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Prompted by Pamela Hutchinson's recent review which mentioned that it drew from the same well as David Lean's Madeleine (1950) albeit bent to an affluent East Coast of the Western Hemisphere milieu. Directed by Clarence Brown from an adaptation by John Meehan and Wanda Tuchock of Marie Belloc Lowndes's novel of the same name, or as the lawyers had it, a plagiarisation of a stage play. Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce (1945)) led. Not great.

Scandinavian Nils Asther (cast as a Latino Lover) shows clothes horse Crawford a good time in Montevideo until she's had enough and it's time to head home. Aboard ship she meets keeper Robert Montgomery but the previous bloke knows she's the only eligible woman in this movie and won't give up without a fight. Stuff happens back in NYC and the situation is adjudicated by cadaverous District Attorney Lewis Stone who knows how these things have to go. Louise Closser Hale as Miranda (Crawford's maid) is perhaps the most fun with a fruity performance.

Mourdant Hall at the New York Times at the time. Wikipedia.

Inevitable after accidentally watching Ernest and Celestine (2012) at the Music Box Theatre back in 2014. I hadn't realised (but am not surprised to find) that it's based on a book series, like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). It was a lot more fun than Toy Story 5 (2026). I saw the version with French voices.

Being French the movie goes its own way: it did not pretend to grapple with present day tech, instead going all-in on the eternal French concerns of comradery, liberty, architecture, mechanism, music and absurdism. And, of course, the law being a necessary/necessarily an ass that can be reformed. I'm not going to claim it all hang together flawlessly but there are many fun images beautifully rendered. Somewhat amazingly Celestine's unyielding positivity doesn't grate, perhaps because she's selfless and takes immense pleasure in Ernest's music.

Three stars from Shiela O'Malley at Roger Ebert's venue. A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times.

Inevitable despite Lightyear (2022) and Toy Story 4 (2019). Co-written and co-directed by (Mc)Kenna Harris and Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo (2003), Wall-E (2008), Finding Dory (2016)). No more John Lasseter! — but still plenty of retro nostalgia.

This one is yet another ode to consumption, of loving stuff and needing to escape from even the most halcyon suburban family. Girls are foregrounded which I guess makes sense as present-day tech has had the most pernicious effect on them, though the most malevolent thing here is an under-analysed group of mean girls. (Surely they need liberation from their screens too.) Just maybe it functions as a bit of a mental health PSA but overall it is accepting of technology, exactly as you'd expect from a company (Pixar) whose movies used to showcase the state of computer animation art. Now that anything can be CGI and/or deep fake the aesthetic becomes more important (which they acknowledge by shifting styles for the girls' imaginative play) but this is not Studio Gibli or The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021). The emotional manipulation remains masterful however.

Perhaps realising that the well is running dry, the auteurs have loaded it up with references: Woody's poncho obviously evokes 1960s Clint Eastwood, the arc of the fleeing toys E.T. (1982), various aspects classic Star Wars (1980s), the fleet of Buzz Lightyears Iron Man 3 (2013), etc. The Lightyears replay Martin Sheen's big move at the end of Apocalypse Now (1979). And I'm sure a lot more. Other issues of the day, such as the environmental impact of plastic toys/packaging and lack of room to store all these toys or play outside, is completely ignored.

Peter Sobczynski: big thumbs up despite the major themes being respins of those of the first two Toy Storys. Dana Stevens: "the premise recalls that of the original movie." Manohla Dargis: "[T]he proceedings [..] never achieve liftoff. It's fine, pretty and amusing, but if no one's heart seems in it, perhaps it’s time to make way for other toys."

More Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet (1944), Cry Danger (1951)). Directed by Anthony Mann from a screenplay that George Worthing Yates and Art Cohn developed from a story by the former and Daniel Mainwaring/Geoffrey Homes. Thoroughly mediocre with a misleadingly high rating at IMDB.

For murky reasons NYC policeman Powell boarded a train to Washington, intent on foiling a plot against Honest Abe's life before he can be installed as POTUS and kick off the Civil War. He mostly just went through the motions with a flimflam plot that makes little sense. (Did people really just leave guns lying around train carriages in 1861?) Militia Colonel Adolphe Menjou (Paths of Glory (1957)) helped and hindered as need be. A very young and radiant Ruby Dee (Do The Right Thing (1989)) played Paula Raymond's slave maid. They were tasked with breaking up the sausagefest and acting suitably shocked as the plot against the POTUS unravelled; a Trumpish manoeuvre ensured things ended well.

