Photo caption: Brian Jones in THE STONE AND BRIAN JONES. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
The Stones and Brian Jones tells the story of the ill-fated co-founder of The Rolling Stones. Most of us remember that Jones was fired from the band when his abuse of alcohol and drugs kept him from being able to record and perform with the band. This film delves into:
Jones’ unhappiness with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard’s diversification of the Stone’s portfolio beyond American Blues.
Jones’ insecurity about his role in the Stones being eclipsed by the band’s primary songwriters, Jagger and Richards.
Jones’ complex relationship with his parents.
The essential testimony of Jones’ girlfriends and those of other Stones (but not from the late Alita Pallenberg, who emerges as a villain in the story).
The most revelatory moments in The Stones and Brian Jones come from Jones’ bandmate, bassist Bill Wyman, who explains Jones’ musical contributions by pointing them out as we hear Stones songs.
Wisely, The Stones and Brian Jones doesn’t spend much time on Jones’ very unmysterious death. Somebody who mixes large amount of barbiturates and alcohol daily just isn’t going to survive very long, especially when they also get in swimming pools alone at night. Jones’ death occurred before premature substance abuse deaths of celebrity music figures (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Mama Cass, Jim Morrison, Gram Parsons, Keith Moon) became more commonplace.
This is a competent and extremely well-sourced doc, which helps us understand someone who played a key role in forming an iconic band, but it’s not a Must See rock documentary. The Stones and Brian Jones is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, in MAY DECEMBER. Courtesy of Netflix.
Todd Haynes’ May December is both absorbing and unsettling. The TV actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) has been cast in a movie to play a real-life person Gracie (Julianne Moore) who,20 years before, had been embroiled in a tabloid scandal. that made her notorious. To research the role, Elizabeth visits the hometown of Gracie and her husband Joe (Charles Melton) to meet them and other people touched by the scandal. I’m not going to spoil that original scandal because Haynes unspools the story so skillfully; it’s a jaw-dropper.
Right off the bat, we notice two things. First, Elizabeth and Joe are both 36 years old, and Joe’s wife Gracie is much older. Second, although Joe and Gracie’s home and family seem very vanilla, Gracie’s behavior is a little off.
Haynes is known for visually rich, female-centered melodramas like Carol and Far from Heaven. This is far more psychodrama than melodrama.
As we and Elizabeth see Gracie with her children (the youngest are graduating from high school this week), she seems a little more than just a socially awkward bossy mom. She can act like a bossy mom with her husband, too. It’s not long before she veers from oddball quirks into the indisputably inappropriate.
As we consume news, we occasionally ask ourselves, What kind of person would do THAT? Or What kind of person would even THINK of doing that? Some people have a blind spot and feel no shame for something shameful they’ve done, justifying their own behavior and firmly seeing it as misunderstood by others. May December is a movie about such an abnormal personality, and the carnage she has wreaked.
Julianne Moore keeps us squirming in our seats throughout the film. Portman, who initially brought the story to Haynes, is equally superb in a role that grows from reacting to Gracie’s dysfunction into her own issues with boundaries. Both Moore’s and Portman’s performances are awards-worthy. Cory Michael Smith is also outstanding as Gracie’s son from an earlier marriage. It’s a vivid and memorable performance.
Casting director Samy Burch wrote the screenplay, her first feature, from her own story co-written with Alex Mechanix. Burch’s pacing in revealing more and more of the backstory is the key to May December’s effectiveness. When she drops in some exposition, it meshes with the behavior we’ve already seen from Gracie. Burch gives Gracie a couple stunning lines and Elizabeth has a killer line, too. When a characters say, “This is what grown-ups do“, it’s devastating.
Incidentally, for those who find the story farfetched, it is clearly based on an 1996 occurrence in Burien, Washington.
May December is in theaters, just before it streams on Netflix on December 1.
Photo caption: Sandra Huller in ANATOMY OF A FALL. Courtesy of NEON.
This week on The Movie Gourmet – we’re in that time of the year when we’re flooded with eagerly anticipated movies, and I’ve posted new reviews of Napoleon, The Lady Bird Diaries, The Killer and Alan Pakula: Going for Truth. Plus a recommendation of tomorrow’s TCM telecast of the classic film noir The Narrow Margin, one of my favorites.
