John Drew Barrymore Double Feature

Posted on by
Reply
Actor John Drew Barrymore aka John Barrymore Jr.

What film or theater buff is not familiar with the House of Barrymore, the acting dynasty known as the “Royal Family of the American Stage”? Led by Lionel Barrymore (1878-1954), the oldest of three acting siblings, including sister Ethel (1979-1959) and younger brother John (1882-1942), the trio dominated the Broadway stage during the early 1900s as well as the film industry of the silent and early sound era. Today, Drew Barrymore, the granddaughter of John Barrymore, is arguably as famous as he was during his era but the actress’s father, John Barrymore Jr., and his stepsister Diana Barrymore, are practically forgotten. Both were promising actors at the start of their career but personal problems and drug and alcohol addictions ended up derailing any opportunities in the profession.

Diana was better known as a stage actress and only ended up making a handful of minor films before her early death at age 38 in 1960 but John Barrymore Jr. had a much longer film career and had the looks and potential talent to be a major star. He made his film debut in the 1950 western The Sundowners and attracted considerable attention in the starring role of his fourth movie, The Big Night (1951), directed by Joseph Losey. As an angry teenager seeking to avenge an assault on his father, John Jr. gives a moody, Method acting-style performance which prefigures the rise of rebellious screen icons like Marlon Brando and James Dean. His acting garnered some good reviews but it wasn’t a breakout success or help to advance his career. And he soon became unemployable in Hollywood due to unprofessional behavior on film sets and high profile press coverage of his abusive behavior toward his first wife, Cara Williams (an Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actress in The Defiant Ones, 1958). Looking for new acting opportunities, he moved to Italy in the early sixties where he made thirteen movies over a five-year period, mostly low-budget genre films that included historical dramas (The Night They Killed Rasputin (1960), peplums (The Trojan Horse, 1961) and melodramas (A Game of Crime, 1964). I am highlighting two of his better efforts, Ti Aspettero all’inferno aka I’ll See You in Hell (1960) and Delitto allo Specchio aka Death on the Fourposter (1964) in this post.

Continue reading →

Perfect Pitch

Posted on by
Reply

1981 was the year that a French film with the title Diva became a surprise box office hit in America. It grossed $6 million dollars, making it the third most profitable French since 1975 to attract both mainstream and art house audiences plus most of the important critics loved it. Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times called it, “A visual extravaganza. One of the most persistently entertaining, absorbing and scary thrillers I’ve seen in a long time.” Pauline Kael of The New Yorker raved, “Every shot seems to have a shaft of wit. It’s Welles romanticized, gift-wrapped. It’s a mixture of style and chic hanky-panky, but it’s also genuinely sparkling.” And J. Hoberman of The Village Voice stated, “Diva is not only the most purely pleasurable movie to open here this year, but surely one of the finest films to arrive from France in a decade.” Yet the film was a complete flop in France when it opened there with most critics attacking the film for a visual aesthetic they claimed was inspired by commercial advertising. Strangely enough, after Diva became a hit in America and around the world, French critics and audiences changed their minds and it finally became a commercial success in its own country, winning four Cesar Awards (the French equivalent of the Academy Awards) – Best First Work (director Jean-Jacques Beineix’s debut feature), Best Music Score (Vladimir Cosma), Best Cinematography (Philippe Rousselot) and Best Sound (Jean-Pierre Ruh). So how does it hold up today?

Continue reading →

The Giant Tetratron Must Be Stopped!

Posted on by
Reply

Not all of the rampaging monsters of the sci-fi thrillers and horror films of the fifties A-bomb era were mutant insects, oversized lizards or gigantic humans. Some were uniquely original and a credit to their creators such as The Monolith Monsters (1957) – growing towers of meteor crystals that absorbed moisture from humans – and the square-shaped robot with cylindrical legs known as Kronos (1957), a giant alien robot that smashed everything in its path. The Magnetic Monster (1953) belongs in this latter group and is an intriguing and intelligent sci-fi thriller, despite its limited budget, modest production values and the occasional serious scene that plays better as comedy.

Continue reading →

The Bus from Izu

Posted on by
Reply

Virtually unknown in the U.S. until recent years and largely neglected in his own country, director Hiroshi Shimizu was a unique figure in Japanese cinema for his insistence on shooting his movies in the open air in real locations and for often working without a script, improvising scenes and dialogue during production. Few directors, if any, were doing this during the silent and early sound era in Japan and unlike his more internationally famous peers like Akira Kurosawa,Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Shimizu specialized in contemporary human stories about people living on the margins of society such as orphaned children or transient workers moving from place to place. Although he made more than 150 movies between 1923 and 1959, many of them have been lost but of the ones that survive, Arigato-san (English title, Mr. Thank You, 1936) is a great introduction to his work during the sound era.

Continue reading →

Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night

Posted on by
Reply
The Czech film poster for DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (1964), directed by Jan Nemec

In what must be one of the most astonishing opening scenes in a movie, two young men jump off a moving train and flee into the surrounding woodlands, racing up a ravine, over mud, rocks and uneven ground. And the cameramen follow them both in their lunging, zigzag movements from the front, side and behind as they race deeper into the darkness accompanied by sounds of their heavy breathing, gun shots, cries of “Halt!” and a steam engine train chugging slowly into the distance. The viewer is immediately pulled into a grim tale of survival and human endurance which alternates between stark realism and dreamlike imaginings. Flashbacks from the escapees’ past life also interrupt the narrative to create a haunting and ambiguous portrait of two men on the run during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during WW2. Demanty Noci (English title, Diamonds of the Night, 1964) was the feature film debut of Jan Nemec and it remains one of the defining masterpieces of Czech New Wave cinema in the 1960s.

