For our generation he was the actor who mattered. The greatest of them all. His death seemed impossible on that day in 1993 when the news broke. It’s still a tragedy.
Monthly Archives: October 2023
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Aka L’atelier della morte to 6 donne per l’assassino/Six femmes pour l’assassin/Fashion House of Death. Perhaps the sight of beauty makes him lose control of himself, so he kills. Rome. Isabella (Francesca Ungaro) one of many beautiful models employed at Christian Haute Couture, a fashion house, is walking through the property’s grounds at night when she is violently killed by an assailant wearing a white, featureless mask, a black fedora and trenchcoat. Ispettore (inspector) Silvestri (Thomas Reiner) of the city’s police department investigates and interviews Massimo Morlacchi (Cameron Mitchell) who co-manages the salon with the recently widowed Countess Cristiana Cuomo (Eva Bartok). He also questions Isabella’s ex-boyfriend antique dealer Franco Scalo (Dante Di Paolo); Silvestri discovers that he uses cocaine and that Isabella had attempted to break his addiction. It is revealed that Isabella kept a diary detailing the staff’s personal lives and vices. One of the models, Nicole (Arianna Gorini), Scalo’s current lover, finds the diary and promises to give it to the police, but her co-worker Peggy Peyton (Mary Arden) steals it during a fashion show. That night, Nicole visits Scalo’s store to supply him with cocaine where she is stalked by the murderer, who murders her with a spiked glove. The figure searches her corpse and her purse for the diary, but cannot find it. Dresser Marco (Massimo Righi), a nervous, pill-popper nursing unrequited feelings for Peggy, visits her at her apartment offering protection, which she politely refuses. She is then confronted and beaten by the killer, who writes a demand in a notebook for the location of the diary. She says she burned it in her fireplace because it contained details of an abortion she underwent. Enraged, the murderer knocks her unconscious. The assailant then carries her away just as Silvestri arrives, takes her to another location, ties her to a chair, and continues the interrogation. Peggy pulls off the mask and is shocked to recognize her assailant, who burns her to death using a furnace. Silvestri surmises that the murderer is a sex maniac and is one of the men associated with the salon, so he arrests everyone he believes might be responsible. Panicking when he is identified as having visited Peggy’s apartment, Marco tries to accuse the house’s dress designer Cesare Lazzarini (Luciano Pigozzi), a guy with a penchant for eavesdropping, for the killings because of his impotence; he then suffers an epileptic seizure and is hospitalised, and his drugs turn out to be medication for his condition. While the suspects are in custody, another model, Greta (Lea Kruger) finds Peggy’s corpse in the boot of her car and the killer smothers her to death in the mansion of her fiancé. Once Peggy and Greta’s bodies are discovered, Silvestri releases all the men; Morlacchi retrieves the same notebook he used earlier to interrogate Peggy … We’re dealing with a mad man here. The significance of Mario Bava’s seminal giallo lies in its fusing of existing genre tropes – his own suspenseful thrillers, German krimis, erotica, fumetti neri and the sadistic violence popular in the era’s pulp fiction. Written by Marcello Fondata and Giuseppe Barilla, this is a potent admixture that demonstrates the influence of foreign films, fashion, fotoromanzi and novels in Italy at the time and is reflected in the cast who hail from several different countries. Mitchell had previously worked with Bava on Erik the Conqueror and was very fond of him but concerned at the time of production that the director had recently had a serious nervous breakdown. Trilingual American actress Mary Arden (under the name ‘Kelly Leon’) contributed unpaid (as she was for her performance! like a lot of the cast) to the screenplay to make the dialogue sound more plausible. The stunning colour cinematography by Ubaldo Terzano with its stylised crane and tracking shots prowling through Arrigo Breschi’s baroque sets was probably influenced by a number of recent movies including Hammer horror output; while despite the evidently low budget Tina Loriedo Grani goes to town on the splendid costuming for the (briefly) elegant women before they’re murdered in successively gory setpieces. The use of mannequins suggesting the lack of the models’ humanity and display, the titles sequence giving the plot away, the light and shadows (introducing an almost supernatural Gothic aspect) presenting the beautiful touristic city as a nebulous noir-ish underworld, all contribute to an astonishing atmosphere. Watching women being terrorised in those jewel-like interiors is an insidious experience. An Italian, French and German co-production, this was shot in and around Rome, with the exteriors of the fashion house filmed at Villa Sciarra, interiors shot at Palazzo Brancaccio with other scenes shot at A.T.C. Studios. There’s a striking score by Carlo Rustichelli who had composed for another Bava film, The Whip and the Body. The film didn’t do particularly well at the Italian box office on release (ranking 161 among the 315 made there that year) but it is now understood as the archetypal giallo. A gaudy, lurid, bold and extreme work, slashing and burning its way through ruined beauties, leaving the colour red dangling in our minds, tantalising us, haunting our dreams. I’m certain that nothing will happen tonight
