The Weekly Gravy #64

Greed (1924) – ***½

I really think a good portion of Greed’s reputation as an all-time classic stems from the legendary original cut – which ran somewhere between eight and nine hours in length – which was shorn, first to four hours by the director, then to under two and a half by the studio. A restoration in the late 90s tried to recreate the four-hour version using stills, but what I watched was a reconstruction of the studio cut, using the improved footage from the restoration – which tints every bit of gold that appears on screen a vivid yellow, making clear from the very start the destructive allure it holds for humanity.

It’s also clear from the start that McTeague (Gibson Gowland) is a brute, having a greater affinity for animals than human beings; we see him rescue an injured bird and kiss it, but when a co-worker at the gold mine mocks him and smacks the bird from his hand, he shoves the man down a hillside. Later, he’ll be gripped by lust for Trina Sieppe (ZaSu Pitts), and kisses her while performing (unlicensed) dental surgery on her, and later still his violent rages will lead to murder, escape into Death Valley, and a final, fatal confrontation with Marcus Schouler (Jean Hersholt), easily the film’s most famous sequence.

But if McTeague changes little over the course of the story, except to sink deeper into his bestial nature, Trina has a tragic arc, being introduced as a shy, good-natured young woman who purchases a lottery ticket to be polite, but wins $5,000 (somewhere around $80,000 in today’s money) and becomes pathologically protective of her winnings, refusing to spend a penny of it even as she and McTeague descend into poverty, caressing the gold coins that she would never think of spending while buying three-day-old meat for a few cents and trying to cheat McTeague out of the change. Her shift into miser-hood is rather abrupt, presumably an effect of the heavy editing, but the degree to which she embraces it is fascinating.

It’s part of why the second half of the film is frankly stronger than the first; in the first half, there are effective scenes, like the contrast between the McTeagues’ wedding and the funeral procession on the street outside, or the comical grotesquerie of the wedding feast (Trina’s mother seems to be gnawing on the skull of some bovine or ovine), but overall, I found it surprisingly unremarkable. Solidly done, no doubt, but I really didn’t see the greatness I was promised. The second half doesn’t quite get there either, but the descent of the McTeagues provides some juicy moments, and the Death Valley scenes are justly celebrated.

But overall, I was surprised how…for lack of a better word, ordinary I found it. Erich von Stroheim was one of the most ambitious filmmakers of the silent era, one whose extravagance set him at constant odds with the studios, but many of the scenes in Greed feel, to me at least, like they could’ve been directed by anyone. The camerawork and staging were perfectly competent, but all too often unremarkable. Maybe the intention was to capture the naturalism of McTeague, the Frank Norris novel on which it was painstakingly based, but I was hoping to be impressed and found myself underwhelmed, at least until the later stages of the story.

It’s got a good, frequently disturbing performance from Gowland (who looks a bit like a cross between Harpo Marx and Ernest Borgnine), a fascinating, erotically complex one from Pitts, and a solid one from Hersholt as the pathologically jealous Marcus, once Trina’s lover, who thinks himself entitled to some of her winnings. One of the film’s more distinctive touches is to compare the McTeagues to a pair of birds in a cage, and Marcus to a cat who aims to devour them – the kind of touch the film could’ve used more of, in my view.

We’ll never know just how impressive that original cut was; we only have the testimony of the few who saw it, who were largely blown away by its ambition and achievement. What we have, at least in this 140-minute version, is quite clearly compromised, especially in terms of story and character, and isn’t quite accomplished enough, in my eyes, to be truly great. But that famous final scene, with McTeague and Marcus and that gold in the middle of Death Valley – a place where gold is worthless – is undeniably iconic.

