Reviews

Symphony of Six Million is a fascinating period piece of a film about a young, idealistic doctor, Felix (Ricardo Cortez), from the Lower East Side, who gives up his clinic practice among the poor and moves his office to Park Avenue to advance his family socially. Family tragedy strikes and he realizes he's lost his soul. The film is notable for its warmhearted depiction of an immigrant Jewish milieu. It's a tearjerker, but it has a sincerity that redeems it. The actors who play his immigrant parents (Anna Appel and Gregory Ratoff) are wonderful. And it has an overwrought but interesting musical score by Max Steiner. This film is a great piece of cinematic Americana and well worth seeing!

Play Girl, made in 1940 shortly before America entered World War II, is a film that looks back to Depression era films. An aging "gold-digger" Grace (Kay Francis), realizes that she's too old (over 30) to hoodwink vain older men. She takes on a destitute nineteen-year-old Ellen (Mildred Coles), and grooms her to be her successor. But Ellen turns out to be a good girl after all, and falls for a young cowboy named Tom, leading to a predictably happy ending. The economically precarious life of unmarried women lurks beneath the film's labored humor. I was struck by the vulnerability of the three women (Margaret Hamilton plays Josie, Grace's maid--a failed maternal figure to both the younger women). Fortunately for the women like the ones in this film, there would be plenty of war work available soon enough. They could earn an honest living and acquire decent job skills while the men fought overseas. In the regressive fifties, films like Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend would bring back the old gold-digger theme, but the women in the later film have a toughness and self-reliance (after all, Marilyn Monroe was discovered working at a munitions factory) that even the sleek Grace can't quite manage. Grace, in a plot twist, goes after Tom and gets a visit from Tom's mother. Like Grace, she's an elegantly dressed older woman who gently puts Grace's feet in the fire. This woman's film is so much about the predicament of aging and marginalized women. It's fitting that Kay Francis, whose studio was desperate to get rid of her, played Grace. She was always a class act.

Toy Story 3 is a beautiful and affecting wrap-up of the Toy Story trilogy. Andy goes off to college, and unlike the girls in most Disney animated films, he actually has a living mother. She's the same age as all of us parents who took our children to the original Toy Story films when they were little. All the Toy Story films have been about the sense of time passing and the inevitable sense of loss that goes along with it. Andy's mom, a single mother is loosing her son and he's ambivalently moving away from her and his childhood, the childhood personified in his beloved toys, especially Woody. The first Toy Story film started with a shot of a cloud-patterned wallpaper in Andy's bedroom. Toy Story 3 begins film ends with the camera panning up into the sky (interestingly, Up ends the same way). The director mentioned during his commentary that this gives the film a "storybook" quality, but it also gives it a dimension of mystery and becomes a commentary on the transitory nature of life. It's this sense that gives these wonderful films their resonance and makes us able to watch them again and again. Director Lee Unkrich and Producer Darla Anderson's commentary was excellent; they really went out of their way to give credit to all the individual animators and the work done by everyone at Pixar on the film. Generosity like that must make Pixar a great place to work.

Joan Crawford plays Edith Whitehead, the worn-down wife of an oil worker who walks out on him after the accidental death of their only child. As another reviewer here has noted, this film is an interesting hybrid--both a woman's film and a film noir. It's a woman's film in the way she goes from rags to riches and changes her identity to that of Ethel Forbes, a wealthy socialite. It's noir in the sense that she accomplishes this by becoming a tough-talking gangster's moll. But she's not as smart as she thinks she is and in the end, gets taken down and ends up back with her parents in the same dreary house she started out in. In the vocabulary of women's films, she has to punished for daring to abandon her husband. But female viewers got to vicariously see her wear a lot of terrific clothes and get treated (at least temporarily) like a queen. Crawford acts well in this film, with a great supporting cast. A well-crafted film and unjustly neglected film.

