Category: Reviews

Tea and Sympathy (1956)

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The Hollywood Production Code did not allow for homosexuality to exist in their movies. Gay people were not acceptable. That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Clever filmmakers often included gay characters in their films. They just couldn’t come out right, and state it. But if you look closely, you’ll find all sorts of gay-coded characters hiding in plain sight.

Tea and Sympathy is a great example of this. Based on a play in which the main character is explicitly gay, the film was never allowed to call Tom (John Kerr) a homosexual, and he never shows any interest in men.  Instead, he’s just not “manly” like the other boys at his school. He likes poetry and art and listening to classical music by himself. When he’s caught sewing a button on a shirt while hanging out with a bunch of teachers’s wives instead of horsing around with the boys, things come to a boil.  

His only refuge is the housemaster’s wife (a wonderful Deborah Kerr), who seems to understand who he is, and who attempts to help. This is still a 1950s movie, and it is still entangled in that production code, but it is a surprisingly sympathetic and heartfelt little drama.  You can read my full review here.

It All Came True (1940)

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Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor. He made some of my favorite movies – The Big Sleep, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Casablanca, and so many more. But the thing I always have to remember is that he spent more than a decade as a second-tier star. He played gangsters and heavies for a long time. He was often the third or fourth actor billed on a poster or in the credits before he became the star that we know and love.

He is exactly that in It All Came True. Originally he was third billed. He plays a gangster causing trouble for top-billed Ann Sheridan. But not long after this movie came out, Bogart did become a big star. In subsequent rereleases, suddenly Bogart was top billed. They even changed the opening credits for him.

Which is kind of dumb because this is Ann Sheridan’s movie through and through. It is an odd movie.  Part of it is a fairly serious drama, but then they keep injecting magic tricks, show tunes, and vaudeville acts.  That makes it less than a great movie, but it sure is fun. You can read my full review here.

Once a Thief (1991)

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I find that while I absolutely love the way John Woo shoots action scenes, I tend to find his drama and especially his comedy a bit too goofy for my tastes. Once a Thief leans heavily into the comedy, and I was mostly bored. But there are a few good action scenes, and the finale is absolutely brilliant. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

A Bridge Too Far (1977)

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A Bridge Too Far is an epic, star-studded war movie about the failed Operation Market Garden, where the Allies tried to secure a single road and several bridges across the Netherlands right to the German border.  It is pretty good, but also a bit too long and somewhat confusing. 

Kino Lorber just released a 4K UHD disc, and I’ve got your review.

Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators: Season Five

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We’re big fans of cozy British mysteries in my house. We watched a couple of episodes of the first season of Shakespeare and Hathaway a while back. It was charming, but we got distracted and didn’t return to it. 

There was a bit of a thing that happened over at Cinema Sentries, and the person who was supposed to watch this DVD set of Season Five was unable to, so I decided I’d pitch in and help out. 

There was no need to prep myself on all the episodes I missed; this isn’t that kind of series. It is about a couple of detectives who like to dress up and solve murders. It is very light and very silly and you can read my full review here.

The Bride! (2026)

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Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! is a big, bold movie that takes a lot of big swings. It didn’t always work for me, and it is a lot, I mean a lot, to take in, but what did work was amazing, and I’m so glad films like this still exist. 

In the original novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus the creature longs for a mate, a companion, someone he can spend time with and who will not be repulsed by him. Victor Frnkenstein begins creating a female creature but destroys it before he brings her life.

Bride of Frankenstein (1935), James Whale’s sequel to his classic adaptation of the story, ponders what would happen if his monster did get a companion. It doesn’t end well. The bride only shows up at the end of the film, and her screen time (played to perfection by Elsa Lanchester) is only a few minutes.

The Bride! lets her live and gives her a modernity not found in any adaptation of the story that I’ve seen. It begins with the book’s author herself, Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley), dead and stuck in some sort of purgatory. She decries that she had more of the Frankenstein story to tell, but death robbed her of it. So she does what dead authors often do: she possesses the body of a 1920s gangster moll, Ida (also played by Jessie Buckley). 

Buckley’s performance here (and everywhere) is magnificent. As Shelley possesses her, she swings from Ida – brashy with plenty of New York accent and attitude—to Shelly – reserved British accoutrements, but full of anger and resentment. At first she struggles with keeping her thoughts and voice under control. She repeats words and phrases and winds up spilling the beans on the mob boss.  This last bit gets her thrown down a flight of stairs to her death.

