Movies

SHOSHANA: two lovers amid a deepening conflict

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Photo caption: Irina Starshenbaum and Douglas Booth in SHOSHANA. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

The thriller Shoshana is a historical drama set in pre-Israel Palestine that revolves around a love story between two people on different sides. The Jewish journalist Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum) is a committed Zionist and a supporter of the paramilitary group Haganah. Thomas Wilkin (Douglas Booth) is the Assistant Superintendent of Criminal Investigation for the British authorities.

All of the significant characters in Shoshana were real people, and the story takes place from 1933 to 1944. We don’t see many movies set in this time and place. The Ottoman Empire had ruled Palestine for 400 years, until the Ottomans were expelled by the British in WW I. The British then took over governing Palestine, with its majority Arab population and small Jewish community, under an international agreement – the British Mandate – and with a policy that there should be a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Arab residents have been living with a few Jews, but are horrified by the specter of mass Jewish immigration, and they revolt. Tit for tat murders begin between Arabs and Jews, which the British try to suppress. Soon there are rival Jewish paramilitary organizations, each with a different take on how to deal with the British, with the Arabs and with each other. When the British sharply limit Jewish immigration and frustrate the efforts to form a Jewish-majority state, the Jews react with anger against the British.

It becomes a lethal gam of three-dimensional chess. Shoshana does a pretty good job in helping the audience track who is who – and who wants to kill who. Shoshana was directed by the veteran Michael Winterbottom (Welcome to Sarajevo, Jude, The Claim, A Mighty Heart and The Trip movies).

Thomas Wilkin and Shoshana Borochov forge an 11-year relationship in an environment that becomes more stressful every year. But Thomas is unwilling to stop being a British policeman, and Shoshana is unwilling to put aside her Zionist beliefs. They love each other, but not enough for either to abandon deeply-held values or their personal identities.

What could doom their relationship is not just arguing politics at the dinner table, but something more ominous – there are plenty of players who want each of them dead. The situation is explosive – often literally. And neither can hide in a Tel Aviv still small enough that everybody knows each other.

The British are trying to cope with what we now know as asymmetrical warfare. A British officer sneeringly asks a Zionist terrorist why he is blowing up women and children, and gets the reply “Because we don’t have the resources that you do“. Ironically, the British in Shoshana are themselves employing mass reprisals, extrajudicial executions and torture that would clearly be considered war crimes today.

Of course, British colonial rule was known for arrogant, racist, and culturally tone-deaf twits, and they are represented by Shoshana‘s villain, police official Geoffrey Morton (the fine actor Harry Melling).

Arabs and their cause may not be depicted in depth in Shoshana, but are shown as victims of both Jewish terrorism and British atrocities.

The historical events constitute the origin stories for both the nation of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The British throw up their hands and fal to provide for Palestinian self-determination within the borders of Palestine. The Jewish organizations in Shoshana later evolved into the two major Israeli political parties of the past 75 years, and the Haganah morphed into the Israeli Defense Forces. Israel has since become a military power and now faces its own asymmetrical warfare.

Given the impact of this history upon the current day, we might have expected more films about this period. After all, there are a zillion films about the Holocaust and a lot set in post-1948 Israel. In 1960, Otto Preminger made the blockbuster film Exodus from the 1958 Leon Uris novel which was the biggest best seller in US since Gone With the Wind. Exodus was set in the period between 1946 and 1948. (My parents saw Exodus at a drive-in with me as a small boy in the back seat.) No less than the pioneering Zionist leader and Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion said of the novel, “as a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel“.

Shoshana is far more clear-eyed and nuanced than Exodus. Shoshana reflects a historical setting that was complicated, and tells the story of lovers’ inner conflicts amid a dynamic and perilous external conflict. Shoshana, which I reviewed earlier this year for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, is now streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

CAUGHT STEALING: Aronofsky picked off first base

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Photo caption: Liev Schrieber, Austin Butler and Vincent D’Onofrio in CAUGHT STEALING. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures.

Caught Stealing is a genre picture by Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, The Whale), who must have thought he was slumming by directing a genre movie. This is a darkly funny, violent thriller, the kind of movie that I almost always enjoy. But Aronofsky, working off a screenplay by Charlie Huston, has wasted a superb cast and a Hollywood-level budget on a movie so ordinary, that it’s not even worth streaming. It’s not even as good as Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t or half of the fare on BritBox.

