Dr. Metablog

Amnesia on Film: Unknown (2011)

Just when you think that the movie industry has run the amnesia well bone dry, along comes still another wild riff on the subject of forgetfulness. What a great disease for screenwriters! a disease that keeps on giving -- and with no end in sight.

This time, Dr. Martin Harris, ostensibly a biotechnologist but in reality a professional assassin, is involved in an automobile accident. Harris wakes up in the hospital but of course without memory. He comes to believe that he's actually the scientist he's pretending to be -- and so do the amnesia-naive among the audience. (I'm giving away the gimmick, but it doesn't matter because no one is going to see this movie ever again. No audience, therefore no spoiler.

Implausible, derivative, threadbare. No cliche left unborrowed: two separate car chases, a coma, a mysterious new girlfriend, double agents, an international assassination syndicate, a sadistic hit man, doctored photos, phony passports, suspenseful countdown to the explosion of the terrorist bomb, etc. The usual stuff.

On the other hand: Unknown is slick, expensive, well acted, well paced; well photographed,

It's a quick fix for those who enjoy "thrillers." Bad medicine for those who prefer psychological credibility. Candy for connoisseurs of the infinite variety of movie amnesia.

By the way, what's happened to Liam Neeson's nose?  It's become Durante-esque. Cyranoid,

Another Film Noir: The Brothers Rico (1957)

 

 

It's not the most artistic poster (way too crowded a field) but it's a heck of a movie. It's a familiar film noir subject: guy (in this case), Eddie Rico, a former mobster, tries to go straight, but his past catches up with him. The first couple of scenes establish him as legitimate businessman and husband. In fact, the director, the ever-reliable Phil Karlson, pushes the Code envelope when Eddie and Alice (Dianne Foster) wake in separate beds (as required by the Legion of Decency) and he reaches over and lays his hand just an inch  or so from her benightgowned right breast. (Makes me wonder how much negotiation was required with the censors: "Can he put his hand here? How about here? Above? Below?") And then when Eddie playfully asks Alice why  she married him, she answers rather forthrightly, "I was a girl. I wanted to be a woman." Whoa, how did Karlson slip that one through?  Did the censors not understand?

Discussion of prudery is relevant, because censorship spoils the ending of the film. It's grim gangland world into which Eddie is reluctantly thrust. Everyone lies, no one can be trusted, every conversation reeks of menace, and violence is ubiquitous and casual. In the showdown, Eddie is wounded and survives, but every element in the logic of film requires that he die. The tacked-on happy ending, in which a headline proclaims that the gang has been destroyed and Eddie and Alice enjoy connubial bliss, is false, and, I think, even insulting to the intelligence of the viewer. Better to ignore it, or, better still, turn off the tv just three minutes before the end, because the first 87 minutes are just terrific.  

Amnesia on Film: Shadow on the Wall (1950)

Another day, another amnesia movie. This one, Shadow on the Wall, is  different only because the amnesiac is a child.  The poor dear has witnessed a murder, and has been traumatized, which we know because her wooden perkiness transforms into wooden woodenness. In the vulgar reductive Freudianism to which the film pays full credence, the little girl won't be cured until she remembers what she has repressed. Which she does, unsurprisingly and predictably, in the last scene, thereby freeing her father (Zachary Scott) from the threat of execution for a murder he didn't commit. More turbid amnesia waters flowing under the Lethean bridge.

I don't now why I have such a dislike for Zachary Scott. True, he's not a good actor, but it's not that. It might be his mustache, which is far too tidy and trim and which says (to me), "this person can't be trusted."  Or perhaps it's his receding chin.  Or his hairpiece. His awkward movements. His pathetic attempts at comedy.  I can't say for sure.

I think that I must have been mistreated by a Zachary Scott lookalike in my childhood, events that I've forgotten but have retained in my subconscious. 

If I could just remember what happened I might be able to free myself of this irrational hatred. Meanwhile, I'm sorry the movie turned out the way it did.  I would have preferred it if Zachary Scott had been executed, mustache and all, even if it was for a murder he didn't commit. 

The Comancheros (1961)

This reprehensible film aspires to be an "inconsequential romp," as one reviewer suggests, but fails to meet even that exceedingly low bar.

If a viewer could swallow the buddy-movie plot (Stuart Whitman as a New Orleans card shark and John Wayne as John Wayne), he'd still have to deal with Nehemiah Persoff as a brutal Mexican gang-and-cult leader and Ina Balin (the worst actress Brooklyn has ever produced) as his spitfire daughter. And also embrace the dubious proposition that the road from New Orleans to Galveston goes through picturesque southern Utah. And many other improbabilities.

Ok, so the film is one big joke, a comedy masquerading as a western, or vice versa.

But if the film is a "romp," then how in the world can we justify its treatment of Indians?

In The Comancheros, Indians have three functions. The first is to be constantly drunk and constantly in search of whiskey. It offers a truly horrible, inexcusable scene in which a renowned chief falls drunkenly into his soup. Amusing? Not to any person with a modicum of fellow feeling. The second purpose that Indians serve is to be cruel: they torture and scalp. Their third purpose is to be cannon-fodder. Scores, perhaps a hundred are remorselessly cut down by our white friends. Not a one of them is awarded a trace of individuality -- though, as is the custom in such films, they get to fall picturesquely from rocky overlooks or be dragged by the foot in the stirrup when they are shot off their horses.

Even worse than these atrocities is a scene in which a bedraggled, impoverished line of hollow-eyed Indians, this time including women and children, trudge dejectedly across the landscape. A mini Trail of Tears. Not to worry, says John Wayne, they're "tame Indians." "Tame" means defeated, reduced to poverty, neglected, dehumanized. Tame as cows or dogs. It's a painful image, hard to ignore or to forget. 

I imagine that we're supposed to say, Oh, this was 1961, we know better now. But by 1961, John Ford had made a few movies in which Indians were depicted with not a lot, but a bit of humanity. The Comancheros was reactionary and unenlightened even it its day, we have to admit, and embodied a transparently racist ideology. It's treatment of our fellow but slightly different humans is grotesque and unforgivable.

Criminal, in fact. It is nothing less than a excuse and justification for genocide. Not inconsequential at all. 

According to the story, Michael Curtiz set out to direct the film, but fell ill and withdrew. The actual direction was under the control of John Wayne himself, so it is at his feet that this appalling monster must lie.