Most of the political rhetoric in this film is against Lincoln (stop the warmonger, etc.) perhaps reflecting the spirit of the early 1950s.

Bosley Crowther at the time. Wikipedia. It's not The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Prompted by a five-star review by Peter Bradshaw and a strong cast; Björk's first role in a feature film since Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) and Lars von Trier's traumatising Dancer in the Dark (2000). Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse (2019)) directed and co-wrote with Sjón. The script is an overly literal, fussy and witless adaptation of the Scandinavian legend of Amleth. Elements are familiar from Shakespeare's Hamlet (~ 1600), Braveheart (1995), Gladiator (2000) and Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005). Much of the plot is disjointed (the plan to instil terror in the uncle's household over many nights does not seem to occur) and/or nonsensical (why drag out the killings?). It's all fates and bloodlines and determinism. Never give a sucker an even break.

Alexander Skarsgård (The Little Drummer Girl (2018), etc.) led in the humourless-Arnie Conan the Barbarian (1982) role. Obviously he took the opportunity to extend his line with Anya Taylor-Joy's earth-witch. Nicole Kidman did OK as anybody's queen. (The matriarchal aspect was underexplored.) I was hoping for more from King Ethan Hawke; so much early gravitas simply evaporated with his expiry. Willem Dafoe as a fool. Graphically violent but did not linger on anything in particular for long.

Dana Stevens wanted more equal-opportunity/less tasteful nudity. A. O. Scott: no camp, no irony. IMDB trivia. And so on.

Orson Welles completism. Also a Peter van Eyck jag from a sneaky rewatch of The Wages of Fear (1953), and also Michael Redgrave from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). The latter is very fruity here as a post-war fence/purveyor of junk in Copenhagen.

Producer/writer/director Welles tried to rebottle the lightning of Citizen Kane (1941) but apparently the budget didn't stretch far enough to encompass his high-concept aspirations. Lead Robert Arden (far down the billing) was a lot weaker than all the other players. His thief, smuggler, etc. is tasked by billionaire Welles to find out what the world knows about Welles's life before 1927 as the man himself has lost it all due to a mysterious bout of amnesia. This leads to much traversal of Europe and a jaunt to Mexico. His sometime lady-friend Patricia Medina runs a parallel operation. That things don't make a tonne of sense does not occur to Arden. Notionally the two men are duking it out for the affections of Paola Mori who has flashes of independence and yet never goes looking for a better man.

Much of the dialogue was dubbed and the lips do not match the sounds. Jean Bourgoin's cinematography was adventurous. It's engaging but the production could've been a lot better.

Someone at the New York Times at the time. J. Hoberman at length for the Criterion Collection in 2006. IMDB trivia. Wikipedia.

Kindle. Unferth's first novel. It's a bit underbaked: a bloke chases another bloke from NYC to Syracuse, NY and then to Nicaragua on the very thin premise that the latter is somehow involved with the former's wife. There's a sideline in dolphin untraining (reconditioning for release into the wild) that prefigures the concerns of her later works. Very occasionally she comes out with a great line but the bulk is a lot of foreshadowing and circling the drain. By the two-thirds mark it's clear there's not going to be a payoff that makes slogging through all the mystifying, fragmentary setup worthwhile.

Madison Smartt Bell at the New York Times: the characters are so abstract that the contrivances are assets. Unferth's take on human connection is bleak. Goodreads.

Kindle. Notionally about underground/experimental/avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's short Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) but more on the California/San Francisco counterculture that Kobek mined a few years previous. Brand new you're retro! — as someone once said. This one is Haight/Ashbury, LSD, occult, the end of the Summer of Love, Manson-adjacent, like Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019). I guess Ken Kesey never did fit that frame.

The book has three parts, a structure that imitates the film as explained towards the end. The focus is on Bobby Beausoleil who Kobek interviewed recently. There are also snippets of an interview with Anger. The thesis is that this movie, or at least a falling-out between these two men, had a major causal role in the Manson Family murders. The first part Therefore is a ramble through the SF and LA scenes and was a bit of a slog. The second [Filmic Material] is an analysis of the film in Kobek's signature style. That was fun and worth the entry price. Finally Because lays out the causal argument. It leans too heavily on some counterfactuals. The whole show is heavily footnoted and referenced, mostly to web resources of dubious veracity. So much tat, ecumenical between DC and Marvel, like the MCU four decades early. Kobek mentions but does not dwell on the Thelema, Aleister Crowley, etc. aspects which link Anger to, for instance, Jimmy Page.

