Film review: The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)

A lesser-known work by Jean "Grand Illusion" Renoir (who was the son of that Renoir - did you know?), this one is slight but interesting.  It takes a while to get going (at least, for me) but the last half hour canters by, and it features one of the more hateable characters you'll come across.  It's billed as a light, fluffy comedy, but what with themes of sexual abuse, murder and a stillbirth that's regarded as fortunate and swiftly recovered-from, that's a stretch, even for the French.  Apparently the script was by Jacques Prévert, who is a well-known poet in France, but whom I know only as the writer of Les Enfant du Paradis, and one can certainly see the similarities.  But it's also an overtly socialist/communist work, and Renoir said it lead to the French Communists recruiting him to make anti-fascist propaganda, which in turn put him in danger when the Nazis invaded.

Anyway, it's one of those "bookend" films, that starts with a huge car dropping off a couple at a small country inn that's "just across the dunes from the border".  They as for a room in the bar, where the man is recognized from the paper as someone wanted for murder (we get to the titular crime pretty fast, as you can see).  He collapses asleep on the bed, but as the room is right next to the bar, the woman can hear the patrons discussing whether or not they should turn him in.  She comes out and admits that he did indeed commit the murder of which he is accused, and says if, after you hear our story, you still want to turn us in, go ahead.  Cut to flashback...

The bulk of the film is in and around a newspaper/magazine publishing business.  It's not exactly highbrow, and M. Lange contributes small items, but in his spare time he writes stories about Arizona Jim (so that's where Spielberg/Lucas got the idea) and his adventures in the Wild West (a map of which he has on his wall, but of course he's never been).  He takes them to the head of the company, the loathsome Batala (a bravura performance of charming monstrous self-interest by Jules Berry, who looks sleazy), who laughs them off.  But Batala, besides shagging every woman who crosses his path, 

has also cut all kinds of deals with various businesses to start magazines that advertise their products and so forth, only to spend the money on anything but paying his downtrodden workers.  The first part of the movie (which I would probably enjoy a lot more on a re-watch) just sets up the wide array of players, from the kindly, sassy blonde Valentine, who has clawed her way up to owning a laundry (it is implied she was a lady of the street before, but she's very much a mother hen to all her girls), 

and who has history with Batala that's she's keen not to repeat, and has her eye on the shy, dreamy Lange (it is she who is telling the story), to the boastful bicycle delivery boy (who breaks his leg, to the grim satisfaction of the old soldier busibody who seems to be the super for the apartments that everyone lives in) and the girl who loves him and whom he loves, 

and whom he forgives for having Batala's bastard (only phew! it dies in childbirth), along with many others.  After doing enough to make us despise him, Batala figures that he's about to get arrested because he keeps getting visited by a persistent "inspector".  So he heads out of Paris on a train, on which he gets into a conversation with a priest, noting that nobody suspects anyone dressed like that.  Cut to news reports about the train derailing, and among the victims the publisher Batala.  (Lesser noted is the report that several passengers, including a priest, are missing.)  The creditors close in and the employees are at a loss, until Lange suggests they form a cooperative.  

This is enthusiastically supported by a new arrival, a Bertie Wooster-like scion of one of Batala's main business creditors, whose father is too ill to come, and who only seems to support the idea because he doesn't know what "cooperative" means.  It's also supported by the "inspector," whom, we discover, is a relative of Batala's who's a retired inspector and just wants a job, "a little one."  

As you can imagine, the newspaper takes off, centered round the Arizona Jim stories 

(which are already fairly popular, except that Batala kept inserting ads for various quack remedies into the text, to Lange's outrage (although that was the favorite part of the stories for the Bertie Wooster character)).  This in turn alerts the very-much-alive-and-dressed-as-a-Priest Batala, when he visits a news stand 

and is told that the stories sell like hot cakes.  He decides to return, and shows up in the offices the night of a New Years' celebration by all the employees where he is discovered by Lange, who has had an idea for the plot of the Arizona Jim film that people are clamoring to make, and goes upstairs from the merry throng to start writing.  Batala announces that he's back to take control of everything, and go back to launching his pet vanity project, which nobody but him likes.  But while there he reveals that he had a secret gun in the drawer of his desk that nobody had found...

After Lange shoots him, he's sort of in a daze, but Valentine keeps her head, and actually Bertie (not his real name) says sensibly, "well, if I'd killed anyone, I'd go on the run.  I'll drive you!" and they all head off to the opening scene.  (Jami and I both felt frustrated that they hadn't exploited the fact that everybody thinks Batala's already dead!  Just strip off the priest outfit and shove him in the river.)  Cut to the bookend, and Valentine has finished her story and awaits the pub crowd's verdict.  "Well, it's obvious what we must do," says one...