Amnesia on Film: Dead Again (1991)

Usually the amnesia is the hardest bit to swallow. The amnesia in Dead Again is particularly unpalatable, because Emma Thompson shows up at a Catholic orphanage without any memory nor with any ability to speak. No explanation is ever offered for her disease, not a grain. No cracking the skull, no mysterious drugs, no trauma, nothing. Just a little all-purpose Hollywood-style amnesia to get the plot rolling.

But spontaneous amnesia slides down the esophagus rather easily compared to hypnotically-induced past-life regression, huge trenchers of which we're expected to bolt and guzzle. I couldn't do it and the film became ridiculous and ridiculously baroque, gimmicky, inhuman. A waste of Kenneth Branagh's extraordinary talent. And the music --portentous, dictatorial, distracting. 

I saw this movie when it first appeared, in 1991, and liked it. What was I thinking?  My salad days, when I was green in judgment. 

Another Film Written by Lenore J. Coffee

It's hard to say how much of The Great Lie (1939) is original to its screenwriter Lenore J. Coffee. In the first place, the film is adapted from a novel, and secondly, at least according to the story, its stars Bette Davis and Mary Astor were unhappy with the screenplay and rewrote much of it. But how much? Nevertheless, in The Great Lie, as in Sudden Fear  and Lightning Strikes Twice, two other films written by Coffee, the heart of the matter is a head-to-head struggle between two strong women. In this film it's Sandra, (Mary Astor) and Maggie (Bette Davis) who go to the mat about first, a husband, who is apparently married to both of them (don't ask!) and then, a baby boy. Maggie (Bette) winds up with both husband and child, but it's touch and go for most of the film. I wish I could say that Coffee's dialog was brilliant, but not so. It's a serviceable, competent screenplay. George Brent, playboy and drunkard, isn't nearly as desirable a husband and father as the film asks us to believe. Not much of an actor, either. 

Mary Astor won an Oscar and well-deserved it; she steals the show. It's ironic, and it may be significant, that Mary Astor herself had been involved in a child-custody case several years before this film was made.

The music (by Max Steiner) is noteworthy -- mood-appropriate variations on themes from Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto.

Hattie McDaniel does as much with the stereotypical "colored" maid as an actress could be expected to do, but her scenes are still painful and embarrassing to watch.

What I Wore to the Oscars (2019)

Actually, I didn't go TO the awards ceremony. This is what I wore to watch the Oscars on TV. Well, that's not entirely true either. I forgot to watch the Oscars. But I did wear the outfit.

My ensemble: plaid wool shirt by Woolrich; trousers by Lee (regular cut -- "smoky quartz" color); white cotton "Gold Toe" socks by Costco; shoes by Hoka (with orthopedic inserts by Dr. Scholl); genuine leather belt by SlideBelts; foundational undergarments by Fruit of the Loom and Carhartt; denim jacket by American Apparel. Accessories: eyeglasses by Kirkland Signature; hearing aids by Phonak. Traditional baseball cap by Otto ("one size fits most").

Hair by Joe.

Once again, I'd like to thank all the little people -- my fashion consultants, suppliers, and supporters -- for their imagination and hard work. I couldn't have done it without the entire team.

Man of the West (1958)

Judging by its almost-allegorical title, Man of the West claims, or seems to claim, that Link Jones, its conflicted protagonist, represents something fundamental and archetypical about the American western experience. And indeed it does, if Mr. Jones, played by rugged stalwart Gary Cooper, is to be judged by his exceedingly laconic manner, his resourcefulness, his fundamental decency, his initial aversion to gun play and ultimate resort to violence. 

But in my opinion the title Man of the West is misleading. Man of the West is a noir in chaps and ten-gallon hat. Its western-ness is superficial. It's noirness is essential and real.

Here's what we've got: a reformed criminal trying to go straight who can't escape his past; a crazed egomaniacal gang leader (played here by Lee J. Cobb but James Cagney would have been a better choice); a dance hall singer who's been mistreated by a succession of men even though she's got a good heart; a bank robbery that goes south and gang members who turn upon each other. No cowboys, no Indians, no horses, no cavalry. Not even a rattlesnake curling around the heroine's shoe who is shot by our hero. Scares her temporarily, but she's grateful.

The film was written by Reginald Rose of Twelve Angry Men fame; it was directed by Anthony Mann (Side Street). Take away the cowboy hats and substitute fedoras and you could call it Man of the East. 

 

Debra Paget Then and Now -- Broken Arrow (1950)

In 1951, when Broken Arrow hit the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue, I was just an ungrown twelve-year-old. I wasn't an assiduous movie-goer because weekends were for basketball and softball, but when I did invest my 14 cents in a matinee, it was for a Western  -- not for a soppy musical or scary crime film. Last night, for the first time in 67 years, I watched Broken Arrow again. I imagined that I would remember it clearly.

Hold on, let me be scrupulously honest here. I didn't pretend that I would remember the entirety of the film, not even the plot. I knew only that Sanseearah, the Indian Maiden "Morningstar" as portrayed by Debra Paget, was incised into the deep fabric of my brain. She, Debra that is, might have been my greatest crush or first true love. And why shouldn't she have been? Just direct your admiring gaze to the still above. Miss Paget was young, lovely, exotic as all get out, and yielding. I admit with chagrin that I didn't fully understand what got me so het up about her in 1951, but het up I was.

But all is changed, now, almost three generations later. What was "hot" and romantic then seems more than a little creepy now. Debra Paget (or DebraLee Griffin, of Denver, Colorado) was only sixteen years old when the film was shot. Sixteen! Moreover, she plays younger. In fact, the film devotes several long scenes to Morningstar's  puberty rites -- so perhaps she's imagined to be thirteen. (The head dress that she wears in the picture below as well as the rest of the ceremony, was, I am sure, what is now called "fakelore.")

Look at her. The poor dear is barely out of childhood. Mr. Stewart (James Stewart, her graying white mountain-man suitor) was forty-two years old, and looks every bit of it. How can we, how did we, not notice the age difference? Why is he attracted by a child?  I tried hard to suspend disbelief, but my powers of suspension are not infinite. The film, I'm sorry to say, teeters into unsavory child-molesting territory.  

My pre-adolescent fascination with the film has now been altered, dampened and dispatched.

It's a shame, too, because Broken Arrow was a self-consciously progressive film in which the Apaches were figured not as brutal savages but as human beings. It deserves high praise for its groundbreaking stance. The film was written by the leftist Albert Maltz, of Brooklyn, New York, who was one of the Hollywood Ten, and who, on the day I saw Broken Arrow for the first time, was in jail serving a one-year sentence for refusing to cooperate with the runaway House Un-American Activities Committee. 

