“Listen, son. You and I are professionals. If the manager says `Sacrifice,’ we lay down the bunt and let somebody else hit the home run. Our job is to lay down that sacrifice. That’s what we were trained for and that’s what we’ll do.”– Admiral to Lt. John Brickley (Robert Montgomery)

Truth is, I have never been much of an envelope-pusher. When the chips tumble in the wrong direction, I take refuge in genre. And to me, as a fan of classic filmmakers like Howard Hawks and John Ford or modern ones such as Michael Mann, nothing gives me more pleasure than a well-crafted genre piece. It’s a critical weakness, I know. And strangely, I am more forgiving of it with film than I am with literature. I can’t remember the last time I read an airport potboiler, but I’ll defend a film that never breaks convention to the last breath.

The trick is, naturally, smarts. Polanski can make Chinatown or Frantic and give a new spin on Hammett and Hitchcock. Eastwood can update the western with Unforgiven. Tarantino can take a World War II film in a new direction with Inglourious Basterds. It’s like a cover of a pop song. The interpretation is the attraction; the artist filtering the material through his or her own sensibilities. I have probably always found that more interesting than the avant-guardians who are the true pioneers. I won’t succumb to electronic music, splatters on a canvas , or Joycian narratives. But again, that’s my problem.

And this might like a rationalization as much as anything, but that explains, if not necessarily justifies, my appreciation of Steven Soderbergh’s crowd-pleasing Ocean’s Eleven franchise.

To be clear, I’m a fan of the first two and remain completely ambivalent toward the third film, which struck no chord with me the one time I saw it (despite the presence of the inspiration of the blog, Mr. Pacino.) That film truly reeked of an exhausted premise, where the franchise finally caved into the sort of movie-star mugging that had loomed as an existential threat all along.

But the first two basically trace Hollywood history from the 30s to the 60s, when a student of film such as Soderbergh astutely recognized that his big-studio backing would allow him to celebrate and subvert genre at the same time, as any postmodern film student would. Eleven is as grand a celebration of Hollywood Classicism as has recently existed. Indeed, Hawks would have adored the film, one in which a group of smart professionals gather together to attain a masculine objective while the hero (George Clooney) is preoccupied with the one woman (Julia Roberts) he considers his true equal.

Clooney and Roberts drip royalty in a way that I understand many critics found alienating, but to me remains reassuring in an age when the digital democracy guarantees every strongly motivated attention-seeker, regardless of innate talent, some moment in the sun independent of moxie. We should still be grading on a curve, and if we would like Clooney and Roberts to be comfortable as the inheritors of the grand tradition, then we should help them along the way.

The tragedy, in fact, is that they never took their natural pairing to a vehicle that gave them ample room to run. (Roberts, instead made The Mexican with Brad Pitt, another Eleven star. Remember that? Of course you don’t.) You could draw a straight line from their exchange in a hotel restaurant to Bogart and Bacall and the picture would have benefitted from more of it.

They’re old now, Clooney and Roberts and Pitt. And already, we’re struggling to figure out who can hold that spotlight. The story of American film is the tale of the up and comer supplanting the wizened ace, but as is typical of any observer falling victim to the ravages of time, it’s hard for me to see the immediate successors. But that’s natural, as I’m of their generation.

But Eleven is an absolute master class in studio filmmaking, with Soderbergh  infusing his touch so that the vibe never comes off as spoiled (as in the Sinatra source material) but practiced. This film is a veteran’s workout, and it’s still a total delight to see not just Clooney and Pitt, but professionals such as Andy Garcia, Elliot Gould, and Carl Reiner summon their game, while allowing in scene stealers such as Bernie Mac.

Given my strident defense of Eleven, you might be surprised to discover that I am more likely to pop in Twelve into the player. It was with Twelve that Soderbergh truly gave into his influences (See also, the sadly overlooked The Limey)—60s cinema. The old art films. The European masters. Knowing the American hostility to the Continent in the first half of the aughts, Soderberg nevertheless produced a studio film that was shot entirely on his own terms. It was derided in some circles as an ego-driven romp—and yes, there are times when it feels that way; the comic dialogue isn’t very good—and the Hawksian ensemble feel of the first has vaporized (on purpose) in favor of a more French, even existential, dynamic (Does intricate planning even matter anymore?), but the payoff is Catherine Zeta-Jones as the femme (in a tight leather jacket) and Pitt as the homme. With Albert Finney waiting in the wings.

Twelve is, at its core, a film about romance, 60s style, with Clooney and Roberts allowed to play, essentially themselves, as say, Grant and Hepburn in Charade, and with Pitt and Zeta-Jones relating back to the rich tradition of the New Wave French crime films. And with Soderbergh playing with what he loves best: jump cuts, color saturation, and fractured narrative. (And It helps for me, at least, that Zeta-Jones’ Isabel Lahiri is one of the most magnetic women in recent cinematic memory, more than Roberts ever was in the first film.)

Getting back to the restrictions of genre: The conventional wisdom holds that Twelve is not a good film. It has far too many narrative problems (and the episode with Julia and Bruce Willis almost sinks the film before Cherry Jones saves it), but its playfulness with time, with narrative, with music (with an absolutely fantastic, madly inventive score by David Holmes) elevates it from a straight heist film into something more abstract and enjoyable. The lack of a coherent plot becomes the point—and Old Hollywood and New Europe share a moment. And Soderbergh proves, yet again, that he gets it. But it’s the only film of the franchise that elevates love over money.

No one would, or should, confuse either film with reality. And nobody’s indie film jones will be satisfied by this unapologetically corporate product. But Hollywood used to effortlessly provide viewers with idealized versions of themselves. These days, that’s harder, whether it’s because a lack of starpower, or the tyranny of an effect-driven presentation, or a shift in cultural interests. It’s exceedingly rare for a filmmaker as talented as Soderbergh to devote himself to pleasing crowds—and we should celebrate what he did with this two films for the accomplishments they are.

It’s done. How can summer be on its way out already? But then, an August that gave us here in Washington an earthquake and a hurricane perhaps deserves to be given the bum’s rush. (And as I write this, it’s almost 80 degrees and sunny in Washington, so maybe it’s not so far gone after all.)

In terms of screening film, it wasn’t the best of times. As I discovered, the availability of Netflix streaming is as much curse as blessing. The Tyranny of Choice, as it were. So many evening were spent casually flitting around its archives, from 80s sitcoms to old Star Trek episodes, to documentaries. That left few hours for cinematic pursuits despite my still-raging romance with my Blu Ray player.

But, we do what we can. And here, again, in summary fashion, is How You Will Know How I Spent This Summer.