Pearl (2022)
Aka Pearl: An X-traordinary Origin Story. One day you’ll never see me again. One day the whole world’s gonna know my name. Texas 1918, during the influenza pandemic, Pearl (Mia Goth) is a young woman living with her German immigrant parents on their homestead while her husband Howard (Alistair Sewell), serves in World War One. Pearl’s father (Matthew Sunderland) is infirm and paralysed with quadriplegia while her domineering mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright) insists that she help care for both him and the farm. Pearl, longing for a more exciting life, is captivated by the films she sees at the local cinema and aspires to become a chorus girl, to strict Ruth’s disapproval. However, Pearl also shows signs of being disturbed; for example, she kills farm animals, feeding them to an alligator she nicknames Theda (after the movie star) and physically abuses her father, making him watch her taking a bath, among other delights. At the local movie theatre Pearl meets a worldly film projectionist (David Corenswet) who takes a liking to her. While riding her bicycle home, Pearl stops along a cornfield and begins dancing with a scarecrow, fantasising about the projectionist and masturbates with it. When her mother realises that eight cents are missing from an errand Pearl did, Pearl is berated about being careless and has her supper withheld. Pearl’s affluent sister-in-law, Mitsy (Emma Jenkins-Purro), tells her of an audition being held to find new dancers for a travelling troupe, which Pearl envisions as a way out of her circumstance. How about a film nobody else has seen? She later sneaks out of the house at night and visits the projectionist, who shows her A Free Ride, and illicit stag film he acquired in France. He encourages Pearl to pursue her dreams. Pearl comments that she cannot abandon her family, and that she wishes they would just die. When Ruth finds a programme Pearl took from the movie theatre, the two get into a fierce argument over dinner, in which Ruth reveals that she has noticed Pearl’s disturbing traits. A physical altercation erupts, during which Pearl shoves her mother against the kitchen hearth, igniting her dress and resulting in Ruth suffering life-threatening burns. Pearl drags Ruth into the basement and leaves her father seated in the kitchen. She flees to the movie theatre, where she has sex with the projectionist. We all share a fascination in seeing people as they really are. In the morning, the projectionist drives Pearl back to the farm so she can prepare for the audition. He is perturbed by a now maggot-infested roasted pig that Mitsy’s mother left for Ruth the day before and by inconsistencies Pearl has told him, as well as her over the top behaviour. When he attempts to leave, Pearl flies into a fit of rage at his abandonment of her and stabs him to death with a pitchfork before pushing his car – with his bloodied brutalised corpse in it – into the pond where Theda eats his remains. Pearl dresses herself in one of Ruth’s lavish gowns and dresses up her father before smothering him. Then she arrives at the church where the audition is being held … What if this is it? What if this is where I belong? Co-written by star Goth with director Ti Wiest, this prequel to last year’s 1970s-set slasher hit X delivers a gorgeous classic Hollywood-styled horror as an origins story for the earlier film’s eighty-year old homicidal maniac. It’s like a postmodern companion to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Or, a rather fetching re-imagining of Psycho which was turned into that amazing and underrated TV prequel. This glistens with beautiful colours, superb production design and a coming of age story like no other. For this young wife is more like a retarded teenager, backward, vicious and utterly compelling. Goth embodies this raging evil narcissist with brio in an absolutely committed performance, from sticking the poor goose to burning and boiling her mother and forking that lovely projectionist. At the core of it is a global pandemic, fear of being uncovered as Germans in the middle of a world war and a lonely sex-starved girl. The gloriously demented score by Tim Williams and Tyler Bates underlines the debt to the great days of the studio era like Oz come back to life in a Technicolor movie that’s all about how cinema drives everyone just a little crazy. I’m a star!
The One Where Chandler Dies. Matthew Perry 19th August 1969 – 28th October 2023
The man who has made us laugh every day for close to thirty years is gone. This is just too sad.
Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (2022)
Did I say something salty? It’s my second language. While hosting a party in the Spanish town of Del Mar, legendary hero and outlaw Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) rouses a woody giant, subdues it but is crushed by a bell. Waking up in a hospital, Puss is informed by the town doctor (Anthony Mendez) that he has eight out of his nine lives and that it’s time to consider retiring. Despite initially refusing to do so, Puss loses a duel with a black-hooded wolf (Wagner Moura) at the pub that night, causing him to flee and ending up at the home of elderly cat lady Mama Luna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) to be a domesticated pet, christneing him ‘Pickles,’ ending his hero status and winding up as just one of hundreds of fellow imprisoned felines. Months later, Puss meets an optimistic Chihuahua (Harvey Guillen) a wannabe therapy dog disguised as a cat, whom he calls Perrito. Then Goldilocks and her Three Bears crime family – Papa (Ray Winstone), Mama (Olivia Colman) and Baby (Samson Kayo) arrive at Luna’s home, looking to hire Puss to help them steal a map bearing the Wishing Star’s location but fail to recognise him, and leave after finding his supposed grave. Puss decides to use the Star to restore his lost lives. Accompanied by Perrito, Puss travels to the factory lair of feared and corrupt pastry salesman and magical artifact collector ‘Big’ Jack Horner (John Mulaney) who intends to use the Star to control all the magic in the world. Puss finds the map, but is interrupted by his resentful ex-fiancée Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek). Goldi, the Bears, and Horner arrive; Puss and Kitty escape with the map and Perrito but Puss sees the Wolf behind them in the distance. The map leads the trio to the Dark Forest, a pocket dimension that changes its appearance depending on the map’s holder. During another clash with Horner, his henchmen, Goldi, and the Bears, Puss sees the Wolf in the distance again and flees, allowing Goldi to get the map from Kitty. After Perrito calms Puss’ panic attack, Puss confesses his fear and his regret for abandoning Kitty just before their wedding. Kitty overhears them, and reveals that she never attended the wedding either, believing Puss loved himself way too much to love her. Puss and Kitty retrieve the map while Goldi and the Bears are distracted by a manifestation of their woodland cottage. When the dimension shifts, Puss accidentally traps himself in Cave of Lost Souls, where he encounters his arrogant past eight lives and the Wolf – who reveals himself as Death. Offended by Puss’ failure to value his extra lives, Death intends to take Puss’ final life prematurely. Horrified, Puss runs out of the cave towards the Star on his own, leaving Kitty and Perrito behind. Meanwhile, Goldi reveals to the Bears that her wish is to be reunited with her biological family; the Bears are at first devastated but then agree to help her. Puss climbs onto the Star and begins to make his wish but Kitty confronts and criticises him for his selfishness and admits that her wish was to find someone she could trust. Before Puss can tell Kitty the truth, Goldi, the Bears, and Horner arrive and there’s a fight for the map; Goldi briefly obtains the map but abandons it to save Baby Bear; while Kitty traps Horner inside his magical bottomless bag. Death arrives at the Star – he says he enjoyed the chase and challenges Puss to a duel … So this is where dignity goes to die. That’s what our beloved pussy declares when confronted with a kibble tray in the cat lady’s house (now we know what they’re thinking … ). This sassy Shrek spinoff sequel takes figures from fairy tales and makes hay from their characters with nifty action and hilarious one-liners. Always a pleasure to see me. Who woulda thunk such a cool cat would suffer PTSD and intimations of his mortality?! Very twenty-first century for an emotional bedrock with poignant moments about love, family and friendship that would put a melodrama to shame in a story that still slinks around with attitude and adult humour. Who’s so unbelievably humble? Even if you’re not an aiurophile you may find a lump in your throat. You’ll laugh! You’ll weep! You’ll gnash your teeth! Camp as catnip! Absolutely hilarious! And touching, too. Directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Maercado from a screenplay by Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, from an inventive and fun story by Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler with additional material by Etan Cohen. Puss in Boots walks alone!