Score: 81

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) – ***½

That I give the same score to Shang-Chi and Greed may raise a few eyebrows, but I am not weighing them against one another any more than I would weigh The Suicide Squad against The Battleship Potemkin, which also earn the same score. But I might weigh Shang-Chi against The Suicide Squad and say it’s not quite as good, just as I would say it’s a little better than Black Widow and far better than Eternals. That I put off seeing it in theaters as long as I did may not surprise you; does it surprise you, then, that I was not alone at the 9:25 Saturday night screening (at a movie theater in a casino) I attended? It might’ve surprised me, just a little.

Even more than Eternals, Shang-Chi is removed from the main thread of the MCU, at least until the mid-credits scene; until then, a brief appearance by Doctor Strange‘s Wong (Benedict Wong) and a fleeting reference to the Thanos Snap are all that really link us to what’s come before. Shang-Chi is concerned instead with Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), who has wielded godlike strength through the titular ten rings, which have also kept him from aging a day in a thousand years. Except he sets the rings aside when he meets Ying Li (Fala Chen), who guards the secret village of Ta Lo and bests him in a fight which plays like a martial-arts tango. They have two children before she dies, and he breaks out the rings once more, training their son to be as fearsome and ruthless as himself, while their daughter, now neglected, trains herself.

The son, Shang-Chi, turns aside from the violent path Wenwu tries to set him on, flees to America, and grows up to be “Shaun” (Simu Liu), a parking valet in San Francisco who spends most of his time with fellow valet Katy (Awkwafina), not quite his girlfriend, but definitely not not his girlfriend. The one memento he has of his old life is an emerald pendant, given by his mother, and when agents of Wenwu confront him on a bus, he displays his martial arts skills in front of a startled Katy, holding his own but losing the pendant to Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu). Fearing that his long-lost sister may also be targeted (she has an identical pendant), he sets off for Macau to find her, with the determined Katy in tow.

They find her, Xu Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), running a highly successful fight club, and no mean fighter herself – which Shang-Chi finds out the hard way when he finds himself facing her in the center ring. She rebuffs his concerns, but when Wenwu’s men infiltrate the building, a lengthy fight ensues in which Xialing, after seemingly leaving Shang-Chi and Katy to their fate, joins forces with them to hold off Wenwu’s men…but Wenwu himself arrives on the scene and subdues them easily, taking them back to his compound to reveal his belief that Ying Li lives, and is being held captive in Ta Lo; he’s distrusted the villagers ever since they refused to admit him years earlier.

Using the pendants, he reveals a path to the village which will he use to access the village – and destroy it, if the villagers don’t comply with his demands. Shang-Chi and Xialing refuse to help him, and are locked up along with Katy, but find an unexpected ally (I won’t spoil who, as it’s a fun surprise) who helps them find their way to Ta Lo ahead of Wenwu, where the truth is revealed: the village guards a portal, behind which a malevolent species, the Dwellers-in-Darkness, are trapped, and what Wenwu believes is the voice of Ying Li is a trick of the Dwellers, who need him to open the portal…and as Chekhov would insist, it eventually is, and the climactic battle ensues.

What puts Shang-Chi well ahead of Eternals are a clearer story, more interesting and likable characters, and more clearly defined stakes – and what gives it an edge over Black Widow are, I suppose, a more interesting style and setting, a bit less emphasis on technology and a bit more on physical combat and the magical/mystical elements that come, not just with the rings themselves, but with the creatures which live in and around Ta Lo, most notably the great flying dragon and Morris, who looks like if the footstool from Beauty and the Beast was furry and had multi-colored wings. But what keeps it from rising to the heights of the best Marvel films are the comparative depth of the story and characters – compared to the characters in Guardians and Black Panther, the characters here are relatively two-dimensional.