I therefore wish that the film hadn't been compromised by the March-October love affair. And that Albert Maltz hadn't side-stepped the real difficulties of an interracial marriage in the 1880s by allowing Dear Debra to be murdered.    

And while I'm wishing, I wish also that the authorities at Twentieth-Century Fox hadn't insisted that the two most important Apache roles be played not by Apaches but by whites. Debra Paget is the one lead, while Cochise, the Apache chief, was played in redface by Jeff Chandler, formerly Ira Grossel, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York. It's not as though more appropriate actors weren't available. In fact, the character of Geronimo, who has one brief speech, was played by an uncredited Jay Silverheels, an accomplished actor of Cayuga and Mohawk heritage.

But would we, in 1951, have been able to empathize with real Apaches, genuine Apaches, rather than with familiar faces in heavy makeup? Or would such Indians have been, even for liberals, too "other," too foreign?

Amnesia on Film: Crack-up (1946)

Ho-hum. Another day, another amnesia movie. 

Crack-up offers still another variant on this most malleable of diseases: amnesia that is chemically-induced.  

George Steele (played by too-old-for-the-part Pat O'Brien) presents a danger to a doctor-thief played by reliable Ray Collins. To discredit  him, Steele is kidnapped and injected with "narcosynthesis" which causes him lose his memory and act erratically. Too many silly plot complications and a couple of murders follow, but eventually a second injection brings Steele round.

I'm not aware of another case of chemically-induced amnesia in film, but I know that there is such a thing in medicine. Propofol and scopolamine are frequently mentioned and I believe that even the common sleeping pill, Ambien, may have amnesiac properties. So there's some limited scientific underpinning for Crack-up's apparently fantastic premise.

In noir, amnesia is as common as the common cold. In the 40s and 50s, a guy couldn't walk down a louche shadowy city street or take a dame out dancing to  a night spot without encountering half a dozen cases. It was a regular plague. 

Canyon Passage (1946)

In our tour of classic western movies, we watched Canyon Passage (1946), directed by Jacques Tourneur, who is famous for the noir masterpiece Out of the Past (1947). Canyon Passage is a good substantial film and it's got everything a frontier drama should have: a cabin raising, a saloon in which a poker game is perpetually in progress, gold mines, muddy streets, Indians (unsympathetically depicted as mere murderous savages), gun fights, bar brawls, lovely landscapes, and Andy Devine. 

At its emotional heart is a mighty curious three-way relationship between Dana Andrews as Logan Stuart, an upstanding entrepreneur; Brian Donlevy as George Camrose, a banker/gambler, and Susan Hayward as Susan Hayward. Hayward is engaged to George but attracted to Logan. She doesn't seem to know what is made obvious to us, that George is a compulsive gambler, a wastrel, an embezzler, a serious flirt, and eventually a murderer. Why Hayward, or Lucy as she's sometimes called, doesn't see him for what he is puzzles us. It's an even greater mystery that Logan Stuart, who knows George's faults, remains loyal -- even, at one point, risking his life and imperiling his reputation to break his friend out of prison. 

The oddest scene is one in which George gives his fiancee Lucy a tepid kiss. He turns to Logan and says, "Can you do better?" Logan takes the challenge and kisses his friend's fiancee; he wins -- she clearly responds less to her intended than to his friend. What are we to make of this?  It seems borderline pervy. Is there a suggestion that the men are closer, more "friendly"  than the conventions of the western film ordinarily allow?  Or are Logan and George more than just good ol'  loyal buddies?

After George is killed, Logan and Lucy wind up together, but more for convenience than passion, or so it seems to suspicious ol' me.  

Notting Hill (1990), Two on a Tower (1882)

We watched Notting Hill, a cute 1999 "rom-com" or "date movie" with cute couple Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. (It's hard to believe that the film is almost twenty years old. It's so slight and fluffy that I can't remember whether or not I saw it last millennium, but frankly, it wouldn't make much difference one way or the other.)  In Notting HIll, Julia Roberts plays a pricey celebrity actress ($15,000,000 a film) who happens to wander into Hugh Grant's tiny bookstore and -- a few cute scenes later -- into his tiny Notting Hill bedroom. It's a slight, unconvincing fairy-tale of a film and I'm giving away no secrets when I say that the cute apparently- mismatched couple not only overcome all psychological obstacles and class anxieties in order to marry but that also, in the cute coda scene, when she's lying in his lap on a bench in the park, she's well along in her pregnancy. Ah love! Ah romance! Ah idealized domesticity! Ah cuteness!

Cynic that I am, I'm curious whether she's crammed herself into his narrow digs (and displaced his second-banana roommate) or whether she's purchased the biggest finest mansion in the upscale Notting Hill neighborhood and moved the new husband into it. And closed down the bookstore. The film is wise to sidestep concerns of such dreary ordinariness. 

Notting Hill is a rip-off and inversion of Pretty Woman (1990), in which Julia Roberts was poor and Hugh Grant was Richard Gere, a mega-billionaire. Notting Hill might just as easily have been called Pretty Man -- it's that close a parallel. Only without the shopping.  

And Notting Hill, though upscale, is no Rodeo Drive. It's a neighborhood that has gone through a number of transformations. Once famous for its piggeries, by the middle of the 19th century, it was on the way up. In 1862, when Thomas Hardy left Dorchester and his Wessex homeland to apprentice himself as an architect, he took up residence in Notting HIll's recently constructed Westbourne Park Villas. And there in Notting Hill he wrote his first novel, never published and now lost, called with the remarkably appropriate Hugh-and-Julia title of The Poor Man and the Lady. 

Lower class boy and upper class girl was a perennial theme in Hardy's novels. An obsession, in fact. By coincidence, I'd just finished reading -- on the same day as I watched Notting Hill -- one of Hardy's most thorough explorations of the poor-rich theme -- his novel Two on a Tower (1882).

No idyllic pregnancy in the park in the Hardy universe.

In Two on a Tower, Lady Constantine falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an impoverished amateur astronomer, but Hardy strews their path with one obstacle after another. For the Lady, a wastrel husband who is missing in deep dark Africa, and who may or not be dead; an inadvertent pregnancy; a duped second husband, this time a clergyman; for St. Cleeve, a badly-needed inheritance that can only be claimed if he remains single, and an extended exile. For both of them, misunderstandings, accidental damaging eavesdroppings, important letters gone astray, etc. And finally, when it appears possible that the poor boy and lady might find solace together, a sudden inexplicable spontaneous death.

Good thing that Thomas Hardy didn't write Notting Hill. Trust me, there would have been no happy ending. Perhaps Hugh would been disfigured in the fire that destroyed his bookstore and his livelihood, and Julia, repulsed, would have returned to her abusive alcoholic boyfriend. But very likely something even more arbitrary and cruel.