A husband's unfaithfulness triggers his wife's depression. Jo (Anne Bancroft), already a parent of five children, marries Jake Armitage (Peter Finch) and is devastated when he has sex with her best friend. Since this is an early sixties pre-feminist film, it doesn't occur to any of the characters that at least part of Jo's problems may stem from the fact she isn't allowed any real role in life except that of being a wife and mother. As was so common with marriages at the time, she's way too over-involved in her husband and her self-esteem rises and falls according to his moods. Jo's in a double bind. If she were to look for a role outside of the home, she would be accused of being unable to accept her feminine role. Even though Jo's sent to see a psychiatrist, Jake has his own problems. Why in the world would he marry a woman obsessed with child-bearing and then complain about his lack of privacy and the fact that she wants to get pregnant again? Her pregnancies may be a way of self-medicating her depression. Jo is completely invested in her role as a mother, but her depression makes her unable to truly love and care for her children. Her oldest daughter becomes her surrogate parent and has the sad job of being perpetually cheerful and competent as she tries to cheer up Jo. Despite being a lousy husband, Jake is good dad. He co-opts her in her relationship to her kids.

This very dated film demonstrates how femininity itself was treated as a chronic disease. There's a great scene where Jo wanders around Harrod's, surrounded by scenes of female consumption where the women's faces and bodies are interspersed with those of blank-faced mannequins. The images reflect not only Jo's feelings of emptiness, but also reflect the negative cultural attitudes towards women that were so prevalent at the time. To please Jake and thinking it will save her marriage, Jo gets an abortion and has her tubes tied. But he continues to philander. The couple buy and renovate an old windmill that's missing its blades. It stands for the ultimate unsustainability of their marriage; a kind of marriage that is running out of steam as the sixties progress. This is a beautifully photographed and well-acted film with a lovely musical score.

I always try to catch this film when it's on TV, but I always stop watching before its terrible ending. Jackson Pollock was a great artist, thanks in no small part to his shrewd wife, Lee Krasner. She was the intermediary between this disturbed and ultimately psychotic man and the sophisticated New York art world that never knew quite what to make of him. Compared to today, the postwar New York art scene looks quaintly innocent. All it took was some pontificating by Clement Greenberg and a spread in Life magazine to make Pollock's career. Ed Harris plays Pollock well, and the scenes where he actually paints are fascinating. The film also does a does a good job of showing how artists actually lived in fifties in New York. By today's standards, it was a grubby life in dilapidated walk-ups painted in the harsh, cheap white paint favored by cheap landlords. But it was possible to be poor and still live in Manhattan. In a way, Krasner did her job too well. Pollock was emotionally unprepared for his fame and it sent him (and ultimately poor, innocent Edith Metzger who had the bad luck to be in his car at the wrong time) over the deep end. Pollock is an honest movie that is obviously a labor of love on the part of director Harris and the actors whose performances are excellent.

As one of the other reviewers here has noted, Sudden Fear is a fascinating cross between a woman's film and film noir. Perhaps because of its older female protagonist, it has been unfairly neglected. Joan Crawford, acting less histrionically than usual, plays Myra Hudson an heiress and successful playwright. The fact that she's rich and talented makes her an obvious target. She falls for and marries sleazy actor Lester Blaine, terrifically played by Jack Palance. Blaine and his mistress, the younger and more attractive Irene (Gloria Grahame) plot to kill her for her fortune. Crawford looks middle-aged and frumpy in this film; she seems to be wearing less make-up and is photographed from less flattering angles. It almost transforms her into a different actress. Its as if we're seeing her true face. For financial reasons, Lester and Irene only have a small window of time to murder her in order to get the money. The latter part of the film is punctuated by ticking clocks. Myra has minutes to pull herself together and save her own life. The ticking clocks also have to do with Myra's aging, dwindling attractiveness and mortality. There are many close-ups of her aging hands and feet that have the effect of magnifying her physical vulnerability. In the film's dramatic denouement, Myra dresses like Irene and the two women's identities merge as they become the object of Blaine's murderous rage. Crawford's training as a silent film actress make the last part of the film extraordinary. A truly great film!