This film is definitely due a revival, what with all the obnoxious tech barons milling around and a new-found fondness in the youth for anti-capitalist ideas.  Maybe Luigi Mangione was inspired by it, who knows. 

Springy things

 

Film review: Cold Storage (2026)

What's Vanessa Redgrave up to these days? you ask yourself.  Well, would you believe acting in a fun little B-movie about a fungus that zombifies everyone and everything it encounters?  No, I wouldn't've either, but there she is, looking decidedly frail (and not just because she's playing a little old lady on her last legs, either).  

But she's not alone in slumming it, because Liam Neeson (stretching himself in the role of gruffly competent military man) and Leslie Manville (perhaps tired of worthy work with Mike Leigh, and itching to play a soldier who hides a nuclear device in her son's basement).

Anyway, you might wonder what this had to offer that was different from, say, The Last of Us, which is also about fungus turning everybody into zombies.  Answer: this film is basically a light-hearted romp, albeit with lots of heads exploding.  All the people who die deserve to die (maybe not the animals) and, in a very 80s-style (maybe even 50s-style) plot, the Military (or at least a few rogue individuals within it) does the right thing (using a bomb!) and solves the problem.

I tell a lie: in the pre-credit sequence, set about 25 years ago (which is still in the 2000s, to my horror), a likeable character does die, but (a) this part of the film is meant to set up the stakes and is correspondingly not comedic, and (b) we don't really have time to get to know the character before she meets her messy end.  This part is set in some tiny outback community where a chunk of Skylab landed in 1979, specifically a tank that had a fungus sample in it, and over the years it degraded to the extent that something got out.  The film starts with a woman (some NASA-affiliated fungus expert) getting a phone call at a cafe in Rome from somebody on a payphone in said tiny town.  The man is clearly panicked and seems to be reporting some kind of attack, but has been shunted from person to person until arriving at our expert.  She quickly jets there and along the way picks up a "team" which, in a running joke, she is surprise to find consists of just two (Neeson and Manville), who have been brought in to assess the risk.  They arrive on the outskirts of town, and, spotting no signs of life, put on Hazmat suits and head in to check out what's happened.  

They quickly find that everyone in town (a) is up on a roof, and (b) has exploded.  The fungus expert examines a tiny hole in the tank fan finds it full of glowing green stuff, in the course of which she manages to step on some, and it turns out her wellies aren't as air-tight as the Hazmat suit.  Still she gets a sample, puts it in a sealed container, and they're heading out of town with her in the lead when she starts to act erratically.  We, the viewers, know what's happened because we get a "fungus-eye view" of matters, and we have watched it climb up from the welly into her brain, and told her to spread it.  So, after complaining of smelling toast and feeling hot (a key plot point later) she runs to the one vehicle and starts to drive it away. Liam (I refuse to learn his character's name, because he's just Liam Neeson) jumps in front of the car and is thrown back and temporarily paralyzed (another key plot point, as he has a dickey back thereafter), the doctor gets out and holds Leslie Manville at gunpoint and then turns the gun on herself.  The team then calls in fighter jets to bomb the town with white phosphorus, and the sample is put in Cold Storage in a facility in Kansas.

And then the real movie starts.  The military has sold off the storage facility (with the important lower levels sealed off) to a private storage company, at which the night shift is just starting, and the horrible greasy biker boss "Griffin" argues with our just-arriving-in-his-implausibly-classic car (listening to affirmation tapes on his drive in) hero, "Teacake," 

appealingly played by one of the older Stranger Things kids.  The storage facility will be our home for the rest of the movie (except for brief excursions involving Liam Neeson being informed and him forming a bond with a female soldier on the end of a phone at some Military HQ, as well as linking up with Manville to pick up "item 7" on a list he deems necessary to deal with the problem), and it operates a lot like the Mall in Dawn of the Dead.  Especially once Griffin returns with a bunch of bikers, who will all meet with grisly fates.  But before then, we have a meet-cute with the new employee of the night shift, Naomi, who despite being a smarty-pants, in comparison with Teacake's well-meaning ex-con (she teaches him the word "loquacious," because he is), because she's taken science classes with the aim of becoming a vet, and before that we have Teacake shepherding an old lady (just recognizable as Vanessa Redgrave) to her storage unit, where she plans to kill herself with the gun she has there (after kissing a picture of her presumably dead husband) but takes a nap first, setting up a late intervention that was entirely predictable).