And, we’re not done yet. I’ve also seen May December and The Stones and Brian Jones. I’ll be writing about them soon, along with The Holdovers, which I hope to see this weekend.
When we get to the Holidays, I pause my regular WATCH AT HOME feature The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE) and replace it with the movies from my Best of 2023 list that are already available to stream.
CURRENT MOVIES
Anatomy of a Fall: family history, with life or death stakes. In theaters.
Photo caption: Joaquin Phoenix in NAPOLEON. Courtesy of AppleTV.
Of all living filmmakers, Ridley Scott would seem the most well-equipped to pull off a boundless EPIC, but his Napoleon, other than three spectacular battle scenes and a little sex, is boring, underwhelming and a little confounding. As The Wife said exiting the theater, it’s a slog, and she wasn’t referring to the winter retreat from Moscow.
For better or worse, Napoleon covers Napoleon Bonaparte’s entire public career – from his emergence in 1793 at age 24 to the beginning of his final captivity on St. Helena in 1815 at the age of 46. It’s kinda like a college survey course in the Napoleonic Era. Napoleon’s historical accuracy is solid, and, for a Hollywood movie, remarkably unusual.
Even with a running time of 2 hours and 38 minutes, there’s a lot of ground to cover. He did fight 61 battles, and it took the SEVENTH Coalition of opposing nations to defeat him. So, we get the briefest of glimpses of Napoleon’s mother, his second wife and other major figures in his life and times.
Here’s what is great about Napoleon – three extraordinarily spectacular battle scenes, depicting the Siege of Toulon, and the famous Battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo. They are amazing to watch, and the first two help us to understand Napoleon’s military genius (and the third, Wellington’s military genius). A segment of Austerlitz where Napoleon orders cannon fire to break the ice under enemy forces is one of greatest and most unforgettable battle scenes in cinema history.
Napoleon also does a pretty fair job with the the relationship between Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) and his first wife Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). It was a very uncomplicated one: he was utterly captivated by and devoted to her, and she just wasn’t that IN to him. Josephine was a survivor and an adventuress, who navigated through her misogynistic environment with a gift for canny manipulation. He finds that even making her an empress isn’t enough to quell her promiscuity. Phoenix and Kirby do a good job with this part of the story.
But, oddly for a biopic, Napoleon fails to help us understand Napoleon. Sure, he’s ambitious from the start, but why? And why does he need to keep conquering, at the risk of overreaching and losing everything? After all, didn’t they name a complex after this guy?
Joaquin Phoenix was so vivid as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, as Commodus in Gladiator, and as Freddie in The Master; he was so original and authentic in Her and C’mon C’mon. But, in Napoleon, his performance doesn’t unwrap the package of Napoleon’s psyche. I can’t say it’s Phoenix’a fault, but the collaboration between Phoenix, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa doesn’t pay off.
Scott does point out in an end title that 3 million lost their lives during the Napoleonic Wars, which raises the question, to what end? This guy with an insatiable appetite for power and conquest was starting wars with some twits who had been born into underserved monarchy.
Here’s a random digression from the movie Napoleon. Was Napoleon’s military prowess overrated? This is ironic, because Napoleon rose on his merits. But the forces he was defeating were led by royalty and aristocrats, who were given command of armies, not by their own training and demonstrated skills, but by the accident of birth. Alexander I of Russia, for example, started out as an immature, headstrong nitwit and aged into a fullblown nutcase. Maybe Napoleon was analogous to MLB Hall of Famers who never had to face black ballplayers. Hmmm.
Napoleon is now in theaters, and will stream on AppleTV on a date TBD.
Photo caption: Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor in THE NARROW MARGIN
The overlooked film noir masterpiece The Narrow Margin(1952) is a taut 71 minutes of tension. Growly cop Charles McGraw plays hide-and-seek with a team of hit men on a claustrophobic train. Marie Windsor is unforgettable as the assassins’ target. It’s on my list of Overlooked Noir, and it’s coming up on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, November 27 – set your DVR.