It didn’t have to be that way. As I watched Caught Stealing, I kept thinking of director Steven Soderbergh, who has made Oscar movies like Sex, Lies and Videotape, Erin Brockavich and Traffic, but now churns out genre movies like Kimi and No Sudden Move that may be less artsy but are solid entertainment. Or Richard Linklater, who could make the Before Midnight movies and Boyhood, the very best American cinema of our century, and still entertain us last year with Hit Man. Hell, Rian Johnson and Questin Tarantino ONLY make genre movies – and they’re wonderful. But the director has to love and respect the genre.

In Caught Stealing, Austin Butler plays Hank, a guy who has run away from his past to bartend at a scruffy Lower Manhattan bar in the early 2000s, in a neighborhood that people hoped that Giuliani would clean up. His dodgy punk neighbor (Matt Smith) has to suddenly leave town to visit his stricken father in Britain, and asks Hank to care for his cat. Unsurprisingly, lots of dangerous people show up who think that the neighbor has double-crossed them and that Hank must know where the loot is hidden. They beat him up, and threaten to kill him and his loved ones. This results in lots of chases through NYC as Hank, some scary Russian mobsters, a pair of Hasidic gangsters and a tenacious cop all pursue each other. There’s a bit of sex, lots of violence, and some mild laughs. There’s not a surprising or unpredictable moment here.

Austin Butler is an appealing hunk who was excellent in The Bikeriders and plenty good enough in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood and Masters of the Air. He even dared to play Elvis Presley and was not the reason that Elvis was bad. Same here.

It’s an impressive cast, with Matt Smith (funny to see The Crown’s Prince Philip sporting a giant mohawk), Liev Schrieber and Vincent D’Onofrio, and Carol Kane and Laura Dern have brief cameos. But the performances by Regina King, Zoe Kravitz and Griffin Dunne are so good, that justice requires them to work in a better movie.

The movie/s title comes from Hank having sabotaged a once promising baseball career, but Darren Aronofsky didn’t even make it to the bag at second base – he was picked off at first.

TWINLESS: smart, funny, satisfying

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Photo caption: Dylan O’Brien and James Sweeney in TWINLESS. Courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

In the refreshingly original dramedy Twinless, Roman (Dylan O’Brien) has been rocked by the sudden death of his twin brother Rocky. Roman and Rocky were inseparable in their Moscow Idaho, childhood, but the more adventuresome and cosmopolitan Rocky had been building his own life in Portland. Roman, admittedly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and burdened with anger management issues, has been stuck in a dead end rut back home with their bitter mother (Lauren Graham). After the funeral, Roman, at loose ends, is sticking around Portland and finds a support group for people who are grieving the loss of their twin siblings.

Roman meets another support group participant, Dennis (James Sweeney), who has very little in common with Rocky, but, like Roman is gay, worldly and quick-witted. What Roman and Dennis share is their grief and loss of connection, and they build a most unlikely friendship. It seems like we’re in for an amiable Odd Couple comedy until something in their back stories is revealed to the audience, but not to both of them. Will the new friends be able to face and overcome this history? The drama is leavened by comedy as Twinless explores grief, loss and identity.

Dennis is played by James Sweeney, Twinless’s writer director. Sweeney has written a character of remarkable ambiguity and vulnerability for himself. Sometimes a person remains sympathetic, even though they have a loathsome character flaw and have done something very wrong. It’s really hard to write (and play) a movie character like that, and that is Sweeney’s triumphant achievement in Twinless.

Dylan O’Brien is well known for the Teen Wolf (as Stiles) and The Maze Runner franchises, with which I am unfamiliar. I’m generally impressed by actors who can convincingly play characters much dumber than they are in real life, and O’Brien is very good as a dopey innocent who we can laugh at but still root for.

Aisling Franciosi plays Marcie, a sunny goodhearted ditz who turns out to be far more formidable than either Dennis or Roman expect. Twelve years ago, in The Fall, I first saw Franciosi’s compelling performance as Katie Benedetto, a troubled Northern Irish teen who is infatuated by a serial killer (Jamie Dornan). Gotta say this – if she can play both Katie Benedetto and Marcie to perfection, she can play any character.

Reflecting both the sweetness and edginess we find in life, Twinless is one of the smartest and most satisfying comedies of recent years.

THE FANTASTIC GOLEM AFFAIRS: absurd, raunchy and funny

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Javier Botet and Bray Efe in THE FANTASTIC GOLEM AFFAIRS. Courtesy of Gluon Media.

