The Gay Deceivers (1969)

The Gay Deceivers is a very curious movie. I've said before that in 1969 Hollywood was cranking out absurd movies where teenagers wanted nothing to do with sex but that there were plenty of other films that showed that teenagers understood precisely how the world works. This movie is one of the latter, in which high schoolers and high-school graduates are having plenty of sex, including sex with other teenagers' mothers.

This movie is also surprisingly gay, by which I mean that although gay culture and gay men are the butt of many of the jokes here, there is also plenty of discussion of prejudice, many many jokes aimed explicitly at gay people, and lots of eye-candy. The entire thing is made with a wink, and although the I may not know my flowers but I know a bitch when I see one line is famous, there are plenty more delightful quips where that came from, and Michael Greer is fabulous.

Young Ahmed

Le Jeune Ahmed is a Dardenne Brothers movie, so it's a beautifully realized bit of social analysis with excellent acting. It is, of course, a tragedy, as most of their films are. This one is about a fundamentalist young man, and the jeune in their title is really important. Ahmed is a young teenager who keeps making terrible decisions because he is too young to understand the world in which he lives. This movie made me hate religion more than I already hate it, but Le Jeune Ahmed is a fundamentally hopeful film, mostly because it wants us to believe – and to continue to believe – that Ahmed can change.

Young Ahmed is available to stream on Criterion.

A Vida Invisível

Invisible Life is a beautifully made family drama with several excellent performances, especially by the transcendent Fernanda Montenegro in the final 20 minutes of the film. But Invisible Life is also, in many ways, The Color Purple reset in Brazil in the 1950s. One thing about dramas like this is that I can never really understand forgiving the awful, awful conservative men and women who destroy families in these things. It makes it hard for me to identify. I wind up just screaming at the screen. Also, I don't know who told me this was about queer subject matter, but it is definitely not.

Blow the Man Down

Blow the Man Down (available now on Amazon Prime) is a Martin McDonagh film without the really brutal violence and without – and this is where it fails – the broad comedy. Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy's movie opts for a quirkier brand of comedy that I didn't really find funny. The inspirations here are McDonagh and the Coens, but the execution just doesn't work. It's fine, and Margo Martindale has a nice juicy part, and June Squibb has a good one too, but there is no more than that to recommend here and the two lead performers are boring.

Cowboy (1958)

Cowboy was sold as the real cowboy life – none of that corny, schmaltzy, cliché cowboy stuff Hollywood has churned out before!

Oh sure. This has some good moments, but it's mostly just as candy-coated and filled with fantastic aphorisms as the rest of these cowboy movies. Glenn Ford (who I love, as you probably know) is perfectly cast in this. He's excellent – by turns charming and gruff and sensitive and funny. What a great actor! Jack Lemmon, however... is miscast. He's too cartoony an actor at this point in his career to really be able to do the kind of emotional work he's supposed to do in the movie. Delmer Daves would have been much better off with an actor who's more of a leading man type. This was the kind of part written for a young Monty Clift or James Dean. Lemmon makes the whole thing feel silly.

And as for this being some sort of real cowboy story? It ends with Jack Lemmon and Glenn Ford sitting in bathtubs next to one another shooting at cockroaches in a fancy Chicago hotel. No corn and no clichés? Come on.

Air Force (1943)

Air Force is a gorgeous film. James Wong Howe really outdid himself here. The photography is breathtaking. At one point I just stopped and cheered for how gorgeous it looks.

This film has some pretty great performances, too, including Gig Young, John Garfield, and Harry Carey. James Brown is in this, too – handsome as all get out but a terrible performance.

Air Force is unfortunately but truly marred by its propagandistic lies. It's a beautiful movie that hates the Japanese, a fact which, perhaps can be forgiven since the country was at war, but the lies that this movie spreads about attacks at Pearl Harbor by Japanese Americans? Inexcusable. And those lies had severe consequences for so many of our countrymen.