Enter Frankenstein (Christian Bale). Yes, technically he’s Frankenstein’s monster, as Frankenstein was the mad scientist. The film acknowledges this but still allows the monster to call himself Frank anyway.  He finds Dr. Cornelia Euphronius (Annette Benning), who has been working on the reanimating of dead flesh. He tells her he wants a companion. They dig up Ida and reanimate her.

The process leave her with blood stains across her face and her hair strays straight up in a way that makes her look vaguely like the Bride in James Whale’s film.

Frank is obsessed with an actor (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), and he takes Ida to see all his movies. After watching one of them, they go to a vaguely queer underground party that feels like it belongs in the 1970s or ’80s, something from Studio 54 perhaps, not 1920s New York City.  Or perhaps not. What do I know about underground parties in the 1920s? I know very little about regular parties of today. I’m such a homebody.

They dance wildly, and it is in these moments that I enjoyed it most. The early parts of the film have this wonderful energy about them. They feel joyous and electric. Later the film will get bogged down in its plot and its deeper meaning, and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much. 

After the dance, Ida is assaulted by some dudes. Frank intervenes, brutally killing them. This brings police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) onto the case, and with him, his assistant Myrna Malloy (Penelope Cruz). She’s really the brains of the outfit (and yes, her name is awfully close to Myrna Loy, the classic film actress, and that surely isn’t a coincidence. This film is stuffed to the gills with those kinds of things.)

Myrna is the real brains of the operation, but she can’t be a detective because she’s a lady. The film will use this to make several nods to sexism and the like, which mostly didn’t work for me. I’m pro-feminism and equal rights, but the film doesn’t really dig deeply into that angle. Instead it just sort of nods to it, and expects us to cheer when she does make detective, gets sneered at by a bunch of redneck cops, and still saves the day.  It is one of many thematic strands that don’t get much attention. The film is trying to do so much, and it just doesn’t have the time to give some of them the time they need.

Frank and Ida are now on the lam, crisscrossing the country, going wherever one of those movies is playing. When watching one of those films, Frank often imagines himself and Ida on the screen doing those dances, singing those songs.  

Bonnie and Clyde is the clear influence on this film, but it also references things as diverse as Wild at Heart, classic song and dance movies like Top Hat, the films of Ingmar Bergman, Thelma and Louise, Metropolis, and so much more. Gyllenhaal clearly has a lot on her mind, and she’s trying to do it all in this film. Amazingly, most of it works. And even when it doesn’t, I admire the ambition.

It does start to run out of steam toward the end. I had a lot more fun watching these two run around the country getting into trouble while pursued by the cops than I did watching them try and figure out who they are and what it means to be alive. 

I suspect this will be a film that will grow on me in time. Further viewings will allow me to take more of it in and enjoy it.  But until then I can say I loved how big it swung and how hard it tried.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection

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I’ve always been a fan of exploitation films. As a young teen, I loved the babes, the sex, the violence, the gore, and the exploitativeness of it all. I still love that stuff now, I guess, but I really love the unabashedness of those films now. Exploitation films are exactly what they say they are going to be. They don’t try to wrap that stuff up in artistic pretensions like so many other films do. 

Sometimes they are actually good movies too, as is the case with at least two of the Female Prisoner Scorpion flicks.  I reviewed the Arrow Video box set of all four films back in 2016 and now you can read them.

The Night Manager: Season One

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The Night Manager is a rather slow but still thrilling spy series starring Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman. It also introduced me to the wonderful Elizabeth Debicki. Weirdly, some ten years after the first season, a second one has dropped. I haven’t seen it but I quite liked the first one. I’m thinking I need to rewatch it before diving into the second one. You can read my review of Season One over at Cinema Sentries.

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939)

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Once again we’ve run into a film that I had forgotten I watched. I pretty much request to review anything that is offered from the Criterion Collection because they are always good, or if not good, at least interesting. Seeing this title, I instantly remembered I had seen it, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Reading my review makes me want to watch it again.  

The story is about a Japanese kid who wants to be an actor but isn’t very good at it.  He has to make many a sacrifice to hone his craft, as does his lover. The film dives into what it takes to make great art and if the sacrifice is worth it. You can read all my thoughts here.