McGraw plays a cop assigned to protect a gangster’s widow on her way to testify against the mob. He immediately loses his partner to an ambush and will have to protect his cargo all the way from Chicago to Los Angeles by himself. His only edge is that the hit men don’t know what his target looks like.
The Narrow Margin has two very special elements. The first is the hardboiled dialogue between McGraw and Windsor and their performances. The second is director Richard Fleisher’s imaginative staging of the woman-hunt up and down the tight corridors and compartments of the train.
The screenplay is easily the best of veteran Earl Felton’s career, and he was nominated for an Oscar for this B picture. When McGraw, still in shock, reflects on the sudden death of his longtime partner, Windsor hisses, “Some protection they send me – an old man who walks right into it and a weeper”. McGraw resents having anything to do with her: “Sister, I’ve known some pretty hard cases in my time, but you make ’em all look like putty”. Later he snarls, “He’s dead and you’re alive. Some exchange.” But they’re both trapped together, and they’re not the kind to make the best of it – the great lines just keep coming: “Relax, Percy, I wouldn’t want any of that nobility to rub off on me”.
The Narrow Margin opens with trench coats and fedora, cigarettes and shadowed faces; when there’s gunfire, we know for sure that we’re in a noir. But then Fleischer moves it all onto the train, and we hear the sound from railroad airbrakes. Fleischer makes an early use of handheld cameras to maneuver around the tight spaces. There’s an especially innovative moment when a fight breaks out in a cramped train restroom – the bottom of a shoe flies up to camera level, then we’re under the sink as head is banged into wall.
The cast is uniformly good. I especially like David Clarke as a (gay?) hit man and Paul Maxey as a very fat traveler who keeps blocking the narrow corridors.
Of course, this is all fifty years before cell phones, and there’s a retro lo-tech moment where a slow-moving train leaves a message via hook to be wired.
Fleischer was a very versatile (and underrated director). When he shot The Narrow Margin, he was a 35-year-old rising director. The Narrow Margin was his sixth noir in five years. After The Narrow Margin, he moved to epics (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Vikings, Barabbas). He later made one of the very best WW II movies, Tora! Tora! Tora!, and the ahead-of-its-time dystopian sci-fi cult favorite Soylent Green. He even made the second Schwarzenegger Conan movie. His noir body of work (Bodyguard, Follow Me Quietly, Trapped, Armored Car Robbery, His Kind of Woman) is impressive, and, in my opinion, The Narrow Margin is his masterpiece.
The Narrow Margin plays frequently on Turner Classic Movies. It’s available to stream from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube. (Don’t confuse it with the inferior 1990 remake, Narrow Margin.)
Photo caption: Lady Bird Johnson in THE LADY BIRD DIARIES. Courtesy of Hulu.
For students of 29th Century American political history, The Lady Bird Diaries is essential. In her time as First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson audio-recorded her candid observations of some of the nation’s most dynamic and turbulent years. The 123 hours of those recordings, now released after her death, have been excerpted into the core of this singular documentary.
We hear Lady Bird’s unique point of view on the JFK assassination, LBJ’s battles with depression, the infamous White House luncheon Eartha Kitt incident and RFK. And, after all, she was living in the White House with LBJ through his Civil Rights triumphs and the morass of Vietnam. LBJ’s presidency was so jampacked, we get the tiniest mention of Medicare (Oh, yeah, THAT was LBJ, too).
Lady Bird’s first-person perspective would be valuable enough in a written document, but hearing her actual voice brings even deeper insights into the events, LBJ and Lady Bird herself.
Indeed, The Lady Bird Diaries Lady Bird’s own voice is almost the entire film, annotated only by director Dawn Porter’s exceptional use of explanatory titles, archive clips and photos. Porter’s use of images is as brilliant as I’ve seen in a doc.
Lady Bird’s narration, combined with recorded phone calls between the Johnsons, makes clear Lady Bird’s involvement in her husband’s career. She gave him advice on matters both tactical, critiquing his speeches, and strategic (including whether to seek re-election). LBJ was notoriously thin-skinned, came closest to welcoming criticism only from Lady Bird. One of the most sharp and insightful segments is a disagreement between the Johnsons on how to handle the Walter Jenkins scandal (LBJ’s chief of staff caught in a homosexual haunt) days before the 1964 presidential election. Clearly, Lady Bird was determined to give LBJ her best thinking, whether he wanted it or not.