Airplane! (1980) dir. by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, Jerry Zucker

Game-changers almost never hold up. Their imitators end up ruining the curve for everyone. Even Citizen Kane doesn’t get as much respect as it used to. And just as Tarantino’s blend of pop music, ultra violence and and whipsmart dialogue feels so played out today, so does Airplane’s rat-a-tat, parodic comedic style, its pure commitment to joke over form.

Back at the dawn of the Reagan era, this sort of thing was not the norm. Woody Allen neurotic comedies were the fashion for the discerning, while an undertow of frat-based humor (Animal House, Caddyshack, Blues Brothers) also held sway.

Even Mel Brooks tried to obey some rules of narrative. But Airplane! gleefully trashes them. From the moment the male and female airport “loading zone” announcers get into a lover’s quarrel, you know that this is a film that has no purchase on reality. It virtually created the self-referential universe in which we now find ourselves living daily.

This is a film that turns Lloyd Bridges into a glue-sniffer, gives Peter Graves lines like “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” and turns Kareem Abdul-Jabbar into a sympathetic figure. It puts Maureen McGovern in a nun’s habit, had Barbara Billingsley speak “jive” and launched a new career for Leslie Nielsen.

The jokes don’t hold up nearly as well as they did 30 years ago, but its sheer willingness to go for the laugh in the manner of a good Marx Brothers comedy, remains its hallmark.

The Big Combo (1955) dir. by Joseph H. Lewis

A film noir that features all the classics: the obsessed the detective, the girl who’s taken a wrong turn, the slick antagonist. In this case, it’s the bad guy, Richard Conte, who dominates the picture over a blank Cornel Wilde. Great atmosphere and smoky cinematography. The two-man shoot-out ending was swiped by Heat, among many other films.

As I discovered, the film is likely best known now for featuring a pair of gay henchmen, Fante (Lee Van Cleef) and Mingo (Earl Holliman). Pretty daring stuff for the 50s. The names of the characters were recycled by Jess Whedon for a pair of underworld types in Serenity.

The Big Knife (1955) dir. by Robert Aldrich

An overly pedagogical look at the evils of Hollywood. Written by working-class hero Clifford Odets (see Barton Fink), it feels stagey in every way, from the endless exposition to the film’s lack of dynamic movement. Jack Palance is the Big Star who has sold out his principles for a paycheck, but Every Time He Gets Out They Pull Him Back In. Melodramatic in a very 1950s kind of way, the ending is both completely predictable and a huge cheat.

Chungking Express (1994)

Fallen Angels (1995)

dir. by Wong Kar-Wai

These two films deserve their own entry, but time is short. Wong Kar-Wai’s frenetic, fragmented account of disparate lives intersecting in late 20^th century Hong Kong might drive with an aversion to the precious right up the wall, with Faye Wong in Chungking Express playing the original manic pixie dream girl (sorry Kirsten Dunst) always dancing to the same song, or the heartbroken cop (Tony Leung) talking to objects in his apartment.

Fallen Angels, which largely tells the tale of a hit man obsessed with his partner, is even more elliptical—and has less of a heart than Chungking. Both films, bathed in a neon glow of modern, restless Hong Kong, are drop-dead gorgeous.

Chungking, however, has an arresting high-spiritedness and romanticism that allows it transcend its tendency toward whimsy. At the end, it stays with you and becomes a film that you hope to sound revisit.

Deadline USA (1952) dir. by Richard Brooks

For years, this was a mysterious film referenced again and again (over whiskey) by my friend Douglas McCollam. This summer it became obtainable through a DVD-R agent on Amazon, so I could finally see the reason why he paid it so much homage.

Start with the last exchange, “That’s the press, baby” and work backward from there. Humphrey Bogart is a New York newspaper editor dealing with problems not so distant from today. His beloved paper is being put on the market, its editorial voice soon to be silenced. He’s got ex-wife problems, mobster problems.

It triumphs in its unvarnished optimism about the role of the press in a (small d) democratic society, holding those in power and those corrupt accountable. At a time when the media has become fragmented into so many component parts that its very essence risks dilution, this simple tale can become life-affirming.

Escape from New York (1981) dir. by John Carpenter

Snake Plissken. Is there anything really to say, except a condemnation of yours truly for never seeing it until now? If anything, the production values were worse than I even had envisioned. Looks like Carpenter filmed it on three or four blocks in Detroit. (Sorry, Detroit. According to Wikipedia, it was St. Louis.)

But, like James Cameron’s The Terminator, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

As we all know now, 1997 really was a futuristic dystopia. I mean, the Indians lost to the friggin’ Florida Marlins.

Gladiator (2000) dir. by Ridley Scott

Eleven years ago, I was never able to place this film in its proper context (although I clearly recall seeing it at the cinema in downtown Bethesda), but the passing years have made that task easier. It’s an actioner, through and through, with an absolute star-marking performance by Russell Crowe, and at root doesn’t require many brain cells. In that regard, it’s the ultimate Saturday night after the football-game tailgate movie.

But there is more here.  In 2000, the United States was, like Rome in antiquity, the unquestioned leader of the world. Soviet Communism had collapsed. Few threats were on the horizon. The economy was roaring. The biggest danger, it appeared, was rot from within.

That was the world of Gladiator, a world in which a fat society contemplated the sins of its leaders and by extension, themselves. Then, of course, the leader was Bill Clinton, in whom personal transgression and global leadership freely co-habitated.

Since that time, that swollen, hegemonic world seems to have teetered on the world of collapse. America has seen two wars, an expanded federal profile, and economic instability since the movie premiered.

If the embedded warning within Gladiator was the threat of ruin, the past decade has served to make it more of a reality in the minds of the many than was ever thought possible back then. It’s the rare instance where what seemed to be a pure, escapist entertainment may have been more of a clarion call than anyone realized.

“There once was a dream that was Rome.” Ridley Scott was talking about America.

(In another post, down the road, we’ll revisit Crowe’s career and whether it has lived up to everything that was suggested. He’s a frustrating actor in that he’s one of the few that on the screen now who remain capable of greatness.)

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) dir. by Joel and Ethan Coen

The Coens again. Inspired by True Grit, I began working back through the catalogue. This has always been an entry that I felt was treated with an undue harshness. But then, back in the early 90s, critics were getting impatient. (They still are, truth be told.) They wanted a Coen masterpiece, an Oscar contender.

After the deep thoughts of Barton Fink and the historical mannerism of Miller’s Crossing, Hudsucker looked like a trifle, despite the towering presence of Paul Newman. (And he really was. And missed even more because of it.)

