The Weekly Gravy #131

Divorce Italian Style/Divorzio all’italiana (1961) – ***½

In 1962, Divorce Italian Style not only won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, but it managed nominations for Best Director and Best Actor – a testament not only to its popularity but to the Academy’s embrace of foreign films during this decade; at least 16 foreign-language films (depending on which films you count as such) got nominated in this category alone, with A Man and a Woman also winning the award, and seven were nominated for Best Director. Ironically, Divorce and A Man and a Woman aren’t held in the same regard nowadays as, say, Last Year at Marienbad or Through a Glass Darkly, which Divorce managed to beat – but don’t hold that against Divorce, a pretty clever film in its own right.

Ferdinando Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni) has problems. His father’s gambling debts have ruined the family fortune, and they must share their ancestral home with his parvenu uncle and his family, including Angela (Stefania Sandrelli), Ferdinando’s teenage cousin whom he’s madly in love with, and who seems pretty fond of him as well. But Ferdinando is married to the ardently devoted Rosalia (Daniela Rocca), and in devoutly Catholic Italy, divorce is out of the question. But there’s a loophole.

Those who commit “honor killings,” usually involving catching their spouse or lover with another, are given very light sentences, especially when they’re defended by attorneys like De Marzi (Pietro Tordi), whose impassioned summations are heralded by bursts of applause from the courtroom audience. But even if a suitable lover could be found for Rosalia, she must be induced to cheat on her beloved Ferdinando – and then she must be caught in such a way that Ferdinando can lethally defend his honor. Complications, naturally, ensue.

The film really makes no bones about what a scoundrel Ferdinando is; he’s trying to rid himself of a loving wife to marry his very young cousin (Sandrelli was 14 or 15 during production, which makes it the more uncomfortable), and even has fantasies about pushing Rosalia into boiling water or evicting her from Earth on a rocket. But that’s part of the film’s broader skewering of Italian society, of the hot tempers and outbursts of violence which mark daily life, of the arrogant lewdness of men, and of the particular brand of vicious honor so intrinsic to their culture that it’s validated by the law itself.

That the film manages to be genuinely entertaining, rather than pushing us away with all this amorality, is partly owing to the script, but also to Pietro Germi’s direction, which is full of energy and little touches of comic invention, and to the editing, which doesn’t overwhelm us but keeps us on our toes as Ferdinando’s scheme develops, and as he must improvise when things don’t work out – or work too well. The strong production design (the Cefalù house is a fantastic setting) and Carlo Rustichelli’s droll score add a great deal as well.

I’m not sure Mastroianni really needed an Oscar nomination, especially in as strong a year as 1962, but coming off La Dolce Vita (which is cleverly featured in this film) he was a major international star, and his deadpan stuffiness (he often reacts to developments with a simple tut and a twitch of the moustache), balanced by his earnestly absurd narration and flashes of hypocrisy (“Is that scoundrel trying to seduce my servant?”) are key not just to the film’s success, but to our being able to tolerate the sleazy Ferdinando. The supporting cast all suitably fill their roles, the real standouts being Tordi as the shamelessly theatrical De Marzi and Rocca as poor devoted Rosalia.

While some aspects of Divorce haven’t aged especially well – and, thankfully, the laws regarding “honor killings” have been changed – its fundamental skewering of human nature, of lustful entitlement and how law and emotion clash in the courtroom (throughout the film, Ferdinando imagines how De Marzi will defend him, his florid speeches changing as necessary), remain quite timeless – as does the final sting in the tail.

Score: 83

Rocktober: Doom (2005) – **

Films based on video games are usually pretty bad; Detective Pikachu is about the only one I’ve seen that I’d consider genuinely good. (Some like Werewolves Within, but I found it tiresome.) Doom is certainly a bad film, and while I probably found a bit more to appreciate in it than Nate did, we agreed it was the weakest Rocktober film we’d seen thus far – it forces one to confront the fundamental problem with video game films, which is that removing the ability to control what happens leaves one to passively experience the story and characters…which is hardly the selling point of Doom.

