Kindle. And yet more mid-century pulp. This one is more hard boiled, more explicitly violent (with a fair bit of man-on-woman violence) but still coy on the sexy bits. The plot is chaotic, often tending to random as the leading man tears up a Texan oil town that has grown more quickly than the law can regulate. None of the characters are deeply drawn or make a lot of sense; at least four are interchangeable Country Club stereotypes of intemperate greed, and all the ladies need other men than the ones they have. Things get a bit screwy at times but too often I felt like Davis was just circling back to the same situations. He implied that there was an arrangement of wives that may've worked for everyone (at least the men) but let that dangle.
Goodreads. Apparently did the rounds of the blogosphere after it was reprinted in 2010.
My first time around with writer/director Ingmar Bergman. #241 in the IMDB top-250, at least until the next round of comic book movies. The IMDB grab for this movie has always sounded so intriguing:
A knight returning to Sweden after the Crusades seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.
but the bulk of the runtime dances around these issues to the extent that I found this misleading. The film assumes a Christian ontology and disposition which seems at odds with a personified Death. Even allowing for that I did not understand why, if you're supreme-being curious and you are given sufficient reasons to suspect that your time is up, you wouldn't hurry to meet your maker. Moreover demanding sensory evidence of the transcendental reeks of category error. What is served up is a lot pontificating, mostly about women, sex and why the Creator is so elusive. It feels pre-modern in its exploration.
Structurally things start out media res and Bergman takes his time establishing most of the above quote. His knight was a very young Max von Sydow, Death Bengt Ekerot. Gunnar Björnstrand as the knight's squire opines at length. I kept waiting for it to kick into gear but all I got was distraction and evasion, an inarticulate fear of death. There is a fair bit of man looking at the world, woman looking at the man.
Roger Ebert: four stars as a "great movie" in 2000. His writeup is more about Bergman's career though. Bosley Crowther at the time.
Unrewarded curiosity about what Jean-Louis Trintignant did after Z (1969). Also an Angie Dickinson jag from Dressed to Kill (1980). She played the wife of L.A. mafioso Ted de Corsia who had more interest in his son Umberto Orsini. Outside hitman Trintignant executed his task just fine but was surprised when a mostly non-speaking and overly inert Roy Scheider tried to execute his. The former was fortunate that Ann-Margret (Carnal Knowledge (1971)) was at such a loose end that she offered to move to Paris with him.
IMDB trivia claims that the French crew — co-writer/director Jacques Deray, co-writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Ian McLellan Hunter — came to the city for another project that didn't happen, and so opportunistically dashed off a script in 12 days. It's essentially an exploitation piece, in love with yank tanks like Melville was but at least here the streets are made for them. The strong cast cannot make up for the disjointed script; there are several stretches of tedium, especially the car chases.
The daytime cinematography was fine but the street scenes at night were very poor. There was the odd inventive image, like the corpse at the funeral parlour. Talia Shire (Connie Corleone) got the Anjanette Comer role there. It does somewhat function as a time capsule for seedy L.A. at the time, much like Whore (1991) did.
Kindle. More mid-century pulp. Written in the style of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). A bloke from the wrong side of the tracks discovers that basketball is a path to small-time riches and dolls. Watch out for those small-time hoods! Well-executed as far as it goes but it didn't aim to go far: everything was entirely predictable, right down to his time in college where a working lady's time tracks his prospects. Or schedule, in their preferred locution. There's not a lot to recommend it.
A grab from this was included in Boorman and the Devil (2025) as evidence of how Hollywood took more risks during the new wave. I mostly wanted to see what Christopher Walken did early on in his career. Also for Sean Connery. It proved impossible to care about his romance with Dyan Cannon (Deathtrap (1982)) whose time ran out. Martin Balsam does some solidly fruity work. Directed by Sidney Lumet from a script Frank Pierson (Cool Hand Luke (1967), Dog Day Afternoon (1975)) derived from Lawrence Sanders's novel of the same name.
Connery apparently spent a decade in the can as a favour to the mafia (I think). He quickly gets bored with not having money and invests an excessive amount of time organising a heist: he aims to empty out an entire apartment block. The second half shows how that unwinds. But perhaps the point of it all was to observe all the surveillance (on film and audio tape) from a wide variety of interested parties, albeit to no particular end.
