The Weekly Gravy #7

Who Killed Captain Alex (2010) – **

If Maya Deren made movies for what Hollywood spent on lipstick, then Nabwana IGG makes them for what Hollywood spends on tipping baristas; he made this film for $200 or so at his studio, Wakaliwood, located in Wakaliga, an impoverished area of Kampala, Uganda. Indeed, the film opens with some behind-the-scenes footage of Nabwana and his cast working at Wakaliwood, fashioning a green-screen from a green sheet tacked to a brick wall, and of Nabwana editing footage on a computer which, I learned, he assembled himself from spare parts. There’s no doubt that his films are labors of love.

And if their minuscule budgets are obvious—this opening clip also shows what seems to be a commando raid on New York City, achieved with the aforementioned green-screen, and it’s not even faintly convincing—that’s just part of their charm, which led to the first trailer for Captain Alex going viral when it first dropped in 2010, and I learned about it…probably around 2013, being just as captivated by the over-the-top action, ludicrous CGI, and spirited narration as everyone else. And today, I finally saw the film itself (and so can you—Wakaliwood posted it to YouTube), and…you might be better off sticking with the trailer.

The story is fairly standard action-melodrama material. The Ugandan government assigns commando Captain Alex (Kakule William) and his team to bring down the powerful Tiger Mafia, led by Richard (Sseruyna Ernest). After Alex’s team captures Richard’s brother and puts him in jail, Richard becomes hell-bent on freeing him, using moles to infiltrate the team with the aim of taking Alex hostage…only Alex ends up getting killed right before Richard’s operatives can kidnap him. But no one knows who did it.

So you have two people trying to figure out…who killed Captain Alex? On the one hand, there’s Richard, who’s pissed that he was not only denied his chance for revenge, but still hasn’t freed his brother, and on the other there’s Alex’s brother Bruce U (Bukenya Charles), a martial arts expert determined to get revenge for his brother’s demise. Much ass is kicked, many people are shot, and at the end we still have no idea whodunnit. Spoilers? Perhaps.

The real question is, will you care? Because for me, the problem with Captain Alex isn’t the infinitesimal budget, but the near-total lack of characterization. Richard is easily the most dynamic figure in the film, and Sseruyna easily gives the best performance; Alex, on the other hand, doesn’t even register, and Bruce doesn’t fare much better. It’s not that the performances are bad, so much as they barely exist; the actors are mostly just figures on the screen. As a result, it’s hard to invest in what’s happening, and outside of the action scenes, it grows rather dull, even with a running time of barely over an hour.

It doesn’t help that Nabwana’s direction is mostly at the home-movie level. Outside of a few key scenes, the filmmaking seems to consist mainly of pointing the camera at the actors and letting them go. There’s virtually no style, no vision, no voice to be found. When Nabwana lets loose with the action, there’s some cheesy excitement to be had, and when he gets ambitious and trots out the hilariously awful CGI to show a “helicopter” attacking downtown Kampala, the film lives up to its ironic reputation.

But overall, once you allow for the conditions under which it was made, Captain Alex is just a hair too competent (or something) to be so bad it’s good, and it’s definitely not good enough to be good. You can appreciate that it exists, that Nabwana and his team made an extremely sincere effort, and that holds together as well as it does, but that’s about all. It’s a shame that the original soundtrack seems to be unavailable and that we have to watch it with the running commentary of VJ (Video Joker) Emmie, who gently riffs on the film at times but generally acts as the film’s hype man, but his enthusiasm, and the fact that he fills the original film’s numerous silent moments, help to make it all considerably more engaging. But still not enough for most viewers to need to bother.