Continue reading →

Organ Harvesters

Posted on by
Reply

Something strange is happening at Boston Memorial Hospital. A surprising number of healthy patients, undergoing routine operations, are turning up as anesthesia-induced coma victims. When one of the brain-dead patients turns out to be the best friend of Dr. Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold), the physician conducts her own investigation into the case, uncovering a sinister plot that implicates the hospital’s chief anesthesiologist (Richard Widmark) in a black market organ transplant operation. A clever hybrid combining the conspiracy thriller with a hospital soap opera, Coma (1978) plays like a contemporary Nancy Drew mystery with a distinctly feminist heroine, one who isn’t afraid to challenge the male chain of command at her job or risk her life in physically perilous situations (like a daring escape on the top of a speeding ambulance!). The film is also guaranteed to make you paranoid about hospitals and who isn’t already?

Continue reading →

End of the Line

Posted on by
Reply

There was a brief time in the 1980s when the international production/distribution company Globus-Golan, managed by Israeli mogul Yoram Globus and his cousin Menachem Golan, garnered and generated more press coverage than box office receipts or critical acclaim for their movies. Their legendary deal-making and oversized egos were part of the film industry’s fascination with the Globus-Golan partnership and the duo had a good run from 1978 through 1988, which were the prime years for their company. Most of their major successes were star-driven action vehicles like Charles Bronson in Death Wish II (1982) and its sequels, The Delta Force (1984) starring Chuck Norris) and Sylvester Stallone as a Los Angeles cop in Cobra (1986). They also had some surprise hits in music/dance and teen sexploitation categories like Breakin’ (1984) and The Last American Virgin (1982). Globus-Golan even tried to crack the arthouse market with smaller indie productions like That Championship Season (1982), Fool for Love (1985), Barfly (1987), and the Jean-Luc Godard directed King Lear (1987) with Woody Allen, Norman Mailer and Molly Ringwald but only a few were successful like Runaway Train (1985), directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Utilizing tropes from prison breakout flicks and man-made disaster films, Runaway Train was a weird hybrid that worked as a straight-ahead action adventure but also as a psychological character study unfolding in an extreme setting – the icy tundra of the Alaskan wilderness.

Continue reading →

Soldier in Skirts

Posted on by
Reply

In the spring of 1943 on a rural farm in Wiltshire, England, Alice Charlesworth (Glenda Jackson) encounters a trespasser on her farm land by the name of Barton (Brian Deacon). He turns out to be an army recruit who is stationed at a nearby military base and the two strike up a friendship that turns into something deeper. Barton proves to be quite adept at helping Alice with work chores as he was raised on a farm and his presence is a comfort to Alice (her husband is currently a prisoner-of-war in Japan). When Barton’s military leave ends, he opts to go AWOL and stay on with Alice but takes on a new identity with Alice’s encouragement. He disguises himself as the farmwife’s sister Jill and for a while they lead a blissful existence as lovers/companions until a sergeant (Oliver Reed) from the nearby army camp and his buddy Stan (Gavin Richards) pay them a surprise visit and become regular visitors to the house as potential romantic suitors.

The idea that an army deserter in wartime England would resort to such a strange masquerade to avoid military duty might seem like an outlandish premise for a movie but The Triple Echo aka Soldier in Skirts (1972) avoids what could have been an unintentional campy comedy and creates instead an oddly compelling and tragic human drama. The film, which was based on a novel by H.E. Bates (The Daring Buds of May), was mostly overlooked by critics in the U.K. and the U.S. during its initial release but it holds up remarkably well today and is significant as the first feature film from director Michael Apted.

Continue reading →

Aerial Daredevils

Posted on by
Reply

Among the many novels of William Faulkner, Pylon is less well known today than some of the author’s more critically acclaimed works such as The Sound and the Fury, Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers (a 1962 Pulitzer Prize winner). Yet, the novel, dismissed by most critics of its era as a tawdry melodrama, is a deeply personal work, reflecting Faulkner’s keen interest in flying while including autobiographical details from his own life. The 1957 film adaptation of Pylon entitled The Tarnished Angels and directed by Douglas Sirk was also unfairly dismissed by critics at the time with one reviewer calling it “…cheaply written…abominably played…and absurd” while another panned it as “mostly colorless…and lacking in punch.” Most surprisingly, The Tarnished Angels reunited three of the main actors from Sirk’s Academy Award nominated Written on the Wind from the previous year – Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone (who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar) – but it was completely ignored by the Academy even though the movie is much more highly regarded now.

Continue reading →

Carnival of the Wicked

Posted on by
Reply
The French film poster for UNTIL THE LAST ONE (1957).

Circuses and traveling carnivals always make fascinating settings for films but it isn’t often that you find a film noir taking place in that milieu with the exception of Nightmare Alley, both the 1947 version directed by Edmund Goulding and the 2021 remake from Guillermo del Toro. If you take into account film noirs from other countries outside the U.S., you might find a few more such as Jusqu’au Dernier (English title: Until the Last One aka Until the Last Man, 1957), an obscure French entry from Pierre Billon featuring an early role for Jeanne Moreau as a femme fatale. It might not be quite as lurid or disturbing as Nightmare Alley but this is the sort of noir where almost every major character is either a thief, con artist, devious double crosser or some kind of desperate character willing to do almost anything for money. There are only two or three relatively sympathetic characters in the lot and they don’t figure prominently in the main story. And there is something so satisfying about seeing a bunch of despicable people get their just deserts as they all vie for a hidden suitcase full of stolen money.

Continue reading →