The mafia connection was entirely dispensable. The setting and its denizens reminded me of Rosemary's Baby (1968). In its favour was the casting of Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz (1939)) alongside Judith Lowry as a sort of Statler and Waldorf pair who provide some very amusing commentary on proceedings. They should have built the movie around those two.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Roger Greenspun at the New York Times. Both enjoyed Alan King's mafioso.
John Boorman's output is a bit all-over-the-shop; from the accessibly mainstream (Deliverance (1972)) to the amusingly fruity (Zardoz (1974)). Some projects may've functioned if better assembled (Excalibur (1981)). This is a doco by David Kittredge about the making of Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).
Having seen none of the franchise and with no interest in it whatsoever was no liability in enjoying the ruefulness on show here. The shoot looked suitably crazy and the claims of supernatural interference are as overheated as everything else. Most of the talking heads (including Louise Fletcher, Linda Blair, Stephanie Zacharek and Boorman himself) say interesting things. (The other, younger directors are mostly filler.) They assert the obvious about the deceased: Richard Burton was a limited actor ("dead from the neck down") with a great voice. The budget limitations caused them to draw inspiration from Black Narcissus (1947) and shoot on sound stages, but it seems the really exciting stuff was shot on location, including the roof of the Warner Bros skyscraper in NYC. Someone claimed that some of Ennio Morricone's score wasn't even music.
Kittredge pumps up Boorman's tyres a bit too much; he is indeed visually creative, wildly so, but his movies tend to philosophical incoherence. This is observed here implicitly by everyone piling on Rospo Pallenberg for not improving the situation. The concept of audience-independent filmmaking doesn't strike me as of much concern now given the huge reduction in the costs of production. Kobek's take on Kenneth Anger is a superior work on that front.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: justice for the heretic. Peter Sobczynksi: "the Boorman film is a stone-cold classic and this is a hill that I am willing to fall upon." He claims that Boorman's crazypants cinema had a revival in 2026. More dished dirt at the film's IMDB trivia page. There is a grab of Friedkin mouthing off in this doco but I can only imagine how much better it would've been if they'd been able to interview him too.
A pointer from Peter Sobczynksi's review of Verity (2026) and some Brian De Palma completism. Notionally a psychosexual/erotic thriller and it is indeed prurient and lurid, ploughing the track for not only Basic Instinct (1992) (amongst many others) but also The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
The movie is split into halves with a thick seam in the middle, bridged somewhat by Michael Caine's shrink in one of his blander performances. The first is languid, focussing on clotheshorse/socialite/housewife Angie Dickinson (Rio Bravo (1959)) who is all hot and bothered in NYC. The scenes of her looking for some attention in an art gallery mostly work before it degenerates into a slasher. Last/call girl Nancy Allen (the Mrs De Palma of the day, The Last Detail (1973), Robocop (1987)) takes over and proceeds to run around trying to crack the case while avoiding the same fate. The late exposition dump was very unwelcome, as was the concluding "it was only a dream" bookend scene. Somehow she (and De Palma) didn't go all Mrs Robinson (1967) over gifted geek/mama's boy Keith Gordon.
Dickinson got the harder task and the better end of the movie, but her efforts to draw attention to the fine details of her activities (the frustrated discarding of a lonesome glove, a missing wedding ring, a letter diagnosing VD) seem misplaced in this very unsubtle production. Getting bored with what I was shown (so many scenes linger, trying to amp the tension) I started to wonder if De Palma wasn't also trying to play identity games ala David Lynch's far superior Mulholland Drive (2001). But the ladies are all blondes.
Roger Ebert: three stars. De Palma was trying to mime the Hitchcock style. Vincent Canby. IMDB trivia. Enough body doubles to confuse everything.
Inevitable as it's Looney Tunes. Essentially a joke-conceit — Wile E. Coyote gets fed up with the failure of Acme's devices and sues them — overstretched to feature length. The cartoon parts are generally funny but the human elements are poor: Will Forte as a loser, ambulance-chasing lawyer, John Cena as a high-level Acme functionary, Lana Condor as something relatable for Gen Y or Z or alpha. Eric Bauza's voice work is nowhere as good as Mel Blanc's; Bugs Bunny just didn't sound right at all, so much so that I'd've preferred something generated by AI. And surely the Road Runner does not say "beep beep".
Even the source material by Ian Frazier stretched the joke too thin. James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch did the overstretching in the writers' room.