  

Amnesia on Film: High Wall (1947)

In High Wall (1947), an extremely noir-y noir, Stephen Kenet, played by an unusually glamorless Robert Taylor, suffers from a fully credible traumatic amnesia. Did he, or did he not kill his wife. He can't remember.

So far so good. Happens all the time in such films.

But he's cured of his affliction in a most unlikely, most unscientific  manner. He's injected with "truth serum" --  sodium pentathol -- and what was once lost is found. Such easy recovery of memory could ruin dozens of amnesia movies.  Good thing the treatment never caught on. 

The gimmick spoils an otherwise grainy, hard-edged film. 

Here's Kenet (Taylor), and Ann Lorrison, played by Audrey Totter. They're good as patient and doctor, but unpersuasive when they emerge as lovers in the last scene.

 

 

The scenes in the asylum are painful especially when they're supposed to be amusing. To me, it's more like a concentration camp than a therapeutic institution. It's scary that it might reflect reality.

 

A Truly Awful Western

The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) -- another film so awful that it's utterly, undeniably fascinating. It's packaged as a western, but underneath the arid mountainous scenery and the garish Technicolor, it's a film noir.  What's it about?  Well, a gang of crooks have been muscling in on the Elder ranch. Not an unusual circumstance, but in this case the heart of the matter, it seems, is that the four sons of frequently praised Katie Elder, proprietor of the ranch, have neglected their mother. They should have visited more often, or written, or at least called. The brothers are, in birth order, swaggering John Wayne, a gunman; sniggering Dean Martin, a gambler; colorless bland Earl Holliman, a failed businessman, and sophomoric Michael Anderson, whom the older brothers want to send to college, but whom they should rather send to high school to fulfill the prerequisites for Acting 101. It's all a mighty predictable -- a string of cliches -- and, just as expected, after the climactic gunfight the Elders get their land back from cheating Morgan Hastings and his gang of no-goodniks. The dialogue throughout is embarrassingly wooden; no, not wooden, harder than that, ceramic; no, not ceramic, titanium. 

I blame it all on Henry Hathaway, the director, who had some good westerns and also a series of films noirs (The House on 92nd Street, The Dark Corner, Kiss of Death, Call Northside 777) to his credit. How could he have perpetrated this film? And someone, I don't know who, has to take responsibility for the ugliest, unfunniest, uncomic bit of grotesque "comic relief" ever perpetrated, in which Dean Martin auctions off his make-believe glass eye to a passel of local yokels. But I also think that some of the blame attaches to the producer, Hal Wallis. This is a film utterly without a female presence except for Martha Hyer,  who wanders into a couple of scenes without point or purpose. I couldn't figure out what the heck she was doing in the film until I read that she was married at the time to Wallis and that her career was on the fritz. I'm positive that Wallis told the screen writer, "Put in something  for Martha."  Well, he did, but it just made the whole mess a little messier, and if possible, a little less coherent.   

The Sons of Katie Elder stoked my indignation. What a waste of resources! 

But hey, there's a good three minute scene of a hundred or more horses being herded by the brothers, and there's George Kennedy as a gunslinger and Dennis Hopper as a neurotic youngster who gets killed  by his own father. It's something, but, sorry, not enough to dilute the indignation.

 

Addendum November 16.  I've just watched another western, Big Jake (1971), in which John Wayne parodies an earlier John Wayne. Just as awful as Katie Elder. Maybe less intelligible. You can infer a lot from the poster.

Cliche of the Decade

There's this woman of a certain age, good looking, usually blonde. Generally, she's a detective but she could be reporter or a spy -- some sort of investigator. She has an instinct for her work, an unusual insight or gift. There's a murderer or villain out there and she's determined to get him; it's personal with her and often she has to violate procedures in order to bring this character to justice. She regularly confronts her superior, an older man who is a stickler for the rules and wants to shut down the investigation. As a last resort, she'll ask for 24 hours, or more rarely 48 hours, to bring the villain in. And guess what -- it turns out that her instinct was right all along and after a brief struggle, in which her life is in danger (often there's an attempted assassination, usually by speeding vehicle), the criminal/mastermind/murderer is handcuffed (British version) or shot (American version).

Amnesia on Film: Crossroads

What a strange little movie, odd even by amnesia-on-film standards!  Film amnesia is the most malleable and flexible of illnesses, as fact free (and fact-averse) as the EPA under Trump.. 

In this modest 1942  adventure, David Talbot, played by William Powell affecting a slight now-you-hear-it-now-you-don't French accent, is either an amnesia victim or an amnesia scammer. He either was or wasn't a criminal before the accident in which he apparently lost his memory.

An extortionist-grifter Henri Sarrou, played by Basil Rathbone, who looks like "two profiles glued together," is trying to squeeze him for a million francs in exchange for not turning him over to the police for a murder that he might or might not have committed in his former life, if he had one.

I don't think I'm giving away any secrets to say that all turns out for the best. But what is interesting, amnesia-wise, is that there is no recovery of memory.  Talbot's amnesia never resolves, and he comes to the end of the film with no knowledge of three-quarter of his life, and that this painful situation doesn't seem to compromise or concern him the least little bit. Off he goes, at the end, blithely, with his luminous bride Hedy Lamarr, at his side.

There are holes within holes in the plot, but what is most striking, I think, is how casually amnesia is deployed,  as if losing one's memory is no more a challenge to selfhood and identity than a case of sniffles.  

 

"Wyoming"

I am totally in love with a bit of dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the great Sidney Lumet social drama/comedy/crime film.

Sonny's plan to finance his wife Leon 's sex change operation by robbing a bank has run aground. In exchange for freeing his hostages, Sonny wants a plane to take him to a foreign country. He asks his not-so-brilliant friend/co-conspirator Sal to what country he would want to travel. Sal cogitates for a while, then suggests, "Wyoming."  After a pause, Sonny replies, "Sal, Wyoming's not a country." The exchange (by John Cazale as Sal and Al Pacino as Sonny) is delivered magnificently -- Cazale with blank-faced understated sincerity, Pacino with tempered exasperation.

"Wyoming" was not in the script (nor in the essay from which the script was drawn) but was improvised by Cazale. A moment of pure genius.

If you haven't seen the film, run -- not walk -- to your nearest TV.  

Small Screen Godlessness

We binge-watched the seven-hour mini-series Godless in three marathon nights.