The film throws us into the deep end, as we’re told that in 2026 (just three years from now!) a portal to Mars was discovered in the Nevada desert, and for 20 years, research has been going on at the Olduvai station on Mars, trying to understand what happened to the ancient civilization that built the portal. We get an idea as a group of scientists, fleeing through the hallways, are brutally torn apart by unseen forces. We’re then introduced to a group of future Marines, led by Sarge (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), who are assigned to identify and contain the threat.

We get a few personal details about them: Portman (Richard Brake) is a pervy sleaze, Goat (Ben Daniels) is a laconic holy roller, Kid (Al Weaver) is a nervous rookie, Duke (Raz Adoti) is a motor-mouth, Destroyer (DeObia Oparel) is tough and cool, Mac (Yao Chin) is present, and Reaper (Karl Urban) is haunted. Their names (well, their code names) are helpfully recited by their guns in some of the bluntest name-dropping I’ve ever heard.

12 minutes into the film and they’re already arriving on Mars, where we’re introduced to Dr. Sam Grimm (Rosamund Pike), Reaper’s sister, who’s one of the lead researchers at Olduvai. As the Marines investigate the site, we’re gradually introduced to the grotesque creatures responsible for the mayhem, which turn out to be human beings mutated by “C24,” a special chromosome invented by the ancient Martians. C24, we’ll eventually learn, turns good people, like Reaper, into superbeings, and bad people (like just about everyone else we see) into demonic beasts.

This Calvinist chromosome seems to have been invented for the film; the games, from what I’ve heard, deal with unequivocal demons. But despite the presence of the intensely devout Goat (who carves crosses into his skin every time he takes God’s name in vain, for a little extra gruesomeness) and a final shot which has our surviving heroes ascending into a white light, God and the supernatural are eschewed in favor of a convoluted quantification which suggests the filmmakers learned nothing from the response to midi-chlorians.

Aside from some compelling visuals, courtesy of Tony Pierce-Roberts’ cinematography, Stephen Scott’s production design (from the silvery sterile labs to the dank blue sewers), and the use of practical effects, there’s not that much in Doom to compensate for the muddled story. The action scenes aren’t so badly staged, but they’re not truly exciting, just as the gory violence is never truly cathartic, just gross.

Part of that is because the human characters are such duds. For the most part, the Marines are unlikable, unpleasant, and frankly rather incompetent – even allowing for what they’re up against, they tend to make stupid mistakes so the film can keep moving. The loathsome Portman is the worst offender, but Duke’s obnoxious womanizing and Kid’s squirming inexperience keep us from caring much about them either – and most of their teammates are ciphers. (It’s never a good sign when the religious fanatic is the most likable character.)

Reaper is a stock haunted badass character, but Urban at least has the talent to make him slightly compelling. Sarge is a comparatively secondary role for Johnson this far into his career, but he took the role (he’d been approached to play Reaper) because, after being essentially heroic for two-thirds of the film, he gets a heel-turn of sorts as Sarge proves so devoted to his mission that he’ll kill those who pose no threat – and kill his own men if they disobey orders. While he’s not a great villain for the remainder of the film, he does get some fun moments, and does get to deliver the immortal line “Semper fi, motherfucker!”

Then and now, Doom is probably best known for the first-person-shooter sequence, in which we experience Reaper’s journey through the bowels of some building, killing various creatures with guns, grenades, and a chainsaw, as if we were making it ourselves. But as technically accomplished as the sequence is, it’s pointless – since you can’t control what’s going on, it loses all the fun of actual gaming, and like most uses of subjective camera, it’s more disorienting than immersive. (Hardcore Henry was actively nauseating.)

At least I can understand the thinking behind it; what’s harder to understand is stripping the supernatural elements from a franchise built upon them, or making Reaper and Sam siblings, when their dynamic is more often that of estranged lovers. But then, everything about this film reeks of dubious choices and the desire to cash in on a name property, whether or not there was a good film to be made from it. At the very least, this wasn’t it.

