June Allyson, The Lone Wolf and Cinema Paradiso uncut - Reviews #45

*MASSIVE SPOILERS*
Cinema Paradiso: Director's Cut (Giusseppe Tornatore, 1988/2002) is longer, bleaker and more troubling than the uplifting 'international version', which scooped countless awards (including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film) and won the hearts of the world. The set-up is the same, with silver-haired moviemaker Salvatore (the excellent Jacques Perrin) looking back on his childhood and adolescence - most of it spent at the local picture palace - following the death of his mentor Alfredo (Philippe Noiret). Sadly, life has afforded no Hollywood ending to the deadened director, who remains haunted by the spectre of lost love, a doomed romance with the middle-class Elena (Agnese Nano). And through it all, Ennio Morricone's sensational score dips and soars.

Rather than a self-indulgent splurge or a cash-in job, as many extended cuts are, this one is the real deal, an expanded take on the original version of the film that toured Italy in 1988. As well as restoring the 31 minutes that were lost in the re-edit, deemed necessary after disastrous box-office receipts, this definitive cut includes an extra 15 minutes of material. So what's new - or rather old? Well, Toto, for one thing. He's old for much longer. In the shortest cut, we get just a handful of scenes showing Perrin as the grown-up Salvatore, still lamenting his betrayal by the only girl he ever loved. Here, there's a full-blown reunion between the former lovers (sadly the older Elena is played by Brigitte Fossey, who's quite poor), along with a stunning, thriller-ish sequence (composed of masterful jump cuts) that reveals the identity of her husband.

Crucially, this release also reveals why the love of Toto's life apparently left without saying goodbye, substantially changing the character of Alfredo from an avuncular, grizzly old duffer to a possibly misguided puppet-master. These are the extra sequences which were bafflingly shown in confusing and meaningless silent snippets over the end credits of the international version! As with that more familiar cut, the best scenes remain those featuring Noiret and the young Toto (Salvatore Cascio), both of whom are just magical, but here they're lent yet greater resonance by the devastating pay-off. In any form, Cinema Paradiso is a richly evocative movie that radiates a love of film and scales some unforgettable heights - the exam set-piece, the outdoor screening, the montage of kisses. This remarkable cut turns much of what you think you know on its head, twisting the film back from a crowd-pleaser to an upsetting, uncompromising artistic statement. See it. (4)

***



Passport to Suez (Andre de Toth, 1943) - Warren William's final appearance as jewel-thief-turned-crimebuster The Lone Wolf is light on comedy and has almost no mystery. Surprising, then, that it's still a pretty snappy thriller, with our hero (I trust he's your hero too - why wouldn't he be?) getting mixed up with Nazi spies trying to steal secret plans. The Lone Wolf series was a staple of '30s and '40s Hollywood and after a superb, glossy outing with Melvyn Douglas (The Lone Wolf Returns) and a surprisingly sprightly one featuring Francis Lederer (The Lone Wolf in Paris), Pre-Code favourite Warren William took over as solo operator Michael Lanyard. His first appearance was in The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt, a matchlessly enjoyable fusion of thriller and screwball romance, before the series settled into an agreeable if unexceptional groove with movies like The Lone Wolf Meets a Lady and The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date. Those earlier sequels are certainly the best, full of nice interplay between William and his doting valet Eric Blore. By the time studio Columbia began shoving Lanyard into WWII propaganda flicks like Counter-Espionage (so steeped in patriotic fervour it feels slightly bossy) and One Dangerous Night, the entries were looking a touch thin. Which brings us to Passport to Suez. It's unusual to see William's character so out of his depth as he appears for the most part here, trying - and largely failing - to stay one step ahead of the Axis agents. Eric Blore is good value as ever, playing valet Jamieson, though the introduction of his screen son is a little wrong-headed. The support cast is somewhat enlivened by Ann Savage, the femme fatale from the classic PRC no-budget noir Detour, who has an intriguingly strange face/head, if not a great deal to do. (2.5)

For a review of the previous film in the series, One Dangerous Night, please go here.

***


The worst drawing of Joel McCrea the West has ever known.

*SPOILERS*
Four Faces West (Alfred E. Green, 1948) is a genuinely offbeat Western, in that no bullets are fired at any stage, though the gunpowder inside is used to cure two sick border children of diptheria. The film begins as a manhunt, with 'bankrobber' Joel McCrea (he leaves an IOU, but does point a gun at the manager) tracked by sheriff Pat Garrett (Charles Bickford). Then it adds some romance and a touch of history, before taking an inspired left-turn. McCrea's Westerns are a mixed bunch. He was a marvellous actor and from 1946 made nothing but oaters. Odd, then, how few were worthy of his talent. Of the 15 or so I've seen, only Stars in My Crown (is that a Western?), Ride the High Country and Colorado Territory really made the grade. This is definitely above-average, improving as it goes along, with a moving, reflective final 30 that comes out of nowhere. The supporting cast includes McCrea's wife Frances Dee as the love interest, and Maltese actor Joseph Calleia, playing against type as a kind-hearted gambler. This moodily-photographed outing isn't a masterpiece, but it does something different, and that's a welcome change in a genre heavily populated by formula films. (3)

***


These women look a funny shape. Can't they get some better artists in Hollywood?