Liv Ullman plays Eva, the shy and reclusive daughter of famous, narcissistic concert pianist Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman). Charlotte is at loose ends after her lover dies, and returns to Sweden to visit her daughter. Both mother and daughter share personal tragedies. Charlotte's daughter (and Eva's sister) Helena, who lives with Eva, is immobilized by a neurological disease. She hasn't told Charlotte that Helena is in the house, because she fears that her mother, repelled by Helena's disability, will refuse to visit. Eva's tragedy is the drowning of her four-year-old son, Erik. Her husband grieves, but in Eva's mind, he's still alive. Charlotte, who took excellent care of her lover in his final illness, has always neglected her daughters. She's frankly bored by Eva. In a brilliant scene, alone in the guest bedroom, she withdraws back into her private life, musing about money and playing Ravel. Poor Eva is still trying to wring some love and recognition out of her mother. The evening culminates in a middle-of -the-night brawl between Eva and Charlotte. Eva accuses her mother of being cold, withholding and of abandoning her, Helena and their father. It seems to me that Eva is blaming her mother for too much and letting her father off the hook. When I first saw this film when I was younger, I identified with the Eva character, but now seeing it as an adult and a parent, I have more balanced sympathies. Charlotte is self-absorbed and puts her music first, but if she were a man it would be acceptable. She'll never give Eva the love she wants. Eva withdraws into her fantasy relationship with her dead son--in death, he gives her the unconditional acceptance she's always longed for. This is a brilliant film, both Ullman and Bergman are brilliant and pull out the stops. It's also great to watch it on DVD; it's so emotionally wrenching that it's good to be able to take a break and come back to it.

It's hard to elaborate on the deservedly scathing reviews 2012 has received; it's not only physically implausible, but it indulges in the worst kind of racial stereotyping. And naturally, it's the Americans who run the show and get to survive for the most part. We're meant to identify with a self-centered family group from Southern California that indulges in soap opera dialog with each other even as their friends and neighbors (even eventually their good-guy stepdad) are slaughtered. The only thing that's supposed to matter to them is "family." The African-American President's wife is dead as is the mother of the African-American scientist protagonist. The fact that the middle-aged black women are dead before the movie even starts speaks for itself since there's a lot of discussion about who "deserves" to survive the catastrophe. An elderly Tibetan woman gets to live (even though she doesn't speak English, a major character flaw in a film like this) because she can virtuously save the white protagonists (who probably wouldn't do the same for her if the tables were turned). The CG effects are dramatic, but pointless because they're designed to be sensational and nothing else. There's a protracted water scene (that I fast-forwarded over) at the end of the film that is somehow supposed to do with re-uniting the John Cusack character with his petulant son. The earth has been destroyed, the majority of the world's population has died an agonizing death and we're supposed to care about this? Eventually the (mostly white) survivors set out to repopulate the lone inhabitable continent, Africa. Colonialism begins again. Every single moment of this film is truly and bizarrely bad.

This lovely film about a group of elderly women stranded at a decrepit house in the country gives unusual cinematic attention to their thoughts and feelings. We rarely see women of this age on film for any extended length of time, which gives it an intrinsic novelty. These are women from a modest and self-effacing generation; no doubt if a similar film were made ten years from now about a group of Boomer-aged women stranded, it would be much different! The women in this film have been brought up to expect little and be satisfied with humble pleasures. The way they patiently wait and amiably pass the time until they are rescued will die with their generation. The women confess their small pleasures, sorrows and anxieties with each other and give each other gentle sympathy. I was sorry when the film ended and the women vanished into the fog at the end. The fog (which is also present at the beginning of the film) could stand for not only their closeness to death, but also for their cultural invisibility.

My only complaint about this film was about the subtitles. It would have been nice to have watched the film in French with English subtitles.

The Whisperers is about a profoundly lonely and deluded old woman Mrs. Ross (Edith Evans), who lives in a shabby flat stuffed with old bottles and newspapers. She's paranoid and imagines she hears voices and is obsessed with the sounds that come from the flat of the interracial couple that live upstairs. She has a rich fantasy life where she imagines she is a bishop's daughter waiting for her father's inheritance. Her sleazy son Charlie comes by and hides some stolen loot in her apartment. She finds the money and is thunderstruck, convinced that the money is indeed her long lost inheritance. Unfortunately, she boasts about it to the wrong person and is robbed and left for dead. After a slow recovery, Social Services manages to contact her husband Archie and reunite them. Her husband is grifter, forced for once in his life to be responsible. She returns to her tidied-up flat. She's looked after, but she's robbed of the paranoia and fantasies that she used to dignify her impoverished life. Archie steals money from her handbag and gaslights her into thinking she lost it. Archie doesn't stick around for long, so in the end she's back to her usual solitary life of fantasizing and hoarding, but it's more nourishing than her depressing life with Archie. And she does have a social safety net that is more than most older Americans have today. A kindly clerk at the welfare office, Mr. Conrad (Douglas Sim) cares about her personally and is, in a way, the son she never had. As the other reviewers have pointed out, the film is filled with melodramatic cops and robbers plot elements that detract from the engrossing story of this aging woman. Edith Evan's acting is extraordinary. Highly recommended.