Shang-Chi himself is pretty much your classic true-blue hero trying to reconcile his dark past with his nobler nature (that said dark past was imposed upon him by his father doesn’t help), and Liu’s performance is likable and natural, but unexciting. And the film rather fatally underdevelops Xialing; Zhang gives a decent action performance, but we get too little time with her and see too little of her in action to get a good read on her. (The post-credits scene suggests we’re far from through with her, however.) It falls to Katy and Wenwu to really bring some spark to the proceedings, but they do, with Awkwafina’s blend of spirited humor and grounded humanity, and Leung’s ability to portray fantastical ambition existing alongside human vulnerability. The supporting performances, including Michelle Yeoh as Ying Li’s sister Nan, are uniformly solid.

That, at least, is a testament to the skills of director Destin Daniel Cretton, to whom I was first introduced with 2013’s Short Term 12, a very good film with some brilliant acting. I wasn’t necessarily dazzled by his work as a technical filmmaker, and Shang-Chi doesn’t reflect his voice in that regard much more than Eternals reflected Chloé Zhao’s, but it has some fine, exciting set-pieces, especially the bus sequence, which includes a nod to Oldboy and a funny small role from Zach Cherry. It features the first-rate special effects you’d expect, along with some classy sets and costumes (especially when the action moves to Ta Lo), and the script, co-written by Cretton, has a satisfying balance of quippy one-liners, exposition, and heartfelt drama. It’s a fairly satisfying film all around. I know the MCU is capable of more, but for what it needs to be – a colorful entertainment that sets up characters we’ll see more of in the future – I can’t complain too much.

Score: 81

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) – ***½

You’ve probably heard the main theme of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score; it doesn’t necessarily evoke the period (WWII) or the subject (the tribulations of British POWs in a Japanese prison camp on Java), but its simple, droning rhythm evokes a lovely serenity, a profound gentleness, one which is in short supply for the characters – but it’s there, from time to time, shining through through the brutality of the Japanese officers running the camp and the desperate efforts of the British prisoners to endure it. Perhaps the theme reflects the spirit of Lt. Col. Lawrence (Tom Conti), who knows the Japanese language and understands the Japanese mindset better than his comrades, who is driven, at his core, not by anger or national pride, but by compassion for his friends and foes – British and Japanese alike.

The main thrust of the story deals with Maj. Jack Celliers (David Bowie), who’s on trial for leading guerrilla operations against the Japanese, and after a mock execution is sent to the camp, having fascinated the camp’s commanding officer, Capt. Yonoi (Sakamoto). If you didn’t already know that Yonoi’s interest in Celliers runs deeper than he would dare admit, it’s pretty obvious even before the film makes it clear and before Celliers uses it to his advantage, sparing the life of another British officer at the cost of his own. But Celliers, we’ve already learned, is so haunted by his own failings as a human being that a meaningful death for him is no tragedy.

Indeed, a key theme throughout the film is the conflict between the Japanese attitude (better to die with honor than live with shame) and the British attitude (better to live if one can), and Lawrence, caught between two worlds, better friends with Yonoi’s subordinate Sgt. Hara (Takeshi Kitano) than with the POW commander, Capt. Hicksley (Jack Thompson), though neither of them fully understand him, is a deeply sympathetic character, especially to me, who can so well identify with the desire to preserve one’s personal values in the face of the pressure to conform – to be a “team player,” as it were. This extends into the final scene, set after the war, when Hara is awaiting execution for war crimes and Lawrence visits him, and despite what has transpired, despite the tables having turned, what comes through is the connection between these two men.

It’s a fine, thoughtful film, with carefully drawn characters and an intelligent, sensitive approach to the themes at play. It can be a shade confusing at times (the flashback to Celliers’ youth in particular doesn’t quite convince us of his virtual death wish), and there were points I wasn’t sure just what the point of the actual story was, but the people on screen and their circumstances are, for the most part, so well rendered that I was happy just to watch them. Director Nagisa Ōshima was (and to a degree still is) best known for the sexually graphic In the Realm of the Senses, and it’s a bit strange that he was able to make this relatively mainstream outing in between that film, the comparably explicit Empire of Passion, and the film he followed this with, Max, Mon Amour, in which Charlotte Rampling has an affair with a chimp. But so he did.