High Heels (1991)

High Heels is a total melodramatic delight. This is campy fun that's also serious. In the vein of La Ley del Deseo and Atame! especially. There are murders, there are lost pistols, there are prison lesbians, there is a drag queen performing as one of the other characters. There's an outrageous dance sequence (in the women's prison) and an incredible sex scene. This has something for everyone. What is especially important are the Joan Crawford–Lana Turner connections here. Daughters trying to live up to mothers, Mildred Pierce, Autumn Sonata, Imitation of Life, Mommie Dearest. All of these films come up numerous times in Tacones Lejanos. I was especially reminded of Where Love Has Gone with Susan Hayward and Bette Davis, a film ostensibly about Lana Turner and her daughter. And there's Douglas Sirk, who made melodramas exactly like this in the 1940s and '50s and is obviously an enormous influence on Almodóvar in general. In any case, all of this makes the film even richer.

Pusher (1996)

Pusher is the kind of thing I would have thought was exciting in the mid-1990s when it came out. Less so in 2006 when it was finally released in the U.S. But now in 2020, I just can't get that interested in these small-time criminals and their dumb misogyny, racism, violence, and stupidity. Pusher is notable for being Mads Mikkelsen's debut, and of course he's great in this. But he isn't in it for long. The performances are good – Laura Drasbæk is particularly interesting. And Kim Bodnia and Slavko Labović are both super attractive. But this film was not interesting to me. Its charms, such as they are, have not weathered well. Structurally, Pusher works rather like a Safdie Brothers movie, but Refn's movie does not work well as the Safdies' movies do. Oh also, the ending is incomplete. A movie like this needs to end. This one leaves the viewer hanging, and while this can work for plenty of films, even thrillers, the generic demands of this film require an ending. Instead, Refn punts.

Something to Sing About (1937)

I like Cagney as a gangster. I have a tougher time buying him as a song-and-dance man, even if he is a good dancer. In this picture, though, he barely even does that. He doesn't really even have a single number all to himself, despite being billed above the title. In fact, this film is pretty far up Cagney's ass, I have to say. This film thinks Cagney is amazing in a way that began to leave a bad taste in my mouth. The music is pretty good, but there isn't much comedy. The highlights of this film were the obviously gay makeup man (who of course was the butt of many jokes and insulted by Cagney's character) and Philip Ahn who has has a supporting part as Cagney's manservant – he has a thick accent that he can shed whenever he wants and he tells Cagney that his previous employers liked it better when he spoke bad English and bowed too much. It's a fascinating bit of racial performance.

Gloria (1980)

Gloria is aces. Gena Rowlands is great, and this film surprised me quite a few times. This was on the Criterion Channel as a film that the Safdie Brothers love and that inspires their work. It is very plain to see why that's true. What an exciting film! I loved this.

The Little Prince (1974)

The Little Prince is actually quite a charming movie musical. I loved the Lerner and Loewe songs. This is in spite of the fact that the Bob Fosse number is super weird and I've never really liked Gene Wilder. But all of the stuff with Richard Kiley and the boy is pretty great, and I liked the Donna McKechnie stuff, as well. And this film was orchestrated by Angela Morley, which is fun, even if Loewe, apparently, refused to go oversee the orchestration because he was unhappy with the studio at the moment. Drama.

Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (1964)

I was really taken with Pasolini's Decameron, which I saw for the first time last month, and since then I have been interested to see more of his work. The Criterion Channel has cycled off the three Pasolini films they were showing, so I decided to watch The Gospel According to St. Matthew, which is on Amazon Prime at the moment.

 It's an epic. It's exquisitely done. It's a cast of hundreds (including, for some reason, Giorgio Agamben), and the art direction is extraordinary. But... well, it's still the story of Christ, and the storytelling here feels disjointed and disconnected, as if Christ's life is a series of tales rather than a single story (which of course it is, but this doesn't make for the best narrative feature). I didn't enjoy this as much as I wanted to.

Also, the homoeroticism promised by the poster (and, indeed, by Pasolini's life) comes to naught. This film is not the least bit erotic, even with the beautiful Enrique Irazoqui in the main role.

Actas de Marusia (1975)

Actas de Marusia is a powerful, very, very violent epic about a massacre in Chile in 1907. It's a film about Chile made in Chihuaha by Chilean director Miguel Littín (who also made films in Nicaragua). This is a dark film about labor and organizing – along the lines of I Compagni, La Venganza, Ådalen 31, or Blood on the Land. As I've noted before, this topic was an important conversation in cinema across the globe, as you can see by the range of locations in these titles – movies coming from Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Greece respectively.  