The Lady Bird Diaries also reminds us of:
Lady Bird’s groundbreaking work on the environment, then known as the “beautification” campaign.
Her gameness to campaign in a 1964 whistlestop tour through the South, facing down White voters howling about LBJ’s Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The toll on the Johnsons from the the unrelenting public scorn about Vietnam.
This is fantastic history and an extraordinary film. The Lady Bird Diaries is streaming on Hulu.
Alan Pakula in ALAN PAKULA: Going for Truth. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Alan Pakula: Going for Truth is the fine biodoc of the filmmaker Alan Pakula, who received Oscar nominations for producing To Kill a Mockingbird, directing All the President’s Men and writing Sophie’s Choice.
Pakula demonstrated very high standards, and, as entertaining as his films are, his filmography doesn’t contain anything cheap and popular or any dumbed-down content. Famous for his “paranoia trilogy” of the 1970s (Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men), he was remarkably versatile, also mastering the psychological thriller (Presumed Innocent) and the heart-wrenching, high-brow drama (Sophies Choice). Pakula was also responsible for launching the directing career of screenwriter James Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News).
Alan Pakula: Going for Truth is exceptionally well-sourced. We see plenty of clips of and interviews with Pakula himself. We hear from his colleagues and widow, along with Jane Fonda, Harrison Ford, Robert Redford, Meryl Steep, and Harrison Ford.
Alan Pakula: Going for Truth can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Michael Fassbender in THE KILLER. Courtesy of Netflix.
In The Killer, a professional hit man (Michael Fassbinder) goes about a revenge quest silently, but we, the audience, hear his constant interior thinking. Directed by David Fincher, the thriller aspects are superbly executed, but the novelty here is the protagonist’s nonstop patter, some reminding him of the basics of his craft and some wittily snarky observations of others.
The one brilliant note is that the hit man is constantly using false identities to transverse the globe, and he has chosen the names of iconic tv characters and the actors who play them. Very funny (and no spoilers from me).
Still, this is an ultimately empty film, and, although I enjoyed it, it’s very, very minor Fincher (Zodiac, Se7en, The Social Network, Gone Girl, Mindhunters).
Fassbinder is very good, as is Tilda Swinton, who elevates her turn in this genre film.
Photo caption: Sandra Huller and Swann Arlaud in ANATOMY OF A FALL. Courtesy of NEON.
This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of the brilliant biodoc The Disappearance of Shere Hite and the gripping thinkpiece Our Father, The Devil, plus the outrageous and hard-to-find classic film noirDecoy, on TCM tonight.
When we get to the Holidays I pause my regular WATCH AT HOME feature The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE) and replace it with the movies from my Best of 2023 list that are already available to stream.
CURRENT MOVIES
Shere Hite in THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SHERE HITE. Courtesy of IFC Films.
Anatomy of a Fall: family history, with life or death stakes. In theaters.
On November 22, Turner Classic Movies is presenting Chandler, the 1971 neo-noir starring Warren Oates as a seedy private detective who gets in over his head. I mention, but don’t dwell on Chandler in my essay Warren Oates: a gift for desperation. Look for film noir icons Charles McGraw and Gloria Grahame in supporting roles.
Photo caption: Ed Norris, Jean Gillie and Herbert Rudley in DECOY.
The obscure, low-budget Decoy is the first film that I’ve been unable to write about without spoilers, but you’ll still be able to appreciate it, even when you know some of what’s coming. It’s coming up on Turner Classic Movies on Friday night, November 17. Decoy, one of my Overlooked Noir , is not available to stream, so set your DVR.
Decoy, from 1946, stands out from the rest of film noir (and from much of cinema) for two elements. The first is the most hysterically evil femme fatale ever. The second is that the plot pivots on a preposterous premise.
The ill-tempered Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong) is on California’s death row because he killed a cop in a robbery. The robbery netted a huge fortune, which Frankie has hidden. Frankie refuses to disclose the location of his loot, because he wants to maximize the incentive for others to work for his release. Frankie’s girlfriend, Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie), is two-timing him with another vicious hood, Jim VIncent (Ed Norris), who is bankrolling Frankie’s legal appeals, They hope to get Frankie out of prison to recover the loot, and then steal it from him. Alas, the appeals go for naught, and Frankie is about to be executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber, taking his secret with him to the grave.