Godless is a Western, or more exactly a fantasia on Western-movie themes and incidents. To the genre-literate, almost every plot element or character will be familiar, but shootouts and jail breaks and horse-rustling and miraculously healing bullet wounds were re-combined in ways that kept our attention. I'm proud to say that I didn't fall asleep once during the three long evenings, which is quite a compliment to the series, inasmuch as I've recently emerged as an Olympic-quality narcolept, prone to drift into sleep at the drop of a hat, even during the second overtime.  

The three most interesting features of Godless, were, in my opinion, a) the landscape, which, although it surrounds us here in Boulder, seemed particularly crisp on the hi def screen, b) the horses, which are noble beasts of their own and were respectfully depicted and admired by the cinematographer, and c) the character of MaryAgnes, played by Merit Wever, who was rather wonderful in the role and who was rewarded with a lot of the good lines. MaryAgnes is a tough young rifle-toting crack shot who plays for the other team but who you want on your side.  

I thought that Jeff Daniels who played the ruthless mass-murderer Frank Griffin overacted like crazy. If overacting were a crime, he'd be looking at a good twenty years in solitary. Plus I know it's the fashion that your deranged evil charismatic lunatic villain always has to be a bible thumper yet let's face it -- that's a cliche that has served its purpose and earned its retirement. Speaking of religion -- even aside from the title of the series and the observation that it's a godless country there's a heck of a lot of religion stuff both good and bad but mostly bad in this series. For example, much of the backstory evokes the Mountain Meadow Massacre -- one of the most dreadful acts of domestic terrorism in our nation's history -- which was perpetrated by Mormons (although Mormon participation is underplayed and instead the atrocity is attributed to a nonspecific religious fanaticism). There are frequent scenes of worship and pilgrimage as well as intermittent focus on the new church that the villagers of LaBelle are constructing and specifically on the fashioning of a substantial cross that is photographed as though it were brimming with significance. Moreover, the inhabitants of LaBelle wait six and seven-eighths episodes for the new preacher to arrive but when he finally appears he has only the most banal platitudes to deliver. Frankly, I'm not positive whether the writer of Godless thought the preacher's speech was genuinely profound or whether he couldn't give him better words, or whether he was trying to assert that the pieties of faith offered no consolation whatever to the beat-up townspeople. It would have been better if the preacher had just sung an appropriate hymn and let the LaBelleians join in so we could at least end with good music.

Godless offers a number of revisionist moments where tradition is overturned, sometimes too obviously. An instance: LaBelle is inhabited almost entirely by women and it is the women who make the decisions and take the active roles; men are passive bystanders. Quite an inversion of the usual macho practice. And also: usually in the westerns when there's the threat of intermarriage between the races, it's the dark skin who gets killed. This time the commonplace was turned on its head with the gratuitous killing of he white guy -- but I think it was a bit too pointed to name him "Whitey." And the Indians: now that we have the word "orientalism" to describe the mythologizing and falsifying of people of the east, we could apply the word "Indianism" to the romanticizing of the Paiutes, who are depicted as repositories of supernatural mystery and tribal wisdom (which is I suppose is a step up from brutal savages, but still not respectful or true). "Indianism" leads to a grotesque failure in the story when the sheriff is accompanied by a lone brave on horseback who may or may not be a ghost and who should have thudded to the cutting-room floor (along with some faux-spiritual nonsense, totally out of place, about the sheriff losing and regaining his shadow). 

The series centered on the conflict between father and adopted son -- a borrowing straight out of Red River, but this time around there's not going to be a reconciliation. The allegorically-named son Roy Goode winds up shooting his father, up close, pistol to temple. Which I liked a lot, because, first of all, I was by this time totally inured to violence, and also because the evil addled father-villain-prophet repeatedly claimed the ability to foresee his own death and "this isn't it." "You're wrong," says Goode, pulling the trigger. So much for prophecy. Immediately afterwards, the hero rides alone into the sunset -- not into a metaphorical sunset but a very real and carefully photographed sunset -- even though if he had his wits about him he would take his more-than-a-match lady friend with him. It's a unsatisfying conclusion and one that is dictated, I think, more by the zillion Saturday afternoon Westerns of my childhood than by the internal logic of the film. She loves him. But Western heroes named Goode just plain love their horses more than hearth, home and sex and they are all secretly afraid that if they marry and allow themselves to become domesticated they'll wind up like poor uxorious powerless Van Heflin in Shane.

Lady on a Train (1945)

When you start to watch a 1945 black-and-white movie called Lady on a Train you have certain expectations, especially when you're told in advance that it's about a woman who sees a murder take place from a train window. And when the movie features such noir stalwarts as Dan Duryea and Ralph Bellamy. And especially when the title of the movie evokes The Lady Vanishes and Lady in the Lake and Strangers on a Train. But Lady on a Train is not what you might think it's going to be; in fact, it's a film that never has a clue about what it is or wants to be. It's an unsatisfying hodgepodge.

There are some films that are so bad that they become fascinating for sheer awfulness. Lady on a Train is that kind of awful. It starts out noir-y and offers, intermittently, fistfights and mistaken identities and shadows, lots of shadows, and enough red herrings to feed cast and crew for the entire time the film was in production. But it also takes a shot at comedy -- not sophisticated banter but broad farce: in one scene, trying to hide herself from a hired gunsel, the heroine disguises herself as a chair and moves around from place to place just as she would in an Abbott and Costello vehicle. And then, if farce/noir weren't enough of a burden, at three separate times during the events, with the least possible justification, Deanna Durbin, playing at being a detective, breaks into song, but only because she's Deanna Durbin, not because the film requires her to do so. So it's a noir-farce-sentimental musical. It just don't work, except for connoisseurs of badness.

Plus it features two of the ugliest hats ever to come out of the Hollywood chapeau-shop:

 

 After making this film (and another clunker) Deanna Durbin left Hollywood, where she had been the highest paid woman in America, married and moved to France, never appeared on stage or on film again -- and reassumed her birthname, Edna Mae Durbin. It's a decision one can respect. 

Amnesia on Film: Love Letters (1945)

Here's another film in the sub-genre that might be called a "Did I Do It."  And still another case of "post-murder amnesia."

Singleton, who can't remember anything, even her own first name, is played by Jennifer Jones with a kind of distant unfocused look about her. She is seriously troubled; in addition to her amnesia, she's been the victim of a prank in which Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten) wrote her Cyrano-like love letters under the name of the lout Roger Morland. She fell in love with the author of the letters, but alas, deceived, married the lout. Now the lout has been murdered and Singleton, blamed for it, is just out of the mental hospital where she was incarcerated. Did she do it?  Of course not. She may not have a clue, but Alan and we the audience suspect that she's too pretty and harmless to have done anything bad, let alone committed a murder. Eventually, the truth outs and the real murderer is revealed. Singleton regains her memory and gains the replacement husband (the eloquent Alan that she wanted all along). It's a mighty unbelievable story but whenever amnesia is involved, probability goes flying out the window.