Those critics would be appeased with Fargo, but Hudsucker was part of a pattern the Coens would repeat. And another shaggy homage to classic film, The Big Lebowski, would be celebrated while this film was relegated to the dustbin. Not right or fair. The neglect might have been due to the influences. In their genetic memory, viewers may still have recalled the noir elements that propelled Fargo and Lebowski, or the immigrant mob stories that underpinned Miller’s Crossing. But counting on America to recall Preston Stuges, Howard Hawks, and Frank Capra? A tougher sell.

It’s not as good as at looks.

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962) dir. by Sidney W. Pink

This was a very big in Denmark. Or it should have been. Not good sci-fi or classic sci-fi. Or classically bad sci-fi, like Plan 9 From Outer Space. More like a third-season episode of “Star Trek.” And likely not even that.  The budget, according again to Wikipedia, was 75 k. I forgot this film the minute I finished it and had to read imdb just to remember the plot.

Night of the Iguana (1964) dir. by John Huston

Not a great film. It grows, in fact, a bit unbearable after awhile. But then I have a problem, obviously, with works adapted from the well-known plays of the time. This was another Tennessee Williams number and is largely endurable because of Richard Burton, born to play a blustery conniver always on the edge of total dissipation, and the always game Ava Gardner. For me, this was a follow to Under the Volcano, another down-and-outer in Mexico directed by Huston.

Iguana seems to go on forever and Sue Lyon (of Lolita fame), playing the sex-starved ingenue, is an anchor around his neck. She’s bad. Madonna bad. She shouldn’t be on the same planet with Burton, or, for that matter, Ava Gardner.

Oldboy (2003) dir. by Chan wook-Park

A haunting, difficult film that offers stunning visual rewards. In a sense, the final plot twist was obvious, but I hadn’t leaped to the conclusion.  But then, I don’t enjoy thinking out puzzles in the midst of films. It’s why Inception disappointed me, because it seemed purposefully designed to force to you figure it out while you were watching it, making the action of the film less important than untangling the riddle, if that tangled sentence makes any sense. (See also The Usual Suspects, Momento.)

Spike Lee is directing an American remake, which we all can, as one, dread.  This film is about fatalism and self-sacrifice, neither of which are prevalent in this culture.

On the Beach (1959) dir. by Stanley Kramer

But then, speaking of fatalism, this is a pretty despairing tale of a U.S. submarine in Australia after a nuclear holocaust has wiped out the rest of the earth. It’s daring material, the kind of thing that felt all-too-realistic in 1960, and a genre of its own that has largely disappeared, replaced by the virus/zombie trope.

But instead of a Zombie Apocalypse, On the Beach concerns itself with the relationships among a small group of friends and lovers (Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner) trying stoically to confront the End Times. The most memorable sequence involves one sailor who decides to emerge into the radiation-filled skies to live alone in empty San Francisco. There is no panic in the streets, but instead resignation to our self-created fate.

Pickpocket (1959) dir. by Robert Bresson

This is a film about inevitability. My first experience with the films of Robert Bresson, it left with a no doubt intentionally alienated feeling toward the blank-faced protagonist, Michel (Martin LaSalle). Ostensibly the ending is about the redemptive power of love, but since strong emotions rarely surface during the film (indeed Michel does everything he can to keep them at arm’s length), the viewer is left wondering whether Michel is just kidding himself and trying futilely to substitute responsible a object of desire (women) for more forbidden targets.

Run Silent Run Deep (1958) dir. by Robert Wise

I have a weakness for submarine movies. I’ve detailed my affection for The Hunt for Red October elsewhere on this site. And of course, On the Beach is reviewed bove. But this tale of veteran Clark Gable battling up-and-coming officer Burt Lancaster was largely remade step-by-step in Crimson Tide, not that there is anything wrong with that. Will the two headstrong officers ultimately see eye-to-eye and grow to respect each other? I won’t spoil it.

The Social Network (2010) dir. by David Fincher

This film has been worked over to death. I’ll just add that it deserves the praise it earned and belongs in the best tradition of cinema. David Fincher’s refusal to make Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) sympathetic was a courageous, and correct, choice. As Citizen Kane illustrated, success in America rarely comes to those of a better nature or to those who might deserve it. A master class in filmmaking—and screenwriting. These days, all one can ask of a film is to have a third act that carries some elements of surprise.

Source Code (2011) dir. by Duncan Jones

I’m a rank sucker for films that manipulate time, so it’s natural that I would gravitate to this, despite its obvious similarity to the recent (for me, at least) Déjà Vu. The premise, in which an agent returns again and again to the moments directly before the bombing of a train, seems driven more by magic than science—but I suppose so is warp drive. But the science doesn’t much matter when you have Michelle Monaghan, one of my favorite modern actresses and someone who invests heart and soul in everything she does.

The reason this works where the Tony Scott-Denzel Déjà Vu doesn’t is a direct result of her believable chemistry with Jake Gyllenhaal, whose ho-humness works to his advantage here. He’s the opposite of a hardcore action hero; he’s just a tired solider who wants to go home. Looks great on Blu Ray.

Sabrina (1954) dir. by Billy Wilder

What is it about Audrey Hepburn? How does she endure in hearts and minds of young girls now more than contemporaries such as Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor? My daughter became hooked with Roman Holiday and then stayed with the more sophisticated Sabrina even though I thought she would soon become bored. She saw it as the fairy tale it was supposed to be: the common girl who chose between two princes in the castle. (Although I am sure, just like audiences in 1955 were, a little confused as to why she would chose Bogart’s Linus over Holden’s David.) And the Billy Wilder-Ernest Lehman script had her laughing. A very good sign.

Tom Horn (1980) dir. by William Wiard (in truth, Steve McQueen)

There should be a special section of this blog devoted to films that capture the essence of the dying movie star. More often than not, their peak is behind them. Even for the greats. The reason we remember Dean and Monroe is because we didn’t have to witness the betrayal of their bodies.  But you can’t watch, say, The Misfits without knowing that Gable was soon to perish and wonder if he knew that. (Monroe, too, of course. But that was different.)

As far as I have been able to discover, McQueen knew he was sick during the filming of Tom Horn, but didn’t know he had incurable lung cancer. He was diagnosed shortly after the move was wrapped. But the film—and it is by no means a great one—is rendered more poignant in that a story purportedly about the Death of the West becomes one about the death of an icon of individualism. Life and art are bound together, narrative fused to metaphor.

After he starred in such films as Papillon and The Getaway in the first half of the decade, the 70s turned empty for McQueen. He retired from acting for several years and Tom Horn was a comeback of sorts. His looks had faded and he was smaller, softer. There are several parts of the film where stunt doubles may have been used. But his spirit remained present. In a badly composed scene late in the film where Horn makes one desperate bid for freedom, it feels now like McQueen himself is running for his life, for a few extra moments.