Anyway, things are kicked into gear when Teacake hears a harsh beep coming from somewhere and asks Naomi to help him find it.  It's coming from behind a plasterboard wall, where they see a lot of dusty old military equipment and a map showing the lower levels.  

(This is the alert that means that Neeson, now retired, is woken up from his bed, and only he knows how serious this is.  In fact, he's had a couple of decades of nagging the military to take it more seriously - even writing a "White Paper" (a phrase that gets uttered implausibly many times for a B-movie horror-comedy) about why global warming will eventually cause problems.)  Anyway, Teacake and Naomi find nastiness, but it has also already escaped, and infects the dead cat in the trunk of Naomi's "man-child" ex-baby-daddy, who has come to ask her advice, because he accidentally shot the cat.  But, as a flashback later reveals, he runs over an infected cockroach, which sends a tendril up into the trunk, re-animating the cat, which promptly seeks higher ground and explodes.  This sends splatter over both the ex and a nearby deer, and we've got a full-on outbreak.  Then the bikers show up because Griffin has a bunch of stolen TVs he wants to offload...

Anyway, silly stuff, very much not part of the current trend of dreary highbrow horror-as-metaphor-for-grief, and a pleasant enough diversion from the real horrors around us.

Film review: Runaway Train (1985)

This is a film based on an unmade Kurosawa screenplay, which both makes sense and doesn't.  It doesn't because the dialogue is just god-awful, but it does seem as if it's been badly translated from another language altogether (and another sensibility).  However, on the other hand, the film is (in its exterior shots, at least) gorgeous to look at, and clearly filmed on location (it's set in Alaska) with real trains, no models or suspect special effects.  

And the beginning sequences in a prison really look more like one would imagine a prison in the USSR would look like (apparently they were shot in Old Montana State Prison), which is perhaps because its director, Andrei Konchalovsky, is Russian (he started out working with Tarkovsky on Ivan's Childhood and Andrei Rublev.  I remarked while watching the film that it would work better if it was entirely in a foreign language, because one is more likely to forgive stilted dialogue when it's in subtitle form.  And overall one gets the impression that nobody making this film other than the actors spoke much English, so they couldn't really tell if the actors were delivering their lines naturalistically.  And, with a couple of exceptions (Jon Voight is very good, even when he has to deliver decidedly odd dialogue) the acting is bad, even from people who are good in other things.

Here's the plot: it begins inside a prison where the TV is showing the warden (Ranken- played as a sort of knock-off Dennis Hopper by an actor called John P. Ryan) being interviewed elsewhere because he's been required by a court to let a certain prisoner (Voight's Manny) out after having been literally welded into his cell for three years, for repeatedly escaping.  Hearing this over the TV (because Eric Roberts's Buck (a young doofus amateur boxer with some kind of Southern Accent, who is incredibly annoying - like a moronic version of Voight's Joe Buck from Midnight Cowboy) has persuaded an old prison guard to turn up the volume - something he quickly regrets) everyone in the prison goes wild, throwing lit pieces of cloth or paper out of their cells, or milling about smashing things.  However, Ranken is completely unfazed when he returns and just strolls through the flames without looking left or right.  He has come to free Manny, but also to berate and scorn him.  Anyway, after some scenes in the prison (Buck fights another boxer, played, in his first role, by Danny (credited as "Daniel") Trejo, somebody (clearly put up to it by Ranken) stabs Manny through the hand, and a prison guard takes pot shots from on high at the resulting melee) Manny is ready to escape.  (Unfortunately, because of the stabbing, it is now Winter in Alaska.)  Buck has a job pushing the laundry cart and manages to smuggle Manny to a room that has a manhole leading to the sewers.  Buck demands to be taken along, and has to grease himself up and wade through shit (while complaining loudly the whole time) before being projected over a waterfall and into a freezing river.  Then they have to trudge through the snow until they get to a station, where Buck finds some shoes to put on his frozen feet in a locker, and Manny decides a train that consists of four engines coupled together with no train cars is the one for them.  