Bosley Crowther, the New York Times film critic at the time, who never liked anything, called it "sentimental twaddle." I myself, once disbelief is not only suspended but obliterated, found it to be a quite an engaging mystery. 

Amnesia on Film: Journal of a Crime (1934)

This pre-Code film deploys amnesia in a manner that is bizarre and possibly unique. Paul, a playwright, is conducting a no ambiguity, no euphemism affair with the actress Odette. His wife Francoise is jealous, so much so that she shoots and kills her rival. And gets away with it. However, she is overcome with guilt and falls into a profound depression, which the actress Ruth Chatterton portrays convincingly, perhaps because her face lacks expression even when she is jubilant. It appears for a while as though Francoise is going to succumb to guilt. However, she is seriously injured in an automobile accident. She is hospitalized but recovers, losing only her memory. But no memory, no guilt, and in the end Francoise has recovered her husband and her health and happily sips martinis on the Riviera. It's a rare case of therapeutic amnesia. Loss of memory doesn't create a problem; it solves it. And why is Paul content to re-unite with his wife the murderess? Because he is convinced that it is all God's will -- a mighty shallow expedient. So God too is complicit in the murder and its aftermath.

This was 1934; they couldn't have made it that way in 1935, when adultery and crime were required to be punished.

Here's Ruth Chatterton, famous in her day but now almost forgotten: 

 

Amnesia on Film: The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Just two days after we watched The Scarf (1951) along comes another case of not "whodunnit" but "dididoit" or better still, "doirememberdoing it."  Another case of amnesia, this one implicating Hollywood stalwarts Vera Caspary and Fritz Lang, who should have known better. This time it's Norah Larkin, a telephone operator well played by Anne Baxter, who picks up a poker and takes a crack at wolf/would-be-date-rapist/nasty-character Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) and then blacks out. Another case of "stress amnesia," I suppose. After many twists it turns out that Norah may have struck Prebble but not hard enough to finish him off -- the real murderer was another of Prebble's victims, a seduced and abandoned ex-girlfriend.

 

I have to say, once again, that Norah's amnesia seems less like a medical condition than a very very tired plot gimmick. Memory is lost and regained o so conveniently.  But the larger implications of the relation of memory to sense of self are left unacknowledged and unexplored. 

 

Just as in The Scarf, Norah recovers her memory and gets the guy -- in this case Casey Mayo, the reliable Richard Conte, who plays a gossip columnist who has just enough brain to solve the mystery.   

 

The Blue Gardenia has been called "feminist," but if it is, its feminism is mild and unobtrusive. Is it that Norah's roommate Crystal Carpenter, played by wisecrack-heavy Ann Sothern, keeps her ex-husband and present-boyfriend around strictly for sexual purposes?  But that's all the film offers in the way of strong women; Norah herself, after her one moment of reflexive poker-wielding, becomes passive, emotional, incapable of taking action. Passive, she leaves it to others to clear her of guilt.

Amnesia on Film: The Scarf (1951)

The Scarf is a most curious, eccentric film. Something of its oddity is conveyed by TCM's one-sentence plot summary: "An asylum escapee meets a waitress and hides on a turkey farm; supposedly he killed someone." The film was written and directed by E. A. (Ewald Andre) Dupont, one of the many German refugees working in Hollywood during and after the war, and features a splendid cast including John Ireland, Mercedes McCambridge, Emlyn Williams and especially James Barton, in a rather brilliant performance as a good-hearted, grizzled, hermit farmer whose flock of turkeys serves as source of income and as watchdog and possibly as metaphor.

John Howard Barrington escapes from an institution for the criminally insane. It seems that he's been incarcerated for a murder that he can't remember committing. Some sort of stress amnesia, the audience is expected to believe. He falls in with Connie Carter, a forthright waitress-singer-floozy: she introduces herself succinctly: "I'm no lily, not at all.  But my morals have no zipper. Let it go at that."  Connie wears an unusual scarf; when Barrington notices it he regains a smidgen of memory. It's going to be the clue to resolving his amnesia.  After many an adventure and some good photography, it is revealed that judge, jury and Barrington himself have been deceived. Barrington is innocent and the real murderer and villain is Dr. David Dunbar, an effete confidence man/psychologist who has hidden his own psychopathic past. At the climax, all is revealed (with the help of the scarf) and turns out for the best --  Barrington gets the girl, regains his memory and his innocence, and takes up the serious business of farming turkeys.

I found The Scarf absolutely riveting although I had to suspend disbelief over the many holes in the plot and some occasional crazy continuity problems. But amnesia movies can be mighty flexible about such details.

And there's a subtext of theatrical repetition-compulsion:  Emlyn Williams, who plays the maniac-murderer David Dunbar, "became an overnight star in 1935, with his thriller Night Must Fall, which he wrote and also played the lead role of a psychopathic murderer." 

You Can Count on Me Again and Again

All my movie-loving friends told me that I must watch Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester-by-the-Sea (2016). That was before the film won all those awards. So I crashed the Netflix line and there it was in my mailbox the first day that it was released on disk. And indeed it's a fine film. No car chases, no special effects, just real people wrestling their way through his world of woe. Good dialogue. Excellent camera work, excellent editing, splendid acting. 

But half way through the film, I began to experience disappointment. An unavoidable sense of dejavuitude. Wait, haven't I seen this before? And then I remembered Lonergan's earlier film, You Can Count on Me (2000). Hmmm.

In YCCoM, 20ish small-town boy Terry Prescott is unsteady and unfocused because he has lost his parents in an automobile accident. in MbtS, 30ish small-town boy Lee Chandler is sullen and isolated because he has lost his children in a house fire. In YCCoM,  Terry Prescott has a nephew, son of his much more grounded sister, with whom he tries to connect. In MBtS, Lee Chandler has a nephew, son of his brother, with whom he tries to connect. In YCCoM, Terry Prescott gets into a fight with a guy he used to know very well. In MbtS, Lee Chandler gets into a bar fight with a guy he's never met.  In YCCoM, Terry Prescott can't stay put, has to be on the road; in MbtS, Lee Chandler is stuck at home, can't get out of his rut. 

The details are different, but it's unquestionably the same story, inverted. It can almost be thought of as a sequel, with Casey Affleck recapitulating the role created by Mark Ruffalo. 