Jason Di Rosso interviewed director Dave Green, focussing on how the movie was sprung from the Warner Bros purgatory. Peter Sobczynksi: it's not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988). A movie about the release of this movie may've been more fun. And so on, way beyond my attention span.
A jag from Falling Down (1993) via Ebbe Roe Smith who acts here. Written by Daniel Petrie Jr. Directed by Jim McBride.
Lead Dennis Quaid is a slightly bent police lieutenant in New Orleans. The only available woman in town, Ellen Barkin (Tender Mercies (1983), Down by Law (1986), Sea of Love (1989)), works for the D.A. and has reason to suspect that the cops are in on a mafia/wiseguy murder or two and a heroin stash. Ned Beatty got the John Goodman role, an amiable police chief, leaving John Goodman with little to work with. Things generally go as they must in a winsome, comedic mode. It's a bit Howard Hawks with Lisa Jane Persky doing the Hildy role well enough that I wish she'd been the focus. There's so much mumbling that I missed boatloads of dialogue and most of the character's names. Barkin is game but not my idea of a good time. She's at her best when she's chewing some man out. There are some funny bits but I felt I was more laughing at than with.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Clearly I missed the depths, the eroticism and the characterisation. Vincent Canby was far less convinced.
An improbable jag via screenwriter Norman Wexler from Saturday Night Fever (1977). He got some help from Gary DeVore in adapting a story by Luciano Vincenzoni and Sergio Donati. Directed by John Irvin whose CV is littered with dreck like this with the singular redeeming exception of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). Ill-advised Arnie completism.
Ex-FBI agent Arnie is tasked with cleaning up the Chicago mob. The setup makes a minimal amount of sense but soon enough the filmmakers fumble the plot. It has no redeeming features.
Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars, presumably because he could laugh at the Chicago settings. Vincent Canby: Arnie is the thinking kid's Stallone.
A Frederic Forrest jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Conversation (1974). Directed by Joel Schumacher (A Time to Kill (1996), some ill-advised Batmans, etc.). Written by Ebbe Roe Smith.
The central conceit was to give the Los Angeles of the day a big broad unsubtle serve, and as such it functions as a time capsule. Michael Douglas led. As a fed-up veteran he went looking for his inner Matthew Modine/Vincent D'Onofrio in an effective, bland and just sometimes explosive performance much like what he did in The Game (1997). Barbara Hershey was his placeholder ex-wife, Lois Smith fine as his concerned mother. Robert Duvall ran on a parallel track, a cop on his last day who is married to Tuesday Weld, to whom time has not been kind. Her histrionics are somewhat amusing. Rachel Ticotin, radiant as Duvall's ex-partner/protege/daughter surrogate. Forrest played the surplus store operator that Chef may've become if he'd made it, and of course he doesn't make it. Dedee Pfeiffer is soaked when Douglas shoots up her burger joint.
Douglas's straight walk from somewhere west to Venice Beach reminded me of Dustin Hoffman's in Straight Time (1978) and more figuratively Burt Lancaster's swim. He decided he's not going to take it any more. The racism lacked the cutting edge of Spike Lee's east-coast Do The Right Thing (1989); here the "Korean" shop keeper is deemed insufficiently white to escape Douglas's rampage. The ganglands were better observed in Boyz'N'Hood (1991) and Venice Beach by White Men Can't Jump (1992). There is a minor-note No Country for Old Men (2007) ruefulness in the Douglas/Duvall pairing. Cliches abounded.
Roger Ebert: three stars. Some easy scapegoating here but he'd prefer you to blame Wall Street. Vincent Canby also noted the similarities with The Swimmer, albeit the John Cheever original. Valentino D. Harrison, the kid who instructs Douglas on how to use the missile launcher.
Paul Barry: The Big Steal: How steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta fooled Australia and the world. (2026)
Tue, Sep 29, 2026./noise/books | LinkKindle. A valiant and entertaining effort to pick at the seams of Gupta's financial shenanigans. Barry does not get to the nub and can't really as the corporate structures are too opaque and public accounts too inadequate. Perhaps half draws on Duncan Mavin's Pyramid of Lies (2022) about Lex Greensill and the collapse of his financing bromance with Gupta. Quite often some diagrams would've helped to make the money and notional ownership structures clearer. Some chapters malfunction; chapter 23 Sanjeev's Last Stand is a theatrical take on some court proceedings, which is jarring after the 10,000 foot view of the financial dealings we got up to that point. I think he could've dug into the InfraBuild situation some more.