What they don't realize is that the driver, realizing he's having a heart attack, slams on the breaks, but without disengaging the throttle.  He then falls off the train a dies.  The train quickly burns through the brakes and speeds off.  All this (except the stowaways) is quickly discovered at train HQ, where a young hotshot who designed the multi-million dollar computer system that the trains run on (in Alaska? in the 80s?  Okay...) is not too bothered, because he figures he can make sure the train gets shunted off somewhere.  In fact, he asks an old guy to switch the points and ensure the train wrecks, when the geezer hears the train horn and tells them that there must be people on the train.  This is also news to our convicts, who have come to believe there's nobody up front, mainly because the train clipped the rear end of another train that was too slow getting on to a branch line without blowing any horn earlier.  Turns out the horn was blown by Sara, whom Wikipedia informs me is a "locomotive hostler" who was napping when the driver keeled over, and who is played by Rebecca de Mornay, 

looking nothing like the sexpot she'd played in Risky Business a couple of years earlier.  She makes her way back to where the convicts are (in the rear engine) because she's realized that the only way to stop the train is in the front engine, and the afore-mentioned collision has jammed the door in engine #2 that you need to go through to get there, so she was going to the rear to get as far away from the front as possible.  From there on it's bickering for our two men and one woman, worries about chemical plants and bridges back at HQ, and then Ranken figures out his men are on the train and tracks it down with a helicopter, 

after it's been sent down a dead end track to certain doom.  Our guys manage to slow it down a little (enough so they get across the bridge at about 70 instead of 90 and thus make it across) by cutting the cables between all but first and second engine, but they can't get through the stuck door, and, because of the second engine's plane-like nose, cannot clamber along the outside as they have for the others.  Until that is, a man hanging out of Ranken's helicopter, supposedly coming to get them, 

slips and crashes through the window of their engine.  Then Manny (who has previously tried to drive Buck to a suicidal mission along the outside of the second engine, and then erupted in a stabby fury when Sara let Buck back in) decides he's going to clamber through the broken window and jump.  (This despite his stabbed hand bleeding again.)  

He falls under the equipment joining the engines and crushes his hand (very convincingly) on the coupling while pulling himself up.  Meanwhile Ranken has taken his turn on the rope ladder and is coming, gun in hand.  However Manny beats him up with a fire extinguisher and cuffs him in the cabin of the front train.  Ranken tells him he has to push the emergency stop button, if not to save them, at least to save Buck and Sara.  This reminds Manny (who's going a little crazy - three years in solitary will do that) of their existence, but instead of pressing the button, he goes back and uncouples their train, waves, and clambers on top of the front engine to ride it to a fiery demise.  Fade to black, with a Richard III quote: ""No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast."

I skipped over a lot of philosophizing.  Manny gives a speech where he says you've got to grind grind grind at the grindstone, to which Buck says he'd rather be in jail, and Manny repeats wistfully that he wishes he could be like those who can live a normal life.  All of which would have made a lot of sense in a Japanese or Soviet film, but which is hard to take, especially with Eric Roberts involved.

Kurosawa wrote the original script in the 60s, but the film, despite being made in 1984 has a definite 70s vibe about it.  Everything looks shabby, for one thing, out of keeping with the glossy Reagan 80s.  (And nobody looks glamorous - they all have very realistically windburned cheeks.)  So, all in all, an oddity.  A very well-made trashy B-movie, which I guess makes sense given that it was a Cannon Films release, albeit with pretensions to something greater.  Watch it for the scenery, at least, or if you're a trainspotter. 

Film review: Our Man in Havana (1959)

Jami and I have a long-running battle in that she loves all things espionage, and I just don't.  I mean, I'll watch Slow Horses or The Bourne movies, but those are only really tangentially "espionage" - they're more action shows/movies that happen to feature spies.  (Ooh, I also really love the Melissa McCarthy film Spy, but that's because it's very funny.)  Real espionage, the Le Carre type, tends to the melancholic.  The life of a spy is unglamorous and lonely, from what I can gather.  (The truly excellent show Patriot does a good job of picking at this feature of it, which is why I don't think I want to re-watch it, but you absolutely should seek it out.)  She got to hankerin' again last night and suggested the Richard Burton Spy Who Came In From The Cold, so I countered with this one, in part because it's supposed to be a comedy.  And, although it definitely has a very sad death and a very tense scene where our hero seeks revenge, it is in general pretty light.  Which I found surprising given my limited Graham Greene experience (all of Brighton Rock and the first few chapters of The Power and the Glory until I couldn't take the bloody Catholicism any more) which tended to the miserable.

Jami swears she'd seen it before, and in fact that we'd both seen it before, and while the beginning, in a vacuum cleaner salesroom, did seem familiar, I'm almost certain I hadn't.  Perhaps it was because she'd read the book.  Anyway, you couldn't fault the pedigree of those involved: directed by Carol "Third Man" Reed!  Starring Alec Guinness!  Featuring Burl Ives and a slew of great British character actors - Noël Coward!  Ralph Richardson!  

