Directed by Robert Wise (The Set-Up (1949), etc.) from a script Robert Anderson derived from Richard McKenna's novel (1963). In two sittings due to length. It proved to be more engrossing than I expected.
Engineer/"Jonah" Steve McQueen caught teacher-from-Vermont Candice Bergen's eye when he disembarked in Shanghai en route to his new posting on a gunboat on the Yangtze in the 1920s. Onboard he learnt that the actual labour is performed by Chinese coolies. After initially rejecting this arrangement as a violation of the natural order he realised that the proper training of the most promising of the locals aligned perfectly well with his rebellious nature. In the meantime Richard Attenborough tried to save Marayat Andriane/Emmanuelle Arsan from the local whorehouse favoured by the U.S. Navy sailors. Their romance was not entirely convincing perhaps due to her lack of acting chops or his wavering semi-British accent in concert with her lack of self determination. Violence increased as the boat went up and down the river during the initial rumblings of the Chinese Civil War. The captain (Richard Crenna) ended up a bit loopy. There was no salvation at "China Light", the missionary terminus.
McQueen got an Oscar nom for his efforts here but really he's about the same as always, that is, not great. Overall it functions fine as an epic in the wake of Doctor Zhivago (1965) and the spirit of Heart of Darkness (1899). The cinematography is up to it. The title is derived from the name of the boat, the USS San Pablo.
Bosley Crowther: a Việt Nam allegory, and therefore clearly clearing the way for Apocalypse Now (1979). "[W]e end up [...] with a beautifully mounted film, shot by Mr. Wise in lovely colour, mostly in the area of Taiwan; a curiously turgid and uneven attempt to generate a war romance, and a finally forceful and depressing blast at getting into trouble over our heads." Wikipedia. A website that collected everything about this movie.
A Red Buttons jag from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and some Marlon Brando completism. Directed by Joshua Logan from a script Paul Osborn (East of Eden (1955)) derived from James A. Michener's novel.
Brando finds himself playing a pilot for the Air Force during the Korean conflagration. He is reassigned to Japan so he can marry his assigned American beauty of the correct military class (Patricia Owens). There he abandons his fate and romances the unobtainable-by-mortals Miiko Taka, trailing in the wake of Buttons who has already landed domestic goddess Miyoshi Umeki. These pairings were tasked by the producers with humanising the vanquished foe to the masses of film goers back home. Throughout this heavy-duty pap Brando mumbles in a Southern accent with a certitude that belies all doubts.
The script regularly reminds us of the American views on miscegenation of the day and also has the Japanese ladies tell us what their culture apparently said, but the only Japanese male with a speaking role (played by Ricardo Montalban!) does not get to say his piece. The plotline that has Owens taking revenge on Brando and her family by getting involved with him is left to dangle.
Some of the scenery functions as a time capsule for those parts of Japan (Kobe, Kyoto, Tokyo) but too much time is spent inside. The canal put me in mind of the early street scenes in Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
A bit of Steve Buscemi completism that was on the pile for a while. Directed by Tim Burton from a script John August derived from a novel by Daniel Wallace.
The life story of a fabulist, played in earlier life by Ewan McGregor and later by Albert Finney, as prompted by his son Billy Crudup and daughter-in-law Marion Cotillard. Wife Jessica Lange's performance is somewhat amazing as, like Cotillard, she has no character to work with; Alison Lohman as her younger self is less successful. The narrative is the purest, most whimsical American hokum, along the lines of Forrest Gump (1994) and The Princess Bride (1987). It is a relief when Helena Bonham Carter appears, several times, to steady the ship. Many scenes depict an expensive and materialistic notion of romance that makes it look like too much hard work. The flashback structure attempts to deny incipient mortality.
There's not much Buscemi but he does light up a scene in a bank and another at a funeral.
Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars, flat and listless. Stephanie Zacharek: holiday treacle, drearily affirming, dull, preachy, just tell us a story already. McGregor brought weightless cartoonish appeal.
Kindle. I'm well past the point of diminishing returns in this series. This one is mostly heist setup in Florida then heist execution in Cuba, signalling Marlowe's shift into the spy genre. As before (as always?) our leading man does not get to keep the loot. None of the colour is in any way striking or memorable. Again well-written but very pedestrian.
Written and directed by Bassam Tariq (Mogul Mowgli (2020), Bait (2026)). IMDB trivia says this arose from the ashes of an aborted Blade reboot, which explains why lead Mahershala Ali knowingly brings a knife to a gunfight. The poster/cover has Ali with a knife and a baby and none of John Woo's humour.
Somehow Ali makes his bread as a righteous Muslim suburban assassin or perhaps lives off his retirement from military activities in the Middle East. Things get complex when his wife passes and he has three kids to take care of, one of whom requires a breast milk McGuffin hunt. Every element of the situation is so brittle that you wonder how he made it this far; he got ahead of absolutely nothing. The sacred is juxtaposed with the profane, ritual set against the quotidian exigencies, belief held without depth, scripture tritely interpreted, extraordinary moral clarity arises ex nihilo. An early, mildly amusing scene of furry curiosity by Ali's daughter Adia promised more than the rest could deliver. John Cho plays an outre preacher/televangelist in Elvis mode. The Christians use guns and mostly survived; nobody is preaching nonviolence here. I think there were two resurrections.
The cinematography is uninspired. The soundtrack is aspirational; somewhat World-y but far off the pace of, for instance, Peter Gabriel's efforts. The entirety is very derivative. It made very little sense to me.
The reviews out there are unreasonably fawning.
Kindle. The sequel of The Name of the Game is Death (1961). It reeks of being a money job. Much of it rehearsed what happened at the end of the first one. Much of the other stuff recounts our protagonist's stay in the prison wing of a hospital and the plastic surgery required for the series to continue. The first had the wit to be set post-heist but the meat of this is about the overly-familiar setup for a bank job in and around Washington DC and Philadelphia. It traded a lot of kook, specifically the incipient rise of the American pornography industry and closely-related moral panics, and tries to sideswipe the lives of the suburban middle class ala Updike and so on. What is there is well executed but none of it had the jagged edges of its predecessor.
Unfortunately it doesn't function as a time capsule for the area, unlike, for instance, Raymond Chandler's efforts.
Kindle. And yet more mid-century hard-boiled noir pulp. This one is quite good in many ways: Marlowe nailed the character of his first-person narrator with a decent backstory, plausible psychology, cold-blooded calculation and competency, and as such he functions somewhat as a prototype for James Caan's character in Thief (1981). I found him hard to hate due to his soft spot for animals. The other characters are not drawn as well, often merely archetypes or worse. The two women, one a cool and incoherent blonde who seems to cop it from everyone, the other a very forgiving keeper fond of the horses, fare poorly but have more shape than the deputy sheriff. Most of the action takes place in Hudson, Florida (on the west coast/Gulf of Mexico side of the Florida Peninsula, now the northern reaches of Tampa suburbia) which could've used a few more locals. The structure mostly works but is sometimes stitched together with explicit binaries that were not exhaustive or convincing. Marlowe is coy about the sexy bits but it works in that a-gentleman-never-tells mode of telling. I wonder why they didn't make this into a movie.
The edition I have had an introduction by Charles Kelly which was unusually valuable and worth reading ahead of the main course. Kelly wrote a biography of Marlowe; here's a grab at the L.A. Review of Books (2012).