After reading the book I watched the film itself (YouTube). It runs about 11 minutes and is visually more interesting (overloading) than I expected. I would have been totally mystified without Kobek's close analysis of it; the Batmen, for instance, are hilarious while Anger's theatricality in his "The Equinox of the Gods" ceremony was quite boring, as were the cremation of the dead black cat, the Rolling Stones concert footage, Marines exiting helicopters in Việt Nam, the Orkustra. I had expected to see more of Anton LaVey who represented the more commercial end of Thelema. Some of the visual compositions are great but it's all too much too quickly. The music is quite good; it's a Moog synth loop with authorship ascribed to Mick Jagger but Kobek claims it was actually just a demo loop set up by the salesman. Whoever heard of Jagger working for free?

Goodreads. Someone suggested that this is Kobek's masterwork; before watching the movie itself I would've insisted on Atta (2011) but afterwards I can't disagree.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with director/co-writer Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep (1996)). Based on a novel by Giuliano Da Empoli. Emmanuel Carrère helped with the adaptation.

The idea was to take a look at how present-day Russia emerged from the Yeltsin era under Putin, coming at it from the view of confected "wizard of the Kremlin" Vadim Baranov (who I later read is a fictionalisation of Vadislav Surkov). He's played by Paul Dano who does not succeed in the lead. Dano delivers tonnes of exposition in a style that is intended to be coldly insinuating. He somehow lands manic pixie dream squeaky party girl Alicia Vikander who is tasked with breaking up the sausagefest. She knows what she wants (excess) but I was never convinced Dano could satisfy that, and she never seemed to enjoy her spoils anyway. For reasons often unknown she just disappears from large parts of the movie.

But the main draw was Jude Law who does function very effectively as Putin. He got the body language down and the brutality, opacity and sheer rapacious vacuity of the ideology across; it seems at this time Putin is paranoid but not as (insecurely) paranoid as he appears to be now. He too lacks much outward expression of the joy of being the new Tzar. Things flag whenever he's not on the screen.

Beyond the obvious decline in civil liberties the movie fails to explain what really changed since the 1990s; apparently it's just a game of oligarchs underpinned by some emotional manipulation of the masses, a fending-off of Western influence in Ukraine. The present-day framing interview with Jeffrey Wright seemed inessential. The visual metaphors are crass. Yorick Le Saux's cinematography is uninspired which is weird as he did far better with, for instance, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Little Women (2019), and Blitz (2024).

Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars.

Kindle. Eventually inevitable due to the gravitation of Malick's movie (1998).

This is Jones's take on the Guadacanal campaign of 1942/1943 that was "the first major Allied land offensive against Japan" of World War II. (Guadalancal, for those of us born long after, is one of the Solomon Islands.) It's relentless, well written, never boring, sometimes hilarious and yet somehow not as iconic as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961); Witt is a bit like Yossarian in being doctrinaire but is not as overtly philosophical about it. (Perhaps the relative lack of enduring recognition is because, like Milton Friedman and the money supply, everything reminds Jones of sex.) The cast of characters initially seems daunting but are sufficiently distinct that they're not hard to follow. His deft treatment of PTSD ("combat numbess") was perhaps novel at the time.

Goodreads. Maxwell Geismar at the New York Times at the time.

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan (2016), Peninsula (2020)) who has made yet another zombie flick. Choi Kyu-seok helped him out with the script. Jun Ji-hyun (Assassination (2015)) led. Generally underbaked.

For generic reasons of revenge mad genius bio-scientist Koo Hyo-hwan cooks up a "virus" and a "vaccine" and proceeds to inconvenience not only the attendees of a biotech conference (where the colony concept is explained to us by Steve Jobs-ish CEO Kom Jeong-tae) but also the civilians in the shopping mall in a high-rise building in Seoul. The survivors/counter-revengers, quasi-led by strong-willed scientist Jun Ji-hyun, dwindle by the numbers. Much of the plot hinges on highly suspect reasoning; for instance, how do the responders even know there's a vaccine? Quite often the players (human and post/sub-human) hang around, inexplicably inert, waiting for a cue. Pretty much all of the characters suck. The ending threatened a sequel. Bring me the zombie king.