At this point, things get ridiculous. Margot and Jim revise their plan, pivoting to stealing Frankie’s body AFTER the execution and reviving him with a dose of methylene blue, an antidote for the cyanide used in the gas chamber. Now, the kernel of truth here is that methylene blue CAN be used as an antidote to cyanide poisoning in someone who is ALIVE. But, of course, methylene blue CANNOT reverse death by cyanide poisoning. But, indeed, the rest of Decoy’s plot is based on the resurrection of Frankie.
Margot and Jim manage to smuggle out Frankie’s corpse, and they force the earnest, do gooder Dr. Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley) to bring him back to life with methylene blue. Frankie unwisely draws a treasure map and is promptly removed from our story. Margot and Jim, with Dr. Craig driving his own car at gunpoint, head off to find and dig up the money.
At this point, Margot takes over the film. In Decoy’s final eight minutes, Margot is not only remorselessly murderous, but she’s sadistic as well. And she can even take pleasure in humiliating a man from her deathbed.
Jean Gillie in DECOY
As outlandish as Margot’s behavior becomes, Jean Gillie’s performance is fully committed. Her Margot actually rejoices in her own perversity. I’m serious when I rate Gillie’s Margot as the most evil femme fatale in cinema. Even compared to the Anne Savage role in Detour, and to the parts played by Cleo Moore in the Hugo Haas movies, she is the most depraved.
Gillie was an English actress who was married to Decoy’s otherwise undistinguished director, Jack Bernhard. That marriage broke up, and she didn’t like Hollywood. After her one major Hollywood movie, The Macomber Affair, supporting Gregory Peck, Joan Bennett and Robert Preston, she returned to England. Gillie promptly died of pneumonia at age 33.
Robert Armstrong is appropriately nasty as Frankie, and has a fun scene when he discovers that he has been resurrected. Thirteen years earlier, Armstrong played the human protagonist, along with Faye Wray, of King Kong.
The character of Jim Vincent is a one-dimensional thug, and Norris doesn’t add any other touches (as Dan Duryea would have).
Potentially, the best role in Decoy would have been Dr. Craig, who is a moral and decent man forced into misdeeds (and that resurrection) by evil people. He is psychologically ruined before he meets his end. There’s even a corny scene where the doc looks across his office, and the camera highlights the section of his medical oath that he is forced to transgress. By the midpoint of the movie, Herbert Rudley staggers around like a zombie as a Dr. Craig who is unable to fathom how his life could have been ruined in just one day. A better actor than Rudley could have brought more heartbreaking depth to this role.
Sheldon Leonard in DECOY.
One of the greatest delights in Decoy is Sheldon Leonard as the cop nicknamed Jojo, Police Sgt. Joe Portugal. Having put away Frankie, Jojo is watching Margot and Jim, waiting for the chance to nab them, too. He keeps showing up to pressure them, and he’s there at the end to pick up the pieces. Nobody could do out-of-the-side-of-his-mouth sarcasm like Leonard.
Leonard earned 109 film credits as an actor, the most memorable being the bartender Nick in It’s a Wonderful Life, Lt. Coyo in To Have and Have Not and Harry the Horse in Guys and Dolls. Although he was a perfect fit for film noir, he was rarely as prominent as he was in Decoy and, a year later, The Gangster. Leonard’s biggest mark on American culture came as a television producer – he produced some of the most popular and iconic TV shows ever: The Danny Thomas Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, USMC and I Spy.
Decoy concludes with a startingly vicious act by Margot and then a very ironic ending (think Treasure of the Sierra Madre) when Frankie gets the last laugh.
Decoy is not a very good film, but it moves so quickly, and its two major elements are so astoundingly outrageous, that it’s fun to watch. Decoy is not currently available to stream. I watched Decoy on Turner Classic Movies.
Herbert Rudley, Jean Gillie and Ed Norris (around Robert Armstrong on the table) in DECOY.