Score: 40

The New Centurions (1972) – ***

Can we look at this film the same way anymore? Can we look at scenes like the whole paddy-wagon sequence, where two LAPD officers spend their shift driving a bunch of black sex workers around town in the back of the wagon, providing them with alcohol so they’ll get too drunk to work, and dropping them off without taking them in, in the same light the filmmakers intended? In the film, it’s played more for humor than anything else—everyone seems to be having a good time. But in this day and age, with the police, their role in society, their racial biases, and their abuses of power more scrutinized than ever before—and not least those of the LAPD—can we take this film as realistic, or is it just another strain of the “Hollywood crap” it openly derides?

But then again, do we even go back to this film anymore? I suppose some must, given its releases on DVD and Blu-Ray, but it’s not like the names of Andy Kilvinski and Roy Fehler are mentioned in the same breath as Joe Friday or Popeye Doyle. The problem, I suppose, is that The New Centurions doesn’t really have that much to make it stand out among the decades-long glut of cop dramas. It does have George C. Scott as the sardonic veteran Kilvinski, and while it’s not one of his great performances, I can’t imagine him ever being less than compelling. But despite Scott’s top billing, the main character is the rookie officer Fehler, and Stacy Keach, while a good actor in his own right, never quite overcomes the lapses in the writing which keep Fehler’s arc—from principled newcomer to alcoholic veteran and partway back again—from really landing.

But the problem is more with Stirling Silliphant’s adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh’s novel. The novel, like the film, is episodic and covers several years in the lives of its characters. But the film compresses weeks—even months—and drastic amounts of character development into the space of a single scene or even a cut, resulting in a choppy story with underdeveloped characters. One moment Roy is a sad drunk trying to connect with a robbery victim (Rosalind Cash); the next, they’re a couple, and just a scene or two later he’s discussing marriage! The film has the feel of a whole season of TV squeezed into a single movie, and not too gracefully at that. At the very least, it probably should’ve been a miniseries.

But at least there are some memorable episodes along the way, my favorite probably being either the one in which a tipsy Fehler finds drugs in the purse of a woman who’s so determined not to go back to jail that she drives wildly through the streets with him clinging to the side of her car, terrified she’ll crush him against another car or a wall, but also terrified that he’ll be killed if he lets go, or the scene where Kilvinski threatens a slumlord who’s exploiting a group of undocumented immigrants. There’s a good score by Quincy Jones, some solid cinematography, and an ending which effectively displays how suddenly tragedy can strike in this line of work.* It’s just not enough to make the film truly memorable, and caught between the previous year’s The French Connection and the following year’s Serpico, it’s no surprise this has fallen through the cracks. And despite Kilvinski’s argument that the critics of the police only focus on the criminals and not the actual victims of crime, the film itself doesn’t have much time for either of them.

Score: 68

*Spoiler: It’s an amusing coincidence that, years before The Ninth Configuration, this film would also feature Scott Wilson cradling Stacy Keach’s body.

Blossoms in the Dust (1941) – ***

Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon made eight films together, three of which—in three consecutive years—earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture. The second, Mrs. Miniver, actually won, and won Garson Best Actress; the third, Madame Curie, went home empty-handed, and I’ve reviewed it here. And this, the first, earned one award, for Best Art Direction (Color), and two other nominations: Best Actress for Garson and Best Cinematography (Color). Mrs. Miniver is at least remembered as a Best Picture winner (and for Garson’s record-breaking acceptance speech—five and a half minutes), but the other two films are largely forgotten. And it’s not hard to see why, as neither is especially memorable.

This one is the story of Edna Gladney (Garson), who was shaped by a series of tragedies. First, her beloved foster sister (Marsha Hunt) kills herself when her prospective in-laws disapprove of her illegitimate birth. Then, her young son dies in a carriage accident (and we’ve already learned she can’t have another child). Finally, her husband (Pidgeon) dies of a vague illness after finally rebuilding the fortune they had lost. So she devotes herself to caring for abandoned and orphaned children, finding homes for them and fighting the stigma of illegitimacy, finally convincing the Texas state legislature to remove the word “illegitimate” from birth certificates. She faces opposition and must make many sacrifices, but is ultimately triumphant.