True Grit (2010) dir. by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

This wonderful movie will soon merit its own post, but suffice it to say, this is top tier Coen brothers.

Some might prefer their more nihilistic turns in A Serious Man or No Country for Old Men, but I prefer when they, well, lighten up a bit. The sequence in which young Mattie Ross (an unreal 13-year-old Hailee Steinfeld) dresses for her journey, gathers her horse, and bravely crosses a swollen river alone made me want to cheer, while its deathly beautiful, greyswept climax (echoing The Night of the Hunter) had me in tears.

The film shimmers. Some would argue genre films can never be art. True Grit is a rebuttal. And because of Steinfeld’s heroic performance, it’s a movie I hope to share with my daughter for years to come.

Winter’s Bone (2010) dir. by Debra Granik

Speaking of tough girls, Jennifer Lawrence deserved the plaudits she received for a teenager trying to search for her no-good father and keep her family together amid the abject poverty of the Ozarks.

While the film is driven by a nourish plot, it triumphs in the small details. The opening minutes are riveting in their precision. In their own way, the images of a hardscrabble and entirely insular American existence are as unsparing as those of the Rio slums in a film such as City of God. When the outside does intrude, it does through only by the two constants in any society—the police and the military.

While the ending provides resolution, it is not uplifting. Sometimes the crab can’t leave the bucket.

Never gave much thought to Melanie Griffith. In the height of her career, the late 1980s/early 90s, I dismissed her as a dollar-store Marilyn Monroe, with the Michelin body and the boop-a-doop voice. (See also: Jennifer Tilly.) She seemed insubstantial, especially compared to leading actresses of her time, such as Glenn Close, Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver.

But I’ve been forced to reassess, watching Griffith back-to-back in two films, Stormy Monday (Mike Figgis, 1987) and Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986), and realizing that she has a quality, one that may have been better appreciated in the days of classic Hollywood, an ability to shift from light drama to comedy effortlessly.

That’s largely a product of the likeable simplicity she projects, where she can seem like a stalwart ally on one hand (Monday) and come off as sexually dangerous on the other (Wild).

Of course, sex and Griffith had always gone hand-and-hand. That was her rep, the curvy ingénue on display in Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) but given full flower in Brian DePalma’s cult classic Body Double (1984), in which she played a porn star and came into her own as a figure who could carry the screen. But she seemed destined for B-pictures, the kind of films today that head straight for DVD.

Although she was not yet 30 by the time she made both Stormy Monday and Something Wild, Griffith had already gained a sort of shopworn quality, a wisdom gained from hard knocks, that was at odds with her sex kitten persona. Set in Newcastle, England, Stormy Monday might be called, for what of a better term, a Reagan Noir.  The plot involves a flag-waving Texas businessman (Tommy Lee Jones, natch) who seeks to strong arm his way to an economic development project, with a jazz-club owner (Sting, back when he was still trying to be a hyphenate) and his gofer (Sean Bean) in his way.

Griffith is enormously sympathetic as the chain-restaurant waitress and sometime-deal-closing prostitute who falls for Bean, but who appears unable to break Jones’ grip on her. The whole woman-caught-between-two-worlds in a noir trope, but she makes it fresh, largely through pure charisma. The movie, as detailed in a recent video essay, is more interested in noir style than substance, which probably plays to Griffith’s benefit.

Something Wild is the better-known picture, given new life because of its release by Criterion.  I’m one of those who believe Jonathan Demme was at his best early in his career, when he fused a pop aesthetic with a comic New York sensibility, making Wild and Married to the Mob. (I know, I know, Silence of the Lambs.)

The great appeal of the Wild lies in Griffith’s performance. Like poor befuddled Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels), we’ve never seen anything like Lulu/Audrey, as portrayed by Griffith.  For the first part of the movie, she’s a scotch-downing, handcuff-brandishing temptress, before switching gears entirely and becoming the kind of girl that can be literally brought home to mom.

Griffith transitions easily from a beguiling, dominating figure in the first half of the film to a bitter, resigned captive in the second, drained of her spark. The film is expertly constructed to have supercharged Ray Liotta come in halfway through to jump-start the story, which was in danger of drifting off into small-town tedium. Daniels is fine throughout, but as with the character he plays, he’s hard to find interesting in long stretches.

Like Stormy Monday, the film was a product of its time and has been called a “yuppie nightmare,” a pedigree it shared with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985). And as in the Figgis film Monday, Griffith makes an appealing counterweight to the self-important, consumer-driven culture of 80s.

Her blue-collar, downmarket appeal is likely what made her so winning at the time. It was a persona she would soon hone to perfection in her breakout hit Working Girl (1988), an film so finely crafted that it holds its own with the best comedies ever made. As the sharpest secretary in Manhattan, Griffith became a star.

Working Girl also offers some interesting commentary on sexuality, as its director, Mike Nichols, went out of his way to show a slightly chunky Griffith in her underwear, likely in an effort to portray his heroine as attractive, but not unrealistically so. It’s hard to imagine such a scene in a modern film, where every woman is an airbrushed, flat-abed amazon. But that was part of Griffith’s charm; her seductiveness was premised in part on her accessibility; she seemed realistic, obtainable.

But whether through her own limitations as an actress or her choice of material (I’d say the latter), her star quickly faded. In the 1930s and 40s, a Griffith-type character could have made a dozen films centered around that sort of rowhouse likeability, but she quickly progressed to playing more polished characters in another Yuppie thriller, Pacific Heights (1990), and the notorious bomb, The Bonfire of the Vanities –which, Wikipedia, tells me is somehow very big in Yugoslavia.

Just like that, her time was over. She should have stayed where she was. Some people belong on the wrong side of the tracks.

I’m not what you would call an early adopter. For one reason, I can’t afford the lifestyle. But even I am hard-pressed to explain why, exactly, I waited years to buy a Blu-ray player.

Of course, those who weren’t in a hurry to embrace hi-def had to await the format shakeout between Blu-ray and HD/DVD. After that, however, even after I bought my first hi-def TV a few years ago, I resisted. At bottom, I thought, how much better, truly, could the presentation be? And as someone who endured the VHS to DVD shift, I was not eager for another regime change.

Basically, I had consigned Blu-ray to some parallel universe to ensure it stayed off the radar screen—the same place I’ve interred hip-hop music, reality TV, organic food, and other items that for millions of people have become staples of everyday life.

Even worse, I continued to stock up on standard definition DVDs, which now, unfortunately, feels a bit like purchasing a few American cars off the lot in 1976.

A couple of months ago, however, I made the plunge, buying a Sony player on discount along with a handful of Blu-rays—and even as I did so, I had a vague uneasy feeling that this was trouble. I can be, a times, a bit obsessive. So I made some vows to myself, a Blu-ray creed if you will.