The Spanish comedy The Fantastic Golem Affairs is unlike any other movie you’re likely to see this year, and the absurdity starts in the opening scene. After a night of partying, the pudgy slacker Juan (Bray Efe) and his best buddie David (David Menendez) are goofing around on the roof of Juan’s Madrid high-rise apartment building. David accidentally falls off and plunges to the roof of a car parked many stories below. That reveals that David is made of ceramic, as he shatters into hundreds of shards.

While still in a state of shock, Juan is annoyed by a shady car insurance agent, his late friend’s obnoxious and venal lover, apathetic cops and a woman with an outrageous computer dating profile. But he is obsessed by the mystery of a ceramic man, and keeps on the investigative trail until he stumbles on an unworldly conspiracy rooted in his own family. Along the way, a bizarre freak accident keeps recurring, killing people that he encounters during his investigation.

It’s been accurately written that there is magical realism in The Fantastic Golem Affairs, but it’s not the sweet, mystical kind in, say Like Water for Chocolate – The Fantastic Golem Affairs is bawdy and in-your-face.

The playfully, irreverent tone strongly reminds me of Pedro Almodovar’s early work (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, High Heels and Kika) and his VERY early work (Pepi, Luci, Born and Other Girlds Like Mom). Indeed, one of the characters observes, “This is like a Spanish movie from the 90s“. The Fantastic Golem Affairs is not as riotous as early Almodovar, but it adds that magical realism and much more absurdism.

Javier Botet in THE FANTASTIC GOLEM AFFAIRS. Courtesy of Gluon Media.

The Fantastic Golem Affairs is highly imaginative work of Spanish writer-directors Juan Gonzalez and Nando Martinez, who call themselves Burnin’ Percebes. They hit us with the absurdity of the shattering ceramic man right at the beginning, juxtaposed with the peppy music underneath the opening credits. The music combines with an often static camera, long shots, and colorfully retro sets that are unabashedly cheap. This is a zany, raunchy movie with some mild body horror.

[Gratuitous digression: I’m always proud to point out when I actually get a joke in Spanish. The directors’ pseudonym is Burnin’ Percebes, and percebes is Spanish for gooseneck barnacle, a hideously ugly (Google it) and delicious shellfish from Northern Spain. They are dangerous to harvest from oceanside cliffs, and are accordingly expensive – about ten times the price of a regular tapa. Of course, The Movie Gourmet himself has enjoyed percebes in San Sebastian.]

The Fantastic Golem Affairs is opening in theaters, including LA’s Alamo Drafthouse.

HONEY DON’T: kinda funny, disposable

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Photo caption: Margaret Qualley in HONEY DON’T. Courtesy of Focus Features.

In Ethan Coen’s dark comedy Honey Don’t, the potential clients of private eye Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) keep getting killed, and she suspects that the deaths are connected to a sexually predatory sham preacher (Chris Evans). She’s a whip-smart lipstick lesbian, and she sizzles with the local cop MG (Aubrey Plaza). Honey and the phony pastor have lots of robust sex, none of it with each other. We think we know who the big villain is going to be, but there’s a big surprise twist.

There’s a lot of sassy dialogue, and there are some LOL lines like “no, but I saw Palmdale” that could have become iconic if this were a better movie. It’s kinda funny, dotted with a few inspired moments, but, on the whole, a disposable movie.

Director Ethan Coen co-wrote Honey Don’t with longtime Coen Brothers editor Tricia Cooke, who also co-wrote his Drive Away Dolls. In a twist on the detective genre, the oversexed, badass characters are women – Honey, MG and a mysterious, motor scooter-riding drug importer (Lera Abova). The two main male characters are Evan’s predatory minister, a doofus who thinks he’s a mastermind, and a smarmy cop (Charlie Day), who knows that he’s a doofus and is blissfully content with being one. That being said, Honey Don’t is all about the carnage-laden comic violence that men tend to enjoy, and I doubt that the female-centric angle is enough to draw women into the audience.

Qualley and Evans are both very good, and I will watch anything that features Aubrey Plaza. There are excellent comic performances by Josh Pafchek, as an impressively dim thug, and Kale Browne, as an old man whose identity isn’t revealed right away.

One of the most distinctive and fun stars of the film is its setting – emphatically downscale Bakersfield. I’m not convinced that there is a nice part of Bakersfield, but, if there is, we sure don’t see it here. Californians will also enjoy the references to Lancaster and Palmdale.