The Opposite Sex (David Miller, 1956) is a disappointing remake of The Women that adds colour, songs and men, but somehow loses the essence of the original. Perhaps the plentiful cuts to plot and dialogue were to blame, though the lacklustre direction and unimaginative incorporation of the numbers doesn't help. June Allyson plays Kay, a former chanteuse who finds that her husband (Leslie Nielsen) has strayed with chorus girl Joan Collins. She's cut up about it and heads for Reno, but the chance of reconciliation is always there. Amidst the disappointment, there are some positives. Allyson was an underrated, distinctive actress and she's very good here, well-supported by Sandy Descher (as her daughter), Ann Sheridan - delivering the best performance of the bunch - and the legendary Joan Blondell, whose part is sadly far too small. June also contributes a couple of musical highlights: Young Man With a Horn, complete with trumpet solo by Harry James, and Now Baby Now, with its explosion-in-a-pastel-factory colour scheme. The latter is an exuberant performance, with staging that clearly informed Elvis' Jailhouse Rock (made at MGM the next year), though it inescapably features Allyson in a light blue jumpsuit, somewhat failing to transmit the desired sex appeal. The film's a bit of a damp squib, all told, though worth sticking with if you do start it. The last third is the best. (2)

Neo-noir, the Nicholas Brothers and frog kissers - Reviews #16

One Dangerous Night (Michael Gordon, 1943) was the second-to-last of Warren William's nine appearances as The Lone Wolf, a reformed jewel thief who tackled crooks and enjoyed oddly platonic relationships with damsels in distress. After the absolutely sensational Lone Wolf Spy Hunt, arguably the greatest B movie of all time, the series found a slightly lower groove in a series of undemanding mystery-comedies with premises of varying ingenuity. The generically-titled One Dangerous Night (giving a clue to the content for patrons who might have missed the trailer; the next year's Boston Blackie was called One Mysterious Night) is fairly standard jewel robbery stuff and notable only really for the timeframe, with the crime solved over Independence Night. There's too much exposition at the start, particularly for a film that only runs 77 minutes, though as soon as The Lone Wolf tells his oxymoronic companion, valet Jamison (Eric Blore), that the pair should "go off to crash a party together", it picks up. The cast is stuffed to bursting with familiar B-movie faces, including Frank Sully (who played Sgt Matthews in several of the Blackie films), noir legend Ann Savage (Detour) and Louis Jean Heydt, along with returning Lone Wolf alumni Thurston Hall and Fred Kelsey. Williams, meanwhile, is his usual delightfully irreverent self. The scene where the star suddenly whips open a door displays his trademark sense of danger - that commodity someone silly once said was required of every great actor (ah yes, like Lillian Gish, or Gary Cooper) - and he bounces off Blore as well as ever. Despite its formulaic nature and the slow opening, the film remains good-natured fun. A weaker series outing, perhaps, but if you've come this far with The Lone Wolf, you'll want to check it out. If you haven't, you probably won't. (2.5)

***



Widely held as Pixar's weakest, Cars (John Lasseter and John Ranft, 2006) is unexceptional but easy-to-take, with a well-worn plot given bright treatment. As has been said before, it's Doc-Hollywood-but-with-cars, as a speedy, superficial young buck - race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) - gets stranded in a small hick town where the residents' goodheartedness and easy-going nature start to work their magic. As in the Michael J. Fox-starrer, our conceited hero is asked to repair the damage he caused during his noisy arrival, and ends up dating a female lawyer who wound up in the area after an unhappy stint in the big city. (Having said that, Doc Hollywood itself is a hybrid of Local Hero, The Secret of My Success, a Dr Kildare, and a complete mess, so it's hardly the essence of originality.) Cars is well-short of the studio's best: Up, WALL-E, Ratatouille and Monsters, Inc., but the usual spark is periodically apparent, particularly in the treatment of tractors and a hysterical epilogue in which Toy Story, Monsters, Inc. and A Bug's Life are given a new spin (pun intended). Elsewhere, colourful characters and cut-to-the-chase races compensate for the sometimes slack narrative and muddled motor-y message. Nice James Taylor song, too. (2.5)