Retribution (2022)
You want your money. I want my life back. Berlin, the present day. Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) works as a financial trader at Nanite Capital under his friend and CEO Anders Muller (Matthew Modine). He lives with wife Heather (Embeth Davidtz), daughter, Emily (Lily Aspell) and teenage son Zach (Jack Champion) . Heather is fed up with his lack of attention and prevails on him to do his share of daddy duty for once. While driving his kids to school, Matt receives a call from an unknown number with a distorted voice who says that there is a bomb under his seat> It’s already armed when Matt sits on it. The bomb is triggered by both pressure plates placed on all the seats and a radio frequency. He threatens to detonate the bomb if Matt tries to get help. Matt finds the device and he is forced to follow the bomber’s instructions in order to keep them alive, all the while his kids are fighting with him and each other, unaware of the jeopardy. The bomber forces Matt to watch Sylvain (Arian Moayed), the latter’s client who is also receiving a bomb threat, being killed in an explosion when Sylvain’s panicked girlfriend attempts to escape when a traffic cop enquires as to her clearly disturbed state. The bomber tells Matt to call Heather to retrieve €50,000 at his safety deposit box at the bank. After Heather gets it, the bomber changes the plan by telling her to give the money to a man in a blue suit. When she does, police swarm and arrest the man. After seeing the news implicating Matt for the bombing, Europol agent Angela Brickmann (Noma Dumezweni)calls him, who tries to convince her of his innocence and orders the signal to be jammed. The bomber reveals to Matt that he and Anders have a €208 million slash fund from the clients deposited on Matt’s emergency collateral account in a bank in Dubai, out of Europol’s jurisdiction. He arranges Matt to meet Anders at the power plant. There, the bomber forces Matt to order Anders to liquidate his collateral account. Despite Anders reluctantly complying, the bomber orders Matt to kill Anders with a revolver in exchange for his life and his children. When Matt refuses, the bomber blows up Anders’s car and shrapnel injures Emily’s leg. After a police chase, Matt is eventually surrounded by them with Angela and Heather arriving at the scene. They haven’t interrupted the telephone service in Berlin since 1945. The bomb squad safely remove Zach and Emily, who is treated for her injuries, after they realise when they send in the bomb squad that the pressure plate is only located under Matt’s seat. Interrogating Matt about the situation, Angela suspects the bombing might be related to the heist. After talking to Heather for what they both think is the last time, Matt drives away and evades the police, determined to find the bomber by himself. Matt demands the bomber to meet him in person if he wants the money … You really do think you’re different, don’t you. Since our favourite Neeson actioner is the Berlin-set Unknown it’s tantalising to see a return to that city with regular collaborator Jaume Collet-Sera serving as producer this time around. And we see Berlin – in broad daylight, in traffic, at cross-sections, maybe not with all the iconography from the previous outing but this tense 87-minuter B-movie by any other name capitalises on the constantly escalating threat to the nuclear family in a compressed race against time narrative. Turbulence is inevitable. When everyone runs from the fire you run to it. The writing by Chris Salmanpour in this remake of the 2015 Spanish thriller El Desconocido/The Stranger is whittled to the bone, targeting what we know about a ready-hewn action hero and the essentials of the genre. So it’ll culminate in a face off and in the meantime in an exemplary genre story which we might call screenwriting by numbers the numbers count – and the plot points are hit like clockwork at minutes 25 and 50 and they are literally explosive. You got everybody’s attention. When the bomber shows up in a rat mask in the middle of one of those millennial protests that decorate every metropolis nowadays there’s an interesting reveal and a decision. Misdirection is at the heart of all great magic tricks. You’d need to have never seen a movie to be unable identify the villain as soon as they show up in the small central cast but it’s still a pleasure to see them unmasked. It’s also a treat to see the terrific Davidtz back on the big screen even as the wife in distress. There’s one thing you didn’t think of – what a man will do when he’s go nothing to lose. We know Neeson the action hero, we know he defends his family, we guess how this ends. There is a sense in which the viewer would like a real bomb placed under Neeson to get him to do more with the role: there’s a lot of phoning in. Ultimately, that doesn’t matter. It’s the getting there that counts, even with the doors off. Effective if unchallenging genre work by all concerned. Directed by Nimrod Attal. I wanted to see how it feels like to be you
Happy Halloween 2023 from Mondo Movies!
Can you spot the scary movies? Have a horrifying Halloween!