They're both excellent films -- just a trifle redundant. As a would-be enthusiast of the later effort, I felt just a little cheated.  

All writers, even the best, repeat themselves. Nevertheless, I'm hoping that Kenneth Lonergan's next picture, to which I'm looking forward with great anticipation, breaks out of the box, tries something entirely new.

Chinatown -- Odd Man Out

At the Vivian de St. Vrain Theater, also known as the bedroom, pleasurably supine on what Italians call the letto matrimoniale, we watch films from all decades of cinema history. The new technologies deluge us with riches. Films arrive by mail, by download, and on TCM and MGM and Encore Classics. It's all so remarkably easy.

We especially enjoy unplanned, spontaneous juxtapositions. Two nights ago, for example, we re-re-re-rewatched, on Encore, a film that must be on everyone's top ten list, the great noir classic Chinatown. Dazzled we were, once again. And then, last night, courtesy of the U. S. Post Office and Netflix, along came Carol Reed's masterpiece, Odd Man Out. There was, trust me, no plan to follow the one with the other -- but what a stroke of good fortune!!  

Chinatown (1974) gives us a fully-realized Los Angeles in the 1930s. The plot is complicated but not confusing. J. J. Gittes, a bored, compromised detective, is smart enough to unravel the plan to steal the water and smart enough to identify the murderer but nevertheless too innocent to grasp the unspeakable corruption at the heart of the of Mulwray-Cross family. Odd Man Out (1947), which also manages to make its Belfast setting as real as real, offers only the slightest plot -- Johnny McQueen's desperate attempt to escape his city. Yet what a remarkable story and how ably peopled with a variety of characters. It becomes almost picaresque in organization as Johnny reels from adventure to adventure, encountering Irish samaritans good, bad, and traitorous. On the surface the films are miles apart --Los Angeles all bright colors and fancy clothes, awash with prosperity, Belfast dark dark dark and gloomy. And yet the two films seemed oddly similar.

The overlaps and echoes were such that we decided to investigate. Here's what we discovered, via the wikipedia entry on Chinatown. "Filmmaker Roman Polanski (the director of Chinatown) has repeatedly cited Odd Man Out as his favorite film. 'I still consider it to be one of the best movies I've ever seen and a film which made me want to pursue this career more than anything else....  I always dreamed of doing things of this sort or that style.  To a certain extent I must say that I somehow perpetuate the ideas of that movie in what I do.'"  So our speculation about the similarities was validated. Unquestionably, Polanski had Carol Reed in mind while making Chinatown.

Let us cut to the chase and (spoilers coming, so watch out!) concentrate on the two films' last scenes. Johnny McQueen, badly wounded, is trying to make it down to the docks to get himself out of Belfast. He's helped by his girlfriend Kathleen Ryan. For a hopeful second, it appears that he's going to escape, but the police surround him. He can no longer see, but he asks Kathleen, "Is it far?"  Kathleen replies (and you have to be made of stone not to drop a tear), "It's a long way, Johnny, but I'm coming with you." She shoots at the police and they respond with "deadly force." It's suicide by cop -- a sad emotional love-death Romeo and Juliet ending. The ending of Chinatown is much more hopeless. Evelyn Mulwray tries to escape her father, corrupt and powerful Noah Cross. She drives away with her daughter but a fusillade of police bullets kills her. Evil, malevolent Cross wins everything -- the money, the land, the water, the child. (Polanski even altered the original ending to make it darker, more like Odd Man Out.) "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" --  i.e. inexplicable, impenetrable.

More on Polanski here.

A "Hitch" Conundrum

According to his biographer (Peter Ackroyd), Alfred Hitchcock "feared and hated the body." When he was a student at St. Ignatius in London, whenever he used the lavatory, he scrubbed it "so that it seemed as though no one had been there." At maturity, Hitchcock stood 5' 5" and weighed approximately 300 pounds. His marriage to Alma Reville (4'11") was mostly "white." He claimed that it was "sexless" and that he was a "celibated" director, and that his daughter, Patricia, was some sort of error. "If he was not the center of conversation or attention at a dinner table, he would often doze off." He made a bet that a property man would not be able to spend the night chained to a camera in a dark studio, then sabotaged him with a bottle of brandy laced with a strong laxative. He referred to his audience as the "moron millions." He was fond of the great painters but had no interest in any "symbolic significance or inner meaning." The actress Ann Todd reported that he had a schoolboy's obsession with sex and "an endless supply of very nasty and vulgar stories and jokes. He was a very sad person." He "had a fetish about women wearing glasses." One of his secretaries reported that he bought her five or six pairs but if she appeared without wearing one, "it irritated the devil out of him." During the making of Psycho, Hitchcock would place one or more grotesque models of Norman Bates' mummified mother in Janet Leigh's dressing room, just to hear her scream. "He would also regale her with his fund of dirty stories just before she went on camera." When asked, "what is the deep logic of your films," he replied, "to make the spectator suffer." When an actor was dissatisfied with a performance, Hitchcock refused another take, saying, "They'll never know in Peoria." While "The Birds" was being filmed, he harassed Tippi Hedren mercilessly, sending her flowers, specifying what clothes she could wear, keeping her from her daughter, trying to convince co-workers that they were having an affair. He gave Hedren's young daughter (Melanie Griffith) an image of her mother lying in a coffin. Hitchcock's recurrent dream was that his penis was made of crystal. 

Is it possible that so stunted a human being might become a great artist?  Or is it rather that his obsessions, distortions and failures of human empathy constitute a permanent barrier to greatness and that time will reveal that even his best films are shallow and brittle -- all surface glitter?

It Happened in Brooklyn, so they Say

If it happened in Brooklyn, it must have happened in metaphorical or mythological rather than real Brooklyn, because it's not the Brooklyn of my memory. It Happened in Brooklyn is a 1947 musical, I guess you'd have to call it, featuring still skinny Frank Sinatra and womanly Kathryn Grayson, and also Jimmie Durante, who steals the show. And also the ever-luminous Gloria Grahame in a very small role as an Army nurse in England. Brooklyn is evoked as a fairy tale land where everyone is nice to everyone and jobs and money fall from the trees -- kind of an urban big rock candy mountain. Not the case -- though nowadays Brooklyn, which used to be mocked, is every Twenty-Something's land of putative milk and theoretical honey. In truth there's nothing much that is recognizably Brooklynian -- even in geography -- to my jaded old eyes except a rather beautiful sequence of Frank Sinatra singing and "dancing" on Brooklyn Bridge. Most of the action supposedly takes place in the basement of New Utrecht High School, but in actual fact it's a Hollywood sound stage.