Honey Don’t is a mildly enjoyable 87 minutes, but not a Must See.

EAST OF WALL: horse riding through trauma

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Photo caption: Tabatha Zimiga in EAST OF WALL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

In the engrossing indie family drama East of Wall, Tabatha (Tabatha Zimiga) is struggling to manage a messy home, which even she describes as chaotic, and to survive financially. Three years after her husband’s suicide, her household includes her teenage daughter and son, her three-year-old son, her mom, her partner of the past year-and-a-half, and four more stray teens. Everyone is damaged by some trauma or another – Tabatha’s nuclear family rocked by her husband’s death and the unrelated teens by their own parental abandonment.

Tabatha is running a dilapidated South Dakota horse ranch, selling the horses that she trains. She’s a gifted horse whisperer, and she teaches horsemanship to the kids. The daughter Porshia (Porshia Zimiga) is a brilliant rider and a champion barrel racer. Trouble is, Tabatha can’t sell the horses at prices high enough to sustain the ranch or keep her family in hamburger and pizza rolls. She’s run out of credit at the local grocery, and has to send in a mortified Porshia with cash to buy the basics.

Her colorful mom Tracey (Jennifer Ehle), isn’t much practical help, babysitting the toddler with horror movies and making moonshine. Tracey is a survivor of intimate partner violence, Tabatha was a teen mom, and it’s clear that Tabatha is trying to somehow break through multi-generational dysfunction. Ehle sparkles in a very colorful role, both providing comic relief in a grief movie and in grounding the traumas endemic to the neighborhood.

Enter Roy (Scoot McNairy), a Texas horse-trader who has both swagger and the humility to recognize someone more talented than he is. And he has enough business sense to spot an opportunity. Roy brings Tabatha the hope of financial salvation, but he’s damaged, too, and there’s a question as to the cost of his help.

In her first feature film writer-director Kate Beecroft, skillfully unspools what is really going on with Roy, and McNairy’s performance keeps us guessing. Beecroft handles the central thread of the story – the highly charged relationship between Tabatha and Porshia – with remarkable authenticity. What is most impressive is that, with the exception of McNairy and Ehle, Beecroft is doing this with non-professional actors in all the main roles. These are all rural South Dakotans playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

Tracey’s gal pals celebrate her birthday with some beers round a campfire. As each, including Tracey and Tabatha share their own traumatic experiences, you won’t hear a pin drop in the theater. It’s one of the most compelling movie scenes of the year.

Beecroft also captures the verisimilitude of the setting and the local ranch-and-saloon culture. The ranch is east of Wall, South Dakota, moderately famous for its Wall Drug attraction. The area is on the edge of the Badlands, which Beecroft and cinematographer Austin Shelton (in also his feature debut) use to their advantage. The shots of galloping horses are thrilling.

(A digression: The director Chloe Zhao (Nomadland) mined rural South Dakota for her breakout films, Songs My Brother Taught Me and The Rider, which also featured non-professional actors. There are only eleven people every square mile in South Dakota, and under a million overall, so ya gotta wonder how many great personal stories are out there for filmmakers to find.)

East of Wall won the NEXT audience award at Sundance and is now in theaters.

SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN: a courageous surprise hiding in celebrity

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Photo caption: Ed Sullivan and James Brown in SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN. Courtesy of Netflix.

Boy, was I ever wrong about Ed Sullivan. Coming of age at the end of the 23-year run of CBS’ weekly The Ed Sullivan Show, which seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and stale, I totally missed the fact that, two decades earlier, Sullivan had been alone in presenting African-American artists to national television audiences. And that African-Americans thought it was a very big deal.

The Ed Sullivan Show began in 1948, before many Americans owned a TV, and Sullivan helped invent the earliest evolutionary stage of television content. Sullivan himself picked every performer on The Ed Sullivan Show – over 10,000 of them over the show’s 23 year run. He harvested Vaudeville and nightclub performers who had not prospered in the Radio Era, including Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and the Ink Spots. Virtually every major African-American act got an early showcase on Sullivan’s show – Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson, Diahann Carroll, James Brown, Ray Charles, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, and the Jackson 5. By the time I was occasionally tuning in to the end of Sullivan’s run, there didn’t seem like anything was risky about Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey – but, then again, they had been appearing on TV for twenty years because of Ed Sullivan.

