HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1951: In which the most important thing, onscreen and off, is lavish spectale and glitzy, high-class entertainment

There is no spectacle quite like the spectacle of the musicals made by MGM's A-list production unit under producer Arthur Freed. Glowing Technicolor, some of the most talented song-and-dance experts ever put on screen, enormous budgets spent on enormous sets: these are the ingredients to make a lifelong fan of the musical genre. Curiously, the Freed Unit musical is an almost entirely post-war phenomenon, despite the apparent reality that Hollywood movies started to tighten their belts after World War II began - though Freed's credits as a producer at the studio stretch from 1939 to 1962, the Golden Age of the MGM musical is much more constrained, stretching from Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944 till 'round about The Band Wagon in 1953, though you could push it a little farther if you were inclined.

From within that era, I now direct your attention to 1951's Royal Wedding, the solo directorial debut of Stanley Donen, who got the job in the midst of a particularly complicated and bitter shoot, in which professional egos and personal demons made a real hell for everybody. The female lead was set to be June Allyson, a mid-level MGM star at the time, until she got pregnant, and was replaced by Judy Garland, one of the studio's top names, whose chemical regimen at the time made her wildly unpredictable and unreliable. The film's assigned director, Charles Walters, was reluctant to work with her again after their previous experiences together, and the studio dumped him without ceremony; when principal photography began and Garland started missing call times, she was fired - not merely from the project, but from MGM itself, leading to her cutting her neck with glass in a fit of depression. And Garland's story from here on continues melodramatic and sorrowful, but we will leave her for now, for she was replaced in her turn by Jane Powell, 21 years old at the time of production and thrust into the first A-picture of a career that would not include very many A-pictures.

So much drama for a movie that's such a fluffy cupcake. The first and maybe only adjective that Royal Wedding insists upon for itself is "charming": and a kind of sleepy, easy charming it is, too, mostly forgettable outside of a handful of really top-notch musical numbers. As written by Alan Jay Lerner - the stage lyricist's very first movie credit - the story tells of a pair of Broadway superstar siblings, Ellen Bowen (Powell) and her older brother - her much, much older brother - Tom (Fred Astaire, whose relationship with his sister Adele inspired the characters), who are given an opportunity to take their hit show to London just in time for the big wedding of the local princess (the Princess Elizabeth had married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten had occurred in 1947; they are not named, but it's preposterous to imagine that 1951 audiences wouldn't make the connection). While there, the two Bowens spend more time falling in love than performing: Ellen with the charmingly awkward and poor Lord John Brindale (Peter Lawford), whom she meets on the ship crossing the ocean, Tom with the dancer Anne Ashmond (Sarah Churchill, daughter of the once and future Prime Minister), that he picks up while casting the show. Minor problems intervene, but there's only a very small doubt of how things are going to wind up.

Charming, like I said; charming and really not all that good. Of the four leads, nobody is bad bad, but Astaire is by leaps and bounds the best; Powell suffers mostly from being exorbitantly miscast as the sibling of the 51-year-old Astaire, and there's never a moment where the movie doesn't feel like it could be improved immensely if they'd been re-written as father and daughter, or lovers on the outs. But for all that she's ridiculous opposite her co-star, and for all that she can't sing very well at all (and not in the way that Astaire had a kind of boring, unemphatic singing voice: she can't sing), she had a pretty nifty sense of comic timing; I am terribly in love with how she plays the scene where she enthusiastically tells two lovers - in the same room - that she's about to head across the Atlantic, all addled enthusiasm and talking over herself. And the stock role of the tough "one of the boys" Broadway baby feels a lot more alive and bracing in her hands than it really ought to, by that late date.

But still, the onscreen talent isn't overwhelming. The dances are perfectly fine, but the only two moments than anybody ever pretends to truly care about are both solo Astaire numbers, which can hardly be regarded as an accident. Those being the instrumental "Sunday Jumps", where a bored Tom starts fooling around in the ship's gym, amusing himself by dancing with a handy hat rack; and "You're All the World to Me", where he's so lovestruck that as he sings his passion for Anne to an empty room, he literally dances up the walls and across the ceiling. The fact that I could just name the gimmick of those two numbers and a sizable majority of the people reading this have undoubtedly already called to mind the dances (or at least the vacuum ad made out of the former) is all it takes: these are iconic, madly inventive pieces of choreography and filmmaking, from a time when Astaire had long since run out of things to prove with simple dancing and had begun to push himself to invent new ways of representing dance onscreen. Something must have been in the air at MGM; the same year, Gene Kelly was busily ending An American in Paris with a full-on dream ballet, an impressionistically-edited fantasy that, like Astaire's audacious numbers here, was totally new to the American cinematic musical.

But the thing is, outside of those two unimpeachable highlights, Royal Wedding simply isn't very interesting - the rest of the songs, with lyrics by Lerner and music by Burton Lane, make very little impression (and for that matter, "Sunday Jumps" and "You're All the World to Me" hardly stick in the mind because of the music), and the choreography isn't nearly as inventive anywhere else: the epically-titled "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life" is basically just a rehash version of "A Couple of Swells" from Easter Parade, and the climactic showstopper "I Left My Hat in Haiti" feels like it was reheated from leftover scraps of a Busby Berkeley narrative number, along the "42nd Street" or "Shanghai Lil" model (it looks ahead to the "tell a short film in dance" finales to several MGM films to come, but is weaker than any of them).

The story, meanwhile, is such a featherweight trifle - and the actors plainly recognise it as such - that it hardly bears bringing it up. Lawford in particular, apparently resigning himself to a completely functional part in a script that doesn't obviously care whether or not it's functioning properly, just seems to exist onscreen, without anything fussy like "character" or "personality" to get in the way of stating his lines clearly and smiling. It's generally amusing and pleasant, but there's no bite to it whatsoever, and no ingenuity: nothing worth quoting, almost nothing even worth laughing aloud at.

But it looks like a million bucks, and it's easy to like, and for Freed, that was what mattered. I think the fact of it being an American movie set at the British royal wedding tells us everything: it's set against a backdrop of opulence, tradition, pageantry, and glamor, that nobody in the target audience has any personal stake in whatsoever. It's all surfaces, and they are delightful, but of the musical's great gift for foreground emotions in moments of greatly expressive non-reality, there is little. The emotions in Royal Wedding are entirely remote, and the charms are entirely fleeting. Astaire aside, nothing here ranks among the truly classic musicals, and taken as a whole, it's forgettable in a way that most of the Freed Unit movies aren't. But you can't win 'em all.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1951
-Chuck Jones begins to shift the Looney Tunes from great comic cartooning into something more like pop art with Rabbit Fire
-Science fiction grows up in a big way with one of the most adult of all genre films, Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still
-Elia Kazan's adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando, fundamentally shifts the development of screen acting and the nature of movie stars

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1951
-Robert Bresson begins his run of aesthetically and religiously austere dramas in France, with Diary of a Country Priest
-Jean Renoir makes his gorgeous Franco-Indian-American co-production in Technicolor, The River
-The first edition of the Berlin International Film Festival is held in June

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JULY 2014 MOVIE PREVIEW

By the end of the first weekend in June, it felt like we'd stumbled, quite by accident, onto one of the strongest summer movie seasons in years. Everyone's report card will be different, of course, but from where I'm standing, Edge of Tomorrow, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Maleficent, and Neighbors were all considerably better than I'd expected them to be going in (though they are not, of course, all equally good), and if we scan back a little bit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier joins them in that company. Godzilla was a terrific opening and closing 30 minutes sandwiched around a central hour that was pleasantly uninteresting, and if that was disappointing, it still nestles comfortably in the formula of boredom punctuated by astonishment that has been part of that franchise for ages. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 sucked, but it's not like anybody cared about that one in the first place.

But then the rot starts to sneak in: 22 Jump Street was a predictably weaker sequel, How to Train Your Dragon 2 was a disappointingly weaker sequel, and Think Like a Man Too was a downright shitty sequel. In between all of that, Clint Eastwood gave us Jersey Boys, which I'm pretty sure is the worst thing he's directed since those dodgy political thrillers in the 1990s, and Transformers: Age of Extinction was made to exist.

And as we turn to the back half of summer, all I see is emptiness. July is usually a big month, but this is some desolation we're about to head into...


2.7.2014

It says a lot that the most appealing wide release is Earth to Echo, a ratty-looking Spielberg knock-off done up in found footage. At least it doesn't have Melissa McCarthy doing yet another "the fat lady curses, ha-ha" movie, the way Tammy is; and though I'm obviously going to see it, I don't even want to talk about Deliver Us from Evil, a demonic possession movie that boasted one terrific teaser and nothing since to make it look even modestly different than every other demonic possession movie.


11.7.2014

I entered 2014 with Richard Linklaters 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood near the tip-top of my "most anticipated" list; it's officially moved into being the release for the whole rest of the year I'm most excited for, and being limited and all, I have no idea when that will happen. But the concept (tracking a boy's growth in actual time) is a flawless fit for the director of the Before movies, and early word has been ecstatic.