It went something like–by the purchase of this player, I will refrain from the following actions:

1)      I will not become a Blu-ray snob and sneer at standard-definition movies

2)      I will not replace SD titles I already own with their BD counterparts

3)      I will not buy titles simply because they look good in hi-def

Anyone who knows me would not be surprised that a handful of weeks later, those pledges lie in ruins. And you can blame The Searchers for it.

John Ford’s classic was sitting there at Target for the unappreciated price of $10. I snatched it up. At home, it was the first Blu-ray I slid into the new player, the trial run. I was expecting little. The film is 55 years old.

And it, well, it destroyed me. From the moment Martha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan) walks outside on the porch of her solitary frontier house and Ford’s camera pans out to the rocks and brush beyond, capturing it all in colors and light so stunning as to almost be disorienting, the way that a hot sun can make the ground seem to shimmer and turn opaque. It made me almost squint.

It was, I might suggest, the purest example I had ever beheld of a film as an image, a work of art. In short, it slapped me across the face.

Over the previous weeks, few people had supported my supposition that Blu-ray players offer any real, noticeable edge over a standard picture (and to muddy the waters further, there’s the whole concept of “upconversion”—a process I’m still not sure I actually believe works). But most detractors had an even more persuasive argument to make: that physical media itself is a not long for this world, that streaming video will render Blu-ray discs as obsolete as the 10 zillion CDs I have packed in boxes.

I have no doubt that will happen. Someday. The speed at which we can view web-based content is already mind-boggling, and streaming via Netflix has changed my viewing habits dramatically. Those speeds, as well as the storage capability of streaming devices, will only improve, although I also fully expect streaming to soon grow to be as expensive as cable.

But for now, even streaming HD doesn’t truly match up with the real deal, both with regard to video and audio. (It sounds ridiculous, but BD audio made we wistful for something I rarely think about—a house. Home theaters don’t really go over well in crowded apartment buildings.)

As for the idea that most people can’t tell a BD disc from a standard DVD, well, of course, I had to prove it to myself. The first tenet of the creed was tested the moment I inserted my SD version of The Departed into the drive.

It looked wrong. The film appeared, splotchy. I replayed the scene where Leonard DiCaprio’s character is recruited by Martin Sheen and Mark Wahlberg again and again. Why wasn’t DiCaprio’s face more sharply rendered. Why did the outline of his head look fuzzy? And why hadn’t I noticed this earlier?

Yeah, but what did you think of the image quality of the transfer?

As it is with a first-class plane flight, a four-star hotel room, box seats to a sporting event—the disparity was unmistakable. The past was rendered miserable, inadequate.

I ran out and bought a BD of the same film—and matched them against each other. Watching the first few opening scenes in a sort of cinematic UFC. The standard DVD couldn’t keep pace. It was a first-round knockout.  (It also felt like a jarringly kooky exercise, an embrace of solitary eccentricity.)

Like any newly minted evangelical, I quickly sought out those of the same faith, and wasn’t surprised to find entire online communities devoted to analyzing whether the transfer of a film to HD resulted in something akin to “reference quality” or whether it fell short (see, the much-criticized 2009 release of Gladiator), lamentations on releases lacking “lossless audio” and esoteric debates about whether Stanley Kubrick intended his Barry Lyndon to be presented in a 1.66 aspect ratio or 1.78. (The same folks who consider this a significant issue despite the miniscule portion of the screenscape at the center of the conflict are the same people who would no sooner watch a standard-def movie if they could help it than shower fully clothed.)

Ben Kenobi told Luke Skywalker in Star Wars that he had taken his first step into a larger world. But this felt the opposite. I had come across a niche, a passion. Something akin to Brooklynites who grow their own food or weave their own clothes. Because of streaming, Blu-ray is unlikely to ever catch on en masse, despite that fact that most Americans own HDTVs. Why? Because people don’t care all that much about picture quality for movies. For sports, yes. For film? Eh.

But that’s all right. For me, it’s been something like having my senses heightened. The rest of the world needn’t come along. (Although it would be appreciated if BD prices kept dropping.)

As I said, the first tenet of the creed fell swiftly aside—which inevitably spelled the end for the second pledge, as well. Before I knew it, I was snapping up Blu-ray versions of prized films, from Blade Runner, to Sweet Smell of Success, to the Maltese Falcon (and yes, Ronin, dammit), and unloading their standard-DVD cousins like shipping so many unwanted adoptees back to the orphanage.

But it wasn’t just beloved classics. I realized the fever truly had taken hold when I found a Blu-ray edition of Crank with Jason Statham in my shopping basket. Thus,  in that way, the third tenet was violated. A brainless action movie that, if reviews are to believed, delivers stunning PQ and AQ on BD. There was no going back.

And hey, at $5.99, buying it was almost the same as not buying it. At least that’s what I told myself.

The movie itself? Haven’t seen it yet.  Plenty of time for that. I’m too busy hunting for the next deal. The heart wants what the heart wants.

Off to the Criterion sale at Barnes & Noble

I had a girlfriend once–hm, maybe I should stop there.These days, that alone seems like an accomplishment. Anyway, I clearly recall this woman becoming almost physically ill as she watched Nic Cage commit suicide-by-drink in Leaving Las Vegas (1995). She simply couldn’t watch someone purposefully abuse themselves so thoroughly.

But then, she wasn’t in love with Cage’s character (or me, as it happened) and so perhaps didn’t quite understand the capacity a spouse or partner can develop for witnessing the self-mandated destruction of an intimate.

In Under the Volcano, we don’t know why Yvonne Firmin (Jacqueline Bisset) has come back to Mexico to reconnect with the husband she at one point seemed to determine to leave behind. Her motives are never articulated–especially to her mate, Geoffrey, who spends much of the film practically convinced she’s an apparition.

I haven’t read the Malcolm Lowry novel upon which the film is based, but perhaps a less literal director than John Huston may have played with that sense of unreality a bit more. After all, the film takes great pains to provide us with an early scene in which Geoffrey (Albert Finney, raging at his helplessness) is dragged to a church to pray for her return from America.

The morning after, when Geoffrey, still drunk, still in his clothes from the night before, dissembling to an uninterested few about his past adventures, first spies Yvonne in the doorway, resplendent in morning light, he turns away. He’s convinced she isn’t real, while a local doctor believes she is a product of the divine.

Geoffrey will spend much of the rest of the movie denying that she’s there in body at all–and more than that, he’ll resist at every juncture the idea that she could be there because she does indeed love him.