Maurice Denham and Raymond Huntley (even if you don't recognize the names, you'd recognize the faces).  And throw in Maureen O'Hara and, in probably the most surprising role, the 50's TV comedian Ernie Kovacs as the rather sinister local (Cuban) police chief (nicknamed "The Red Vulture") Captain Segura.  (I'm ashamed to say I assumed the actor was Hispanic, but I thought the same of Eli Wallach in the Westerns he was in, so I'm easily fooled.)

Anyway, the basic plot is that Alec Guinness's Jim Wormold is a proprietor of said vacuum cleaner dealership in pre-revolution Havana, whose main troubles are that his wife left him and ran off leaving him to raise his daughter, Milly, who has grown up (to about 17?) to be a magnet for wolf-whistles and a spendthrift, and he's not selling many vacuum cleaners.  Into his life and his showroom walks Coward's (rather buffoonish - the British Secret Service does not come off well in this film) Hawthorne, 

who recruits him (with offers of untold $$ - just after Wormold's daughter has bought a horse and wants to join the local country club to ride it in) for the purpose of in turn recruiting agents under him and gathering intelligence.  He happily takes and spends the money, but quickly realizes he's hopeless at recruiting people (he just drives them away in alarm), so he tells all to his best friend, WWI-but-not-II veteran German ex-pat Dr. Hasselbacher (Ives, doing a not-too-cheesy German accent), 

who advises him just to make up stories.  This Wormold does prove adept in, but goes too far when he sends drawings supposedly of huge industrial buildings spotted by one of his recruits, a pilot, when flying over a hidden valley.  The problem is that he models them on his vacuum cleaner 

and when Hawthorne sees them he recognizes them (but not before they've been shown to all kinds of high muk-a-muks in the government and military, so that Hawthorne realizes exposing Wormold will count against him too).  Hawthorne's solution is to send Maureen O'Hara's Mrs. Beatrice Severn to keep an eye on him (without telling her his suspicions).  

She is Mrs. in name only, because, as with Wormold, her spouse ran off.  Wormold is forced into more contortions in preventing her from meeting his "recruits," and sadly his confabulations prove fatal because he invents a pilot called Morez, forgetting that there exists just such a pilot, and, because his messages are being intercepted by Cold War rivals (spoiler alert: Hasselbacher has been recruited (with threats and intimidation) to translate his code, and thinks it's harmless because he knows Wormold is making everything up) Morez gets killed.  This causes a crisis in conscience in Hasselbacher and he alerts Wormold that his life is in danger when Wormold is giving a speech at a meeting of vacuum cleaner salesmen.  (In fact Hawthorne had already told him that an attempt would be made to poison him (and it's first by John Le Mesurier, 

who isn't even credited) so it's especially tragic that (ANOTHER SPOILER) Hasselbacher is killed for giving the warning).  Meanwhile The Red Vulture has been hanging around, 

mainly because he wants to marry Milly, but also because he's basically a one-man Stasi - certainly much more competent than any of the actual spies) and he has played Wormold tape of Hasselbacher's handler talking to him on the phone, and he has a stutter, so Wormold recognizes his adversary when a fellow vacuum cleaner salesman has a stutter.  This person's attempt to poison him is thereby thwarted (alas, a little Dachshund gets it instead), and then Wormold decides he finally has to do something brave and spy-like and get revenge for his old friend.  This entails getting a gun, and this he achieves by using the many tiny bottles of whisky/bourbon he has been collecting (with help from Hasselbacher - the last one for his collection is found in his dead hand) to play a boozy game of checkers so that Segura passes out and his gun can be used.

Will Wormold survive?  Will Beatrice (who has grown very fond of Wormold (it's mutual)) forgive his lying?  Will he be put away in the Tower of London for treason?  Well, let's just say the ending is a bit happier than Brighton Rock.  Although the fact that Graham Greene wasn't bumped off by MI6 shows either that they can take being made fools of, or that they really are incompetent.

Small things

 The sultry weather has alternated with massive storms (it's been a miracle that we haven't lost power) with dams flooding all over Michigan (although not here).  This has stalled Jami's intended re-vamping of our garden(s), although she did get started on the front and bought some solar-powered-glow-in-the-dark mushrooms at Costco for some reason.  Oh, and the screen door we've had forever (i.e., since 1999 at least) fell off, so we took it to the magic disappearing place and it went away after a day or so.

Suddenly Sultry

 It hasn't been a week since the temps dipped below 20 degrees F, and today...

Good thing: I ordered new shorts and they arrived today.  Bad thing: we went for a walk and I caught them on a post and they ripped like wet tissue paper:

 

Cheeky bugger

 Somebody has found that (a) there's a bag of seeds in our porch, and (b) we can't easily get at him/her