***



Pixar typically include a spin-off, direct-to-video short on each feature film DVD. The one for Cars is DTV SHORT: Mater and the Ghostlight (John Lasseter and Dan Scanlon, 2006), in which the principal comic relief character from the movie is apparently pursued by an unearthly blue glow. I'm not sure quite what the point is, but it's an OK watch, and the final gag is fairly chucklesome. (2)

***



Being a made-for-theatres outing, SHORT: One Man Band (Mark Andrews and Andrew Jimenez, 2005) is understandably better. Set in a lushly-realised Italian piazza, it sees rival musicians face off in a fight for a peasant girl's penny. The battle is as imaginative as you'd hope, and the whole thing has a great sense of place, but it takes an ill-conceived, unexplained turn near the close that's, like, well random, and trips the whole thing up. Shame. (3)

***



- "Did you guys come over here to arrest me?"
- "It kind of looks that way, Wayne."
Red Rock West (John Dahl, 1993) was made by the director a year before he wowed most everyone alive with The Last Seduction, a dazzling, resolutely nasty neo-noir that would presumably have taken home a bevvy of Oscars had it not been screened on TV first. Whoops. The earlier film is an effective, smirkingly fatalistic thriller about a drifter (Nicolas Cage) who's mistaken by lowlife Wayne (J.T. Walsh) for the hitman (Dennis Hopper) he's just hired to take care of his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Dahl is a gifted director and for the first hour it's pretty triumphant: atmospheric, exciting and riotously enjoyable, with an interesting treatment of creeping moral corruption and little clue given as to where it's heading next. But then the tightly-wound plot starts to unravel, with improbable (and therefore uninteresting) twists creating the enduring mental image of Dahl at his writing desk, scowling and scratching his head with the end of his pencil as he wonders how we got from that to this. It's still fine viewing, with a brooding, ever-present score and Hopper's excellent performance as Lyle from Dallas, a Johnny Cash look-alike of a hitman with an inferiority complex and a sentimental attitude to the Marines. It picks up for the last five, too. (3)

***



Bridge to Terabithia (Gabor Csupo, 2007) is perhaps the loveliest film I'll see this year - at least until I dig Remember the Night out for New Year's Eve. Josh Hutcherson is a fifth-grader (he's about 10) who finds solace from schoolyard bullying and home troubles with new classmate AnnaSophia Robb. The pair close their eyes and open their minds, conjuring a mythic land in a nearby forest that helps them confront their real-world problems - but tragedy is just around the corner. Former animator Gabor Csupo's understated handling, subtly incorporating fantastical elements, is perfect for the material, and he's aided by a trio of fine juvenile performances: from Hutcherson, Robb and Bailee Madison - playing Hutcherson's younger sister. T2 villain Robert Patrick is also very good, playing a gruff dad presumably not fashioned from liquid metal. There are very minor weaknesses, like a slight overreliance on musical montage and Zooey Deschanel's underwritten part as a teacher, but this is an extremely assured, intelligent, sensitive film with a believable and immensely touching friendship at its core. (3.5)

***


Harold and Fayard Nicholas dance for the Sheik of Araby.

Tin Pan Alley (Walter Lang, 1940) is a superior example of those composer biopics that were all the rage in golden era Hollywood - but with fictional songsmiths! It also appears to be employing the WWI-as-WW2 dynamic somewhat ahead of time. John Paine and Jack Oakie are musical publishers in 1915 New York. John's romancing tuneful Alice Faye, while Jack's got his sights - somewhat unrealistically - on leggy dancer Betty Grable. They all hit the big time, but it takes America's entry into WWI (late as usual) to iron out their differences. Attractive performances, top-drawer songs and an appearance by spectacular hoofers Fayard and Harold Nicholas, doing yet another eye-popping routine, make this well worth catching. (3)

***



CINEMA: The Princess and the Frog (Ron Clements and John Musker, 2009) - A lazy prince and a workaholic waitress fall in love after being turned into frogs by a voodoo spiv. That’s the premise of Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation, an enjoyable ride set in Jazz Age Louisiana that smells suspiciously like progress - that and swamp water. Waitress Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose), the studio’s first black heroine, dreams of opening her own restaurant, while her best friend Charlotte fantasises about marrying a prince. The arrival of a ukulele-playing royal (Bruno Campos) promises to help them both achieve their ambitions - if only a rakish occultist hadn’t just turned him into a frog. It’s an enjoyable ride, with a rich New Orleans flavour that extends to an agreeable jazziness in the film’s many new tunes, while the forays into art deco animation are nicely handled. And if too many supporting characters seem to be based on those from previous Disney hits, at least there’s Cajun firefly Ray, a funny and touching comic foil. But the film’s side-stepping of the real difficulties facing black Americans in the 1920s seems hamfisted in the extreme, undoing much of the good done by its bold setting. Also, fireflies can’t talk, but we’ll let that slide. (3)