Dead Ringer (1964)
Aka Who Is Buried In My Grave? You really hate me, don’t you? You’ve never forgiven me in all these years. For 18 years, twin sisters Margaret DeLorca and Edith Phillips (Bette Davis) have been estranged. It started when Margaret faked a pregnancy to steal Edith’s fiancé, Francesco ‘Frank’ DeLorca, a rich American military officer both sisters dated during World War 2. Now Frank has died, mourned by both sisters at his funeral. Margaret will be secure for the rest of her life, thanks to her late husband’s wealth. But Edith’s prospects are dismal: her cocktail lounge is losing money and she is facing eviction for not paying her bills. Edith plans revenge against Margaret, phoning her to come to her room above the bar so that they can settle old scores. Soon after Margaret arrives, Edith shoots her, and swaps clothes with the corpse, framing Margaret’s murder as her own suicide. She then takes over the DeLorca mansion by assuming Margaret’s identity. However the servants including butler Henry (Cyril Delevanti) and chauffeur George (George Chandler) become suspicious. For one thing, the house’s Great Dane, Duke, known for hating Margaret, becomes weirdly devoted to Edith. Second, Edith is a smoker, something Margaret was adamantly against. Meanwhile, LAPD Detective Jim Hobbson (Karl Malden) who had been dating Edith before her alleged suicide, visits the fake Margaret several times, asking questions. Edith’s scheme runs into trouble when Margaret’s lover, Tony Collins (Peter Lawford) unexpectedly shows up and sees through her charade. Tony blackmails Edith over the killing of Margaret, receiving expensive jewellery as payment. When Edith discovers Margaret and Tony had conspired to murder Frank by poisoning him, Tony and Edith quarrel; when he threatens her, Margaret’s Great Dane attacks and kills him. Already suspicious about DeLorca’s death, Jim leads a police investigation, exhuming Frank’s body and discovering traces of arsenic … Edie’s a soft touch. And a soft touch is a bad risk. Billed as a horror, this is more a sophisticated Gothic look at life in dayglo LA in its coolest era, with Bette Times Two or Three, if you count her double, Connie Cezon, who does another Bette for good reason. Appropriately, it was Davis’ second time to play identical twins (after A Stolen Life, her solo producing effort) and here she’s directed by good friend Paul Henreid, the inimitable Jerry from Now, Voyager, many people’s favourite Davis film. Adapted from 1946 Dolores Del Rio starrer La Otra (Dead Pigeon), this was shot by Ernest Haller, who had developed the trick and process shots in the earlier Davis film and it was his final work as a cinematographer. And what a portrait of Los Angeles this is, with a gathering of wealthy ladies who (don’t) lunch, rather in the manner of those morbid movie stars in Sunset Blvd., this time at the city’s Greystone Mansion, as if it was the final stop in a tour that starts at the downtown cocktail lounge on Temple and Figueroa, nods in passing to the suburbicon of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and settles into the preferred destination of all Angelenos – behind automatic gates in Beverly Hills. The story by Rian James plunders all those references and more besides in a screenplay from Albert Beich and Oscar Millard. As for the rest of the cast – well! There’s Jean Hagen as Didi Marshall: Maggie, darling! Forgive me for not coming to the cemetery yesterday but Tom has an absolute phobia about cemeteries. Besides, we had to go to this cocktail party in Pasadena. Entertainers. Darling, it was absolutely mad! You wouldn’t believe some of the things that went on. Estelle Winwood is no less daunting. The men essayed by Malden and Lawford play perfectly to type, even quasi hysteria. Edie’s journey to comfort is of course not without its necessary complications and this is superbly constructed, cleverly made entertainment and looking for the sisters’ tics is a lot of the fun. Henreid kept it in the family by having his daughter Monika play a maid in the mansion. The score by Andre Previn is augmented by the band in Edith’s lounge including Perry Lee Blackwell who is the organist here but previously appeared as a singer in Pillow Talk. It was on the set of this film that the short documentary narrated by Joseph Cotten, The Unsinkable Bette Davis, was shot. For more on this dualistic performance and its double, A Stolen Life, you can read my essay A Double Life https://offscreen.com/view/double_life_part_1. And its sororal twin. Part 2, follows! You’re not yourself!