Actas de Marusia also is clear to mark the racism/colonialism that fuels this violence. The soldiers see themselves as killing Indios, not Chileans like themselves. 

Finally, Actas de Marusia is also about contemporary violence in Chile in the mid-1970s; it includes torture sequences that seemed to me to reference Pinochet. There's even an intriguing moment where the military men talk about how they're being funded by the U.S. government! In any case, this film is epic. It's extraordinarily made, it must have cost a fortune, and its politics are decidedly leftist and anti-racist.

Manhattan Merry-Go-Round

Manhattan Merry-Go-Round is one of the typical musicals from this mid-1930s period where all the musical numbers are diegetic. Gangsters are running a music studio in this film, and so we get cameos from Cab Calloway and Kay Thompson (her stuff is weird) and Gene Autry (also weird). There is also a plot with an opera diva. Tamara Geva, who plays said diva, is this film's most outstanding feature. She's by turns adorable and terrible; she's smashing vases one minute and begging for love the next. It's an excellent performance, but the film she's in is pretty dumb.

The Front (1976)

The Front is a Woody Allen movie that wasn't written and directed by Woody Allen – in fact, this film predates Allen's big smashes with Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979) – but it's still Allen at the film's center, and the jokes feel very Allen throughout.

The Front is very, very good. It's funny for the first two acts, and then it turns serious. And Martin Ritt has directed it so well that the serious turn made perfect sense and didn't feel the least disruptive. The movie stays serious after that – it is a film about the blacklist, after all, but the screenplay is aces and Ritt's direction is excellent. Michael Murphy is great in a supporting role, but Zero Mostel is incredible. He's so perfect in this. And when, as the credits start to roll, each name says when he was blacklisted in the early 1950s, it brought tears to my eyes. The Front has a powerful ending, and if this romantic comedy stays lighthearted, it always takes its main topic seriously.

Bullitt (1968)

This film is excellent. The car chase is fuckin' cool. The plot is great. Jacqueline Bisset is wonderful. McQueen is perfect.

Guys and Dolls (1955)

Am I drunk or did I actually enjoy this as much as I think I did? I wasn't expecting Guys and Dolls to be as fun as it is, but all the principals are excellent, and Vivian Blaine is truly a standout among great performers. There are some really brilliant numbers in this – "Luck Be a Lady" might be the most famous, but "Don't Rock the Boat", "For Some Doll", and (especially) "A Person Could Develop a Cold" are lyrically brilliant. And Michael Kidd!! This was a blast.

The Vagabond King (1930)

I had never heard of Dennis King before, but he's very good in this... as long as he's singing. Other than that, well, I've already seen the 1938 non-musical version If I Were King, so I guess I just thought it was old hat. And I know that the Frank Lloyd movie came out eight years later, and I realize that isn't really fair to the ol' Vagabond King. But either way, I wasn't into it.

All the King's Horses (1935)

This could have been really fun, and I think it was probably an amusing script, but All the King;s Horses is very oddly directed. Carl Brisson and Mary Ellis are both in excellent voice, but Edward Everett Horton is given nothing to do - and he doesn't even interact onscreen with Eugene Pallette. Clearly the director didn't have good musical comedy as a priority. As for the title of this film, I have no idea why it is called this. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again, right? There are no horses in this film. Is something not able to be put back together? I don't get it.

White Material

White Material is pretty great. I feel like I don't usually care for Claire Denis; I definitely thought High Life was sort of boring. But I thought this movie was exquisitely done.

Totally Fucked Up

I really loved almost all of Totally Fucked Up, and I was very much a fan... and then it ended the way it ended. I actually just don't think the ending of this film is right or works or anything. I get that the ending is presaged by much of what goes on in the first two acts of the movie, but boy did I dislike the ending a lot.

I am not really sure how I managed to get this old without having seen these early Gregg Araki movies, but I loved The Living End and I really liked this one (for the most part). They have an insanity to them that is very appealing. I will check out some more of them soon.

P.S. James Duval is super cute in this. Gilbert Luna too.

P.P.S. The title is a question for me. There is no title card in the film, but a character says the phrase totally fucked up. So is the title Totally Fucked Up or Totally F***ed Up like the poster says. The Criterion Channel opted for the latter. I think that's probably correct. In any case, the words fucked and f***ed are pronounced the same and mean nearly the same thing.