As for wide releases, it just so happens that the only big film I'm excited about all month is the same day: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, follow-up to the surprisingly pretty great Rise of the Planet of the Apes (and God, how I wish their titles were swapped). So, yay 11 July, I guess.


18.7.2014

There is a line in the Sex Tape trailer that goes something like "Nobody understands the cloud! It's a mystery!". Nobody Understands the Cloud would have been a far better title, and I expect was the pitch, of a film that combines weird levels of technophobia with weird levels of tech illiteracy into some kind of fluffy quiche of out-of-touch idiots throwing the word "Siri" at a script to seem vaguely topical. And I say this as someone who would rather cut my fingertips off than own a smartphone.

Elsewhere in a preposterously dire weekend: Planes: Fire & Rescue finds DisneyToon Studios continuing to give zero shits about telling stories that anybody might conceivably want to see, and Rob Reiner's death march continues on to And So It Goes, sucking Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton into the wake. But I'm easily most excited-dreading The Purge: Anarchy, a universe-building spin-off of the most frustratingly half-baked horror movie of 2013.

No, seriously, how is this not September? And like, the really bad part of September.


25.7.2014

One limited release that I'm actually excited for: A Most Wanted Man, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman's final non-Hunger Games feature, and an adaptation of a John le Carré overseen by Anton Corbijn, who built up a reservoir of goodwill with me in making Control that he is unlikely to ever run out. And one limited release that I feel duty-bound to see: Woody Allen's Magic in the Moonlight, a period comedy that has way too many echoes of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion for comfort.

As for the wide releases, there's maybe some reason to hope for Lucy, a sci-fi thriller with Scarlett Johansson, whose last such movie was one of the year's best releases thus far. But producer Luc Besson is on a cool streak. If there's any hope for the Brett Ratner-directed Hercules, it's that it will be sufficiently fun in its badness for a good party movie; and those who know more than I about Gabriel Iglesias - which would consist of having heard of him more than five minutes ago - can tell me if there's any hope for his comedy concert film The Fluffy Movie.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: FUCKIN' WHATEVER, ROBOTS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: now we have Transformers: Age of Extinction out in the world, and I don't even know what to do with that fact. There are only so many things you can do with movies about robots from space, even when some of the space robots are dinosaurs. I just don't, I don't care. Here you are. Fucking robots.

Time has been astonishingly kind to 2005's Robots, a film that looks like (and is, really), an undistinguished kid's animated adventure-comedy stealing from Pixar and DreamWorks in approximately equal measure. At the moment of its creation, it was merely the sophomore feature from the studio that had produced the dully likable 2002 talking animal comedy Ice Age,* and given the vogue for founding new animation studios in the early '00s, there was no reason to think that this "Blue Sky Studios" was up to much of anything that we needed to pay attention to. Nine years and seven features later, with four already scheduled for the future, Blue Sky has very much established itself as in the game for keeps, at least as important in the family-friendly junk food business as Illumination Entertainment and arguably bigger than the increasingly dented DreamWorks itself. And yet, in all that time, Blue Sky hasn't yet managed to top the visual quality present in their second effort: Robots has the best rendering, most creative animation, and certainly the most imaginative design of anything the studio has ever made.

A whole lot of that has to do with the fact that Robots is, after all, about robots. As Pixar and its early exercises in animating plastic, tin, and vinyl objects could tell you, inorganic material is far easier to make look realistic than flesh and fur and blood and muscle; and having made it look realistic, it's easier to push it to appealing extremes of non-realism. When an Ice Age mammoth moves, and his hair hangs uncertainly and his legs move stiffly, it screams out that something is wrong and we're watching low-grade fakery (and that's an extinct animal: the tiniest imperfections are even more obvious when they're happening in human form). When one of the characters in Robots moves inflexibly at rigid points of articulation, with his surface holding a very stiff, glossy shape, it barely registers; after all, why wouldn't that be the case?

But it's not simply because the filmmakers cheated their way into a scenario that requires less of a buy-in from our suspension of disbelief that Robots looks so much better than even something much later, like 2013's Epic: the characters really do look pretty terrific in every respect, and if the film were made today with all the money any major studio could through at it, I honestly don't know that it would look an ounce better. The lighting, undoubtedly, would be more carefully sculpted and realistic, but given the bounciness, vivid colors, and playful movements involved, I very much doubt that would be the right direction for this to go, anyway. It's a cartoon: a beautifully touchable, wonderfully inventive cartoon. The production was designed by William Joyce, a picture book author whose only other work designing a feature was on, guess what, Epic; the character designs are credited to Buck Lewis, a name it's very much worth knowing: his work in design and concept art has high, high peaks (Ratatouille!) and low, low valleys (Alvin and the Chipmunks...) but his batting average is impressive, and even some of his weaker efforts still ooze unique personality and idiosyncrasy. Robots is, at any rate, not one of his weaker efforts, designing several robot characters, many of them seen only briefly, in terrifically distinct components that give them mountains of personality and unspoken backstory, the rattletrap collection of ad-hoc parts and the sleek chrome figures alike.

Between Lewis and Joyce - the latter giving the film's robot towns and robot cities the kind of madly, wonderfully broken logic of a kid throwing all of her toys together in a pile and figuring out on the fly how to make them work together (though the opening waltz through the robot world owes far to obvious a debt to the early scenes in Monsters, Inc.) - Robots has a deeply appealing look to it, an Art Deco-infected riff on mid-20th Century futurism in the Walt Disney mode; the whole time I was watching it, I couldn't shake the feeling that it took place in the world that Disney's later Meet the Robinsons (based on a Joyce book) was aiming for, and not hitting.

And what - what, pray tell - does this immensely beautiful, tactile, lived-in and vibrantly artificial world do with itself? Squanders itself on a completely miserable script, that's what it does. The bar for 21st Century family entertainment is too low for me to go around spewing angry words where they plainly don't belong, so I can't claim that Robots is somehow worse than anything else that came out in 2005 (Chicken Little and the first Madagascar hailed from that year, after all), now matter how wretched the writing is. And it's pretty wretched: the hopelessly derivative "hero's journey" shtick on the typical model where the first act is comedy, the second act is heartwarming, the third act is a frantic chase, with a brutally clichéd lesson to learn about how you can be yourself and follow your dreams and up-end the mechanics of robber baron capitalism and all.

That would be the really disorienting and unpleasant thing about Robots: it has some of the worst tonal shifts of any American animated movie in its generation. Mostly, these things know what they are: the ones where the parents are just there to grind their teeth and suffer through the saccharine nonsense; the ones where the kids won't understand that two-thirds of the jokes are even jokes, let alone why they're funny. Robots tries desperately to split the difference, and it's as ugly a join as I can imagine. The plot, again, has to do with corporatist overreach displacing the homeless and the deeply impoverished: when young starry-eyed robot inventor Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor) arrives in the economically stratified Robot City, it's to find that humanitarian (robotarian?) industrialist Bigweld (Mel Brooks) has been displaced in his own company by shiny bastard Ratchet (Greg Kinnear). This sleek robot openly wishes to starve out all the robots who can't afford the costly new upgrades he's rolling out - that's openly, you understand - while secretly plotting with his deranged mother, junk shop maven Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), to convert all of the newly-destitute into molten metal for re-purposing into God knows what.

Horrifying stuff; well, kids' movies can be horrifying, even when the sociology is weirdly over-politicised. But that's just the tip of where Robots indulges in material that's purely aimed for a grown-up, or a least an adolescent audience. The film's depiction of robot dating, robot procreation, and robot puberty - complete with robot gender identity confusion! - practically begs us, weeping on its hands and knees, to really dwell on the mechanics and implications of robot sexual biology. It is, I am not hesitant to say, a wildly smutty thing, the most fuck-crazy animated movie about robots with a PG-rating that I can ever expect to see. But then there are so many things which could only possibly have been designed with a very young audience in mind: a lengthy sequence in which a houseful of robots, each in their turn, demonstrate their skill at armpit farting (culminating in a genuine, and apparently quite foul, robot fart; which raises almost as many questions about biology as the film's explicit contention that robot males have penises); or the shticky impressions and ethnic caricatures provided by Robin Williams as Rodney's comic relief sidekick Fender Pinwheeler,. The soundtrack includes Britney Spears's "...Baby, One More Time", and yet it also includes Tom Waits's "Underground", the latter of which has to win some kind of award as the most unexpected song in an animated movie in the 2000s (it's played in full, for God's sake).

And there are plenty of ways in which Robots is just a lazy, routine, wannabe Shrek: the somewhat arbitrary voice cast of famous people who neither sound right nor obviously add marquee value (Halle Berry, Amanda Bynes, Drew Carey, and Stanley Tucci join the ones I've already named; at least Broadbent, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Coolidge, and Paul Giamatti put some kind of effort into their performance), the metronomic progression of plot points that require a certain compactness of narrative which makes it feel like this huge, wonderfully detailed metropolis only actually has about a dozen people living in it; the gratuitous use of obvious music cues. More obvious than Tom Waits, that is.