There was a real Edna Gladney, who ran the Texas Children’s Home and Aid Society, who really did campaign to change the law, who really did help a great many children find good homes, and who put the money she made from the film right back into her work. She didn’t, as far as I can tell, have a sister who killed herself from shame; in fact, Gladney herself was born to an unwed mother. She also didn’t lose a son that I can see, and her husband died much later than the film would imply. Nor was she brought up in the posh lifestyle the film depicts her enjoying at the start. But what of that? Most biopics take liberties with the facts.

But I have to object when they change the facts for the sake of generic tropes and clichés, as they do here. Gladney did laudable work and her fight against the stigma of illegitimacy was a just one. But this is just another prestigious biopic, with a romanticized story and stirring speeches to try and change the hearts of her straw-men opponents, and some very dated elements, especially Gladney’s cheerfully subservient black servants (Clinton Rosemond and Theresa Harris). It certainly didn’t deserve a Best Picture nomination, not over The Devil and Daniel Webster (which won Best Score and was up for Best Actor) or Fantasia (which was eligible this year and won two honorary awards).

It didn’t especially deserve the nomination for Garson, who’s okay, especially in the scenes where she shows Gladney’s grueling workload and the ease with which she bears it, but whose big speeches feel like…well, like big speeches, Oscar clips before those were a thing. (Pidgeon is adequate but forgettable; the best performances are from Felix Bressart as the German doctor who becomes Gladney’s right-hand man and character actor Marc Lawrence as a slimy client of hers.) The cinematography is nothing special; it was nominated mostly because any major color film at the time got on. As for the Oscar-winning sets, they’re pretty good, both the plush mansions early on and the humbler houses in the second half. Given the minimal competition (there were just three nominees), it was a reasonable winner. But there’s just not much to recommend here, unless you’re a Garson fan or an Oscar completist.

One minor annoyance for me, by the way: the film is mostly set in Texas, but “Home on the Range” makes several appearances on the soundtrack. As a native Kansan, I do not approve.

Score: 65

Underworld (1927) – ***½

I was able to see this in a theater—the suitably Art Deco Music Hall in downtown Kansas City—with live musical accompaniment courtesy of Kansas City Theatre Pipe Organ Inc., and for no admission charge. It was the kind of treat I wasn’t going to pass up, and the program also included a few purely musical elements (including a suite derived from the score to the Rudolph Valentino film The Eagle) and an early Chaplin short, A Woman (crude but amusing), so it was well worth the time. And the feature presentation wasn’t too shabby itself.

It’s an early gangster picture (the KCPTO publicity touted it as the first noir ever made), but it’s not so much about crime as it is about characters, about generosity and jealousy and self-denial, and if it’s not one of Josef von Sternberg’s great films (like, say, his next film, The Last Command), it’s still quite intriguing and holds up fairly well over 90 years on.

It’s the story of brash bank robber Bull Weed (George Bancroft), who’s witnessed pulling his latest heist by an alcoholic vagrant he nicknames “Rolls Royce” (Clive Brook). Rolls promises not to squeal on Bull, who gets him a job as a janitor at a favorite club of his. After Rolls incurs the wrath of Bull’s biggest rival, Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler), by refusing to be humiliated by him, Bull fully takes Rolls under his wing, giving him money to clean up and setting him up in an apartment which happens to be a favorite hideout of Bull’s gang. Bull’s moll, “Feathers” McCoy (Evelyn Brent), becomes fascinated by the low-key, intellectual Rolls, so different from the boisterous Bull.

At a gangland party, Buck attempts to assault Feathers, and a drunken Bull pursues him, finally shooting him to death. He’s sentenced to hang, and Rolls develops a scheme to rescue him as he’s being escorted to the gallows. Feathers wants to run away with Rolls, wishing to be out from under Bull’s thumb, but Rolls points out how much they owe to him and how they couldn’t live with themselves if they betrayed him. Unfortunately, Bull gets word of Feathers’ feelings for Rolls, and breaks out on his own, ready to take drastic revenge on those he believes betrayed him.

