewing.  However, for my part, the very ending of the movie left me frustrated.  While French audiences may have seen it differently in 1974, I saw it almost as if the filmmakers simply ran out of story and used a title card to tie things up in a bow.  But the journey to get to those final frames is worthwhile, even though the lead character is one of the most loathsome people I’ve ever seen on film.  I would compare him to Amon Goeth from Schindler’s List, not because they are similar characters, but because they elicited the same reaction from me: disgust.  (Or maybe they are similar characters…you tell me.)

The film opens in 1944, just a few weeks after D-Day, in a small town in southwest France.  We first meet young Lucien Lacombe, maybe 17 or 18, mopping a hospital floor, apparently doing a good deed for his community.  Through an open window, he spies a small songbird chirping on a tree branch.  Lucien makes sure no one is watching, pulls a slingshot from his pocket, takes careful aim, and kills the little bird with one shot.  He smirks and goes back to the business of mopping.  We will witness many other instances of Lucien killing other animals.

Indeed, many of these scenes are done for real: the actor playing Lucien clearly kills several rabbits with a shotgun, one with a wooden club.  In another scene, he catches, decapitates, and calmly starts to pluck a chicken for dinner, all in one unbroken take.  Now, this would have been normal behavior for someone living in a farm community in the French countryside, where someone has to prepare tonight’s dinner.  The difference is, Lucien seems to enjoy these tasks a little too much.  Even worse, though, are the times where he is utterly impassive about it, especially with the one rabbit he catches in the snare.  These are hard scenes to watch, but in hindsight, they are vital to unpacking or interpreting Lucien’s actions later in the film.

Through a series of events that reminded me a little bit of Goodfellas (“All my life, I wanted to be a gangster”), Lucien allows himself to be recruited into a cadre of French collaborators whose base of operations is a fancy hotel where their opulent lifestyle is a rebuke to those silly Resistance fighters who must scrape a living from the dirt.  He is more than willing to do what it takes to get a taste of the good life.  He turns in a schoolteacher who is also a Resistance officer; he makes a show of being contrite about it, but he quickly gets over it.

The rest of the movie shows Lucien puffed up with pride in his new social status, bullying anyone and everyone who dares to talk down to him.  There are, to be sure, broader statements being made here about the psyche of anyone who deludes themselves into believing in their inherent superiority over their fellow man just because they’re handed a membership card, regardless of how small-minded or shallow they might be.  However, during the movie, I never thought of those broader implications.  It’s a testament to how well the movie was directed and acted that I was concerned only with how Lucien behaved and acted, and not with whatever director Malle was trying to say from a metaphorical or allegorical standpoint.

To watch Lucien bully people around was sickening and pathetic.  He is introduced to a tailor, Albert Horn, who will make him some new clothes.  Lucien’s friend in the Gestapo casually informs him that Albert is a Jew who is only allowed to live in relative peace because of his skills as a tailor, and because he makes regular payoffs to the Gestapo.  Albert has a 20-something-year-old daughter, improbably named France, with whom Lucien is almost immediately smitten, despite her ethnicity.  He tries to impress France by getting her to the front of a food line, but she demurs.  When people in line complain, he smugly explains he’s with the German police and he can do whatever he wants.  The idea of that kind of power in the hands of someone as despicable as Lucien made me as angry as I can ever recall being while watching a film.

In the background of Lucien’s plotline is the shadowy Resistance itself.  Various members of the French collaborators are being killed here and there, certainly not a bad thing.  But the aftermath of their attacks is no less disquieting than anything perpetrated by the pro-Nazi collaborators, especially after a brazen attack on the fancy hotel headquarters, where the bodies of the collaborators are just as dead as the bodies of the Resistance fighters.  Perhaps the film is making a point that dead is dead, no matter which side you’re on, so you’d better be sure you’re dead for the right reasons because history will remember you one way or the other.

At the center of all this is Lucien’s face with his cold eyes and virtually expressionless mouth.  He doesn’t smile, he smirks.  He threatens Albert and France with exposure and arrest if Albert doesn’t allow Lucien to date, then marry, France.  For her part, France is wise enough to know when to humor Lucien and when to go along with his behavior, for the good of her father.  Lucien, besotted with power, is too clueless to realize how smart she really is.