I frankly don't know what to do with it. I look at it, in motion or even just in stills, and I am convinced it's one of the highlights of American studio animation in the last 15 years; I listen to it, and I want to take an axe to my own head; I attend to the plot, and I'm too bored to notice how tremendously, unflaggingly irritating it is. This level of technical accomplishment and this level of dreadfully flat commercialism don't usually go hand in hand; the pleasure to be had in the design and animation of Robots is real and pure and deep, but it's a tremendous chore to wade through all of the bullshit the filmmakers put in the way to get at it.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: PSYCHO KNOCK-OFFS

There's little doubt that the heyday of Hammer Film Productions in the 1960s is now best-known for the studio's Gothic horror, films with Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Dr. Frankenstein, and such. But while those films were being produced, Hammer was also busily cranking out a far less visible, though still awfully prolific, run of movies that were referred to, with admirable honesty of purpose, as their "mini-Hitchcocks": cheap little shockers that were all made to cash in on the insane killer movie craze that had been triggered by Hitch's Psycho in 1960. If these films haven't remained alive the way that Hammer's glossier, more directly horror-driven movies of the same period have, we must admit that it's because they're not, in the main, quite as good; they were by and large not made by the studio's A-list talent, and their budgets were lower. But there's a level of blunt grubbiness to the best of them which makes them pretty effective regardless of their limited polish and ambition.

Not the best of these, though probably the most high-profile owing to the presence of a relatively major star in the cast, is 1965's Fanatic: it also has far and away the most amazing title of any of them, at least in America, where it was renamed by distributor Columbia with the somewhat more lurid title Die! Die! My Darling! Which actually shows up (though without the exclamation points) in the film's dialogue, so at least it wasn't sheer random exuberant tastelessness on Columbia's part for the sake of it.

Anyway, this particular Psycho knock-off switches things up in some fun ways: instead of a deranged son obsessively keeping the memory of his dead mother alive in some very disturbing ways, Fanatic is about a mother who has devoted herself a little too fixedly to honoring the memory of her dead son. And just to cover its exploitation movie bases, it also borrows liberally from 1962's What Happened to Baby Jane?, in using a living legend of Old Hollywood in the role of a menacing old lady. In this case, Tallulah Bankhead, the hedonist's hedonist from the Roaring Twenties, places the part of a former wild woman of the theater world who has spent most of her days in profoundly unyielding religious asceticism. Which can absolutely not be an accident, and if nothing else, it suggests that producer Anthony Hinds was approaching this project with a little more braininess than some of his other wannabe Psycho pictures.

The plot is simple enough: visiting American Patricia Carroll (Stefanie Powers) is in England to marry her fiancé Alan Glentower (Maurice Kaufmann) - a rather peremptory, bossy bastard, and the film doesn't do nearly enough to call him on it - and decides that the right thing to do would be to visit the mother of her dead former lover Stephen Trefoile. Trekking out to the small village where Mrs. Trefoile (Bankhead) lives, Patricia finds a bizarre, insular little hyper-religious compound inhabited by the none-too-devout Harry (Peter Vaughn) and Anna (Yootha Joyce), a married couple working as servants and waiting out Mrs. Trefoile's death and the inheritance Harry, her only living relative, will receive; and Joseph (Donald Sutherland), a mentally disabled handyman. Things immediately seem off with the whole situation, but it takes until the second day, when Mrs. Trefoile starts going on about how Patricia and Stephen were basically already married and that means that Patricia needs to remain devoted, pure and committed to the unendurable Puritanical lifestyle practice at the house of Trefoile, and it becomes very clear, very quickly, that the old woman is extremely willing to go to homicidal lengths to protect Patricia's sanctity and thus Stephen's purity in heaven.

It is, top to bottom, the Tallulah Bankhead Show. Nobody in the cast comes even close to making the same impression he does: Sutherland, in one of his earliest roles, is effectively odd and creepy, but much underused, Joyce plays one brittle chord over and over, Vaughn has a nice piggy menace to him, but the writing doesn't give him enough to work with, and Powers is at her best in the early going, when she can still be a bit saucy and flippant; when the time comes for Patricia to start being terrified for her life, and to start her frenzied attempts to escape, Powers never quite rounds the corner where it feels like she's actually aware that she's not in control. Also, the American actress plays an American character with an odd but unmistakable hint of a British accent.

Bankhead, though, is just plain incendiary. Is it something of a Bette Davis in Baby Jane impression? It is. But a good one, and Bankhead's facility with over-emphasised bitchery, present in her screen acting from way back (I know nothing of her reputation onstage, though I believe it to have been impressive), suits her well even when the motivations for that bitchery need to be completely re-oriented. Hammy, domineering authority came beautifully to the actor, and she blows through Fanatic with a performance scaled the rafters, just big enough that it's still believably terrifying when she turns into a real menace and not the oddball zealot of the film's first act.

I cannot imagine the film working nearly as well without Bankhead's performance. The script - adapted by the great genre master Richard Matheson from Anne Blaisdell's novel Nightmare - is solid enough, though Matheson had better work throughout his career, and the "hurr hurr, religious folks are crazy" tone in the early going is a bit too self-congratulatory. It's very meat-and-potatoes storytelling, though, palpably anxious to be filled in with depth and complexity and interest by the filmmakers. Bankhead, of course, is great. Cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson, creating weird tensions from filtered daylight in the big old house, is great, even when he indulges in some ecstatically stylish but none too sensible colored lighting tricks near the end. Production designer Peter Proud, whose work I do not otherwise know, is pretty close to great, creating an impressively neat and fussy country home that feels like a whole human life was lived there, in an oppressive way that leaves no room for the present, with all that past crowding it.

But nothing else is great, or near great. Silvio Narizzano's direction - he'd mostly worked in television prior to this, and would the following year make the tedious kitchen sink comedy Georgy Girl - doesn't lean nearly heavily enough on the plot to keep things moving at an increasingly fevered pitch; towards the end, when Mrs. Trefoile has finally jumped from "punishing fanatic" to "homicidal maniac", the film starts to lose momentum in exactly the wrong way; the last 20 minutes of the film are also the paciest and in many ways the least interesting. Narizzano's lifts from Hitchcok are generally solid - the swinging lamp from the climax of Psycho puts in a cameo - and he's good at fixing the camera on Bankhead and Sutherland's faces, just letting them be tense, but he mostly seems to have been more animated by making a brittle black comedy than a thriller, and there's nothing in the back half of the film that's can really be defended as comic. Parts of the first third, accordingly, are the strongest, when the film is still mostly a broad culture-clash: the staging of Mrs. Trefoile's droning recitation of verses from Deuteronomy, with overworked dramatic music on the soundtrack (courtesy of Wilfred Josephs) is one of the highlights in this respect, and most everything Powers does throughout the expository scenes is laced with enough acerbic Modern Woman tang to give it some ironic heft. I am especially fond of the cheeky humor of the opening credits (the sequence has no individually credited designer) with music and color playfully commenting on the film's impending cat and mouse gamesmanship.

But none of these things are really in the film's best interests as a thriller about a crazy old woman, and that is, after all, what Fanatic is. Bankhead and the general atmosphere are enough to haul it over the finish line, and there are some individually creepy moments scattered throughout, but on the whole, the movie is too genteel. Too nice. It never entirely feels like Patricia is in danger, only a particularly severe form of inconvenience, and the general scope, if not the details, of the outcome are rarely in doubt. There's enough here to please hagsploitation fans, but there are so many little and significant ways that the movie could be better without even touching its best elements that it's hard to feel that this is more than a satisfactory Hammer B-side, and certainly no thriller classic.

Body Count: 2, the exact same number as Psycho, though the function those bodies serve in the narrative is totally different.

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TIM AT TFE: YOU GOT THE TOUCH! YOU GOT THE POW-AH!

My weekly column at the Film Experience continues as ever, but I bring it up this time around since I know that at least some of you were hoping that I'd use the release of Michael Bay's Dinobot Thing to review Transformers: The Movie, the animated semi-classic from 1986. Well, you will be pleased to know, I have. Go, enjoy, discuss!

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CHASING CARS

There's something especially annoying about a movie that veers between mostly good and very good for its entire running time, only to complete puke itself apart in the last few minutes. I present to you The Rover, writer-director David Michôd's sophomore feature after his impressive but in many ways frustratingly commonplace crime thriller Animal Kingdom. Two times isn't enough to make a tradition, but that's twice now that Michôd has almost succeeded in making a real genre classic, but just couldn't quite make it happen, and if it happens a third time, someone will have to give him a stern talking-to about the right things to do with one's obvious talent.