This was not the norm for programming by the three corporate television networks (yes, kids, there were only three TV channels for many years). Sunday Best: The Untold Story of the Ed Sullivan Show lets White Americans learn that, on Sunday nights, African-Americans rushed to their TVs – it was their only chance to see performing artists that looked like them. Sunday Best presents the testimony from Berry Gordy, Oprah Winfrey, Harry Belafonte and Smokey Robinson.

Sullivan did all this with intentionality. His own sense of justice required him to showcase the talents of the best artists regardless of race. And he despised Jim Crow and racial segregation. Director Sacha Jenkins has accessed Sullivan’s own personal writings, as well as contemporaneous recordings, so we hear Sullivan’s own words. Sullivan modeled his fearlessness and principles from his father, who knew about earlier anti-Irish discrimination. 

Two career incarnations earlier, Sullivan had been a NYC sports columnist. When NYU chickened out and benched their one Black football player so they play the University of Georgia, Sullivan was so outraged that his column called for NYU to drop football altogether in shame.

Personally, he was such a close friend of Bill Robinson that Sullivan helped organize (and probably pay for) Robinson’s funeral.

Everyone today (hopefully) remembers the Jim Crow era for the separate restrooms and drinking fountains, the segregated schools and accommodations, the back-of-the-bus shit and the terror of the KKK. But there was also prevalent a lot of craziness about people of different races touching each other at all (based, I’m sure, on fear of Black sexuality). In the South, black people were supposed to give change for retail sales without touching white hands, and whites would consider a swimming pool defiled if a black person dipped their feet in it. If a white person, like Ed Sullivan, even shook a Black person’s hand on TV – let alone put his arm on their shoulders – it was a Big Deal.

Imagine if John Legend introduced Taylor Swift at the Grammys and gave her a chaste buss on the cheek – in 1955, that would have made heads explode in a third of the nation.

Network executives were legitimately concerned about Southern Whites boycotting their sponsors. White supremacy activist Asa Carter and Georgia Governor Herman Talmadge both organized actual boycotts. But Ed Sullivan, fearless, just didn’t care.

Ed Sullivan and Ray Charles in SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN. Courtesy of Netflix.

This is big news to those of us who remember Sullivan’s anti-telegenic stone face and the acts with spinning plates and hoop-jumping dogs. The CBS network censors were notorious for not letting the camera show Elvis’ gyrating hips and for trying to get the Stones to change the lyrics of Let’s Spend the Night Together to Let’s Spend Some Time Together. But Elvis was only censored from waist down in his THIRD appearance on the Sullivan Show.

There are lots of gems in Sunday Best, including Sammy Davis Jr and Flip Wilson trying to outdo each others’ Ed Sullivan impression while standing next to Ed Sullivan.  

A 1958 Jackie Wilson performance on the Sullivan Show is gloriously entertaining by today’s standards. But, knowing what we learn in Sunday Best, it’s absolutely thrilling. In 1958, mainstream audiences would never have seen anything like Jackie’s rendition of Lonely Teardrops, effortlessly sliding into falsetto and nonchalantly dropping a jazz split. And all with a confident, cool swagger and without a hint of racial deference.

White Baby Boomers like me should watch Sunday Best to discover how invested Ed Sullivan was in civil rights before it became mainstream on national TV. Younger people, not just kids and Gen Xers, but also Millennials, should watch it to appreciate the ridiculous limits to which the American mainstream was cowed by Southern White racism. And all of should appreciate how The Ed Sullivan Show didn’t just reflect the cultural taste of America – it helped drive it.

Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan is streaming on Netflix.

Ed Sullivan in SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN. Courtesy of Netflix.

ACT OF VIOLENCE: stunned into terror and self-loathing

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Van Heflin (right) in ACT OF VIOLENCE

You could argue that Act of Violence is the single most underrated film noir, because a story of moral relativity and situational ethics is told as a thrilling man hunt, with two career-topping performances and a starkly photographed nighttime chase through Los Angeles’ seamy Bunker Hill. Just like the top tier films in the film noir canon, Act of Violence has it all. I’m writing about it today because it’s playing on on Turner Classic Movies on Friday night, and it’s not available to stream.