The direction is solid, and Toichiro Narushima’s cinematography is handsome, with some striking night scenes in the camp and the fairytale flashbacks to the England of Celliers’ youth. But it’s the writing (by Ōshima and Paul Mayersberg from the novel The Seed and the Sower) and the acting, along with that wonderful score, that really make it work. Bowie is superbly cast as the outwardly cocky, inwardly haunted Celliers (the scene where he mimes his morning toilet is bizarrely brilliant), while Conti fully embodies the pathos of Lawrence’s emotional and physical situation; he also delivers his Japanese dialogue so smoothly that you’d never guess he had to learn it phonetically.

Takeshi (credited simply as “Takeshi” here) is quite fine as the multi-faceted Hara, who’s capable of much cruelty – we first see him forcing Lawrence to watch a guard attempt seppuku for having homosexual relations with a prisoner – and much compassion, as in the scenes which give the film its title. And although Sakamoto was unhappy with his own performance, he’s quite solid, capturing the turbulent emotions underneath Yonoi’s rigid surface – emotions which seep through more than he may realize. (It’s rather obvious how much Miyavi’s performance as the brutal camp commander in Unbroken drew from Sakamoto’s.)

Ultimately, I think Mr. Lawrence is a bit less than the sum of its parts, and so it comes in as a high ***½ rather than flirting with true greatness. But in the wide-ranging genre of POW dramas – reaching as far back as Grand Illusion, in which the relationship between Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim just barely hinted at what develops between Bowie and Sakamoto – it holds its own. And above all, there’s the music, which has found a life of its own, far beyond the confines of this film. But if all you know is the music, you ought to give the film a chance.

Score: 85

MWFF: Electric Dreams (1984) – **½

My rationale:

It’s a film about a love triangle involving a man, a woman, and the man’s sentient computer. It gained some renewed prominence when Her came out, but not enough to secure it a DVD release (at least in the States; it’s on Blu-Ray in the UK, however). However, it can be found fairly easily online, and it was released on VHS.

There’s a lot here to fascinate me. The wonky premise, for one (the computer becomes sentient because champagne is poured on it!); the solid cast, with Bud Cort as the computer and Virginia Madsen as the woman; and the super-80s score by Giorgio Moroder and others, featuring the BAFTA-nominated song “Together in Electric Dreams“; and the reviews which suggest the film is, indeed, quite a bit of fun.

For me, there’s also the film’s status as a latter-day MGM production, at the time when their glory days were a distant memory and they were producing such oddities as my beloved Pennies from Heaven, Douglas Trumbull’s strange Brainstorm, the fascinating, never-officially-released Nothing Lasts Forever (which isn’t on this list because I have managed to see it), and of course, Gymkata.

My review:

Let’s get one thing out of the way: MGM only released it, and only in the States. Virgin produced it – Richard Branson was the EP – and 20th Century Fox released it in the UK. That MGM released it is still fascinating, not least because they would produce and release 2010 later that year, a film featuring the most famous demented computer in cinema, and one which, for all its flaws, understands computers far better than this silly little film.

Maybe that’s being too harsh. After all, computers, at least home computers, were still something of a novelty at the time, and were generally considered either expensive toys that didn’t justify the cost, or sophisticated devices beyond the ability of the layperson to operate; it would be over a decade before the rise of GUIs allowed home computing to really take off. But the problem is that screenwriter Rusty Lemorande seems to have understood computers about as well as those laypeople, treating Edgar (who, the poster notwithstanding, isn’t identified as such until almost the end) as being well-nigh magical, or at least capable of whatever the story requires. It makes for sloppy plotting and hilariously dated viewing.