In the case of The Rover is that old chestnut, the Post-Apocalyptic Australian Movie About Desert Wanderers and Their Cars. It's not quite right to call the movie a knock-off of, or homage to Max Max and its series, so much as a distillation of themes, tropes, and iconography from across the gamut of post-apocalypse storytelling: the film Mad Max, the book The Road, the video game Fallout. Wisely, the film does not try to be about the fall (which it alludes to elliptically in an opening card, white on black: "Australia, ten years after the collapse"), nor the state of society after the fall; it takes for granted our ability to quickly tease out the general shape and scale of how much things have gone to shit, and uses that as the basis for a kind of character study. And I say "kind of" rather advisedly, for that's really the whole trick of the thing: it's actually more of an anti-character study, dedicating itself not to the explication of how one man's personality functions, but to the explication of how and why one man would cease to have a personality. It's a character study set in a world where character has become a liability, and our protagonist as succeeded in eradicating his.

That protagonist is very clearly and persistently never given a name: we can think of him as the rover of the title, though the end credits call him Eric, in a clear-cut case of bullshit. In any case, he's played fantastically by Guy Pearce, in the sort of performance that doesn't announce itself as "acting" in any conventional sense: Pearce doesn't do much with his line deliveries, since he only speaks in curt bursts of words; and he doesn't do much with his face, which is grimy, bearded, and mostly inflexible. It's his coiled-up body language that impresses: tension that speaks to a history of survival and violence, animalistic in the sense that human beings are animals, and the world the film depicts is one in which we're not much else.

At its best - and it really does spend a lot of time at its best, for something that left me feeling so itchily unsatisfied - The Rover plays like a fable of hopelessness, depicting a world where the state of mind that defines every character is the degree to which they remain optimistic that something like order and reason still exists. The rover is at one extreme end of that: he exists for nothing, seemingly, but the individual moment, having concluded that no future moment is likely to be so different from any other that it's worth bothering about any of them. He is a nihilist in an unusually exquisite and pure form: not your teenage nihilist, who just hates, and not your cynical nihilist, who uses it to secretly assume superiority. He is a nihilist because there's nothing not to be nihilistic about: he lives in a laweless, amoral world, nothing he does again will ever matter, and nobody will ever care. The film's plot occurs when three men - Henry (Scoot McNairy), Caleb (Tawanda Manyimo), and Archie (David Field) - steal his car from the little shithole in the middle of nowhere where he... lives? Is temporarily resting? It doesn't really matter. The point is, the three are in a frenzy, having recently fucked up a robbery that left Henry's brother dead, and have managed to crash their truck. The see a car just sitting there outside a little shack, and they steal it; the owner of that car manages to see it just too late to catch them, though he's able to get their truck started to follow them. Along the way, he finds that Henry's brother Rey (Robert Pattinson) isn't so dead as all that, and he grabs the young man of apparently limited mental capacity, first to help him track the fleeing robbers, then because he latches onto Rey as a companion in need of help and care. But that comes very late.

For the great bulk of its running time, The Rover appears to be a very simple, direct, feverishly focused depiction of a man who exists in such a rundown, stateless place of being that matters of motivation are simply pointless: his car was stolen, it is his car, he will retrieve his car. It's as brutal, bleak and nasty as you could please, while also being one of the most intelligent, unromantic, serious attempts to grapple with what actual post-collapse life might function like that I can call to mind. It suggests, rather cruelly, that we're on track to our own meaningless non-society, and demands that we ponder for at least the film's running time what it might feel like to live that way, to actually have no hope and no hope of hope. Until the end. I won't give away what happens; there's a protracted ending sequence that I didn't much care for, but was willing to concede that endings are hard, and sometimes the thing that seems right is to give the viewer the raucous payoff that the rest of the film has so rigidly avoided, even if it wasn't all that right. But the last, literally, 30 or 60 seconds of the film, are just fucking dumb - we find out that the rover had a motivation all along in a twist that completely shifts everything that has played out for the entire movie, but not to such interesting effect that it was worth having lied about it the whole time. I still like the movie in my head better, but the movie explained by the twist would be just fine, if it had explained itself early enough to inform the experience of watching the movie. But coming as it does, it's just a tedious "fuck you" - not even a fun "fuck you", the kind of "fuck you" that reinforces the film's nihilistic themes. It's a mean "fuck you" that exists only because, what the hell, twists are a thing you can end movies with. So why not end 'em that way.

And the twist having so completely broken the movie's spell, it becomes a lot easier to start carping on all the things that movie had been doing wrong the whole time, the scenes that don't play, the concepts that are bonkers in the wrong way, the flares-ups of melodrama and trite theme-explaining that were tolerable when the thing was a savage beast of driving momentum, and end up feeling like a gifted but undisciplined writing student doing a really swell Cormac McCarthy impersonation without McCarthy's cosmic gravity.

Now, parts of the movie still work no matter what: Pearce is brilliant, and Pattinson is at his career-best, playing a man who looks, at first, like an undistinguished Faulknerian man-child before he slowly reveals himself to be a dreamer, a moral thinker, an innocent who would have fit better in the pre-collapse world he apparently has some unfocused nostalgia for. Given all the ways the performance could have been annoying, it's pretty great that Pattinson turns his character's puppy-like craving for someone to guide him into an interesting, moving performance. The thing is also blessed by some breathtaking cinematography by Natasha Braier, which is by no stretch of the imagination "attractive", but presents the sand-blasted Outback in which the film takes place with amazing potency, stressing the vacantness, the far horizon, and the monochromatic dustiness. It's an amazing vision of the end of the world.

Basically, The Rover is a film I would have slightly adored if it had ended 10 minutes earlier, liked if it had ended one minute earlier and can't quite tolerate the way it is. Does that make it a failure? I don't know that I've quite worked that one out yet. It makes it hellaciously frustrating, that's for goddamn sure, and not the kind of frustrating that still ends up feeling rewarding, somehow.

6/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD, WEEK 6 POLL: PSYCHO KNOCK-OFFS

VOTING CLOSED - WINNER: FANATIC
Thanks to everyone who voted!

Not many films in cinema history, irrespective of genre, had as significant or immediate an impact as Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror thriller Psycho. We shall not, at this moment, rehearse all the many things that changed in the wake of Psycho, limiting ourselves to one of the most visible and overt immediate responses: the B-movie producers of the world immediately understood that a new market for movies about crazy killers had just announced itself (it proved to be an especially popular genre in the United Kingdom, for some reason, which must have been a cold comfort to poor Michael Powell, whose similar Peeping Tom only slightly beat Psycho to theaters, and effectively ended his career).

As these were some of the earliest "gawk in delight as violence happens in front of you" pictures ever made, no historical tour of the horror film could ever be complete without stopping over there, so for this week, I've selected three especially superlative examples of the form, right down to their use of a one-word title describing a mentally imbalanced state.

Fanatic AKA Die! Die! My Darling (1965)
From IMDb: "A young woman is terrorized by her fiance's demented mother who blames her for her son's death."

Homicidal (1961)
From IMDb: "The brutal stabbing murder of a justice-of-the-peace sparks an investigation of dark family secrets in a sleepy small town in Southern California."

Paranoiac (1963)
From IMDb: "Simon Ashby is a wealthy psychotic who is is coddled by his aunt in their palatial mansion outside of London."

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VEGAS IS FOR LOVERS

2012's Think Like a Man is, by and large, not a very good movie. But it does an absolutely fantastic impression of one, thanks to a game cast of very talented comic actors who don't get very much work in major movies owing to their unbankable skin color, all of them working double-time to flesh out the basic notion of their various characters with depth and personality, giving the film a genuinely appealing "let's hang out" vibe that mostly compensates for its essentialist gender representations and stock romantic comedy plot points. It leaves no indication that we need to care about any of these people any longer, but they're mostly likable enough that a chance to hang out with them even longer isn't an inherently awful idea, and to test that theory, we now have Think Like a Man Too, and oh, fuck me, is it bad.

The cast is all back, but in the intervening two and a half years, one particular member of that cast has seen his movie career erupt: instead of a well-balanced ensemble comedy, the new film turns out to be the Kevin Hart show with an immensely well-stocked backdrop of Taraji P. Henson, Gabrielle Union, Romany Malco, Regina Hall, Michael Ealy, Jenifer Lewis, and so on. Hart's a fine, appealing comic presence and all, but it's a tragic waste to have all those people playing second bananas with one or two featured scenes and a lot of background action; and it's much, much worse for the women. No longer dedicated itself to illustrating the tenets of Steve Harvey's dubious relationship book in dramatic form, this sequel finds the core nonet headed to Las Vegas for the wedding of Michael (Terrence J) and Candace (Hall), where they are excited to hang out for the first time in ages and have naughty fun. Cedric (Hart), having accidentally appointed himself best man, has a particularly elaborate plan laid out for the boys' night, but the girls are right behind, just as soon as they figure out a way to ditch Candace's dour future mother-in-law Loretta (Lewis).