WW II vet Frank Enley (Van Heflin) is a successful developer with a new bride and baby, popular and prominent in his community.  Then, the sunny prosperity of the postwar boom – and Frank Enley’s life – is shattered by the arrival of Joe Parker (Robert Ryan), a guy with a trench coat, a limp and an obsession. Parker’s limp is only the physical manifestation of a psychological wound from the war. While in the same Nazi prisoner of war camp, Frank took an action that Parker believes cost the lives of their buddies. Parker has come to town to kill Frank as retribution.

In the extremity of a Nazi prisoner of war camp, Frank was faced by a situation with no good choices; he knows (correctly) that few in 1949 America will be able to see his action in that context. Because he would instantly lose his standing in the community, he can’t call the police. Now Frank is plunged into both the terror of being killed and self-loathing because he thinks he deserves it,

Frank flees in a panic, going underground in Bunker Hill, a far cry from Frank’s bright, well-tended suburb. Dazed by the position he finds himself in, Frank tries drinking, but there isn’t enough booze in LA to quell his terror. He encounters the world-weary prostitute Pat (Mary Astor), who hides him in her apartment while she figures out how to bleed some money from him; she connects him with a couple predatory bottom-feeders (Barry Kroeger and Taylor Holmes) who may be more heartless and lethal than Joe. All the time, Joe Parker is closing in, right up to the unpredictable climax.

There’s no question that Ryan’s Joe Parker is the villain here, but you can make the case that it’s Frank Enley who committed the unforgiveable and that Joe is the avenging angel, here to deliver justice.

Remarkably versatile for a leading man, Van Heflin was so good in war movies (Battle Cry) and westerns (Shane, 3:10 to Yuma) and corporate drama (Patterns). He may have been his best in classic film noir (Johnny Eager, The Kid Glove Killer, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Possessed, The Prowler and East Side, West Side) and the neo-noir Once a Thief. Underrated in his lifetime and overlooked today, Heflin was naturally relatable (but very scary in The Prowler and Once a Thief). Topped by his staircase scene with Janet Leigh and his wild stumble to Pat’s apartment, Heflin captures all of Frank’s stunned desperation and self loathing despair; in my book, Heflin never surpassed his performance in Act of Violence.

Mary Astor in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Mary Astor was one of the very most beautiful humans as a teenager, and was 35 when she played the alluring Brigid O’Shaughnnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Astor was 42 when she made Act of Violence, and she looked the part Pat, with all of the mileage on her, without any vanity, . Capturing all of Pat’s exhaustion, cynicism and ambivalence, Act of Violence rates with The Maltese Falcon as Astor’s finest performance.

Pat’s sordid apartment and the grimy joint where she drinks and picks up customers seem so much farther from Frank’s well-trimmed suburb than the actual distance of a few miles. It’s a milieu that has worn out Pat, and she knows it; she’s about to move and try another town.

Pat’s sense of morality is flexible. What she does for a living is illegal although it’s a victimless crime. She tries to milk as much money out of each man she meets. But she has her limits; she’s ok with bleeding some money from a rich guy like Frank, but, while she might tolerate fraud or blackmail, she won’t countenance murder.

Ryan’s single-minded, relentless and cruel Joe Parker would be the best thing in most movies, but the performances by Heflin and Astor are for the ages. Ryan is off-screen for the most chilling moment in the film, when Pat, holding the telephone receiver, relays Joe’s reaction to Frank’s buyoff offer.

Van Heflin and Janet Leigh in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Frank’s wife is played by a 21-year-old Janet Leigh, in only her second year of screen acting. Leigh is excellent as a fresh-faced, naive young woman who could never have imagined the situation she faces now.

Barry Kroeger and Taylor Holmes really elevate Act of Violence with their supporting turns. Kroeger’s shark-like grin is very scary, and Holmes is an even more venal lawyer (disbarred this time) than the one he played in Kiss of Death.

Van Heflin, Mary Astor and Barry Kroeger in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Act of Violence came early in the career of director Fred Zinnemann, who had debuted impressively with The Kid Glove Killer and was only four years away from his masterpiece, High Noon. As an A-lister, he went on to direct iconic films like From Here to Eternity, Oklahoma! and A Man for All Seasons, garnering seven Best Director Oscar nominations and winning for The Sundowners. Another thriller, The Day of the Jackal, is my personal favorite Zinnemann film.

Cinematographer Robert Surtees’ remarkably varied body of work included Oklahoma!, Ben-Hur, PT 109, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Collector, The Graduate and The Last Picture Show. Surtees was not known as a noir DP, but he brought out all the obsession, desperation and shabbiness of this story. No one ever lit and photographed Bunker Hill any better.