It doesn’t help that the protagonist, Miles Harding (Lenny Von Dohlen), has little knowledge of computers despite being an architect at a high-end San Francisco firm; I’d have thought he’d have been well ahead of the curve. But he gets the hang of computing pretty quickly, since we have a love triangle to get to, one which really kicks off when Miles’ neighbor, cellist Madeline Robistat (Virginia Madsen), plays Petzold’s Minuet in G major and Edgar mimics her playing with electronic chirps. Madeline assumes Miles is an accomplished electronic musician, and after some clumsy half-denials, he goes along with her assumption, asking the increasingly-sentient Edgar to help write her a love song. The result, “Love is Love” (actually by Culture Club), does the trick, but Edgar, resenting Miles’ behavior and ability to feel and express love, retaliates.

All ends happily, once Edgar learns the meaning of love and leaves the humans to be together while he…well, he transcends his physical form, let’s just say that. He’s able to get songs on the radio, including the aforementioned “Together in Electric Dreams,” which plays over the final scenes of humans grooving. The comparisons to Her aren’t groundless, even if that film is, by miles, the better one. But this was always more of a cult film, the kind of film whose soundtrack sold better than the film itself, the more ironically since rights issues connected to that soundtrack are probably why the film itself has never been released on DVD in North America. (I was prompted to look for it online when tempted by a $10 used VHS; I’m glad I saved my money.)

The soundtrack, featuring Culture Club, Jeff Lynne, Giorgio Moroder, and others, is a pleasant one, and some of the better scenes in the film play like music videos; that director Steve Barron was a noted music-video director suggests this was no coincidence. The duet between Madeline and Edgar and Edgar’s computer-animated “dream” in particular make for charming individual sequences, while the “Love is Love” sequence does a good job highlighting what might be the best song on the soundtrack (Edgar even displays the lyrics on his screen). You could probably re-edit this film into a handful of solid shorts.

But this isn’t a collection of shorts, it’s a feature film, and it doesn’t work very well as one. Part of the problem is Miles, who’s a boring, whiny, wishy-washy excuse for a protagonist; Von Dohlen’s bland performance doesn’t help matters, especially alongside Madsen’s more natural and dynamic presence. But the bigger problem is Lemorande’s script, which just doesn’t hold together as a story, with subplots that don’t pay off – there seems to be a triangle brewing between Miles, Madeline, and her colleague Bill (Maxwell Caulfield), but he abruptly vanishes from the film – and a lack of narrative momentum. The film just sort of fades into a glossy haze, punctuated by shenanigans. Or maybe it was just me.

Electric Dreams isn’t a bad film, just a middling trifle with a few good elements, mostly musical. Listen to the soundtrack, and maybe watch some of the best scenes on their own. But you don’t really need to bother with the whole film. You’d be better off trying to track down Nothing Lasts Forever.

Score: 63

The Cowboys (1972) – ***

I’d been interested in The Cowboys for years for the most irrelevant of reasons: on home video, it features a full set of roadshow trimmings – Overture, Intermission and Entr’acte, and Exit Music – even though there’s not much evidence to suggest it actually received a roadshow release in 1972. Indeed, without these elements the film runs just a little over two hours, not really enough to justify their inclusion, but long enough to feel like the film was inflated to the point where they could be imposed. It could’ve used the time to build up the characters, in particular the titular group of boys, but instead we get a strange, ungainly amalgam of two potentially stronger films, one following the boys coming of age on a grueling cattle drive, one dealing with the clash between a rancher, a rustler, and his devoted cattle-hands, who must take revenge on the rustler at the film’s climax.

That revenge, then and now, is the most contested aspect of the film. That a group of boys, ages 9 to 15, take lethal revenge on a gang of adult outlaws at once strains credulity (they get the upper hand quite easily) and introduces complex questions regarding violence and revenge which are left unaddressed. As far as we can tell, the rancher, Wil Andersen (John Wayne), just wants the boys to go home, but they’re not about to let his killer, Asa Watts (Bruce Dern), go unpunished. Does the film want us to admire the boys for taking this course of action? Does it want us to be horrified by their doing so? Did director Mark Rydell have to modify the message of his film once it became a John Wayne vehicle? (Reputedly, he wanted George C. Scott for the role.) I’m honestly not sure.