It's not particularly vile or destructive or wicked, or anything like that, but only by virtue of barely existing in the first place. For the most part, Think Like a Man Too - whose grammatically cryptic title is never explained or resolved in any way - consists of scenes of people riffing around in Vegas locations so pornographically product-placed that Caesar's Palace and Paris Las Vegas make more of an impression on the narrative than half of the named characters. Director Tim Story, who has officially not been visibly excited by the material he's making into a film for over ten years now, only really comes alive when the film drops off into extended musical moments: a generic montage here, a pot-fueled fantasy music video set to a rewritten version of the 1990 Bell Biv DeVoe song "Poison" starring all the girls there (the latter of these is, by a crazily lopsided margin, the most inspired, energetic, interesting thing that happens in the movie). Otherwise, he mostly just points the camera at group shots, occasionally providing enough footage for editor Peter S. Elliot to put together some bouncy visual jokes and high-spirited momentum, and mostly soak up the color and noise of Vegas without bothering to situated his characters much within that color.

The characters themselves are provided by writers Keith Merryman & David A. Newman with absolutely nothing original or challenging to do (the film throws a litany of relationship issues that reek with age - their career paths are heading in different directions! she wants a baby but he doesn't! she can't handle knowing how much sex he used to have! - and could possibly be argued to be lazy gender-derived stereotypes, except that engaging with Think Like a Man Too on that level means that you let it win; nothing about the movie demands or benefits from being treated like an actual social document instead of just a lazy summertime cash-in on a surprise hit). That means the actors have nothing original or challenging to, and while some of them are more invested in making an impression regardless - it's like the film tosses us a life preserve any time Henson or Hall shows up - there's absolutely none of the breath of life into stock characters that there was in the first movie. The clichéd, derivative situations are thus left to die on their own, and the film's outlandishly PG-13 idea of Vegas debauchery - the movie desperately wants to play in The Hangover's sandbox, but it hasn't remotely the same killer instinct - is so sanded down and unimaginative that it calls even more attention to how utterly generic every beat of the whole thing is.

We have here a pristine example of... not exactly inspiration vs. mercenary instincts. Think Like a Man wasn't coming from a place of extreme artistic passion, but it was well-meant if ridiculously old-fashioned, and the actors and directors were committed to making it closer to the best iteration of itself than the worst. Think Like a Man Too is a textbook sequel: recycling character beats, tossing in fake conflict, amping up the elements of the first that seem to be the most marketable regardless of whether or not the drama benefits from it. I would be lying if I said that I'd though much, or at all, about the characters since the first movie was in theaters, but having had a chance to revisit them, I'm terribly sad that they didn't have more interesting, invigorating problems in their lives. And I certainly wish that the talents of the cast hadn't been spent in service to what seems, from the available footage, to have been a somewhat irritating working vacation in a glitzy pleasure spot that nobody was hugely enthusiastic to visit.

4/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1950: In which thar be pirates, matey

In the annals of films with an influence completely disproportionate to their quality or latter-day popularity, the 1950 adaptation Treasure Island stands out as a genuinely iconic work of pop art. I can think of no film that has influenced so many people who have never seen it in such a narrow way: it is nothing less than the movie that nailed down the pirate accent as we know and love it today. In playing Long John Silver, the most famous buccaneer of literature, Robert Newton of Dorset took his cues from the history of famous pirates who'd hailed from the West Country of England, and cranked up his own native accent to an absurd, cartoonish exaggeration. While this was probably not an invention per se, it was the first time the accent had been married to piracy in a movie, and it proved definitive: in the short term, Newton played variations on the role in film and television multiple times in the few years remaining of his career and life, solidifying his instantly-popular interpretation of piracy in the pop culture firmament. In the long term, Talk Like a Pirate Day.

It's only fair, really, given that Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 children's adventure novel codified pretty much all of the other iconography we associate with pirates: missing limbs, parrots on the shoulder, "pieces of eight" and "dead man's chest", buried treasure on deserted West Indies islands, maps with arcane physical landmarks and an X marking the spot. And just like Newton's accent, all of these things have antecedents earlier than Stevenson (that author was himself working from the pseudonymous 1724 A General History of the Pyrates), but things have a way of becoming more real when there's a phenomenally popular piece of art to hang them on, even when that piece of art has become, as Treasure Island has in the modern age, one of those things that absolutely everybody has heard of, though comparatively few people (especially younger ones) have read or seen.

On top of everything else, the '50 movie of Treasure Island had the benefit of being produced by one of cinema's all-time great inventors of new myths, Walt Disney; both before and after its namesake's death, Disney was a studio that had made an art form of adapting public domain stories and marketing them in such a way that it's virtually impossible not to think of their version before all others. And if somebody had to invent, in the mid-20th Century, the way would henceforth think about pirates, it might as well have been Disney (and just to complete its takeover of the very concept of a type of human being who lived and were active over a fairly long stretch of history, there's also Disney's theme park ride Pirates of the Caribbean, which I suppose has done more to perpetuate the new stereotype of pirates than any movie).

This was all accidental and after-the-fact, though. In 1950, the stakes for Disney were very different: Treasure Island was the company's first all live-action movie, made as the international market for animated films was economically constricted after the Second World War had constricted it for other reasons. It was still the era when that studio was perpetually living hand-to-mouth, with the economic security of Disneyland five years in the future; but 1950 was very, very good to the company, between this and the monstrous success of the fairy tale musical Cinderella. Having that kind of revenue stream open itself up was obviously too appealing to pass up, and from 1952 onward, the production of live-action films (cheaper, easier to export, faster to make) became a key element of Disney's business model, though it would take a few years before the real explosion happened, with Disney ranking alongside the better-established studios in terms of volume.

It would be even longer before Disney's live-action broke terribly far outside of the mold established by Treasure Island: Technicolor adventures with storybook locales and a bright "boys' own tales" tone that one can easily imagine ol' Walt himself talking about with the boyish gleam he got on his TV show anytime he spoke of something that reminded him of being a youth in those giddy days in middle America, when breezy swashbuckling yarns were all you needed to be a perpetually-entertained kid, getting into boyish scrapes and all. And I'm well aware that I said "boy" three times in one sentence, because that's very much where Treasure Island has its head located; Stevenson's book was already a bit of a sausage fest, but the adaptation written by Lawrence Edward Watkin (who'd remain a bit of a Disney mainstay over the following years) removes even the solitary female character of the source material. This is a film that knows exactly what it wants to be about, and it tackles its goal of being the kind of exotic boys' adventure that would inspire things like Frontierland and Adventureland with minimal dross and fuss. Say anything else about it, but Disney's Treasure Island is a brisk, efficient beast with absolutely no patience for any kind of bullshit over the course of its tight 96 minutes.

The plot is, of course, the stuff of legends: at the Bristol inn owned by his widowed mother, young Jim Hawkins (Bobby Driscoll, Disney's go-to child actor) is busily protecting the secretive Captain Billy Bones (Finlay Currie) from the mysterious figures hunting for him in the West Country dusk, Black Dog (Francis De Wolff) and Blind Pew (John Laurie) - so committed is this adaptation to cutting out the deadweight that it cuts out all the backstory and opening scenes to have Bones already secreted in the Admiral Benbow Inn. Bones is delivered with an omen of doom called a "Black Spot", and before he dies, apparently of fright, he hands Jim a map to protect. Jim takes this to the two adults in his life with the most stability and sense, Squire Trelawney (Walter Fitzgerald) and Dr. Livesy (Denis O'Dea), who recognise it as the map of legendary pirate Captain Flint; with visions of pirate gold in his eyes, Trelawney outfits a ship, the Hispaniola, under command of Captain Smollett (Basil Sydney). Trelawney and Livesy aren't nearly the conspirators they'd like to be, and even while admonishing Jim, now the ship's cabin boy to keep quiet about everything, they manage to tip off several waiting ears in the Bristol seaport about their mission. The fatal mistake, though, is in hiring as ship's cook a particular one-legged man named Long John Silver (Newton): his disability squares with a description Bones gave to Jim of the one man above all men to be feared and avoided, and while the old rascal quickly wins Jim's affections by treating the boy with fatherly respect like nobody else ever has, it turns out that he's the very many Bones was warning about; Flint's old quartermaster, and the leader of a ring of pirates that he's able to sneak into the Hispaniola's crew. By the time the ship arrives in the West Indies, Silver has made his move and commandeered the vessel, leaving the heroes forced to hunt for treasure and fight pirates at one and the same time.