I have a general guideline that I dislike movies with rotten characters at the center of them.  But I must admit that Lacombe, Lucien sucked me into the story and kept me there, despite how much I disliked Lucien himself.  I guess I wanted to see how much the filmmakers would allow him to get away with before he was swatted down.  Whether he gets swatted down or not is for you to discover, but let it be said that the ending manages to have it both ways, which was challenging for me.  I both did and didn’t get the kind of closure I wanted, which explains my somewhat median rating despite how well-made the film is.

It may be that I’m not old enough, or knowledgeable enough, to really appreciate the impact Lacombe, Lucien had on 1974 audiences.  I can only report how it made me feel right now.  It made me feel anger and indignance towards Lucien throughout the whole movie, even when he makes a crucial decision that seems as if it will redeem his character.  I don’t think it does, because the damage he instigated has been done and cannot be undone by a single act of contrition when it’s far too late to make any difference.  Perhaps that’s not a very Christian idea, but that’s how the movie made me feel, regardless.  Lucien deserves what he gets and more.  Does that apply to the real-life French collaborators, many of whom were still alive when this movie was released?  It’s not for me to pass judgement on those people.  But I can’t deny how the movie itself made me feel towards the people within the world of the film.

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (United Kingdom, 1961)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: J. Lee Thompson
CAST: Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, Anthony Quayle, Irene Papas, Richard Harris
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 92% Fresh

PLOT: A team of Allied saboteurs is assigned an impossible mission: infiltrate an impregnable Nazi-held Greek island and destroy two enormous long-range field guns preventing the rescue of 2,000 trapped British soldiers.


The Guns of Navarone is a “message” picture cleverly disguised as a World War II action-adventure/thriller.  No surprise there since the screenwriter was Carl Foreman, who also co-wrote 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, another stirring wartime adventure with a strong anti-war message buried inside.  I found it interesting that, in the multiple behind-the-scenes documentaries on the Blu-ray, not one of them mentioned the one movie which I feel most resembles The Guns of Navarone: 1967’s The Dirty Dozen.  In both films, teams of men mount insurmountable odds to accomplish an insanely difficult mission, incurring casualties while ultimately succeeding.  In both films, there is a buried, or not-so-buried, subtext about the futility of the mission and/or war in general, while still gluing audiences to their seats.  However, given the timeframe of the release of The Guns of Navarone in the early 1960s, I find it to be the more surprising of the two, despite the foregone conclusion of the movie.

The movie’s narrated prologue tells us everything we need to know.  (Forget for a moment that there is not, and never was, a Greek island called Navarone.)  In 1943, two thousand British soldiers marooned on the island of Kheros must be evacuated before Germany convinces Turkey to join the Axis.  But the only sea lane to Kheros is defended by two massive German guns built into the sheer cliffs of the island of Navarone.  The guns must be knocked out of commission by a team of Allied saboteurs before any rescue attempts can be made.  This team will be led by Captain Mallory (Gregory Peck), Corporal Miller (David Niven), Colonel Stavros (Anthony Quinn), and Major Franklin (Anthony Quayle).  Along with the rest of the team, they must sneak on to Navarone, scale a steep cliff at night, and sneak across the island to the guns, hooking up with Greek resistance fighters along the way.  These details are laid out with admirable brevity, during which we are given just enough information about each of the three primary characters to understand their actions once the mission is underway.

The Guns of Navarone may be constructed almost entirely out of war movie cliches regarding desperate men behind enemy lines on a secret mission, staying undercover, close calls, and unexpected setbacks.  However, I enjoyed how much Navarone sort of “leans into” the material.  It’s almost as if the filmmakers said, “Okay, so this is a cliché, right?  We might as well embrace it and do it up right.”  For example, we find out that one of the squad commanders has a nickname: “Lucky.”  In the history of movies, any character in a war picture named “Lucky” has been anything but.  You know this, I know this.  Even so, as events transpired, I found myself thinking less and less about the most cliched material and just admiring how it was executed.  It’s a tribute to the director, J. Lee Thompson, that he found a way to present everything in such an uncomplicated fashion that its very directness pushes aside our suspension of disbelief.