Is she and does she? Again, Huston doesn’t have much fun with that idea. (Although go too far and you have Inception. Or Solaris. Or, groan, Shutter Island.) If the movie, like the novel, were told entirely from Geoffrey’s point of view, we might wonder. But Huston painstakingly gives us asides featuring Yvonne and Geoffrey’s half-brother, Hugh, that make it clear that she has come back to Mexico for her husband.

I suppose that makes the story more of a tragedy–that Geoffrey is so far gone, so possessed by the bottle, and so shackled by his weaknesses, that he can’t reclaim his life with Yvonne even as he desperately wants to–but an alternative version might be that she left long ago, a prophet of his descent, and that her change of heart is his late-night drunken fantasy. Those can be as real as anything.

Huston instead positions Yvonne for much of the film as Sera was in Leaving Las Vegas, the faithful, unquestioning, standby, watching until the bitter end, choosing perhaps not to intervene in some strange hope that peace will be the result.  The final act, however, seems to want it both ways.

That which will be will be.

As Geoffrey tumbles into the hellish swirl of a cantina and whorehouse, he appears to lose his final tether to reality and film teeters on the edge of a dream along with him. The sequence in which he finally reviews Yvonne’s letters, in particular, has a feverish, account-settling surreality to it, as if his life is flashing before him in hand-written cursive.

That mood extends to the much-maligned ending, where both estranged lovers fall in a machination worthy of Shakespeare (who did it better). The choice propels the film further into the realm of allegory, yanking us farther away from the questions that Huston seemed, earlier, had wanted us to ask. Why did she come back? Why did she still love him? And why was she so powerless to stop him?

Post-war is hell in both Tokyo (above) and New Mexico.

War–and service–in these two very different films are things to be exploited.

In Samuel Fuller’s  House of Bamboo, GIs who defeated Japan in the Big One want to do it again, from the inside out. Acting from a sense of superiority and entitlement, they seek to dominate the country in a criminal sense in the way just a decade earlier they did so militarily.

In Karl Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain, the Vietnam vets at the center of the story want nothing to do with the country they left behind, but they’ll use its riches–in this case, heroin–to profit in the same manner as Fuller’s ex-Army men.

Both films, in their own way, cover the soul-siphoning effects of war. Both are populated with men who have little left to offer a society that is hungry to move forward from military conflict.

In Fuller’s film, a platoon reorganizes itself as a gang. In Reisz’ movie, it’s everyone for themselves. The differences between America’s dedication to World War II and its ambivalence about the Southeast Asian conflict couldn’t be more readily expressed when comparing the two.

Times, of course, were different, although the films are less than 25 years apart. Bamboo, one of the first American pictures to be shot on location in Japan–just years after the end of the occupation–is more exotic. In vibrant, picturesque scenes, Fuller details the tension running through Japanese society, from the traditional dances to the modern industry, from the peasant workers to the cocky Americans.  It hews closely to the themes of 50s crime noir, with the one lone hero immersed in a foreign environment in which he doesn’t know whom he can trust.

By contrast, an anti-authoritarianism runs through Rain, befitting a film that uses Vietnam as a departure point. Nobody in this film wears the white hat, from the anti-hero Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte) to the government agents chasing Hicks and drug-addled Marge Converse (Tuesday Weld).  Hicks motivations are simple: Driven by an overdeveloped sense of loyalty to a war buddy, he simply wants to unload some smuggled heroin. Later, he only wants to stay alive.

If Bamboo was a product of the 50s, right down to Yankee imperialism, then Rain is clearly fashioned out of the tumultuous 70s, with its casual treatment of drug use (at one point, Nolte, the nominal good guy, introduces Weld to smack) and its downbeat, everybody-loses ending. But both films take a cynical view of military service, refusing to lionize the experience of serving in wartime.

As a sidenote: The term movie star is often used for cinema’s brightest lights, from Grant and Bogart, to Newman, and Crowe. But these two films are powered by their male leads, Bamboo‘s Robert Ryan, who plays the crime boss, and Nolte. They offer textbook illustrations of how one actor’s charisma and energy can carry a film, even modest ones such as these.

(Rain also features, by the way, a chilling supporting performance by Richard Masur as one of the henchmen chasing Nolte and Weld. Masur was likely best known at the time for serving as Bonnie Franklin’s shlubby boyfriend on CBS’ One Day at a Time.)

My favorite shot from either film? It has to be the punch delivered by Ryan’s crony, played by Cameron Mitchell, that knocks Robert Stack through a Japanese screen–which tears away to reveal Ryan himself.

So you set out to identify 25 films that, to your mind, provide the definitive Los Angeles experience. That means you have to watch a lot of movies that don’t make the grade.

Here’s a progress report on those so far that have fallen short:

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) dir. by Vincente Minelli.

This melodrama, told in flashback, details how a ruthless producer (Kirk Douglas) manipulates the careers of a director, an actress, and a screenwriter, and served as an early indictment of the Hollywood studio system. Douglas is strong in the role, but the boozing Lana Turner character, in particular, didn’t work for me, nor did Dick Powell’s Southern writer.

All of it was a bit more soapy than I care for, but hey, it was the 50s, so that’s what you’re going to get. As a critique of Hollywood, it suffers in comparison to Sunset Boulevard, released two years earlier.

This film holds the record for most Academy Awards (five) without being nominated for Best Picture.

Barton Fink (1991) dir. by Joel Coen

A film that stubbornly refuses to grow on me, something that would likely would please the Coen brothers. Looking back at a post I wrote about Burn After Reading, I noted then that the Coens’ high standards are held against them. But in this case, I’d say they are given the benefit of their doubt for their cinematic pretensions.

Like A Serious Man (2008), this movie appears to be engineered to frustrate, and like that film, Barton Fink is layered with symbolism, so much so that, in my estimation, the narrative almost collapses under the weight. Those two films also share similar protagonists, and like Larry Gopnik, Fink is an inert  presence, to whom terrible, purposeless things happen, but who refuses to draw any meaning from them.

More often than not, the central figures in Coen films don’t evolve, and the brothers have often been accused of having a bleak view both of their own cinematic creations and of humanity itself. They don’t propel the action of the film; they’re more often dragged through it, sometimes literally. (Lebowski may be the best example.) That’s why the Coens are always called “absurdists.” Life is a joke, but a cosmic one.

Barton Fink, however, is an ambitious work that attempts to say something about art and commerce. The question remains whether the film is a sendup of writers (and by extension directors) who consider themselves artists, as well as the left-wing intelligensia, or whether the movie is a more sober look at the pitfalls of commercialism and selling out.

The irony is thick and likely intentional: John Turturro’s Fink is the object of ridicule in the film, pompously defending the common man even as he exhibits a near total lack of interest in anyone besides himself. His work (“the cry of the fishmongers”) is laden with caricature.