I won’t say how the story resolves, except to say it does so less in the genre mold and more in the mold of a story about people who, for all the darkness in their characters, care about one another and value some things more highly than wealth or power. Bull is quite different from the standard gangster of the genre‘s heyday, whose virtues were mainly performative or too few to outweigh their vices. Bull has plenty of those, but his regard for Feathers and Rolls is genuine, and his rage upon learning of their relationship is clearly rooted in a sense of being wronged by loved ones.

Bull is a brute, and a frequently childish one, and his moments of tenderness are, if anything, more startling than his violent outbursts. One of the film’s strangest scenes has him returning to the apartment, preparing to confront Rolls and/or Feathers, and hearing what he thinks is a cop by the door. He arms himself and opens it—only to find that it was the milkman leaving a bottle by the door, and a small kitten is sniffing at it. Bull takes the bottle and the kitten, sits down, pushes the cap in with his finger, and lets the kitten lick the milk off of it, all while having a dazed look on his face.

It’s an odd little scene, but Bancroft makes it work; he’s got a blunt energy rather like Wallace Beery’s, but he seems more genuinely likable, and his boisterous fits of laughter are at once rather hammy and rather compelling. It’s a very solid performance.

But in many ways, the most compelling character is Rolls and the most compelling performance is Brook’s. The early scenes, with the haggard, drunken Rolls, are especially fascinating because Brook was best known for playing stiff-upper-lip types, strongly disciplined officers and refined gentlemen (as he did in Cavalcade). Seeing him play so much against type, and so convincingly that I didn’t even realize it was him until I looked it up afterwards, is about as high a piece of praise as I can offer. But he really does fine work by any standard, especially when he compares Bull to “Attila at the gates of Rome,” revealing his intellectual side and his wistful melancholy at the same time; he then tells Bull he was born two millennia too late for the kind of life he lives.

Before…

After Rolls cleans up and shifts into something more like the standard Brook mode, Brook’s performance remains compelling. Chatting with Feathers, we learn that he was once a lawyer, and when she guesses a woman was partly responsible for his descent into drunkenness, he claims not to be interested in women. Though he and Feathers grow close, and they share a few kisses (rather restrained on his end), there remains the tantalizing possibility that Rolls is either gay or asexual, with Brooks’ steely restraint leaving Rolls fascinatingly ambiguous. He seems at once most at home in a suit, surrounded by his books, and more confined, more repressed than he did when he was wandering the streets. It’s really a fine performance Brook gives here, possibly the best he ever gave.

…and after.

If anything, Bancroft and Brooks are so good that the rest of the film seems weaker by comparison. It’s not bad by any means; von Sternberg’s direction is solid, Bert Glennon’s cinematography is fine, the script has some intriguing elements (Ben Hecht won the Oscar for “Best Story,” roughly equivalent to Best Original Screenplay, at the first Oscars), and the other performances are fine; Brent in particular allows for some intriguing ambiguity about Feathers’ exact feelings for Bull. But nothing else about the film stands out to me the way their performances do, and for them, it’s definitely worth seeing at least once. And if you can see it, or any other silent film, with a live score, then do that. It’s absolutely worth it.

Score: 82

Bright Road (1953) – ****

Chalk this up as one of the pleasantest surprises I’ve had in ages. I’d known about the film but hadn’t thought about watching it, until I happened to catch it tonight on Turner Classic Movies. It didn’t take long to win me over, and by the end I was truly grateful that circumstances allowed me to see it; it’s the kind of film I long to discover so that I can champion it. It aired right after Carmen Jones, a far better-known film, a far more tragic one with Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte playing far different roles—and singing with their own voices, although Bright Road isn’t a musical.