P.P.P.S. I really hate covering over indecorous words with asterisks for precisely this reason. In the first place, you are not fooling anyone. The word loses all sense if we don't understand what you mean, which means, of course, that we understand exactly what you mean, which means, of course, that you're actually just still writing the word. So what the asterisks indicate is that the writer wants to say the thing the writer wants to say while at the same time behave as though the writer would never say such a thing. To my mind, if you don't want to use those words, don't use them. If you want to use them, use them, but don't pretend you don't want to use them when it's perfectly obvious that that's exactly what you wish to do. None of this is Gregg Araki's fault. I'm just ranting.

A Thousand and One Nights

Alfred E. Green's A Thousand and One Nights is a really fun movie. It's a totally silly romp through the Arabian Nights with Aladdin and a magic lamp but also with anachronistic jokes. Phil Silvers plays Aladdin's friend Abdullah in 1940s glasses as if he just dropped into a fantasy version of the medieval Orient from mid-century Los Angeles. It's quite silly.

 I enjoyed myself a lot, and the costumes are exquisite. I also really loved Cornel Wilde in 1945 – I always forget how handsome he was back then. Sign me up!

This movie is quite obviously what Disney's 1992 Aladdin film is based on. The parallels are too striking for this not to be true. And, coincidentally, I just finished reading Sean Griffin's Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: the Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out, in which he claims that Howard Ashman, who was one of the main creative forces behind Aladdin had imagined the Genie as a giant black man – an image he would have taken directly from A Thousand and One Nights.

The Gingerbread Lady

Only When I Laugh is a serious Neil Simon screenplay with jokes, rather like The Sunshine Boys. This is better than The Sunshine Boys, but it's still a difficult watch. Marsha Mason is excellent, but most of this feels stagey and forced. Simon's dialogue often sparkles, and it certainly has the capability of being very funny, but it never quite feels natural, and this is a movie that wants to talk about depression and alcoholism and the losses that can attend it. So this often feels witty, but it never really feels true. Only When I Laugh's racist jokes have also not aged well, and I find it surprising that anyone ever laughed at them. They're not remotely funny.

Joan Hackett, in her final film performance, is absolutely great in Only When I Laugh. She reminded me a great deal of one of the acting professors at my university when I was in college, Leslie Rivers. She rather looked like Leslie and her performance made me think of her. In any case, she's great. She would die of ovarian cancer within two years of making this film.

Incidentally, Only When I Laugh is based on Simon's play The Gingerbread Lady (1970), which starred Maureen Stapleton in the U.S. and Elaine Stritch in the U.K.

Affair in Trinidad (1952)

Affair in Trinidad is a kind of reboot of Gilda six years later, with a similar location, a similar antagonistic relationship between Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth, and a similar sinister film noir plot. None of the magic is gone. This is the best way to reboot. Affair in Trinidad is sexy and fun and mysterious. I had a great time. Hayworth does two night club numbers – both of them are sensational.

And the gowns. They're by Jean-Louis and they're stunning. Of course, Hayworth is wearing them, so that doesn't do any harm at all, but Jean-Louis is doing superb work in the early 1950s. Affair in Trinidad also boasts an excellent performance by Juanita Moore! It's so good.

The Sniper (1952)

The Sniper is a very strange movie in many ways. In the first place we follow a serial killer for most of the movie. We watch him lose his mind and fight with his own murderous tendencies, we watch him try to stop himself from killing. And then we watch him kill many times. The camera even occasionally takes the point of view of the rifle – of course it does.

The other thing that is very interesting about The Sniper is its emphasis on a kind of delinquent mapping of the abnormal person who can kill, the case history that can predict who will become violent. This is the kind of thing Foucault was describing in his lectures in the early 1970s. And then there is the ending – which doesn't end with a shootout, just a crying serial killer, sitting on his bed and clutching his rifle. It's a very strange end for a crime film like this.

Mosquita y Mari (2012)

Mosquita y Mari is disappointing. It's not that it's not fun to see a high school Chicana lesbian love story, it's just that this one doesn't quite know what it wants to do and isn't really very enjoyable. My take on this movie is that it's really about Mosquita (who is a cypher for the director, Aurora Guerrero) and not really about Mari except as an idealized fantasy or memory.