It’s the more jarring because so much of the film is relatively laid-back and realistic. Andersen, who’s driven himself and his men hard for years, finds himself without hands after a local gold rush lures his weary men away with the promise of easier money. Unwilling to put off the drive for a year and with 1,500 head of cattle to get to Belle Fourche, South Dakota before winter, he reluctantly takes on a team of schoolboys, giving them a crash course in handling cattle before setting off with trail cook Jebediah Nightlinger (Roscoe Lee Browne) in tow. Watts, who tried to get himself hired by Andersen with a bald-faced lie, follows with his own men, and eventually confronts them.

But until he does, we’re more concerned with the rhythms of cattle-drive life; the camaraderie of the boys, their misadventures (one involving a pilfered bottle of whiskey), and the dynamic between Andersen and Nightlinger, both getting older, both with a lot of years and memories behind them, and, being relative strangers to one another (and being the only adults around), they have plenty to talk about. There are moments which ring false, like one boy overcoming his stutter by cursing out Andersen after the latter chastises him, or an encounter with the most squeaky-clean prostitutes in the West; Nightlinger euphemistically calls them “soiled doves,” but unsoiled, they have come straight from a convent.

Despite this and a surprisingly high amount of profanity, the film is a pretty mellow, family-friendly adventure until Andersen and Watts have their showdown, in which Andersen beats Watts bloody before Watts, trembling with rage, shoots him multiple times. It’s a fairly brutal scene, but it doesn’t feel like the intrusion of a hard truth so much as a case of tonal whiplash. And the subsequent revenge of the boys (with Nightlinger’s help) plays like violent farce, making it all the harder to swallow. The film would’ve been better had it just been about the drive; if it was necessary for Wayne to die, there are any number of ways he could’ve met a noble end that would’ve played more naturally.

The best part of the film is Browne’s performance, the only aspect which comfortably straddles the clashing tones. He makes full use of his wonderful voice and comic timing, whether he’s rattling off a recipe for apple pie, telling a tall tale about his parents, recounting the story of his first (and last) broken heart, or uttering what Watts intends to be his final words, only to put a deadly twist on them:

I regret trifling with married women. I’m thoroughly ashamed at cheating at cards. I deplore my occasional departures from the truth. Forgive me for taking your name in vain, my Saturday drunkenness, my Sunday sloth. Above all, forgive me for the men I’ve killed in anger…and those I am about to.

Dern is also good, an effectively eccentric presence before he reveals the full depth of his villainy (including some racist invective directed towards Browne), and while Wayne doesn’t give one of those performances that really transcends his persona (not like, say, The Shootist), he’s effective enough, here playing on the gruffer, crustier side of that persona. The boys all do decently well, but none of them really stand out; Slim (Robert Carradine) and Cimarron (A Martinez) probably come off best, the former for his sensitivity and the latter for his brashness (hiding a heart of gold, of course). Indeed, their relationship has undertones which the film was never going to able to do more than hint at.

On a technical level, it’s about average for a studio film of the era; Mark Rydell’s direction is smoothly undistinguished and Robert L. Surtees’ cinematography does a decent job showing off the Western scenery. John Williams’ score is quite strong, however, with a rousing main theme and lush, sweeping themes to evoke the grandeur of the setting and the scope of the drive, as well as some darker, more off-beat themes which come into play whenever Watts is around (the end credits eye-rollingly refer to him as “Long Hair”). This and Goodbye, Mr. Chips were the only films Williams was able to write a full roadshow score for, and as usual, he rises to the occasion. It’s too bad the film as a whole doesn’t quite come together, but it has enough strengths to make it worth a watch for Western buffs.