That’s not to say there aren’t a couple of surprises.  Capt. Mallory devises an ingenious method of dealing with a man so injured he may have to be left behind.  A clandestine trip to a local doctor turns into something quite different, offering Anthony Quinn the opportunity to perform some amazing off-the-cuff histrionics that would make Nicolas Cage envious.  The Greek resistance fighters turn out to be two women who offer much more to the story than mere eye candy or comforting shoulders.  (One of them, played by the great Irene Papas, may even be the strongest member of the squad…discuss.)  David Niven’s character, Corporal Miller, is given two remarkable speeches that would have stopped a lesser film in its tracks, considering their anti-war and possibly even anarchic sentiments, including this exchange:

Mallory: And if Turkey comes into the war on the wrong side?
Miller: So what!  Let the whole bloody world come in and blow itself to pieces.  That’s what it deserves.
Mallory: And what about the 2,000 men on Kheros!
Miller: I don’t know the men on Kheros, but I do know the men on Navarone!

Was that kind of dialogue or sentiment even possible in a war movie made in the ‘50s?  (Aside from The Bridge on the River Kwai, of course.)  A war movie made in 1961, just fifteen years after The Greatest Generation rallied to defeat the worst dictator in history, and one of the main characters seems to be advocating desertion in order to survive the night?  Wow.

In my eagerness to describe how, I guess, subversive The Guns of Navarone is, I have yet to mention the action.  It’s top-notch.  Find it in your heart to forget how some of the effects are clearly matte paintings and models and miniatures and remember that this was top-of-the-line production values in 1961.  In fact, Navarone won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects that year.  There’s an impressive shipwreck sequence, attacks from dive-bombing airplanes, massive formations of tanks and troops (provided by the Greek monarchy), and the titular guns themselves, full-size props that dwarfed the actors and belched real fire when activated.  No expense was spared to provide audiences with true spectacle.

Is The Guns of Navarone perfect?  I mean, I personally could have done without the sequence where one of the soldiers sings along at a local wedding.  The story itself is ageless, but the film doesn’t quite feel timeless, despite its anachronistic tendency towards liberalism in the middle of a war zone.  There are one or two story decisions that I found questionable.  (One character’s death looked as if he was basically committing suicide, and I found no reason for it story-wise.)  But there’s no denying it’s a thumping good yarn.  And come on, who doesn’t enjoy watching Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn tear up the screen for two-and-a-half hours?

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Jack Arnold
CAST: Grant Williams, Randy Stuart, April Kent, William Schallert
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 83% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After being exposed to an ominous mist, Scott Carey starts to shrink in size, baffling medical science and subjecting him to unanticipated dangers.


I appreciate the seemingly endless string of 1950s sci-fi/monster movies in the same way I appreciate the short films of Georges Méliès: I acknowledge their place in movie history and their influence on the films of today, but I have no overwhelming desire to hunt them down and watch them.  If that makes me a dilettante, so be it.  I remember watching some of those ‘50s films as a boy on Saturday afternoons, although the titles elude me.  (One of them was in 3-D, requiring a trip to the local 7-11 to get a pair of those funky cardboard glasses.)  As young as I was, I could already see that these were not exactly Hollywood’s best films.  The plots were creaky and repetitive, the special effects were barely passable, the scripts were hammy and the acting even more so.  The ideas behind the stories were more compelling than the movies themselves.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I sat down to watch 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold, the man behind a few of the most famous entries in the sci-fi/horror craze at that time: It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, This Island Earth, and Tarantula.  Even though Shrinking Man appears on the National Film Registry as well as the invaluable list of 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I was prepared to be mildly bored with cheesy effects and overwrought acting.  Instead, I was genuinely thrilled by the adventures of Scott Carey, an everyman whose body inexplicably starts to shrink and shrink, until one day a housecat poses a mortal threat and a household spider – well, a tarantula – becomes as symbolic as anything from Hemingway.