I have seen this beautifully made film many, many times and never get tired of it. I hope eventually all of Vincente Minelli's films come out on Blu-ray. They deserve to be seen in every bit of their gorgeous detail. Even this film's flaws make it richer. Gregory Peck's acting as sportswriter Mike Hagen is stiff and lackadaisical and Lauren Bacall also seems somehow preoccupied (possibly with her husband Humphrey Bogart's poor health). But their personal malaise as actors reinforces one of the central themes of the film, that is, the near impossibility of creating a truly compatible marriage. The sexually ambiguous character of Randy Owens (Jack Cole) also undermines (in a good way) the gender stereotyping that Mike Hagen and his buddies desperately cling to. Dancer Lori Shannon and producer Zachary Wilder are the only true adults in the film; it's their eventual pairing at the end of the film that gives it a sense of emotional completion.

Designing Woman also presents a wonderful cinematic vision of New York; it evokes a time when the world of musical theater and Broadway played a central role in American popular culture.

I just caught this great film on TCM and it reminded me of the Douglas Sirk films featuring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, with their wounded female protagonists. Ellen Bowker's wealthy father, believing she will die in a year of heart disease, convinces (and pays the bills) for charming Dan Pierce to marry her. She truly loves him and is shattered when she finds out the truth. The direction reminded me of Sirk not only in its empathy for Ellen's distress, but also in its over-veneration of doctors and its reference to a mysterious medical organization dedicated to "Organic Heart Disease" that recalls the shadowy religious organization in "Magnificent Obsession." Dan also has elements of Ron Kirby from "All That Heaven Allows"; he designs a faux-farmhouse in Connecticut and likes to eat in Italian restaurants (which seems to signify a kind of bohemianism). Ellen, unlike Sirk's women though, is completely infantilized; doctors are consulted without her knowing it (it might "upset" her to know too much about her condition) and Dan even schedules an operation for her without telling her. This is a dignified woman's film with fine cinematography and excellent acting. Too bad it wasn't shot in lush, Sirkian Technicolor.

Dim Sum Funeral is about a family of estranged siblings who find themselves having to get back together in the process of planning their mother's funeral. In doing so, they all stop fighting and learn to accept each other. This is a charming film in some ways, but its depiction of sibling rivalry is not realistic. In a truly dysfunctional family, which this family purports to be, occasions like weddings and funerals are not times to come together, they're times to wage further warfare. And once things like wills and inheritances are thrown in, the fur starts to fly. This would have been a better and more psychologically true movie if the siblings continued to be estranged from each other at the movie's end; it would have shown the difficulty of healing childhood wounds and the essential loneliness that adults who've had an unhappy childhood carry throughout their lives.

I always try to catch this movie when it's on TCM. During World War II, a boy named Danny tames a dog and in the process learns to control his own anger at his new step-mother Ann and fight off German spies along the way. Looking at the film today, it's striking how all the men wear suits and ties--even the German spies wear suits, ties and hats when they land in their lifeboat.

Danny's parents are kind-hearted and progressive for their time (Ann even goes to a psychiatrist). But eventually, Danny's anger wears her out, and she moves in with her best friend, Louise. Danny comes over and pleads with her to come back home; he misses having her around to do "women's work." At Louise's, Ann isn't shown wearing an apron or doing housework (as she is when she was living with Danny and his dad). She and Louise spend their time hooking rugs, smoking cigarettes and wearing great clothes. In the end, Danny wins her over and by the end of film she's back on duty taking care of the menfolk. The postwar urge to push women out of the workforce to make way for the returning war vets was already beginning.