Though it's hardly the earliest adventure story of its sort, Treasure Island quickly became the one against which all others have to be measured, because it just works really damn well: the creepiness of the opening, the vibrancy of the sea material, the exoticism of the tropical island. You'd have to do something incredibly dimwitted, like setting it all in a fantasy version of outer space that nonetheless looks exactly like 18th Century England, to actually fuck the story up. On top of how neatly it cycles through all kinds of appealing genre material, the relationship between Jim and Silver is one of the great character studies in English language children's literature, and while I suppose it's possible to break it with poor casting, this film doesn't do that (the other way to break it is the one Disney explored in its next adaptation of the book, 1996's Muppet Treasure Island, in which the filmmakers simply didn't give all that much of a shit about Jim).

The last thing this film has is poor casting: while, sight-unseen, I'd have said it was impossible for any cinematic Long John Silver to improve on Wallace Beery from the 1934 Treasure Island, Robert Newton does exactly that, pushing as far as he could into being a ludicrous live-action cartoon, somehow managing to have a pronounced squint and bugged-out eyes at one and the same time, on top of his robust voice work; but not so far that he couldn't pull back as needed to find the humanity and tenderness required to make the Silver/Jim relationship function. Driscoll, to be sure, is no Jackie Cooper: owing, perhaps, to overlit sets designed to make sure the lavish full-color sets would register proper in Technicolor, the young actor spends most of the movie with his face bent up in a squint that makes him look perpetually disgusted, like something smells just absolutely foul and he's not going to start acting till he figures out what it might be. But Newton's good enough to carry the film for the both of them.

Meanwhile, as raw spectacle, Treasure Island is more than good enough for a pleasant matinee adventure, though it shares the peculiar tendency of all Disney live-action films into the '70s, even the ones that had a lot of money thrown at them, to look singularly artificial. I'm not sure that's entirely by accident, as it surely was in other cases; at its best, such as the early scenes at the country inn, this feeling gives the movie the feeling of a rich watercolor illustration, and certainly between director Byron Haskin and cinematographer Freddie Young, we have two pretty damn talented on hand, even if for both men, their best work was still in the future (Haskin's career would oscillate between genre masterworks, like this and The War of the Worlds, and completely forgotten genre junk; even so, he'd already established himself as a top-notch special effects artist. Young, of course, would eventually shoot Lawrence of Arabia, one of the most gorgeous movies ever made). So even though a couple of individual scenes fall flat - the Bristol seaport is so transparently a soundstage, it looks like they were filming at the yet-unbuilt Disneyland - the whole effect is genuinely transporting, with wonderfully bold colors that bring a certain more-alive-than-life feeling to the entirely non-realistic, but agreeably lavish, sets designed by Thomas Morahan.

It's not great art, not at the level of Disney's animation of the same period (and even that was a step down from Disney's animation of 10 years prior); but Disney's live-action filmmaking wouldn't ever really pretend that it was trying to be great art. It was always a way of bringing live to thrillingly innocent adventures of a kind that were already old-fashioned when Disney made them, creating fantasy worlds for kids to live in - and be marketed to, though that wouldn't be nearly as big a thing until a few years later - and for their parents to enjoy well enough. It's simple escapism, not like the more complex escapism of the animation studio, or even of Disneyland itself, for that matter; but effective escapism nonetheless, and for all its heavy-handed, traditionalist idea of what an adventure story could and should be, it's about as much brisk fun as any pirate movie out there, and twice as pretty as any of them.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1950
-The Oscars host a Grand Dame-off between a haughty, bitchy Bette Davis in All About Eve and a bug-eyed, oversexed Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.
-Director Anthony Mann and star James Stewart collaborate on the first of their legendary Westerns, Winchester '73
-The first big-budget prestige sci-fi picture of the post-war era, Destination Moon, is sniped on its way to theaters by the first cheap indie space adventure, Rocketship X-M

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1950
-Kurosawa Akira directs Rashomon, which will prove to be the West's first significant exposure to Japanese cinema
-Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman collaborate on Stromboli, leading to her pregnancy and temporary moral exile to Italy
-Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl completes the documentary Kon-Tiki, about his famous raft trip across the Pacific

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: CLINT SINGS!

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: there are not many living filmmakers whose style and interests would seem to make them a worse fit for making a musical than Clint Eastwood, and yet here he is, counter-intuitively making Jersey Boys. Of course, this is not, notoriously, Eastwood's first encounter with the musical film genre.

My suspicion is that here in the 21st Century, most people who've heard of it are familiar with the 1969 film Paint Your Wagon from a rather nasty parody of it that cropped up in a ninth season episode of The Simpsons, where it's lampooned with generic Wild West music and insipid lyrics like "We ain't braggin' / We're gonna coat that wood". This isn't fair at all - it has given all of those people an unduly optimistic and pleasant impression of what really is one of the very worst studio musicals of the 1960s, the same decade when the studio musical turned into a gaudy monstrosity of bloat, tacky set design, and overall misery (there are good '60s musicals, of course, but they are few in number).

Adapted with an exceptionally loose hand by Paddy Chayefsky from a 1951 stage musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, the film tells of a most unlikely friendship during the California gold rush, between grizzled drunken prospector Ben Rumson (Lee Marvin) and the younger man (Clint Eastwood) he shanghais into being his partner without even bothering to stop and learn his name or much of his background. They're among the first to stake claims in a region that eventually sprouts the boom town No Name City, with an all-male population till the fateful day that a Mormon shows up with his two wives. The male population of the city enthusiastically convinces him to auction one of them off, and an immeasurably drunk Ben puts in the winning bid, over Pardner's objection; and so it is that their little homestead blossoms from two men with absolutely clear-cut and unmistakable homoerotic undertones to two men and one woman with what turn out to be polyamorous overtones when Elizabeth (Jean Seberg), Ben's bride, confesses that she loves them both so much, and if a Mormon man can have two wives, why can't a woman have two husbands, anyway? Meanwhile, gold lust still burns in the heart of all the No Name citizens, and Ben's scheme for finding as much of the yellow stuff as possible ends up altering the face of that patch of the wild West beyond hope of returning to the simple, peaceful anarchy where a roaring pioneer like he can be content.

All of that takes place over the course of 158 minutes. And no matter what problems someone might tell you end up torpedoing Paint Your Wagon - the leads' inability to sing, the generally anemic quality of the songs, the stupefying sexual politics, or the general problems in staging a big-scale musical on a location shoot in the Oregon woods - that's what does it. It's the utter, air-sucking indulgence of a zippy little Western comedy that works almost solely because Marvin is impeccable as a surly old man given to sarcastic asides and comic bluster, stretched out to more than two and a half hours, a solid hour more than it can possibly survive. In attempting to lighten Chayefsky's darker, satiric concept for the story (the shape of which can only be guessed through the final product, though certainly satire is just about the only way that the film's attitude towards woman could possibly be converted into something digestible), Alan Jay Lerner - producing and writing the final version of the screenplay - and director Joshua Logan succeeded only in making something frivolous and empty-headed that's far too agonisingly protracted to possibly work as a deft piece of audience-pleasing fluff.

Not that the other problems aren't problems; they're all problems. Paint Your Wagon is a film where problems rain down like angels' tears. The most immediately accessible is its failure as a musical. Onstage, the show only really boasted two real stand-out numbers that could stand with top-tier Lerner and Loewe (it precedes their best work by a few years: My Fair Lady and Camelot in 1956 and 1960, with the film Gigi right in between): "They Call the Wind Maria" and "Wandrin' Star". And this remains true in the movie, but the gap in quality is far more pronounced, with five new songs with lyrics by Lerner and music by André Previn, all of which are perfectly dreadful. When a musical is as dreary to listen to as the film Paint Your Wagon, the time has come to back up and fix it, since music is a pretty key element in the form. Anyway, the songs aren't nearly as big a problem as the singers: "Maria", performed by Harve Presnell, is the only number in the film performed by a trained musical theater artist, while Seberg was overdubbed by Anita Gordon, who at least had some professional singing experience. Eastwood and Marvin, famously, were left to their own devices, with mixed results; most of Ben's numbers are such that a certain gravelly flatness works fine, though it's no loss that Marvin never saw fit to release an album of standards. Eastwood, though... sheeyit, he's bad. The cracking, raspy singing he does at the end of Gran Torino, 39 years later, is legitimately better; at least it has feeling. What the actor is up to here is merely unpleasant, nasal baying that gets across no emotion and is too droning to even be amusingly terrible.

Eastwood is pretty droning in general; he wasn't happy with the shoot and looks it (supposedly, his displeasure with the experience of making Paint Your Wagon was a definitive moment in his decision to start directing). Seberg is even worse, which I imagine has something to do with the impossible character she's playing, an irreconcilable mixture of feminist impulses and deeply sexist baggage, a woman that the film paints as an object and then tries and badly fails to use as the focal point for a satiric indictment of frontier masculinity. Marvin gets away unscathed, I guess, in a burly comic role that requires little but a mean attitude and ability to holler out laugh lines; it's enough to make the film endurable, but certainly enough to make it enjoyable.