Sinatra, a returned soldier, thinks he's in love with Kathryn Grayson but she prefers Peter Lawford, playing the shy grandson of an English Dook. The film is worth seeing if only because Sinatra and Grayson sing, believe it or not, "La ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni -- as far as I know Sinatra's only foray into grand opera.

If I had been the screenwriter, I would have had Gloria Grahame jump on a luxury liner and return to Brooklyn for the climactic concluding scene, rather than remaining, as she does, merely a sweet overseas memory of Frankie's. 

It Happened in Brooklyn

 

Poor Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past, Angel Face)

On successive nights, we watched Out of the Past (1947) and Angel Face (1953). Both are, as they say, "gripping" films. In my present situation, "gripping" means that even though the nominal curtain rose on these movies after 9:00 pm, and I was in bed, comfortable, with a full stomach, I was sufficiently gripped that I didn't waver or snooze or nap, even for a second. Such criteria of excellence may not seem significant to younger folk, but trust me, loyal readers, in these latter years, staying awake and engaged is a crucial critical yardstick.    

Both Out of the Past and Angel Face are superior noirs. In both films the central character is played by Robert Mitchum. I couldn't detect a the least tad of difference between the two parts he plays. You could lift his Jeff Bailey from Out of the Past and plunk him down in Angel Face as Frank Jessup and no one would notice, except that civilian Frank would lack private-eye Jeff's semi-official trench coat and fedora. In both films, Mitchum's character is expressionless and sleepy-eyed and smart but, once his testosterone kicks in, falls prey to a clever, ruthless bad bad bad girl. Both characters know that they're being framed for murder and yet can't just pack up and move to Nebraska or Mexico or somewhere sensible -- as any human being outside of the world of noir would do. You, the spectator, want to raise yourself from your soft pillow and shout at the TV and at the guys Mitchum plays, "Hey you big lug, what the heck are you doing. Use your noodle." But lunkhead Mitchum makes mistake after mistake. I hope everyone who's reading this post has seen the movies, because I don't want to spoil their pleasure in the endings, but let me just say this -- Jeff, or Frank, or Bob, please next time don't get into an automobile with a homicidal femme fatale in the last few frames of a murder mystery and expect to escape alive. And if you must  do so, at least check your so-called girlfriend's purse for a silver-handled Beretta. And under no circumstances surrender to her the keys to the vehicle. Do the driving yourself.

These films have everything one would want in a classic film noir: a relentless wicked ambitious beautiful dame who entraps an honest but naif and helpless ingenu, and also snappy dialogue, a gloomy claustrophobic atmosphere, multiple plot twists and turns, and the valueless atomistic society that Hobbes feared would follow from curtailed authority. And much yearning for cash, which is never in adequate supply. Lots of shadows and odd-angled photography. Some good, complicated characters but a few who are merely melodramatically evil. 

Mitchum's acting is much praised of late but I don't buy it: he's effective in a way but monochromatic to a fault. A better actor is Kirk Douglas, who  projects gleeful menace as a corrupt, criminal businessman. But to me both movies are carried by their female leads. Dazzling Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat is equally adept at innocence and villainy, often in the same scene, sometimes from moment to moment. At the end of the film, when she's killing people left and right, she wears a nun-like snood that only an accomplished actress could transform into a brilliant metaphor. Equally splendid is Jean Simmons as the angel-faced Diane Tremayne, who conveys innocence, ambition, obsession, and intermittent but genuine madness with the raise of an eyebrow (and the help of excellent lighting). And good girl Mona Freeman shines in a restaurant scene in which she sees right through Tremayne's beauty to the dangerous craziness beneath.  

Here's Mitchum and Greer together.

 

 

 

Pussygate

A textbook example of the unthinkable actually happening:

"It's good to be the king," says Mel Brooks (as Louis XVI) in The History of the World, Part I, lifting the skirt of one of his lovely courtieresses in order to dry-hump her. It's make-believe Hollywood pseudo-licentiousness. It's outrageous, beyond the pale, and hilarious as long as it stays in the movie.

"It's good to be star," says Trump, bragging about his license to kiss women and grab them by their "pussies."

What in comedy is amusing is in real life simply grotesque -- as is the perpetrator of the atrocity, the maniacal Republican candidate for the most powerful office on earth.  

Junebug (2005)

When I saw Junebug for the first time shortly after it appeared in 2005, I enjoyed its gentle, affecting comedy. It's yet another "stranger comes to town" enactment, although this time, for once, the stranger is a woman. Madeleine Johnsen is a fortyish, worldly, sophisticated Chicago-based art-dealer. She arrives in a small North Carolina Christian-saturated community accompanied by her brand-new twenty-something husband, who is a native of the place. If they're not deeply in love, they're certainly enjoying a time of sexual satisfaction, perhaps even frenzy. As the film proceeds, a series of exquisite culture-clash misunderstandings illuminate both city and country.  

On last night's viewing, however, the film was far less amusing and more painful than I remembered. Did I see it the first time with rose-colored glasses?

In the film's loveliest scene, the young husband George Johnsen, played gracefully by Alessandro Nivola, is prevailed on at a church-basement social to "give us a hymn," which he does rather beautifully, offering Will Lamartine Thompson's ""Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling" which is an extremely melodic but theologically naive piece of sentimentality. As he sings, obviously very comfortable with the milieu and with the surroundings, the director's camera focuses on his wife Madeleine's (i.e. Embeth Davidtz's) expressive face. 

When I saw the film in 2005 or thereabouts, I thought Madeleine shone with wonderment and appreciation. O, I thought, she sees and appreciates a new dimension in her husband. This will lead to understanding between them and help her to navigate the gulf between her and her new family. How could I have been so undiscerning? This time, it was entirely clear that her reaction was exactly the opposite of what I had previously attributed to her. Madeleine doesn't get it at all. It's not appreciation, it's incomprehension, perhaps even condescension. Madeleine, I'm sorry to say, doesn't understand her husband, his culture, his religion, or his family. And indeed, subsequent events in the plot confirmed my new pessimism, for every time Madeleine has to make a choice, she does so with no accommodation to her husband's upbringing or values

She's glad to leave the place, she says at the end, but it's clear to me that she's learned nothing and that there's trouble brewing.

Most of the attention that the film has garnered is owing to Amy Adams' performance as George's pregnant child-like sister, which is indeed a remarkable piece of acting. But for my money, it's the visiting husband and wife who steal the show -- along with the intelligence and art of the director (Phil Morrison) and the writer (Angus MacLachlan).