In any case I was less interested in Gupta per se and more about what's happening with the steelworks at Whyalla. Barry interviewed the S.A. Premier Peter Malinauskas and minister/righthand man Tom Koutsantonis but did not interrogate their version of events. For instance, did it make sense to bet the state's energy storage/green steel transition on Gupta in February 2024, knowing what was known then? (Greensill's operation had collapsed in 2021, for instance, and Gupta was already zombie-shuffling funds amongst related entities, sucking funds out of InfraBuild and the Tahmoor Colliery.) Have they sold the generators from the hydrogen plant yet? And how much was spent on not getting the blast furnace going again? (It was already struggling in March 2024 after Gupta's operators reduced production too much.) Why has the sale date slipped from the end of September 2026 to the end of the year or perhaps March 2027? Barry observed but did not dig into KordaMentha's rushed sale of the steelworks to Gupta in 2017 — a decision that Koutsantonis claims here he did not like but could not influence — and provided us with no reason to believe they'll do a better job this time around. Barry is keen to moralise over Gupta's appropriation and misallocation of Other People's Money (and fair enough too) but gave the politicians and administrators too much of a pass.
Obviously the story is not yet complete; Barry updated a chapter recently with more details about the lawsuits over the insurance on some relevant delinquent financial instruments. It reads like the purest farce. The snail-paced UK Serious Fraud Office investigation into GFG is apparently still live. Tahmoor has been sold to a consortium including M Resources who is one of the final two-or-so bidders for the steelworks. (Does their proposal to generate hydrogen and solid graphite from natural gas make sense for anyone other than Santos? Does their technology scale? Is their financier Golden Energy and Resources sound?) And of course Gupta is still out there somewhere making promises that some choose to believe. And so on and on.
Goodreads. Barry visited Whyalla a couple of months before the steelworks got sent into administration in 2024. (This formed one chapter of the book.) Reviews are legion but do not grapple with the flaws. Most witlessly cheer on the government intervention. It is all very fascinating.
Prompted by Dwight Garner's review of a collection of Nik Cohn's articles and a sense of eventual inevitability. Englishman Cohn wrote the source material (Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (1976)) that Norman Wexler (Serpico (1973)) massaged into a script that John Badham (WarGames (1983)) directed.
John Travolta's first big-screen splash, and it got him a deserved Oscar nom. The dialogue is mostly very amusing but he and it are let down by a scenario that struggles for plot when it should've settled for character and scene: disco and the Bee Gees, they speak loud and clear, then and now. It does function as a time capsule for some part of Brooklyn and the graffiti-encrusted subway that only our main man is brave enough to use. The elements of romcom involving dream-dancer/girlfriend Karen Lynn Gorney (David and Lisa (1962)) provide little heat or light, unlike the polyester suits. Brother Martin Shakar pulling the ripcord on the priesthood seemed totally irrelevant.
The cinematography is generally fine in mostly a realism style, out on the streets, but flags in the discotheque: the lights at the same height as faces erase features and there are too many shots from below that occlude the important stuff.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars at the time and four stars as a "great movie" in 1999. This was Siskel's favourite film; Ebert keeps circling back to La Dolce Vita (1960) as some kind of biographical touchstone. Janet Maslin. IMDB trivia: instant retro. Who even knew there was a sequel (1983)? Directed by Sylvester Stallone! — one star from Roger Ebert.
Samantha Morton completism. On the pile since forever, mostly because I've struggled to get started with all of Lynne Ramsay's movies; this was the first I managed to get all the way through. She directed a screenplay she co-wrote with Liana Dignini based on Alan Warner's book with the same title (1995). Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's mention of a a new book by Anwen Crawford on this movie.
It's Christmastime in or near Glasgow and some people have seen enough of those. Morton responds to her boyfriend's departure by going out partying with her bestie Kathleen McDermott. After recovering she decides to pirate the manuscript of his novel and spend his money on a jaunt to Andalucía, Spain but not before slicing up his mortal remains. Finally, a use for the great Scottish outdoors! The packaged tour encourages industrialised, putatively hedonistic but actually just bad behaviour; McDermott takes to it like a thawed-out fish but Morton seems mostly disconnected until she encounters a boy who has also lost someone. There's a scene that I took to be a homage to Manuel from Fawlty Towers (~ 1975). Morton drags McDermott up the coast a bit where they're sort-of running the bulls. A publisher comes through with more money than Morton could ever dream of but the bestie cannot imagine leaving Glasgow. Morton departs, alone.