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
If you’re gonna make trouble, make it big. Oklahoma, 1923. Osage elders somberly bury a ceremonial pipe, mourning the assimilation of their descendants into white American society. Wandering through the badlands of their reservation, several Osage find oil gushing from the ground. The tribe becomes fabulously wealthy after the exploitation of oil on their lands but the reservation laws require white ‘guardians’ to manage their money. In 1918, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from World War One to his rancher uncle William ‘King’ Hale (Robert De Niro), who also houses Ernest’s younger brother Byron (Scott Shepherd) on the reservation. Hale poses as a friendly benefactor of the Osage people, speaking their language and bestowing gifts upon them but secretly schemes to murder them and steal their wealth. To facilitate his plan, he tells Ernest, who is working as a cab driver, to pay special attention to Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an Osage whose family owns much of the oil headrights. A romance eventually develops between the two and they are married in a ceremony that mixes Catholic and Osage religious elements. Hale tells Ernest that he will inherit a greater share of the headrights as more of Mollie’s family dies. He has already ordered the deaths of several wealthy Osage and continues by ordering the husband of Mollie’s sister Minnie (Jillian Dion) to slowly kill her with poison, the effects of which resemble a wasting illness; he has her other sister Anna (Cara Jade Meyers), a young mother, killed by gunshot. Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal), Mollie’s mother who is herself being poisoned, blames the white residents of the reservation, as does an Osage council, which urges the members of the tribe to fight back. Lizzie Q dies in her bed and envisions her ancestors welcoming her to the afterlife. After Ernest displays reluctance to kill Mollie, with whom he now has two children, Hale gets Ernest to poison Mollie by drugging her insulin but tells him it’s just something to slow her down to prevent further investigation of what’s going on with the white men’s wards. Mollie begins to experience the same wasting illness as Minnie a doctors attributes it to her diabetes. Hale then orders the death of Mollie’s first husband Henry Roan (William Belleau) and has Ernest kill Rita (JaNae Collins), Mollie’s last remaining sister, along with her husband Bill Smith (Jason Isbell) by blowing up her house. Mollie now owns all of her family’s headrights: when she dies Ernest will inherit them. No outside help has yet materialised: a representative of the Osage nation seeking to lobby Congress is murdered in Washington DC and a private detective William J Burns (Gary Basaraba) hired by Mollie is beaten and chased away from the reservation by a gang of thugs led by Ernest. Mollie decides to make the journey to Washington herself despite of her condition and beg President Calvin Coolidge (Mark Landon Smith) for help but he is uninterested in her plight. The Bureau of Investigation sends Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and some assistants to investigate. Seems more like an epidemic than bad luck to me. It is obvious to the investigators who must be behind the plot: then Hale tries to cover his tracks by murdering a number of his own hired killers but White works out the truth and arrests him and Ernest. The agents find Mollie close to death and get her proper medical care. White pressures Ernest into a confession and persuades him to turning state’s evidence, testifying against Hale in exchange for legal protection … You told him to do it in the front of the head, then why did he do it in the back of the head. Adapted by Eric Roth from David Grann’s superb and slickly written non-fiction book, this is elegantly filleted from a beautifully constructed true crime mosaic with a sense of western epic – as if Scorsese is fusing his two most reliable cinematic tropes: the gangster story and the religious narrative, with a kind of redemption arc overall in the face of the theft of the country from its owners. In doing so it refuses the kind of pleasures that fanboys love from GoodFellas or even Mean Streets yet despite the setting it doesn’t adhere to the rules of the western either (revisionist or otherwise) which is a consistent disappointment even when there is an air of late Ford about it. Speaking of those two canonical Scorsese films, there is one majestic tracking shot from DoP Rodrigo Prieto (whose work was last seen in Barbie) which calls up memories of both. Money flows freely here now. The narrative structure of Grann’s book is shifted in the screenplay from its focus on the early days of the FBI to the relationship between Ernest and Mollie. I brought them into the twentieth century. It’s certainly an interesting facet of film history to see Scorsese work with his two principal acting muses. You’re strong. Be there for her. De Niro’s performance is overripe as the arrogant boss albeit he is terrifying when speaking the Osage language with forked tongue, especially when he appears before a halluncating Mollie; while Di Caprio mugs too as the viciously cute nephew who means well until his uncle gets him in his grip: we are not sure that the jutting-jawed gormless act is a good fit. In terms of his star text however it serves as a fascinating complement to his turn as J. Edgar a decade ago: now he’s on the other side of the equation in a narrative that graduates from criminal conspiracy to police procedural. I don’t know what you said, but it must’ve been Indian for ‘handsome devil’. Gladstone inhabits a major role with precision and finesse, quiet and haunting, offering the film’s most complete and resonant performance. Plemons scores too and John Lithgow is memorable as Prosecutor Leaward in the courtroom standoff against Brendan Fraser’s W.S. Hamilton, Hale’s attorney. All these dead women are Indian women. Although it’s shot in a palette of yellows and browns, this tale of a culture clash and gross criminality refuses nostalgia and overstays its welcome at three and a half hours even as a story that needed to be told – proving the old saw that law and justice are mutually exclusive. Don’t swear on your children – it makes you look foolish. Scorsese has made the violent gangsterism at the heart of America’s mythology a legendary narrative style but this conscientious telling of the so-called 1920s Reign of Terror strays too far from his urban comfort zone as a guilt trip in worthiness to be truly in the top flight of his output. With an ending that reminds us of Spielberg’s bold choice at the conclusion of Saving Private Ryan, we wonder if the same stylish audacity had been applied to the narrative as a whole (the kind that was so ferociously effective in GoodFellas or even Adam McKay’s The Big Short) whether this might have been an even more meaningful work. History lessons come in all shapes and sizes but the reality is that this story is ongoing in real life, as Greg Palast’s forthcoming documentary (Long Knife) on the ensuing 100 years of the Osage experience demonstrates. It’s sad but apposite that this is Robbie Robertson’s final score, paying tribute to his Native American heritage. Can you find the wolves in this picture?