I wish the Koreans would get around to remaking Shaun of the Dead (2004).

Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert's venue: two-and-a-half stars. The zombie genre has seen a lot of innovation including the conceit used here. Seongyong Cho: two-and-a-half stars, "another typical zombie movie which does not surprise me a lot." Fungal not viral.

Written and directed by Michael Haneke. Drug up for reasons unknown; perhaps for Juliette Binoche who leads with Daniel Auteuil or maybe because the precis evoked the early parts of Lost Highway (1997). I did not understand this movie.

Video tapes (how quaint) mysteriously arrive on the doorstep of the middle-class Parisian couple that contain surveillance footage referring to unshared events in the man's childhood. Their son is becoming more troublesome as he undergoes puberty (no other motivation is provided). The police are mostly as disinterested as I was.

The characters are weak stereotypes; Binoche made the most sense as a bewildered wife. Husband Auteuil is mystifying. The couple inhabits a highly-paid literary fantasy land that has surely been eroded by now. Both are so quick to jump to conclusions and stand on their own amour-propre that we rarely get access to anything factual. I guess this is one way for the guilty to respond when challenged (guilt being an obvious theme of the movie) but it is unsatisfying that so many scenes dragged on or replayed earlier scenes with minor variations. I was not engrossed and things did not conclude satisfactorily; it wasn't so much that the plot dangles as the motivations remained opaque or trivial. For instance, why did Maurice Bénichou (Majid) cut his own throat at that plot-convenient time?

The cinematography is harshly digital, of a piece with the video tapes. Most of the movie is dialogue in tell-don't-show mode.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie". A. O. Scott wants it to be deeper than it is. Wikipedia. All claim the mystery of who sent the tapes is answered in the final shot — I was too impatient for it to be over to scan the frame sufficiently but apparently it was the sons wot did it — and if that was the (trite) intention then we needed to see more of the other characters.

Kindle. Deb Olin Unferth's follow-up to Barn 8 (2020). A short-and-punchy holiday in post-apocalyptic sci-fi (much like Tim Winton's latest) with all the tropes, so much so that it does not seem very original or insightful. I read it in a day in the hope it would level up.

We start after the depop event, with mother dragging daughter to a solipsistic Atlantis to escape the surviving humanity. (Things are gynocentric throughout.) We soon learn that most of the men (mostly ineffectual/emasculated) have departed for Mars (Total Recall (1992) without the brunettes, blondes, Arnie, mutants, everything) but "Command" likes to send crews to the heavily degraded Earth in search of saleable tat. You'd expect it all to be heavily AI-mediated but it isn't, not really.

Escaping her mother's Hermicity our femoine escapes to the oh-so-clean desert (think Dune (1965) or Mad Max without the fashion) for an internship at a research lab. There she takes a bullshit job (futilely shovelling sand) rather than become part of "the company"'s machine, preferring to do her intellectual labour in the privacy of a container-house (Winton's The Shepherd's Hut (2018), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)) that she purchases with her inheritance. (The mechanics of food, water, sanitation, money or any other technological or economic thing are not in Unferth's wheelhouse.) On a frenemy-funded rec trip she meets the love of her life, a fake human robot who has undergone extreme beauty surgery after being stolen as a child (Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)). Later her mother uploads her consciousness to a Sputnik-esque vehicle (Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Permutation City (1994)) and slips the bounds of this solar system.

The appearance-enhanced character is also functionally augmented (Neuromancer (1984), Highlander (1986)). This somehow leads to an all soul-and-feeling ending (Asimov's later/fat Foundations) that — and my eyes may've glazed over by this point — felt like a very modest variation on the concluding movement of John Brunner's Threshold of Eternity (1959) which also centred a female spirit, albeit one with more apparent agency.

The writing is relentless, mostly not funny but occasionally hilarious. Unferth likes the idea of human volition so the apocalypse is lowrez nuclear and not some slow-burn expiration of the ecology, and there's some point to the genetic preservation efforts. I don't think she had a moral point to make (unlike Ned Beauman), at least not one of any arresting novelty. Some clangers were clearly intentional (and amusing), others pointed to an underbaked understanding of systems: humans are natural too, and just the latest in a long line of ecocidal totalitarians.

Lincoln Michel acknowledges Unferth's derivativeness but protests that her "playfulness" cures all. Goodreads was generally unimpressed. tl;dr — just an appropriation of geek culture.