Morton's character is deliberately underexplained, which would have been fine if she exhibited a bit more of the quiet/internalised desperation about her Scottish situation that came out in one line about how many years she has until she can draw a pension. Mike Leigh did a better job on that front in All or Nothing (2002); perhaps I was insufficiently sympathetic to track the subtleties here. McDermott mostly just giggled all the time, a good time girl who also lacked character development. She's more rusted on to Glasgow but we're not shown why; her excitement at the prospect of an Englishman coming to visit her suggests she should also be eyeing the exits. One thread is how money cleaves people from their situations and generally decreases social adhesion.
The camerawork is often very jittery, trying to evoke some urgency from outside the frame when there is or could be enough going on within it. At other times it superbly captured some messy and/or sublime imagery. There is a lot of unselfconscious nudity. I missed a fair chunk of the dialogue, at least sometimes due to the sound mix. I didn't find it all that emotionally involving, which was perhaps the point.
Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars and an inaccurate review. A Critic's Pick by Elvis Mitchell. The source novel "felt like an answer to Irvine Welsh's book Trainspotting (1993)". (Women are from the west, men the east?) "A nihilist road movie." And some hefty caveats. Stephanie Zacharek at length. That shot of Morton on a balcony against this expanse of Spanish hotel is very striking. All claim the boyfriend's suicide is selfish but it did provide Morton with the means to escape and start her own life.
Kindle. More mid-century hardboiled pulp noir. Short punchy sentences. Third person. Little humour. The action starts in Chicago but doesn't loiter. The author implies that the University of Chicago is close to Division (where I used to live) but it isn't. Riding the rails, like Scarecrow (1973) to some small-town shenanigans in Ohio, near the border with Michigan, where all the ladies would be rich if only someone let them. (This jag made little sense as the protagonist claimed to be aiming for Mexico.) The main thread is essentially Lolita (1955). It is emphasised that the bloke's cognition is failing due to lust and a lack of sustenance which is just to say that the plot got weaker. The mystery parts mostly consisted of withheld information that is not very imaginative. I couldn't believe this guy was the brains behind the prison break at Joliet.
Goodreads. Apparently (re-)published alongside Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel (1953).
Eventually inevitable Deborah Kerr completism. She's very young here, playing a Sister who would be superior in an Anglican order of working nuns, sent from Kolkata to her own semi-private Kafiristan to enlighten the natives. We're shown in flashback that she was abandoned by a brainless Irishman set on making money in America. This appears to have inoculated her against the charms of males, incarnated in the valley by David Farrar who looked like the 1980s matinee idol Richard Chamberlain (The Thorn Birds (1983)) with tonsils to match. Sabu (The Thief of Bagdad (1940)) as The Young General may also have been expected to have interested the Sisters but he of course goes for the lowborn, apparently-mute Jean Simmons (in brownface and cheap jewellery).
All the nuns looked the same to me (all wearing a fair bit of makeup) which made it a relief when fruity Kathleen Byron (Sister Ruth) got out of her habit and did the Brides of Christ (1991) thing. All are histrionic and overwrought to some extent which is exacerbated by the film barely showing their quotidian existence. At times it dons the camp motifs of classic horror (obtrusive music, insufficiently-motivated histrionic cackling laughter, shadows, ...) to bewildering effect. I didn't really grasp what the point of it all was.
The Technicolor cinematography is sometimes amazing, especially given that it was shot on sets in England and Ireland; it got Jack Cardiff an Oscar. Written and directed by Michael Powell Emeric Pressburger. Based on a novel by Rumer Godden.
Someone at the New York Times. IMDB trivia: indeed the valley is populated by people from all over Asia.
So improbably connected to Ninotchka (1939) that I had to watch it. Also some misguided Arnie completism. Directed and co-written by Walter Hill (The Driver (1978), The Warriors (1979)). Harry Kleiner and Troy Kennedy Martin helped with the screenplay.