Score: 41

Rock Score:

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988) – ***

In the very first article in this series, way back in August 2020, I rewatched Airplane! and declined to provide a score; I was so surprised at how little I enjoyed it, at least compared to my previous affection for the film, that I simply left the matter for another time. That time has yet to come, but since then I’ve watched two other films from the team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker: Ruthless People (which I enjoyed well enough) and this, which I don’t think I’d ever actually seen, despite having been well aware of the franchise for many years.

Police Squad! was a short-lived TV series (just six episodes) created by the trio and starring Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin, continuing the comedic work the once-serious actor began as the bone-dry Dr. Rumack in Airplane! Exactly how and why the property was revived for the big screen I can’t say, but it was a prudent decision, as the first film was a major hit and led to two profitable sequels – and as I write this, a long-rumored fourth film is scheduled to start production in 2023 with Liam Neeson starring as Frank Drebin Jr. We’ll see if that pans out.

It’d be interesting to see if a revival of the series is as sharply topical as the original, which begins with Drebin undercover in Beirut (on vacation, no less) delivering an all-American beatdown to a meeting of contemporary antagonists including Mikhail Gorbachev, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Fidel Castro, and will later focus on his foiling an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II (Jeannette Charles) by an unwitting assailant.

That attempt, masterminded by devious businessman Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalbán) is also somehow connected to a heroin-smuggling operation which Drebin’s colleague Nordberg (O.J. Simpson) was seriously injured whilst investigating. There’s also the matter of Drebin’s budding romance with Ludwig’s assistant, Jane Spencer (Priscilla Presley), and his interplay with Capt. Ed Hocken (George Kennedy), who admires Drebin as much as he’s exasperated by him.

But the story is just a framework on which to hang all manner of gags. They may not fly quite as thick and fast as they do in Airplane! – having one director (David Zucker) may have helped – but there’s still a bid for laughter in nearly every shot. How successful those bids are is a matter of taste, but for my part I laughed a solid amount, even if they weren’t belly laughs.

Nielsen’s performance in Airplane! worked because he played almost completely straight, right down to his repeated utterances of “I just wanted to let you know: good luck. We’re all counting on you” even in the middle of a rough landing. His best moments as Drebin come when he’s comparably serious – “And one more thing, I faked every orgasm” is possibly the funniest line delivery in the whole film – and when he hams it up (not often, but enough to be worth noting) it just doesn’t work as well.

That goes for the film as a whole, which is a lot of fun when it’s turning police-procedural tropes on their ear, as in the opening credits, when a police car cruising down the streets of L.A. finds itself heading down sidewalks and even zipping through the hallways of a house, or when the location where Nordberg was found is marked by a chalk outline…on water. It’s less amusing, at least to me, when the characters act like they know they’re in a farce; John Houseman’s cameo as a deadpan driving instructor is one case where the self-awareness works, because it’s so underplayed.

Again, it’s a matter of taste, and there are those who’ll laugh as hard at Drebin butchering “The Star-Spangled Banner” (I can imagine the Canadian Nielsen enjoyed filming that) as at Drebin’s understated lament “It’s the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day,” and the little exchange which follows it: “Goodyear?” “No. The worst.”

Score: 73

You Can’t Take It With You (1938) – ****

There are elements of You Can’t Take It With You that don’t really work if you take it too literally. Grandpa Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) may preside over a household where everyone does as they please, encourages others to join them, and proudly tells the story of how he left business behind when he realized he “wasn’t having any fun”—but if the toilet backs up, he’d better hope the plumber has fun plumbing. (Or maybe he’d suggest we should give up the toilet and go back to outhouses.) He may tell a peevish IRS agent he doesn’t believe in income tax, and easily dismiss the agent’s arguments that national defense and politicians’ salaries justify the institution—but if you cited public education, public works, the general public good (the sort of thing the humanist Grandpa would advocate for) he might at least admit you’ve got a point.