Van Heflin in ACT OF VIOLENCE

Robert L. Richards (Winchester ’73) adapted the screenplay from a story by Collier Young.

Remember, you can’t stream Act of Violence, so make sure to DVR it this Friday on Turner Class Movies. 

Van Heflin in ACT OF VIOLENCE

TO KILL A WOLF: mysteries revealed

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Photo caption: Maddison Brown in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.

In the character-driven indie drama To Kill a Wolf, a reclusive woodsman in the Pacific Northwest (Ivan Martin) finds the seventeen-year-old runaway Dani (Maddison Brown) collapsed in the forest. He brings her back to his isolated cabin, nurses her back to health and tries to learn how he can return her to her home. She’s not forthcoming, so he has a mystery to solve. Meanwhile, the audience is on to other mysteries – why is the Woodsman (that’s the character’s appellation in the credits) living such an isolated life and why is his relationship with local community members so charged? As the Woodsman takes Dani on a road trip to her most recent residence, the answers, one by one, are revealed. It’s an absorbing story.

To Kill a Wolf is the first feature for writer-director Kelsey Taylor, who demonstrates herself to be a very promising filmmaker. A superb story-teller, she doesn’t explain behaviors before you need to understand. We’re continually wondering about the characters and about what will happen next, and are usually surprised about what the Woodsman is doing and why. Music is unusually important to the characters and to the film itself. The way Taylor ends the film is perfect – the final shot is not even a half-second too long.

Ivan Martin in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.

The lead performances are excellent, as are those of the rest of the veteran professional cast. The roles of Dani’s Aunt Jolene and Uncle Carey are especially well-written, realistic and textured, and the performances of Kaitlin Doubleday and Michael Esper are vividly authentic. As the Rancher, David Knell captures the surprises in the character’s attitudes.

To Kill a Wolf opens this weekend at the Regal Sherman Oaks Galleria and rolls out in Regal theaters elsewhere. I’ll be sure to let you know as it becomes more accessible.

ARCHITECTON: unexpectedly hypnotic

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Photo caption: ARCHITECTON. Courtesy of A24.

The singular documentary Architecton is cinema as high art and surprisingly entertaining. Almost narration-free and elevated by Evgueni Galperine’s original music, Architecton is director Viktor Kossakovsky’s immersion into rocks – rocks arranged and moved by Nature and by humans. The visual experience is hypnotic.

Kossakovsky takes us to the site of Baalbek, with its famed, massive stones, somehow hewn in antiquity and still among the world’s largest quarried stones and to its Roman quarry. We see scores of fallen segments of ancient fluted columns – and, then, the majesty of five columns still standing intact. Kossakovsky presents an enormous, tiered modern quarry, rock-crushing machinery in close-up and light cascading on wet, glisteneing rocks. In a very long shot, we see a seemingly endless freight train pulling a hundred gondola cars filled with rocks.

Architecton begins with ugly Soviet apartment blocks in Ukraine, destroyed by Russian bombardment. Later, we see similar damage in earthquake-ruined cities in Turkey. As the rubble is hauled away, it makes new mountains. It’s like the circle of life for inanimate rock.

There’s an elderly Italian architect named Marcele De Lucchi, who is directing construction of a circle of stones at his home; the only dialogue in Architecton is chatter between De Lucchi and his crew of stone masons.

ARCHITECTON. Courtesy of A24.

Kossakovsky had previously made the highly acclaimed Aquarela, taking audiences into the worlds of water. The movements of the camera and Kossakovsky’s choices of perspectives make looking at rocks for 98 minutes actually enthralling. The cinematographer is Ben Bernhard (Aquarela), who should win awards for his drone photography alone.

Early in Architecton there are close-ups of a rock slide, with four shots taking about four minutes, followed by an overhead shot. The scene could only have been safely captured by a drone zooming in, presumably, on a quarry explosion. It’s absolutely mesmerizing.

I take notes in darkened cinemas, and I wrote, “nowhere I’d rather be than in this theater watching this movie.” That was before the epilogue where Kossakovsky himself prompts De Lucchi to expound on the role of architecture, the malignant impacts of concrete and the planet’s future. The epilogue takes us out of the immersive experience and is a buzz kill, the one weak part of Architecton.

Architecton is now in theaters, and it’s one of those films which must be seen on the biggest screen that you can access.