Yet the Coens have often been accused of precisely the same thing–and the effect, at least in Barton Fink, is doubly alienating.

Changeling (2008) dir. by Clint Eastwood

Reviewed here.

Crips and Bloods: Made in America (2008) dir. by Stacy Peralta

An informative, but ultimately unsatisfying documentary about the rise of Los Angeles’s two famous turf gangs. It vividly documents the institutional racism that help turn South Central L.A. into a dilapidated war zone and human toll 40 years of street battles has taken, taking its cameras into those neighborhood so we can witness the devastation up close.

But the film sometimes feels as if it’s lacking context–and it does little to visit the world outside South Central to examine the gangs’ role in the drug trade.

Criss Cross (1949) dir. by Robert Siodmak

A film noir filmed on location in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown L.A., this potboiler features a young and winning Burt Lancaster trying to get over former flame Anna, played by Yvonne DeCarlo. His obsession leads him into an alliance with mobster Slim (Dan Duryea).

The Angels Flight hillside railway can be viewed through the window of a since-leveled building in a scene where an armored-car robbery is planned.

Cutter’s Way (1981) dir. by Ivan Passar

A highly underrated paranoiac thriller set in Santa Barbara, featuring a headlining performance by John Heard, as a crippled, alcoholic Vietnam vet who suspects a conspiracy at the heart of the town’s power structure. It’s a 70′s-style drama transposed into the early years of the Reagan administration and turns even more effective as a result.

Jeff Bridges plays a callow beach bum, a precursor to Jeff Lebowski, but Heard  rager drives the film.

DOA (1950) dir. by Rudolph Mate

A classic film noir, a sweaty, combustible Edmond O’Brien searches frantically in San Francisco and Los Angeles for the man who poisoned him.

The film opens with a famous tracking shot of O’Brien walking down a corridor to the LAPD desk in City Hall, and O’Brien later confronts his killer in LA’s Bradbury Building, which would later be used famously in Blade Runner.

But for me, the most interesting sequence was the one set at a club in Fisherman’s Wharf where O’Brien listens to a black R&B band, five years before rock n’ roll would reshape the American landscape.

DOA is the highest of high concepts, but was executed in a somewhat clumsy manner.

He Walked By Night (1947) dir. by (the immortal) Alfred L. Werker

An early by-the-book police procedural and an influence on everything from Dragnet to CSI, this otherwise unremarkable film is notable its sociopathic antagonist played by Richard Baseheart, an early take on wily serial killer. The third act involves a chase scene in the L.A. sewer system, similar to the one in the final reel of The Third Man.

Into the Night (1985) dir. by John Landis

Cuckholded insomniac Jeff Goldblum links up with livewire Michelle Pfeiffer in a comedy-thriller that I recalled fondly from my college days, but one that really doesn’t hold up. Goldblum is his usually low-fi, befuddled self while a young Pfeiffer is immensely appealing. You can see movie stardom awaiting her around the bend.

But the plot is full of schtick and jarring elements, the film is overly–and needlessly–bloody. And the cameos of Landis’ director friends is distracting. A clean miss.

LA Story (1991) dir. by Mick Jackson

Steve Martin’s love letter to Los Angeles has become an iconic representation of the city–and more than two decades later, it’s hard to recall whether Martin helped establish a genre with jokes about guns on the freeway, infinite varieties of cappuccino, weather, and health foods, or he simply became a leading proponent of them.

But the film simply tries to too hard to be quirky, especially with Victoria Tennant’s character. The most fully realized performance in the film (as annoying as it may be) is by Sarah Jessica Parker as, if I can spell it right, SanDeE*.

Less Than Zero (1987) dir. by Marek Kanievska

A literary phenomenon by Bret Easton Ellis watered down into a “Don’t Do Drugs” that could have borne Nancy Reagan’s seal of approval. Most interesting now for the on-the-edge performance of a young Robert Downey Jr., with some good malevolent supporting work from (naturally) James Spader. But Jami Gertz makes for an improbable wrong-path wastrel, while Andrew McCarthy would soon be dancing with mannequins.

Still, it endures, largely as  a well-preserved artifact of the 1980s, chronicling the plight of errant Beverly Hills and Bel Air rich kids with some rich detail.

Lethal Weapon (1987) dir. by Richard Donner

Reviewed here.

Mildred Pierce (1945) dir. by Michael Curtiz

Likely the film on this list that came closest to cracking the top 30, this film comes advertised as a noir, but make no mistake, it’s a melodrama through and through. The familiar tale of a entrepreneurial business woman and her spoiled, no-good daughter was recently remade by Todd Haynes for HBO.

Locales range from a beachfront house to a Pasadena mansion. This film marked my introduction to Joan Crawford–the real one, not Faye Dunaway’s hanger-hater–and, what can I say? I don’t get it. But Michael Curitz’ noirish black-and-white direction, which contrasted the look of sunny Southern California, would provide a template for other daylight neo-noirs such as Chinatown.

Repo Man (1984) dir. by Alex Cox

A virtual stew of Reagan-era alienation mixed with L.A.’s punk rock scene, Repo Man deserves its status as a cult classic. Few films so boldly announced that the 70s were gone for good. (Witness the turn of Otto’s parents from hippies to mindless followers of televangelists.)

Very similar, in its own L.A. way, to 1955′s Rebel Without a Cause. Both films dealt with young dropouts groping for meaning and connection in a world where they felt invisible. (Think, too, about both films’ use of galactic imagery and about the lethality of the outside.)

Repo Man was one of the many 80s films to take on the subject of vanishing prosperity and the crumbling of the American dream. I’m wondering where the chronicles of lower-and-middle class struggles during the current downturn are? I’m sure they’ve exist, although likely not in mainstream form.

Skin Deep (1989) dir. by Blake Edwards

A movie I saw when it came out–and of course it all seemed rather ribald and glamorous in its own way. A typical Blake Edwards picture, a boozy writer screwing his way through life. What could be bad about that?

On second viewing, of course, the darkness of the film takes hold. But at the end of the day, despite its cry-for-help sequences,  it’s fluffy–nobody loses an eye–and it has the happy ending it deserves, even if it doesn’t seem terribly realistic. In one very real sense, it was the 80s version of Californication. (Come for condom scene, stay for the pathos!) The film does well to take advantage of John Ritter’s gift for physical comedy. He carries the picture better than you would expect.

10 (1980) dir. by Blake Edwards

More Edwards. Reviewed here.

Tequila Sunrise (1988) dir. by Robert Towne

What went wrong? You had the writer of Chinatown. Two appealing male leads. A young superstar actress in the making (Michelle Pfeiffer again). And a good helping of steamy sax-infused sex–standard for 80s films, I think.  But something did go off track. The cocktail ends up bland. Robert Towne was shooting for a modern neo-noir in his tale of Two Old Friends on Opposites Sides of the Law, but there’s very little tension, or atmosphere, or anything. And any time Pfeiffer isn’t around, you check your watch waiting for her to come back.