The Harder They Fall (1955)

The Harder They Fall is the second Bogart movie I've watched this week, and I'm just so impressed. Obviously I've seen dozens of Bogart movies in my life, but I guess I just hadn't thought much about what good choices this man made as a filmmaker and also how well he can hold a picture together and bring the audience along with whatever his character is thinking.  

The Harder They Fall is not a great movie, but it has some excellent acting – Rod Steiger chews the scenery beautifully and gives a superb performance, and former boxers Jersey Joe Walcott, Max Baer, and Pat Comiskey make appearances... as older boxers, of course.

The script is not bad, but the whole thing just doesn't hang together very well, and it lags in the middle. I hate to say this as a lover of Columbia noir, but I think it needed just a little more heart – which is something Somebody Up There Likes Me (another movie about pugilism from the same year with Paul Newman) has. While we're on boxing movies, Mark Robson directed one of my favorites – also about corruption in the ring – Champion, from 1949 with Kirk Douglas.

And Then We Danced (2019)

And Then We Danced (და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ) is a Georgian film from a Swedish director. It's about gender and traditional Georgian dance, and it's also about homosexuality in Georgia. It's fairly conventional in lots of ways, but And Then We Danced has some really remarkable qualities.

The film's central performance, by Levan Gelbakhiani, is extraordinary. He's a gorgeous dancer, but he's also completely, totally lovable, and he communicates how in love he is perfectly. It's a stunning, beautiful performance. I adored him from the film's first few minutes, and I felt instantly protective of him.

I also really loved the way Gelbakhiani's character figures his sexuality out, which is not something he has been hiding throughout the film but something he instead discovers as the film progresses. He actually seems not to understand about homophobia and the dangers his desires present him. There's this gorgeous moment where he hugs his girlfriend and cries and says Forgive me. I didn't understand. It's an extraordinary thing to say, and it's a scene that for me makes And Then We Danced special.

The soundtrack is great, too. There are two beautiful sequences of Georgian choral music, and of course a lot of great dance music, as well as some excellent pop songs at perfect moments – Robyn's "Come Get Your Honey" is used exquisitely.

And I loved the ending of this film, which describes a new movement in Georgian dance.

So, this film has lots to recommend it, even though it appears conventional.

The Scoundrel (1935)

The Scoundrel is an old movie, so I suppose it deserves a little mercy, but I'm not feeling very forgiving of this Ben Hecht–Charled MacArthur film. The thing is, The Scoundrel just doesn't work. Noel Coward, who should be perfectly right for this part, doesn't make the role zip the way it ought to. The script clearly sparkles, but Coward's delivery is all misery all the time. One can't understand why anyone would ever be charmed by him, and the whole point is that this scoundrel is supposed to be charming!

And then there is the premise, which is promising but turns out to be moralistic and strange. A scoundrel, cad, what have you, is a jerk to a woman who loves him, is almost killed, but is saved by a god and required to return to earth to find someone who will shed tears for him? 

 So it's Der Fliegende Holländer set in 1930s New York, but The Scoundrel takes a moral tone that can't help but ring hollow. Furthermore, the whole thing would have been more enjoyable if the scoundrel's actual bad behavior contained any fun. Unfortunately even the scoundrel's scandals are joyless in this movie.

Lacombe Lucien

I think the trouble with Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien is Lucien himself. He's an awful little entitled young man who winds up working for the Nazis in the south of France. I guess I'm not sure what I was supposed to like about him. Of course, he's a stupid little boy, who doesn't have many options in life, but he knows he could do better, he just chooses the easiest, most violent path possible. Malle's film is well made, of course, but I don't think I liked it much. The film's best performance is by Holger Löwenadler, who plays the father of the woman Lucien claims he loves.

Sahara (1943)

Sahara is an expertly made war film from 1943 that is designed to build up pro-Allied sentiment (and even pro-Italian sentiment!). The Germans in the film, however, are uniformly ungentlemanly, untrustworthy, and false. It's easy to make fun of Sahara's obviously propagandistic aims, but this is an excellently made war picture shot in the middle of the desert. It's wonderfully acted and beautifully shot, and it even kinda choked me up at the end.