It's such stately, overbearing slog: by no means bleak as the worst of the late-'60s megamusicals (the reek of 1967's Doctor Dolittle is hard to ignore); I don't even know that it's as dispiriting as Logan's other Lerner and Loewe adaptation, Camelot (also from '67), which takes better material and leaves it even more waxen and dead-eyed, with nothing but some pretty fucking terrific sets to recommend it. At least Paint Your Wagon, with real trees and real dirt to guide it, feels like a living thing; a suffering thing, that would be better put out of its misery as quickly as possible, but a living thing. Logan, mind you, was a pretty fine director for making bloated movies that needed to be euthanised as quickly as possible: coming to movies from Broadway, he never did quite figure out what to do with the camera or how to coax his actors into giving movie-scale performances that suggested the bombast of the stage without swamping the viewer. His movies tend to feel at once overwhelming and shriveled up, lavish with mean little inhumanity lurking where the actors are meant to be, and even by those standards, Paint Your Wagon is a disaster: even with the usually infallible cinematographer William A. Fraker behind it, the film boasts almost no interesting shots, and all of the ones it stumbles happen in montages or establishing moments, never with the characters. It manages to feel stagebound even outdoors (the scenes on the streets of No Name City are annoyingly flat), and much too close to the actors most of the time. The only time it comes life at all is during the slapstick comedy, and being as it is slapstick comedy from 1969, it's of an especially shrill sort.

Basically, nothing goes right, anywhere in the movie: the best that can be hoped for is things which fail to go wrong. It's a tedious bit of drudgery not buoyed up by its music at all, telling a muddled and at times actively unpleasant story anchored by actors who transparently don't know what to do with their parts. It's not individually the movie that killed of the musical - in fact, it earned a lot of money, it just couldn't turn that into profit owing to a ludicrously costly price tag - but as part of the cluster of films that led to the genre's suffocation in the early '70s, Paint Your Wagon makes it eminently clear why what was at one time the most popular form in all of cinema spent some three decades in exile. Any time a genre reaches this point of autoeroticism, the only thing for it is to take it behind the shed and shoot it.

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1949: In which a cold war replaces the hot one, in guiding how society thinks about itself

The Woman on Pier 13 had previews under the title I Married a Communist, and only came into its far less show-offy title when the test audiences rejected it for reasons that probably make perfect sense in the cultural context of 1949, but all it really says to me is that people used to have way less awesome tastes. Because The Woman on Pier 13 is like a pair of fresh-washed jeans, crisp and sturdy and really quite impossibly unexceptional, but I Married a Communist - tell me that there's not a tiny part of you that isn't desperate to see that movie. If the film had come out even a couple of years later, when the tacky excesses of '50s B-pictures had begun to make itself felt, I suspect it might have even been released under its far more delectably outrageous name, but then, by any title, The Woman on Pier 13 feels like a film which found the 1950s pushing their way in to the 1940s ahead of schedule.

It's not hard to guess that a film titled I Married a Communist at any point its development was intended as a ripe piece of anti-Red agitprop, and that was indeed a subject much on the mind of all Americans as the '40s turned into the '50s. The infamous blacklist had started in 1947, when the House Committe on Un-American Activities (HUAC) had begun investigating Communist ties in Hollywood, and those who refused to play ball were prevented from working by general agreement of the studio bosses, deeply anxious to avoid getting on HUAC's bad side. In 1950, a pamphlet titled Red Channels kicked the blacklist into high gear, and in that same year, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy began his attention-grabbing claims that the U.S. government - and the whole country! - was infiltrated by a small army of well-trained, merciless Commie agents who where this close to toppling the entire system of American democracy. Within a couple of years, American political discourse would be in full-fledged hysteria over the Red Menace, and within a couple of years after that, it would all be over, and the Red-baiting of McCarthy would already be regarded as weird, embarrassing paranoia.

The Woman on Pier 13 got out in front of that trend, and not by accident: RKO Radio Pictures, the studio that made it, was itself something of a crucible for how the film industry was tossed back and forth by the pressures of the anti-communist mood of the time. Two of RKO's top creators, director Edward Dmytryk and screenwriter Adam Scott, were numbered among the Hollywood Ten, the first blacklist victims, which gave the studio an early association with the scandals and ugliness that nobody much wanted to deal with at the time. Coupled with the collapse of the film marketplace in 1947, down from the all-time high water mark of 1946, RKO - always one of the smallest and most fragile of the big companies - was in freefall, and in 1948, a controlling interest was acquired by notable crazy billionaire Howard Hughes, who made a conscious point of retooling the studio to reflect his interests, which included nuking the progressive message pictures in the pipeline and replacing them with things like, well, like the hysterical I Married a Communist. (In 1950, Hughes made the decision to play along with the government's antitrust suits against the studios - which in those days were both producers and exhibitors - and divested RKO of its theater chain, one of the key developments in the end of the classical studio era. Which doesn't really concern us at this point, but it speaks to the turmoil during Hughes's time in charge, and even to the desperate straits that RKO would never emerge from after this period - the company would keep making movies for another decade, but never regain its footing as a significant studio).

I lead with the social context surrounding the film, and not the film itself, since without that context, The Woman on Pier 13 is not much more than any other meat-and-potatoes B-level noir of the same period. Less than, maybe; in its zeal to score political points, it allows character motivation to dangle, and so it feels quite a bit more dimwitted than the average 1949 thriller. On the other hand, it was shot by Nicholas Musuraca, one of the great noir cinematographers (though he's best-known for the horror film Cat People), and it's strong work even by his elevated standards. So no matter how flimsy the committee-written story gets, the film always looks like a million bucks, and the mood of tension and omnipresent danger remains high thanks to the visuals even when the script wants to suck all the wind out of it through some preposterous artless dialogue and character beats.

The "I" who married the Communist - ex-Communist, actually, though he gets browbeaten into rejoining the Party early on - is Nan Collins (Laraine Day), née Lowry, newly married after a whirlwind courtship to one Brad Collins (Robert Ryan), an important executive in the San Francisco shipping world. No sooner have they returned from their honeymoon than Nan starts to realise the dark side of getting married to a fellow you barely know: he has secrets in his past, dangerous ones like the obviously shady Christine Norman (Janis Carter), who the couple encounters at a restaurant. How shady are we talking? Norman won't even drink good old American booze - she makes a big point of requesting important beer and champagne.

In no time at all, we find out - but Nan doesn't - that Norman is an active Communist, and that back in the '30s, she had quite the love affair with Brad, when he was still going by his birth name of Frank Johnson. He's since had to change identities to cover up his own Communist activism when miserably unemployed during the depression, and now Norman and her handler, a menacing hulk of a man named Vanning (Thomas Lopez), want Brad/Frank to do some work for them. There's a big war between the shipping union and the bosses, you see, and Brad has been the best voice of reason for a negotiation, convincing the union not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and convincing the bosses to stop being so resistant to giving up a fraction of profits for the benefit of all. But Vanning doesn't like that: he wants Brad to start stonewalling the union to trigger a strike and shut down shipping. He has a whole litany of options for blackmail and coercion right at his fingertips, too, and Brad's as good as dead if he doesn't play along. Meanwhile, Norman is busy seducing Nan's brother Don (John Agar), at first to hurt Nan and Brad, then to have another pawn in the fight against the shipping industry, then because she falls in love, to Vanning's immense disgust; for him, no good Communist would ever even think of having human emotions. And naturally enough, Norman's fit of the girlies will have some nasty ramifications that end up making everything a lot worse for Nan and Brad.

Impassioned message-spinning, I am sure, but The Woman on Pier 13 is awfully murky in pursuing that message: it's not really clear what the Communists are up to besides being Evil, with the shipping plan serving no apparent purpose besides causing mischief and hurting innocents. As far as propaganda goes, the film's a complete dud, since it's so freaked out by the merest mention of the word "communism" that it's more akin to one of those crazy anti-drug melodramas that have been made, on and off, throughout film history; especially in the form of Don, so wide-eyed in his innocence as to beggar belief as any kind of human character, simply functioning as the vessel for the film to depict how easily The Bad Thing can take control of your loved ones. It's so frenzied in its melodramatic scare-mongering as to lose any real ability to effectively monger those scares. And while it makes sure to put authentically communist-sounding statements in the mouths of its Party members, ideology isn't governing their actions, which feel like a low-rent supervillain cooked them up, rather than a radical strategist.

For all that, the film is still a brisk, easy thing to watch, for which we can above all thank its 73-minute running time (it's hard for even a very bad movie to feel particularly unpleasant when it has to rush through its plot quickly enough), but also the generally high level of its cast and crew. Laraine Day is a bit of a wet noodle, and with more or less the lead role, that's a problem; but everybody else around her is in pretty good form, especially the men: Ryan (a liberal activist who openly opposed HUAC and makes an odd choice for a film like this) is particularly great in a role that asks him to balance resentment at the dirty Commies with shame at knowing he was ever involved with them, while having to play the covert spy in front of his wife. It's a B-performance in a B-role, but within the range the film requires him to work, it's hard to imagine anybody doing better, and it provides a human hook that The Woman on Pier 13 dreadfully needs.