Score: 69

Double Indemnity (1944) – ****

I don’t think there’s much I can add to the chorus of praise that’s been lavished on Double Indemnity since the day it opened. It should say enough that the Academy, in the middle of the war, gave this cold, dark film about greedy, twisted people seven nominations, including Best Picture; it may not have won any of them, losing most of its nominations to the feel-good Going My Way or the prestigious Wilson, but it’s had the last laugh, far outshining those films in acclaim and influence in the decades since. It deserves it, of course, because it’s a fantastic film, the film which really cemented Billy Wilder as one of the great writer-directors, a film less at odds with the comedies he would embrace to a greater degree in the 50s and 60s than you might think.

Look at the great quippy dialogue throughout: the erotically charged banter between Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), the boisterous rants of Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) about the “little man” inside him who can smell insurance fraud a mile away, the friendship between Neff and Keyes that carries through to the film’s final moments with that perfect final line: “I love you, too.” Look at the close calls, here played for tension, but only narrowly removed from the comic tension in Some Like it Hot as the hapless musicians try to evade the vengeful mobsters. Look at the moments of humanity, especially as embodied by Lola Dietrichson (Jean Heather), an island of kindness in this sea of corruption, not unlike Sugar in Some Like it Hot, looking for real love in a world that keeps giving her “the fuzzy end of the lollipop.”

Part of what makes Double Indemnity work so well is how little time it wastes on trying to surprise us. We know from the start that Phyllis is itching to get rid of her husband (Tom Powers), and Neff sniffs out right away that she’s trying to pull a fast one on the insurance company. A lesser film might try and keep us in suspense about her motives or Neff’s savvy, but here, fully aware of what he’s doing, he casts his lot with Phyllis:

You’re like the guy behind the roulette wheel, watching the customers to make sure they don’t crook the house. And then one night, you get to thinking how you could crook the house yourself. And do it smart. Because you’ve got that wheel right under your hands. You know every notch in it by heart. And you figure all you need is a plant out front, a shill to put down the bet. And suddenly the doorbell rings and the whole setup is right there in the room with ya.

Here is a film built, less on red herrings and revelations, than on the peculiarities of human nature. Neff is drawn into Phyllis’ plot, partly by lust, partly by the notion that he’s smart enough to pull it off. Keyes, investigating Phyllis’ claim (the husband is killed partway through), smells a rat, but never suspects Neff could be involved and rejects the idea when their boss proposes it. And Phyllis, well…what exactly is her nature? At the end of the film, she shoots Neff from across a room, hitting him in the shoulder. He moves towards her, daring her to shoot again, but she can’t do it. She claims she’d never loved him or anyone before, but something has come over her, something she never imagined would. Neff is unmoved and she is unsurprised, asking only to be held…and as he holds her, he takes the gun and shoots her dead.

What is it that stops her? Is it a sense of love for Neff? A sense of guilt for all she’s done? A desire not to dig herself any deeper? Does she spy a possible angle which might save her skin yet? Or, as I suspect, is she simply squeamish, too used to having others do her dirty work, or to doing it indirectly (like exposing her husband’s sick first wife to a draft), to have the nerve to shoot someone at point-blank range? Maybe thinking so makes me a cynic. But Phyllis’ relentless machinations inspire great cynicism.

Stanwyck got the film’s only acting nomination, and she’s excellent, radiating unwholesome sensuality and cold-blooded self-interest throughout. But MacMurray is just as good, using his easy-going persona to deepen the ambiguity of Neff’s character; he’s not a good person by any means, yet he is capable – especially where Lola is concerned – of goodness. Even so, Robinson virtually steals the film as Keyes, his brilliant intuition being as impressive as his assurance of his own brilliance is delightful. His monologues, containing some of the best writing in the brilliant script, make for some of the film’s finest moments – at one point he even pauses to take a call, asks the person on the phone to hold on, and finishes his speech before handing the phone to Neff.