It’s a portrait of a year in the life of Jane Richards (Dandridge), a fourth-grade teacher at an all-black school in the South. It’s her first assignment and she’s nervous (as she reveals in her inner monologues), especially as she tries to work with C.T. Young (Philip Hepburn), a boy who’s quite intelligent—he’s especially good with insects and keeps a beehive, selling the honey to help support his large family—but clearly impatient with the restraints of the classroom, as he’s repeated the last two grades. As she works to bring out the best in him, he develops a bond with classmate Tanya (Barbara Ann Sanders), whose religious devotion and romantic view of the world contrast with C.T.’s skeptical realism.

There’s not really a story so much as an overview of that year, through moments comic and tragic, as C.T. struggles with Jane, his classmates, the principal (Belafonte), and his own stubborn nature. But all ends positively, especially after his skill with the bees saves his class from potential catastrophe, and it’s clear he won’t have to repeat this grade, even if he’d like to.

It’s a rare film from this era to have an almost entirely black cast and be a major studio production (the only white character is a doctor (Robert Horton) who appears in one scene), let alone to be one which virtually never touches on racial issues, outside of a Sunday-school scene where C.T. asks why, if all human beings are brothers under God, they don’t always behave that way towards each other, to which Jane replies that this is not God’s doing, but humanity’s. According to Wikipedia, the film was taken to task for not dealing more effectively with the racial politics of the time, but Bright Road isn’t trying to be that kind of film.

It’s a film about life, about black people living their lives, about childhood and the simultaneous ephemerality and timelessness of that part of one’s life, about love and pain and laughter. It’s arguably more radical for not using its characters and their experiences to any end beyond depicting simple human experience, especially coming as it did from MGM, then under the control of Dore Schary, who loved his message pictures. But if there’s a message here, it’s more in praise of public schoolteachers than in specific favor of racial harmony.

And it mostly eschews messaging entirely in favor of observation, at which it works beautifully. The scenes of the children at play and in the classroom ring amazingly true, feeling real and unaffected throughout, getting all the humor and fragility of youth in scenes like C.T. and Tanya “conversing” with a mockingbird, or the rehearsals for a classroom production of Sleeping Beauty, with stilted deliveries that ring absolutely true for anyone who’s put on a show at that age—and a turn for the tragic which is ultimately dealt with in a scene of heartbreaking restraint. Even here, the emphasis is on showing, not telling, and it makes for a film which holds up remarkably well decades later.

The performances are strong, with Hepburn (whose career was fairly short-lived—I can’t find any information as to his later life) being the true star of the film; he’s wonderfully natural, conveying C.T.’s snarky wit (at one point the principal strikes his palms four times with a ruler, and C.T. points out that he got six strikes the previous time), fierce intelligence, defiant nature, and fundamental goodness to fine effect. Dandridge is warm and earnest, convincingly inexperienced but not coming off as a naïf, and if her voiceovers are a touch on-the-nose, she delivers them with the right tone of gentle exasperation which we’ve all seen in our teachers. Belafonte is a touch stiff at times (though sometimes to suitably amusing effect), but he’s quite charming as well, and his rendition of “Suzanne” (which may have been written for the film) is one of the film’s loveliest moments; he’s just singing to relax at the end of the school day, and Jane is just listening to him.

It’s another example of how the film is able to just step back and let life play out before the camera. Director Gerald Mayer (Louis B.’s nephew) mostly worked in television, and his lack of affect helps the modest material, namely Emmet Lavery’s script from Mary Elizabeth Vroman’s story “See How They Run,” a tune which pops up in David Rose’s generally fine score (marred only by the fleeting, tacky-sounding usage of electric organs). It’s not a flawless film, with a few moments that don’t feel quite as natural and real as the rest of the picture, and I’m willing to admit I’m rating it higher than most would. But honestly, I was so thoroughly charmed by it that I don’t care. At a brisk 69 minutes, it’s an easy watch. Check it out.

Score: 88