And, in owning his home and being, it would seem, decently well-off financially – enough to retain housekeepers Rheba (Lillian Yarbo) and Donald (Eddie Anderson), keep everyone fed, and keep the lights on – Grandpa is a lot freer to do as he pleases than, say, a renter, a parent or guardian to young children or invalids, or simply someone unable to make ends meet. But that’s if you take it too literally. And why on Earth would you do that?

After all, we’re in the world of Frank Capra and Robert Riskin, a world where the Vanderhof-Sycamore can exist, where impromptu musicales, candy-making, playwriting, and the making and testing of fireworks can all occur simultaneously, and more importantly, a world where a wealthy businessman who’s long tried to hold wealth and power as the most important things in life can finally realize how empty life is without simple friendship – and change his ways.

The personal crisis of Anthony P. Kirby (Edward Arnold) is greatly expanded in Riskin’s screenplay from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, and it’s a credit to the film that it works pretty well; Kirby, trying to buy up a neighborhood next to the planned site of a munitions factory, finds his plans stymied by Grandpa’s refusal to sell his house – and his classism challenged by his son Tony’s (James Stewart) falling in love with his secretary, Alice Sycamore (Jean Arthur), which scandalizes Kirby’s wife Miriam (Mary Forbes), whose snobbery only deepens when the Kirbys and the Sycamores meet, with results that threaten Alice and Tony’s future together.

It works because the script, Capra’s direction, and Arnold’s performance show from the start that Anthony P. Kirby, greedy and hard-hearted as he can be, has a soul, loves his son, can even laugh from time to time…and is not so in love with the path he’s chosen; the indigestion which plagues him can be seen as a manifestation of this. So when he realizes what really matters and life and changes his tune, we not only believe it, but we’re heartened by it. It may be fantasy of a kind – could you imagine Elon Musk having such a change of heart? – but that’s Capra-corn for you.

My memories of the play are a bit fuzzy (I saw the day of my mother’s memorial service, which was coincidentally the day the first John Wick opened), but I believe the film also considerably expands the romance between Alice and Tony, which works because Stewart and Arthur are so incredibly charming and their dynamic has such a sweetly off-beat energy, whether they’re canoodling in the office, learning a dance in Central Park from a group of kids, or starting a ruckus in a swanky restaurant. Watching Stewart here, I thought of how, 12 years later, he’d so perfectly play Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, the kind of lovable eccentric who’d be right at home under Grandpa’s roof.

If anything, the antics of the other characters seem almost schticky compared to Kirby’s redemption and the romance. They’re still amusing, with Mischa Auer quite fun as the pompous Russian choreographer Kolenkhov (“It stinks!”) but aside from Barrymore, who naturally makes a meal of his role (the scene where he tells Alice about her late grandmother is especially effective), none of them really stand out, not even Spring Byington, who got the film’s only acting nomination as Alice’s mother Penny, flitting from one artistic endeavor to another; she’s fine, but it’s odd that she was singled out among the cast instead of, say, Arnold.

The film won Capra his third Oscar for Director and second Oscar for Best Picture; the direction is good, but not quite on the level of It Happened One Night, and the film, while quite delightful, shouldn’t have beaten Grand Illusion, Pygmalion, or The Adventures of Robin Hood. It was also up for Screenplay (losing to Pygmalion), Cinematography (good but not Oscar-worthy), Editing (pretty good at balancing the characters, though at 126 minutes it’s a shade long), and Sound (I heard everyone all right).

You could definitely put You Can’t Take It With You down for not being as good as this film or that one (it’s also not as good as My Man Godfrey, another film about an eccentric family with Auer playing a hanger-on), and like the other Oscar winners between It Happened One Night and Gone With the Wind, it feels just a bit overlooked these days. But it’s really a very good film in its own right and I get why it won. It’s a feel-good film that really does make you feel good.

Score: 88

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) – ****

“Kind of like a stripped-down B-movie equivalent of The Equalizer, John Wick is exactly what it needs to be. I don’t know if it really has much long-term potential, but it’s thoroughly engaging in the moment.”