The real draw, though, is the style: Musuraca plunging the Communists into smokey shadows and letting darkness slowly creep in around Brad, while he and director Robert Stevenson come up with some pretty ingenious framings that present a close, claustrophobic industrialised world - the staging of a stoolie being drowned on Vanning's orders, for Brad's benefit, is in particular a fantastic piece of horror-tinged gangster viciousness of a kind that only a B-movie could have dreamed of getting away with in '49. Stevenson, a British filmmaker who came to Hollywood after the war and found himself at Disney after RKO folded, is undoubtedly most visible nowadays for his fantasy musicals Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, about as far from film noir thematically, morally, and tonally as you could possibly go; and yet there's a whisper of the same visual sensibility, of creating a light touch of the otherworldly. The film has at places a slight but distinct tang of non-reality, more like a very bad dream than a grubby urban hell like in other noirs; how much of that is the director, and how much is the cinematographer wanting to keep pushing forward, I cannot begin to speculate. But it has some nice touches of weirdness regardless: a couple of unusually low angles in the climax, some conscious dissolves that link characters together and emphasise the control that Vanning and Norman have over the good characters' lives.

It is, all told, a film for specialists: for history buffs digging into the world of the second Red Scare, for noir buffs, and probably not for anybody else. The script is, after all, pretty much a joke, and the themes wildly outdated, even more than in most films noirs. Certainly, it's not surprising that the film was a critical and box office fizzle when it was new, since it doesn't offer much that other films without so many flaws don't already have in abundance. But it's a very special little missive from a very unique time and place, all right, and it's more than a little bit rewarding to the morbidly curious.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1949
-Cecil B. DeMille reinvigorates the Bible epic with Samson and Delilah, at Paramount
-At MGM, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy star in what remains their most well-loved collaboration, Adam's Rib
-King Vidor, Patricia Neal, and Gary Cooper are among those not quite sure what to do with themselves in Warner Bros' wildly dysfunctional adaptation of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1949
-The British-produced The Third Man, shot in Vienna, is the finest depiction of moral rot in post-war Europe ever filmed
-In Japan, Ozu Yasujiro begins his cycle of family dramas with seasonally-inspired, virtually indistinghuisable plots with the masterpiece Late Spring
-Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren make the outstanding experimental animation Begone Dull Care for the National Film Board of Canada

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MY EYES ABHORRED YOU

Well, we finally got there: a Clint Eastwood movie that even I, ever the enthusiastic Clint Eastwood apologist, can't pretend is worth a damn. We have in front of us Jersey Boys, a sepulchral adaptation of the 2005 jukebox musical based on the songs of the Four Seasons that has been stripped bare of any life or energy, and it's easily the worst thing the director has signed off on since Blood Work over a decade ago. It's not just because it fails to be a frothy sing-a-long piece of artistic junk food, like the theatrical production - every mom's favorite show of the 2000s - and the fact that Eastwood plainly wanted to make something with more gravity and depth and intensity than that certainly counts in his favor. Still, Jersey Boys was still ultimately and always going to be a Frankie Valli biopic, and for it to have been the best possible version of such a project would have required a director to make the opposite decision at nearly every juncture.

Not that he wasn't going to make those decisions. By this point, eleven years after Mystic River inaugurated the Classicist Auteur phase of his career, the movie he makes are the movies he makes. That means cinematography by Tom Stern in the carefully desaturated-but-not-monochrome palette he and Eastwood have refined over the years; that means editing by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach that moves with the steady pace of breathing in and out, following a steady pattern between wide and close shots with punctuated establishing shots. This is an aesthetic that has proven nervy and wiry for crime pictures, severe and unforgiving for war pictures, reserved and observational and interrogative for character dramas. And while Jersey Boys is, broadly speaking, a character drama, it's one whose script (by Marshall Brickman & Rick Elice, adapting the book they wrote for the stage musical) is shot through with a theatrical flair that would seem to require a bit more pizzazz even if the fact that this is based on the life of one of the zippiest pop groups of the 1960s didn't already suggest that maybe a bit more flair and a bit less angry, muted "this is what fucking poverty in fucking New Jersey looked like - thinned out colors and hard lighting" minimalism. To take just the most obvious example: Brickman & Elice have left in their theatrical gesture of having three of the members of the Four Seasons speak in direct address to the camera. That can work in movies, though not quite as easily as it does onstage; it requires a heightened reality and barreling momentum, though, and those are the exact two things that Eastwood's style most specifically denies the film. So every time one of the band members looks at the camera in the second or two before opening his mouth to deliver another batch of exposition, the effect is less "ooh, we're forming a personal connection!", more "oh Christ, this again".

The story, anyway - with some historical fudging, but that's just how these things go: Frankie Castellucio (John Lloyd Young), 16 years old in Belleville, NJ in 1951, gets wrapped up with the considerably older bad boy Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), while learning to be a hairdresser. Tommy is one of the many, many people who recognises that Frankie's angelic falsetto is his ticket to a Better Life Someplace Else, and decides to join Frankie in getting there, making the boy the lead singer of a group that Tommy has formed with his brother Nicky (Johnny Cannizzaro) and their friend Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda). The four of them struggle upwards, with jail terms for everybody but the minor Frankie along the way; eventually Nicky drops out of the picture, and Tommy gets the word from his friend Joey Pesci (Joseph Russo) - the one who'd grow up to become an actor in movies like a better version of this one - that Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), co-writer of the bubblegum hit "Short Shorts", presently looking for work. After some interpersonal wrangling, Frankie convinces Tommy to stop being such a dick about little things, and Bob joins the group. All the pieces are in place - with Frankie having adopted the surname "Valli" for marketing reasons - for the band to start its ascent to the stratosphere, which they do on the back of "Sherry" in 1962, with the help of producer Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle). Money and fame pour in immediately, but those interpersonal issues haven't gone away, and for some good boys from Jersey, having that much success only makes it easier to get into even bigger trouble than they ever managed to as kids.

I didn't realise the biggest problem with the movie until I typed all that out: the lifespan of the Four Seasons isn't really all that exciting or unique. Certainly, it's no more dramatic a story than the life and career of Ray Charles, whose 2004 biopic Ray is a mediocre sack of crap. Since Brickman, and Elice can't match that film's moderate level of conflict by making the Four Seasons either blind or black, they have to compensate by relying on the songs to give the film shape and energy, and this is basically the reason the stage Jersey Boys exists. For reasons known best to themselves, the filmmakers (it's hard to say for sure if it happened at the writing or production stage) decided that their movie would be a lot better if it didn't have so many damn songs in it, and Eastwood rather petulantly stages those musical numbers that can't be totally eliminated without much flair, or without letting most of the songs play for more than half of their running time. So we're left, especially for the absolutely deadly first half of the movie, with a paint-by-numbers story about some kids trying to hack it in New Jersey, given gloominess but not much insight by Eastwood's aesthetic (points, though, to Deborah Hopper for her costume designs, which look pretty terrific), which replicates the noirish bleakness of Changeling, especially, out of his recent work, without anything in the material that motivates that choice.

We know that he can do this sort of thing right: generically, Jersey Boys is in the same wheelhouse as his 1988 biopic of Charlie "Bird" Parker, Bird, which is among his best films and maybe the best "musician with issues" film ever made. But everything in Jersey Boys falls flat: outside of Christopher Walken in a small role as the head mobster of Belleville, the performances are serviceable but totally without any currents of depth or inner life (and Young, who created the role of Frankie onstage and has an otherworldly ability to replicate Valli's unique singing style, is painfully too old for the role in the first third or more of the film), and the cumulative impact of their choices and mistakes is blunted by the film's complete inability to keep track of time - 19 years pass by in the main body of the plot, but the only indication that this is happening is done in the form of clothes and hair, and it gets in the way of the drama more than once. When Valli's daughters suddenly grow up by leaps and bounds, it's confusing more than its fast-moving or efficient. And the music doesn't give the film nearly enough energy and spunk to overcome its problems, though at least in the second half, with the Four Seasons cranking out hit after hit, there are enough songs flitting across the soundtrack that the movie isn't as much of a dirge as in the early "teenage years in Jersey" material.

I'll say this: the film opens and closes well, beginning with the backing instrumentals from "December, 1963 (Oh What a Night)" that boldly and yet with a kind of cool reserve usher us into the film's world; and ending with a giant production number of the same song, the one and only place where Jersey Boys even pretends that it's a musical, and not a character drama about people who sing. So at least the first and last impressions are solid. But it's a 134-minute film, and that's a fuckton of time for Eastwood to be miles out of his element and the story to dribble its way across the screen with no pleasure, either on its part or on ours. From an auteurist perspective, it's fascinating to see such a distinct style applied with so little regard for what it's doing or if it works, but that fascination never manages to transfer into anything terribly edifying or enjoyable.

5/10

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