A plot summary seems mildly superfluous: while boating one day with his wife, Scott Carey unwisely remains topside as a mysterious cloud of mist passes over their boat, leaving his body coated with somehow ominous glitter.  Six months later, he starts to notice his clothes aren’t fitting as they should.  His wife, Louise, barely has to stand on her tiptoes anymore to kiss him.  Doctors are baffled, but promise to do whatever they can, spouting pseudo-scientific nonsense about phospholipids and a “deadly chemical reversal of the growth process.”  There is some unintentionally (?) suggestive dialogue as Scott expresses his concerns to Louise: “I’m getting smaller, Lou.  Every day.”  And: “You love Scott Carey.  He has a size and a shape and a way of thinking.  All that’s changing now.”  Not exactly Michael Crichton, but I rolled with it.

One of the things that sells the movie and the story is the ingenious production design that kicks in when Scott reaches about 36 inches in height.  As he walks around his living room, everything has become larger than life.  When he sits in an easy chair, his head doesn’t even reach the top of the back.  A pencil is larger than a baseball bat.  He despondently visits a diner, where a cup of coffee is as big around as a beer barrel.  This aspect of the film seemed reminiscent of, say, a Disney movie.  It seems obvious at first, but it’s done so well that I was drawn into the illusion completely.  Some clever trick photography manages to put the shrunken Scott in the same frame as the full-size Louise many times.  Even my experienced eyes couldn’t see the “splice” without a lot of searching.

Scott eventually shrinks to just a few inches tall and must resort to living inside a literal dollhouse, another triumph of production design.  This sets up the first major set piece of the movie as their housecat sees the tiny Scott as a tiny morsel and attacks the dollhouse.  Scott winds up in the cellar, Louise comes home and assumes the cat has eaten her beloved husband, and Scott, unable to climb the now-inaccessible staircase, must navigate the menacing wasteland of a dimly lit cellar in search of food and water.

This central portion of the film is what sets it apart from most other similar films of its era.  The screenplay was written by Richard Matheson, based on his book.  Matheson also wrote I Am Legend, and in both stories, there are long passages where a solitary character is alone with his thoughts and must solve life-or-death problems with no one to talk to.  The silence of Shrinking Man during Scott’s adventure in the cellar is striking.  The film started with narration, and I expected it to last throughout the cellar sequences, but the filmmakers wisely decided to keep it minimal and focus instead on Scott’s actions, allowing the audience to think along with him instead of telegraphing what he was thinking.  I was reminded of Cast Away (2000), although poor Scott never gets a Wilson.  Instead, he’s stuck with the resident tarantula that becomes his nemesis.

I should mention the subtext of the story, even though it’s not something that occurred to me while watching.  I’m told in various documentaries that Matheson wrote his novel The Shrinking Man in 1956 during a bout of depression and insecurity as a new father.  Scott’s shrinking reflected Matheson’s own sense of insignificance under the responsibilities of a father and husband in an age of accelerating technology and the fears of the Cold War.  This is something that might have been far more obvious to audiences of the time than it is to a member of Generation X, but in hindsight, it’s an intriguing added level to a story that is compelling enough on its own.  If I wanted to, I could connect this story with Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park with its ravenous dinosaurs paired with a warning to the scientific community about the dangers of unchecked progress.  Pretty neat.

As fascinating and, at times, terrifying as the cellar sequences are, what really sets Shrinking Man apart from its contemporaries is the ending.  In virtually every other ‘50s monster film, the story ends on some kind of positive resolution where the threat is removed due to some new scientific discovery or an unexpected ally (the germs in The War of the Worlds come to mind) or, like Godzilla, it just disappears into the sunset.  This movie sidesteps that cliché by presenting the audience with an existential statement about the vastness of the universe on both a cosmic and an infinitesimal scale.  I know that sounds dry as hell, and the final monologue flirts with hokeyness, but listen to it carefully, and the ideas in it are grand and mystifying.  It mentions “God” here and there, but if you think of God, not as THE God, but as the unknowable engine of fate and/or the cosmos, the sentiments expressed have thought-provoking implications.  Scott’s last words in the film may sound simplistic, but they’re loaded with meaning, and can be applied to his own situation or to anyone struggling with the meaning of their own existence.  Pretty heady stuff for a sci-fi/special effects genre movie.