Once a Sinner (1950)
I’m through with being a barmaid. Bank clerk John Ross (Jack Watling) falls for good-time girl Irene (Pat Kirkwood) who’s long been involved with small-time crim Jimmy Smart (Sydney Tafler). At first she tries to discourage John whose employer Bridges (George Street) is hearing stories around town about John’s association but he pursues her and they are quickly married. They soon find that Irene does not get along with either John’s middle-class parents (Gordon McLeod and Edith Sharpe) or his friends with the exception of Lewis Canfield (Humphrey Lestocq) who helps get them sorted out with a flat. When John finally insists on meeting Irene’s family including her brother Bill (Harry Fowler) he is taken aback when her mother Mrs James (Thora Hird) is so openly hostile towards her own daughter. Then Irene admits she has had a daughter by her former lover. When John tells her it’s over between them, Irene reluctantly goes back to Jimmy and they move to London. A few weeks later, when John’s father hands him letters from Irene which his mother had tried to hide from him, John realises he still wants Irene and he sets off to find her … I never knew what love was before. Lewis Gilbert’s debut film as director is a sparky crime meller with lovely Kirkwood getting a great spotlight as the wrong girl who pays the ultimate price for her past. Watling (on loan from Herbert Wilcox) is believable as the rather befuddled yet determined young man who believes he can solve the insoluble character flaws of the woman he loves and even decks Tafler (Gilbert’s brother-in-law in real life). I’m very generous, I’m taking somebody else’s leavings. You can’t resist me! Tafler’s embodiment of the spiv is splendid. The seedy atmosphere of the post-war seaside town (code for criminality in British cinema) is admirably conveyed in the establishing shots and the contrast between the exteriors, positing the sordid bars and downmarket hotels against the more stilted conventional middle class home that John is used to. This is about class, after all. Irene laughs at John’s innocence when he presumes her parents were divorced – it’s not what her kind of people do, they move out, shack up, and disappear. Somehow he wants to get involved with her and we can only infer it’s all about sex. You are cheap and common and wicked into the bargain, John blurts out when he realises his wife has had an illegitimate daughter and didn’t bother to tell him. That he gets from this low point in their relationship to defend her so we can see there’s a bittersweet – even tragic – ending on the way. And it happens on a train. Perhaps it’s not the most persuasive character development but Hird has a ball as the dreadful mother – no role model in this scenario. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see the lovely actress and singer Kirkwood whose name was forever dragged into the mud because of the night in 1948 Prince Philip chose to visit the wartime star in her dressing room following a stage performance. They had dinner in a restaurant and allegedly had breakfast together the next morning. She said nothing happened between them and that she advised him to go home to his pregnant wife. It made the papers and affected the entire course of Kirkwood’s career. Noel Coward revived it with a specially written show in 1950, Ace of Clubs, but the story haunted her. It’s great to see lovable Danny Green (best known perhaps from The Lady Killers) playing her stepfather, Ticker, in an ensemble that simply vibrates with life. Radio star Lestocq’s surname was Gilbert but unlike Tafler apparently wasn’t related to the director. Adapted by David Evans from Irene, the novel by TV producer Ronald Marsh. There’s a striking score from Ronald Binge. In marriage two’s company and three’s divorce
mondomovies 