“Not since Fury Road has there been such pure action mayhem on the screen; it may not achieve that film’s mythic grandeur, but it sets very few feet wrong, and asks no more of us than it is willing to reward.”

“All you really need to know, though, is that Keanu slaps a horse on the ass to make it kick a dude to death. Everything else is just context.”

So I said of the three previous John Wick films. And now, eight and a half years after he sought revenge for his dog’s death, the story of John Wick comes to a finish in a globe-trotting epic which runs nearly three hours. To quote myself again:

“The essence of John Wick is extravagance surrounding minimalism—an elaborately conceived world of crime, populated by melodramatic figures, all playing host to our hero, the distilled essence of Keanu Reeves’ screen persona, an extraordinary Everyman who seems vaguely amazed at being himself.”

That I rate Chapter 4 at **** is almost in spite of John, but the film builds up the supporting cast so much and so well that the film almost isn’t about him as a character so much as a living MacGuffin; in his friends he inspires fierce devotion, in his enemies he inspires vengeful wrath, and in his most of his fellow hitmen he inspires the desire to prove themselves by killing him – and the massive bounty on his head doesn’t hurt.

But the main antagonist of Chapter 4, the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgård, a wonderful weasel) wants John dead because his continued existence offends the authority of the High Table, the governing body of all hitmen, and he’s willing to destroy anyone who helps John – having Winston (Ian McShane) stripped of his hotel before petulantly destroying the building – and willing to go to any lengths, including forcing the retired Caine (Donnie Yen) to return to their lethal way of life, to stop him.

In a weird way, Chapter 4 reminds me of You Can’t Take It With You, in that the hero – who appreciates the people in his life – stays alive in no small part because his friends (most of whom have loved ones of their own) stick their necks out for him, while the villain, a dangerously ambitious young man who never shows anyone the slightest bit of affection, is doomed in no small part because he doesn’t trust or care about anyone else enough to listen when he’s told, as he is repeatedly, that his ambition will eat him alive.

To be sure, character and theme have always taken second place in this franchise to action, and here, with a big budget to spend and an epic running time to fill, director Chad Stahelski and his team, especially the stunt coordinators, craft a dizzying array of set-pieces, the three biggest being the infiltration, by High Table agents, of the Osaka Continental, a battle principally between John and Killa (Scott Adkins, hilariously grotesque), a cheerfully hulking German übermörder in and around a Berlin nightclub, and a chase throughout Paris between John and dozens of French foes, culminating in a Sisyphean struggle up the steps to the Sacré-Coeur.

What good would it do to try and describe them? What can words do to match the stunning choreography, the visceral sounds, Dan Laustsen’s thrilling, richly colored cinematography, the expansive production design, or the expertly managed editing? You just have to experience them, and in full, because the sheer length, the joyously absurd relentlessness of it all, is so much a part of it.

And while the rest of the film isn’t necessarily as gripping in of itself (which is why it’s a very low ****), it still reflects how this franchise has gradually blossomed from a modest story of personal revenge to a saga of global proportions, developing its world by adding characters and concepts with each new film, yet has never gone too far in doing so, has never jumped the shark or lost the plot along the way. At some point I really want to rewatch the whole quartet and see how well it flows from those humble beginnings to, without giving too much away, a rather humble end.

There’s a lot more I could mention: Yen’s fine, dryly clever performance, Skarsgård’s hilariously fancy suits (and general air of spoiled villainy), Shamier Anderson as the sly Nobody, accompanied by a very good dog indeed, Clancy Brown as the coolly authoritative Harbinger, or the late Lance Reddick as Charon, whose role in this film is all the more poignant after Reddick’s sudden passing only a week ago (as I write this). And sure, there are nits I could pick – some over-polished imagery here, an homage to The Warriors that doesn’t completely land there – but to what end? For what it is and what it seeks to do, Chapter 4 hits the spot. Over and over.

Score: 87