This movie is mostly boring. Arnie plays a Russian cop with Garbo-esque rigidity in what was one of his least amusing performances. He's paired with Chicago cop James Belushi who continually runs at the mouth. Peter Boyle can't do this straight stuff (a police chief) too well. Larry Fishburne with the shit-eating grin, not yet large. Richard Bright. Notionally they're on the trail of cocaine-importing Russian (Ed O'Ross) via his wife Gina Gershon and some black power cats run by Brent Jennings from his prison workout set. Brion James, informant, copped the usual abuse.
So, many strong players but not well cast. The minor characters were more interesting.
Roger Ebert: three stars, probably inflated by the Chicago setting. Vincent Canby: should've gone straight to video. It would probably be deemed a second-screen effort these days.
Kindle. Prompted by James Walton's review of Nathaniel Rich's Cloudthief (2026) in the New York Review of Books, and curiosity about mid-century hard-boiled noir. And to break up the interminable slog through Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams (2001).
Much is made early on of the song If You've Got the Money, Honey, I've Got the Time (1950) which more-or-less summarises the dynamic between the leading man (who recounts in the first person) and his lady-love. They meet in proximity to a bathtub in the South (Louisiana, Mississippi) and head West (Colorado) where their heist goes off like clockwork. She's an NYC moll and takes to affluence in New Orleans like an Australian but he's more of an outdoorsy bloke who is soon weighed down by the ashy proceeds of crime. The ending was a bit lame. Some of it functions as a time capsule (the wilds of Colorado before it became an enclave) with a fair bit that's generic (the timeless demimonde of New Orleans).
I guess it could be read as a commentary on post-war drifting, the failure of stuff to palliate, satiate or otherwise make the time pass agreeably. He wasn't born bad (this is a bit Natural Born Killers (1994)) but went wonky due to the irremovable shrapnel in his head or perhaps thirty-four months in a Japanese PoW camp on Luzon; there's still the need to fend off the childhood sweetheart, to give her a good enough reason to finally, totally lose heart. Much of the doing was committed but the undoing seemed more accidental or perhaps was a matter of decreased concern. Most of the good lines are mostly in poor (or at least non-PC) taste.
And even more Ernst Lubistch completism with a dash of curiosity about Jimmy Stewart's early career. Samson Raphaelson derived his screenplay from the play by Miklós László.
Quite tame by Lubitsch's standards. Stewart is a clerk in a gift shop in Budapest with better taste than his boss or coworkers. Spunky Margaret Sullavan comes in, looking for a job, impresses with her mad skills in unloading a tacky music-box-ish cigarette receptacle on a susceptible woman and is hired on the spot. Both keep up a correspondence with a mysterious, sophisticated other. We do not get to see much of the letters. The boss, Frank Morgan (The Wizard of Oz (1939)), has some domestic difficulties. Things go predictably for the most part.
The identity shenanigans struck me as Shakespearean. The scenario wants us to believe the characters are somehow not materialistic despite their privation and work as salespeople. The women are all hysterical to varying degrees, and Sullavan's self-reflection pointed to the later psychologicals. Jimmy Stewart got to spin a yarn, much like in Rope (1948).
Frank S. Nugent at the time: genial and tender.
And still more Ernst Lubitsch completism. He directed a screenplay from the very strong team of Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend (1945), Sunset Boulevard (1950)), Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch, based on an original story by Melchior Lengyel (To Be or Not to Be (1942)). It seems this was the first thing I'd seen Greta Garbo in and it's coincidentally her highest-rated feature at IMDB. Over several nights.
Three Soviet comrade-stooges are sent to Paris to flog some jewels expropriated from an Russian aristocrat (Ina Claire, reminding me a bit of no-fuss Piper Laurie in Twin Peaks) who just happens to reside there. She finds out about this in the usual screwy/small world way and her not-as-rusted-on-as-she-thought paramour Melvyn Douglas offers to help her lay claim to them. Garbo is sent to close the transaction (so the people don't starve) and of course she and Douglas meet cute and so forth. The romance is heavy-handed and the entirety is all very predictable but is made bearable by some very funny dialogue.
Garbo started out as robotic as Arnie as a fake human Soviet apparatchik but softened into dreaminess on return to privation in dreary Moscow. I was so envious of her ability to ignore irrelevant bullshit all the way along. Her performance got her an Oscar nom. Bela Lugosi appeared late-on as a commissar.
Frank S. Nugent: "gay and impertinent and malicious." This was in the time when Stalin wasn't yet beyond the pale. IMDB trivia: are we really to believe that Arnie studied Garbo's performances?