A Michael Redgrave jag from The Lady Vanishes (1938). Produced and directed by Tony Richardson from a script that Alan Sillitoe derived from his own short story. In black-and-white. In two sittings due to a lack of grip.

Abiding post-war privation in 1960s Nottingham yields an idle, youthful Tom Courtenay up to a borstal (juvie) for unsurprising reasons that are uncovered later on. (Even the TV set comes in for suspicion.) Some G-rated antics with the house leader does not impede the governor (Redgrave) taking a shine to him, given his promise as (wait for it) a cross-country runner. There's not much hope on offer (maybe a whiff of happily-for-a-while with squeeze Topsy Jane, she of few aspirations) and even those are squelched by an ending that denies things as prosaic as class solidarity.

The cinematography is very workmanlike, perhaps due to budget limitations. It generally functions as a time capsule. Not as pointy as other English social-realist projects of the era (e.g. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Mostly grim with the odd flash of (gallows) humour. The psychologist came in for a tepid shellacking.

Bosley Crowther. Like The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972) the title is better than the movie. He struggled with the accents.

Kindle. Inevitable after Enrigue's excellent You Dreamed of Empires (2024). Once again ably translated by Natasha Wimmer. Lengthy, too much so.

Notionally Enrigue is telling us about Geronimo, one of the last of the militant Apaches. He does this on a multitrack which allows him to defer many interesting bits to the end. The first story is an account of a Mexican recovery party on the trail of a woman who was abducted. (Those of us unfamiliar with Apache lore may harbour suspicions that she is Geronimo's mother, him being deemed so exceptional by all those who encounter him.) Another recounts Geronimo's eventual surrender to the U.S. Army in what struck me as a post-civil-war mop-up operation; putting to use the now-permanent army in settling and taming the southwest, completing the conquest of the continent. Some of the military manoeuvring and shenanigans are amusing. Other parts sink into the swamp of excessive research and/or Cloud Atlas (2004). Cinematic for sure.

Less vital but probably more important to the author is an interspersed present-day travelogue through Apachería. I struggled with his essentialism: the Apache bloodlines doubtlessly persist but I can't see this as any kind of victory if the culture has been so thoroughly disrupted if not destroyed. The ranking of manliness amongst the peoples of the area (Mexican, European settler, native American) was a bit trying.

Dwight Garner wrote a thoughtful review. "Enrigue is filibustering, leaning too heavily on his research." "This is a long book (456 pages) that feels even longer." Indeed Enrigue's take on his own citizenship status(es) could make for a great read. Goodreads.

Jacques Audiard's immediately-previous feature to The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005). Again Tonino Benacquista was his co-writer but this time it's an original conceit.

The setup has repressed, semi-deaf, overworked secretary Emmanuelle Devos hire recently-released Vincent Cassel as an office menial at a construction firm. He assists her rise with some larceny and heavying of some counterparties and she helps him out with her lip-reading skills when it's time for a heist. His parole officer Olivier Perrier gets his own track (something about his wife of 35 years) that does not seem to be particularly relevant or convergent. Her bestie/sister (?) Olivia Bonamy never passes up an opportunity to remind her of what she's been missing out on as a wallflower. She develops a taste for power and a willingness to use it that he learns to appreciate. It's good and sometimes fun. I'm not sure the concluding movement held together but by then it doesn't really matter.

Audiard opted for far more continuity and fluidity here. I enjoyed Cassel's performance the most of those I've seen from him. Devos seemed a bit old for the role (surely she would've cracked before hitting her mid-30s) but succeeds with her nervy, expressive face. The cinematography was good. The soundtrack is well-modulated, a precursor to Sound of Metal (2019).

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. The criminality is merely the way they "discover deep compatibility". Tonnes of hostility. A. O. Scott. A film of two halves. Peter Lennon interviewed Audiard at the time.

Director Jacques Audiard's feature immediately-previous to A Prophet (2009). For reasons unknown he and Tonino Benacquista thought the world needed a retooling of James Toback's early Harvey Keitel vehicle Fingers (1978) that I haven't seen.

Romain Duris leads as an implausible enforcer/real estate wheeler/dealer who semi-secretly pines to pay homage to his deceased concert-pianist mother by (wait for it) becoming a concert pianist. Father Niels Arestrup, far less robust here, tasks him with extracting funds from recalcitrant tenants. One of his business partners (Jonathan Zaccaï) uses their need to meet random people late at night as cover to cheat on his wife (Aure Atika); like several threads here the capricious revenge Duris takes for the imposition just dangles. His sessions with Vietnamese piano coach Linh-Dan Pham were full of promise but only once or twice really landed. I didn't feel any of the characters were especially well drawn.