Where other films of its kind attempt and fail to ascribe grand themes to their kitschy stories and rubber-suited big-bads, The Incredible Shrinking Man actually made me think.  That’s an accomplishment.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: John Huston
CAST: Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern, Jean Hagen, James Whitmore, Sam Jaffe, Marilyn Monroe
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 97% Fresh

PLOT: A major heist goes off as planned (almost), but then double crosses, bad luck, and solid police work cause everything to unravel.


On the Criterion Blu Ray of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, noir historian Eddie Muller says you can draw a straight line from Jungle to the French heist film Rififi on through to the Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible franchise and Three Kings.  To that list I would add the crime films of David Mamet.  At the moment, I can’t think of another movie in Asphalt Jungle’s era in which the dialogue is so flat, menacing, and uncluttered.  The story is exciting without being flashy, the characters are sharply drawn, and the cinematography creates the underbelly of a city almost Blade Runner­-ish in its gloom.  Even the planned jewelry heist, while detailed, is almost like a Hitchcock MacGuffin: the heist itself hardly matters, only the results…like Reservoir Dogs.  Another descendant.

Doc Erwin Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) has just gotten out of prison.  After evading a police tail, he visits a local clip joint looking for help in putting together a heist he had worked on before he was imprisoned.  (I like how Doc and his colleagues rarely refer to “jail” or “prison”; it’s always “behind the walls.”)  He eventually enlists Gus, the wheel man (James Whitmore); Louis, the safecracker (Anthony Caruso); and Dix Handley, the muscle (Sterling Hayden, as shambling as ever, even in 1950).  Doc dismisses Handley as a hooligan.  “Violence is all they know, but they are, unfortunately, necessary.”  Throughout the film, Handley will do nothing to prove them wrong.

They need a bankroll for the heist, so the team goes to a crooked lawyer, Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern), who agrees to their terms, but eventually reveals himself to be even more crooked than they are.  (Emmerich has a mistress, Angela, played by a young, gorgeous Marilyn Monroe in the role that made her a star.  She calls Alonzo “Uncle Lon” and steals every scene she’s in.  John Huston reportedly said Monroe was “one of the few actresses who could make an entrance by leaving the room.”)

The Asphalt Jungle is not so much about the heist as it is about the characters and their behaviors.  We watch how Dix Handley treats the one woman in his life, the appropriately named Doll (Jean Hagen).  She shows up on his doorstep the day after he’s released from a police lineup.  He grudgingly acknowledges her existence and allows her to crash at his place for a couple of nights, “but don’t you go getting any ideas, Doll.”  We see the money man, Emmerich, as he sweats about his planned double-cross, but still has to find the time to placate his bedridden wife.  There’s a great scene with Gus, the wheel man, who also owns a greasy spoon.  A rude cabbie takes cruel jabs at Gus’s hunched back, crippled gait, and scrawny pet cat; Gus reveals his true colors when he handily throws the cabby out of his restaurant while Dix looks on, amused.

Everyone gets their character-driven spotlight, even a crooked cop, Lt. Ditrich, who is assigned the task of finding Doc Riedenschneider, but when he does see him inside a clip joint, he simply turns around and walks away.  Later, Ditrich has a brutal scene with the weak-willed owner of the clip joint where he slaps him around several times to get him to spill his guts.  Watch the scene carefully, and it certainly looks as if Ditrich is really slapping this guy around.

Behavior is everything in this movie, not necessarily the plot.  Without giving too much away, behavior is what gets two characters killed, gets one arrested, drives another to suicide, and leads one to meet his fate in a horse pasture.  Nothing feels artificial or melodramatic.  There is an inevitability to what happens, a tragic undercurrent, that causes us to empathize with these hardened criminals.  These are not nice people.  But when one character unwisely stays seated in a diner when he really should have left, we are disappointed.  When one character’s lies to the police come back to haunt him, we shake our heads in resignation.  Their nature got the best of them.

Sterling Hayden is the headliner of The Asphalt Jungle, and he does get one or two scenes that are “juicier” than the rest, but this is a true ensemble piece.  It takes its time to make us familiar with each key player, with who they are, so we will understand why they do what they do at every turn.  That may seem like Storytelling 101, but you’d be surprised how many movies get that wrong.  Here’s one that gets it right in spades.