Part of the problem is that Mel Gibson makes a lousy drug dealer (also a lousy parent, but that’s a different story). There are no hard edges. You feel like Gibson and cop Kurt Russell (styled up like Pat Riley) could resolve their differences over a round of golf and a couple of brews at the 19th Hole.  In fact, it’s more fun to watch Russell give I-used-to-be-in-everything JT Walsh a hard time than sit through his trading barbs and threats with Gibson. And while Pfeiffer is dolled up like a 80s version of a femme fatale, she turns out to be much more femme sans consequence.

This is the classic example of a film to which a viewer brings a lot of goodwill–largely because of its leads (or its poster). Hollywood, especially classic Hollywood, of course, has banked on star power. And then the movies slowly siphons away that benefit of the doubt for the better part of two hours, whereupon you sit back and wonder, just what was that about?

Watching it again for the first time in years, I was struck by the bizarre places Raul Julia takes his character. He’s the only one in the film having any fun–and the movie benefits, and turns all the stranger, when he enters. In that sense, it seems rather similar to His Kind of Woman, which I recently screened.

Still, I’ll watch Lethal Weapon again (and again) if I want a fix of 80s Mel.

Take the Monet and run?

A lot of critics are praising Midnight in Paris as a return to form for Woody Allen, but it’s hard for me to get behind that assessment. The new release, which I saw last week in New York, is a flight of fancy about an American who journeys back to the Paris of the 1920s. The film was enjoyable enough, but only reinforced in my mind how far Allen’s stature has fallen.

As with many, my entry point with Allen was first Annie Hall, a film I used to show to prospective girlfriends as sort of a test (this may partially explain why I am single), and then Manhattan.  By those lights, Midnight in Paris is a minor work, a toss-off. From what I have read, Allen would likely disagree, but mainly because his view of his process, and of his films themselves, comes off as rather workmanlike.

Midnight makes for an interesting bookend with Manhattan. Both open with similar extended shots of their respective locales. And both, as with many of Allen’s films, concern an unrealistic sense of romance and nostalgia. “He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion – er, no, make that: he – he romanticized it all out of proportion,” Allen says, of himself, over the gorgeous black-and-white images of the city.

Allen has always been fetishistic about the past. His films, which conservatively always begin in the same style, with the same typeface, are suffused with old jazz recordings or classical pieces. Many of his movies are homages to old masters, such as Stardust Memories (1980) and Fellini. His characters, usually played by Allen himself, find solace in the Marx Brothers or Bogart.

Midnight, without giving too much away, deals explicitly with the theme of living in the past, quite literally, in fact. As such, it’s a natural subject for Allen. And the pleasure it yields arises largely from familiar names, and faces, piled on so high that it feels a bit like being assaulted by a 20th century lit course.

Owen Wilson, like the stars of many of Allen’s recent films, tries to channel Woody while only barely succeeding. And his laid-back, stoner delivery is completely at odds with Allen’s familiar mania. Truth be told: what sounds like a better potential for comedy:  Owen Wilson barely-there Texan having a conversation with Hemingway about hunting, or Allen’s nervous, urbanized New Yorker?

You might argue (since Allen is so Freudian) that his predilection for younger women, most vividly expressed in Manhattan,  is another attempt to pursue the past at expense of the present. It’s that aspect of that film that seems to, oddly enough, date it more than anything. We’re more conservative as a nation now than in the liberated 1970s–and a romance between a 42-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl in a mainstream movie these days would likely elicit outrage and comparisons to Elizabeth Smart. (Playing the 17-year-old? Mariel Hemingway, Papa’s granddaughter. Another connection between the films.) Compare and contrast Manhattan to, for example, the relationship between Bill Murray and Allen favorite Scarlett Johanssen in Lost in Translation (2003).

Manhattan has always been one of my favorite movies. With its lush cinematography, the soaring Gershwin score and the urbane references, it seemed, to a kid in Ohio, as a passport to another universe.  As noted above, Midnight involves an actual passage to another place and time.  But this time around, the journey is less interesting, the characters less alive. The film lacks the sharp, sometimes uncomfortable edges that characterizes Allen’s best work.

Midnight ends with the central character learning a lesson about nostalgia–but the ending is more old-time Hollywood than anything Allen ever attempted in Annie Hall or Manhattan.  The ultimate pessimist has mellowed with time. Better for him. Not so much for the rest of us.

Both of these films rely on the chemistry between Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.  Physically, they were larger, more exaggerated, more, er, robust, than any pair of actors on the screen at the time. Both conveyed a sense of insolence, even ambivalence to the proceedings at hand.

Macao is easily the more conventional of the two films–with a story that was designed to be out of your head a few minutes after you left the theater.  Don’t take it from me. Take it from the New York Times’ famous grouch, Bosley Crowther, who wrote:  “Macao a flimflam and no more—a flimflam designed for but one purpose and that is to mesh the two stars. The story itself is pedestrian—a routine and standardized account of a guy getting caught in the middle of a cops-and-robbers thing.” Sounds like just about every Ryan Reynolds/Sandra Bullock movie at the multiplex, right?

The most interesting thing about Macao, beyond watching Mitchum and Russell case each other over greedily, is that it was the film in which Josef von Sternberg was fired by RKO’s Howard Hughes (who masterminded Russell’s career). Von Sternberg was replaced by Nicholas Ray, who worked with Mitchum to try and help the film make sense. Macao’s cup runneth over in another way: Not only does it feature Russell, but the sublime Gloria Grahame.

But if Macao struggled to make sense, His Kind of Woman runs off the rails completely. I can’t recall a classic-era film that ended up surprising me so much. While the first part of the story involves sort of a noirish set up–Mitchum is a California drifter sent to Mexico as part of a complicated scheme to stand in for a gangster. But the second half turns into farce, as delusional actor Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price) literally hijacks the film. (Indeed. Russell almost vanishes, at one point being locked in a closet.) Price’s comic portrayal of an actor who chooses to live a dramatic life rather than remain an actor turns the film into something that would become a staple of modern films, the self-aware action comedy–with some lurid scenes of torture mixed in. (Tarantino anyone?)  This was no flimflam. It was prophetic.

Both films know what they have in Russell and conspire to keep her in tight-fitting gowns as much as possible. She was no actress–but paired with Mitchum, she didn’t have to be. She just had to appear game for anything, his kind of woman. The final shot of the film has them kissing while an iron burns his pants. Hitchock wasn’t the only one who could end films with sexual metaphors.