The whole show is disjointed, more a series of occasionally-effective scenes that didn't add up to something with a point to make. The cinematography was often trying: jittery and of unclear purpose. But you can discern the shape of his next (and far more successful) project.

Roger Ebert: three stars and an inaccurate review. Stephanie Zacharek.

And yet another UK prison drama. Milquetoast David Jonsson is slated for early release due to overcrowding but has to navigate sharing his cell for his last few weeks with psycho Tom Blyth, fresh from Aylesbury. Blyth has empty-headed ambitions to dominate the drug trade in their wing but the established order (Alex Hassell and Corin Silva) stand their ground.

It's mostly like a simplified A Prophet (2009) but nowhere as interesting: Jonsson's character is hopelessly naive and weak, and having him dominated by the stronger prisoners yields a far less interesting dynamic. Much of it makes little sense — why put this (fire)cracker in with someone who's almost out? why do the authorities leave these violent men who almost killed each other on the same wing? why is security in the kitchen so lax? why are the screws so cowed? etc. Perhaps the most interesting bits are the services Jonsson provides: haircuts and curries cooked in electric kettles. He's proud of his work, so much so that he's more concerned that the tea will taste funny if he doesn't clean up right away than the task ahead when the big day comes around.

Some of the cinematography is interesting: overly-brief "vertical videos" showing various goings-on are interspersed, which I guess is something of a lift from Natural Born Killers (1994). I wish these had been longer and better contextualised. Directed by Cal McMau from a script by Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran. The acting is generally fine. I wish it had tried to say something new and not just replay the odd-sock cellmate moves. Humourless.

Peter Bradshaw: four stars. "Some of the tropes are familiar, but this film sidesteps the cliches with the committed acting and fierce storytelling punch" — if only that were so.

Likely unavoidable after Whore (1991). Here Ken Russell had Kathleen Turner play a woman divided between her day job of designing women's sportswear and her evenings as a working girl who'll do whatever's required by the denizens of L.A. She strives to be the best in both roles. The script by Barry Sandler is disjointed, lurid, clunky and generally poor, especially in how it draws Anthony Perkins's god botherer who somehow identifies with her. The scenes from a marriage (between John Laughlin and a vacant-seeming Annie Potts (Bo Peep in the Toy Storys from 1995 onwards)) are boring, tepid reworkings of Rabbit, Run (1970), until Perkins got his cue. The camerawork lacks the necessary realism, and the sets etc. are too cheap and nasty, for it to work as a time capsule. In a couple of sittings due to mystification.

Roger Ebert: one-and-a-half stars. Silly. Severely cut to fit into an R rating. Janet Maslin. Extremely tawdry. The bulk indeed has a "flat, joyless tone" which is annoying as the first time we encounter Turner (with a john) is quite funny.

Carol Lombard (Twentieth Century (1934), To Be or Not to Be (1942)) completism. Directed by Gregory La Cava from a script that Morrie Ryskind helped Eric Hatch adapt from the latter's novel of the same name (1935). In two sittings.

The screwy Bullock family attend an NYC society event that features a scavenger hunt. The last item they need to win the show is an "unwanted man". They discover a whole trove of them at the dump on the East River but of course the only really suitable one is William Powell. He and Lombard have a few good dialogues and she invites him to buttle. All the ladies of the house fall for him and things go as they must in Depression-era black-and-white. The final half an hour is overly heavy and serious in a similar way to It Happened One Night (1934).

I enjoyed Eugene Pallette's flat, droll and very amusing performance. Alice Brady was a bit too strident for me as the mother but she got most of the really effective screwy stuff; Lombard was too giggly little-girl space-cadet ditzy self absorption. Gail Patrick is perhaps the straightest shooter as an improbably-resistible conniving femme fatale. The vibe is pure Americana: there are no problems a man can have that cannot be fixed with a job and a woman, though some may require someone with more financial engineering nous than he has. Women do not have problems that do not involve a man, and some of these can be solved with a direct approach. Everyone has a right to do what it takes to remain in their class.

Roger Ebert: four stars in 2008 as a "great movie". Frank S. Nugent at the time. IMDB trivia suggests that things make more sense if you hear "protegé" as "gigolo".