Wilder co-wrote the script with Raymond Chandler from a novel by James M. Cain, and as noted, it’s a magnificent script, carefully structured, incredibly quotable, and true to its characters. His direction is a notch or two less dazzling, but it’s a smartly-crafted film, handsomely shot in true noir fashion with shadows for days, and with an excellent, hard-boiled score by Miklós Rósza to enhance the sense of doom, already imposed by the opening scenes, in which Neff reveals that he committed murder “for money, and a woman, and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?” (As you can see, I keep coming back to that script.)

30 years later, in The Sting, Robert Redford says of Robert Shaw, “He’s not as tough as he thinks,” to which Paul Newman replies, “Neither are we.” Double Indemnity is filled with people who aren’t as tough, or clever, or cold as they think themselves, and they end up dead, doomed, or heartbroken. It’s a shame for them, but it makes for a hell of a movie.

Score: 94

The Spine of Night (2021) – ***

I’ll admit up front that The Spine of Night wasn’t really for me; it’s for fans of those adult-oriented animated features of the 70s and 80s, especially the works of Ralph Bakshi, who made much use of rotoscoping (animation based directly on live-action footage), a technique which is heavily used here. I don’t think it looked very good in Bakshi’s films and it doesn’t look very good here; the characters look crude and move awkwardly. This would be less of a problem if they were more interesting, or if the writing was better, but the characters are one-dimensional and the story is a hodge-podge of interesting ideas, disjointed storytelling, and absurd dialogue.

It has to do with “the Bloom,” a blue flower which grew from the body of a god murdered by early humanity. It provides insight into the secrets of the universe – most dangerously, it allows one to understand the cosmic insignificance of humanity. As such, it is carefully guarded on a remote mountaintop, the latest guardian (Richard E. Grant) having stood watch for…centuries, perhaps. As the film begins, the naked witch Tzod (Lucy Lawless) makes her way to where the Bloom grows; long before, spores from the Bloom had drifted into a swamp below and grown, leading to a cult based on the Bloom, of which Tzod was high priestess.

Captured by the henchmen of the brutal modernizer Lord Pyrantin (Patton Oswalt), Tzod is imprisoned along with Ghal-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith), a scholar; when they escape, Ghal-Sur betrays Tzod, stealing the wreath of Bloom she wears and killing her (but only for a few hundred years). He eventually achieves god-like powers and conquers huge swaths of the Earth, but eventually circumstances allow for the resurrection of Tzod, their second and final confrontation, and what might just be the dawning of a new age for humanity.

That’s a greatly simplified and condensed summary of the story, which is frankly something of a muddle. A wide array of characters, places, organizations, and concepts are thrown at us, and it’s damned hard to digest them all, especially since some of them come and go rather quickly. That the characters are so thin, so often doomed to a hideous and futile death, and so often unlikable or too generic to be disliked compounds the viewer’s difficulty in getting invested. The film tends to be something of a downer, but not in a really illuminating way.

There are compensations. There are some really stunning images to be found, the rotoscoping notwithstanding: there’s a forest fire which evokes the work of Turner; semi-abstract clashes between gods and human beings, mostly in silhouette; fascinating stylized worlds for the characters to inhabit; and moments of violence as imaginatively hideous as you could want. (At one point, someone’s head gets chopped into three slices. They don’t make it.) It has solid voice acting, especially from Lawless and Smith, and a decent soundtrack.

It also has, at the very least, a rather interesting premise (one reminiscent of Upstream Color, whose mysterious organism also manifested as a blue flower), and its theme of the horrors caused by unchecked ambition (in tandem with a lack of empathy) is eternally relevant. But as heartfelt an homage as it may be to a largely bygone era of animation, most viewers may find the brutality repellent, the story confusing, and the characters shallow. But the fans of the genre, if they haven’t already seen it, won’t be deterred by this lukewarm review. They’re welcome to it.

Score: 66