The Black Rose (1950)

I am not quite sure why I was so disinterested in Henry Hathaway's The Black Rose. Perhaps it is Cécile Aubry as the protagonist's love interest... she's twenty-one or so, but she looks much younger because she's very short, and so the love between her and Tyrone Power never really registers as believable. She isn't a bad actress per se, acquitting herself well in a scene where she declares her love for him, but I just never bought his attraction for her. She just looks like a little kid.

I think, too, The Black Rose suffers from not having any narratives about the sea. I am used to seeing Tyrone Power on a ship, and this adventure narrative covers an overland trip through medieval Persia to China. This has its appeal, and there are some cool scenes, but Power feels kinda trapped.

In any case, despite being a very expensive and beautifully designed epic, this is just not that great. It's narratively wonky – it should have been more like two and a half hours instead of just two – missing big chunks of important travel and information. And its nationalist politics feel really on the nose: Power plays a Saxon who hates the Normans even though it's 200 years after the Conquest. What he needs to learn is that he loves his nation, and that's more important than who runs it... or something like that? The lesson is unity: we love this land where we were born, and so Saxon and Norman can work together for its glory. (I.E. Put aside all of your complaints about what a bad job I'm doing running this country, and stop complaining about all of the injustices you've suffered under my illegitimate colonial reign, and think of the land.)

I am skeptical.

Action in the North Atlantic (1943)

Yet another contemporary WWII movie, Action in the North Atlantic boast some cool sea fights. This follows a big tanker taking supplies from the U.S. to the Soviets while being chased by a fleet of submarines. It stars Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey, with a very important supporting part played by the instantly recognizable Dane Clark. It's criminal that he didn't become a huge star. I really don't know how that happened. He's wonderful.

In any case, one very strange thing Action in the North Atlantic does is have the Germans in their submarine speak only German. The film does not subtitle their speech, so we actually spend a lot of time in this film listening to German without any translation. It's a very strange move for a 1943 film.

Happening

For me, L'Événement (Happening), Audrey Diwan's new film about a young woman in France in the early 1960s trying to get an abortion, feels a bit like a retread. I liked it a lot, honestly, and it's quite a thriller, actually – I was on the edge of my seat for much of it – but I guess I feel like I've seen it before. In 2020 there was Eliza Hittman's excellent US American film Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which was much more of a terrifyingly tragic drama than Happening. But this movie reminded me most of Cristian Mungiu's truly wonderful 4 Luni, 3 Săptămâni şi 2 Zile (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) from 2007, which works a lot like Happening.

In any case, Happening works very, very well, and it was a good watch even if it didn't feel completely original. It also feels very important in the U.S., where rampantly misogynist state governments – and a truly backward federal government – are once again attempting to force women to give birth by passing anti-abortion legislation.

Sunset (1988)

Late Blake Edwards is just not good. Sunset boasts a winning, delightfully comic performance by Bruce Willis but not much else. I love James Garner and Mariel Hemingway, but they both feel wooden in this. But, honestly, the entire premise is faulty. It's title is the rather somber Sunset, and it looks on the outside like it should be a neo-noir picture – a kind of Farewell, My Lovely or L.A. Confidential – but it actually wants to be Hail, Caesar!. The Coen Brothers would do this kind of silliness tinged with real issues correctly, but Edwards' version can't make the broad comedy and the mystery–melodrama make sense together.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Man oh man. I love a World War II movie made during World War II, and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! comes from an idea Lang came up with alongside Bertolt Brecht. This movie was banned for a while in the U.S. (I presume) because of Brecht's involvement and possible pro-Communist sentiments. (U.S. American fascism is fascinating, honestly. We rant and rave about the Nazis burning books and then we ban films like this.) In any case, Hangmen Also Die! is a thriller, and it's excellent. The cast is great – Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee, and Gene Lockhart especially, but really everyone.

This movie is about an assassin who has killed one of the worst men during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. But the film starts after "the Hangman" has been assassinated, and what we watch instead is his attempts to escape – to find a place to hide in the immediate aftermath and to avoid detection once the Nazis begin to crack down on finding the Hangman's executioner.

What's so great about this is the plotting of the Czech resistance to fight the Nazi occupation. I can see why the U.S. American fascists opposed this. It's a film about choosing community over the individual. It's about resisting coercion and working as a group to do what's right. This is honestly a great film, and as I said, it's a thriller. I was honestly on the edge of my seat the whole time. I'm glad we can watch it in full now – and free – on Amazon Prime.

A Certain Smile (1958)

Jean Negulesco's A Certain Smile doesn't work. It's unfortunate because it starts off pretty good. Basically it should be a kind of intriguing story where a young woman has an affair with her fiancé's hot, rich uncle and she can't quite figure out why she finds him so compelling, but she does. And A Certain Smile starts off that way. It's intriguing and sexy for a while. And then it becomes a kind of strange moral tale. The young woman behaves very badly and ruins lots of things, and then we get a speech from Joan Fontaine about marriage or something or other.

I was with this for a little bit. Rossano Brazzi is fantastic as the enigmatic, sexy uncle. And Joan Fontaine is fabulous as his wife. (Now is the time for us all to admit, finally, that Joan Fontaine was just a much better actress than her sister, Olivia de Havilland. I don't care how many Oscars de Havilland won; it's really not even up for debate. Joan chose more interesting characters to play, and she played them better.) But then there's the film's lead – Christine Carère – who doesn't seem to understand the part and whose English is not great and who is rather wooden in the entire film. It's an interesting role, actually, but Carère doesn't know what to do with it, and the film really suffers because of this.

The Bolshoi Ballet

Surprisingly sublime, Paul Czinner's film The Bolshoi Ballet documents some gorgeous performances, especially Galina Ulanova's work in Giselle, which takes up the latter half of the film.

The Bolshoi Ballet is rather a strange film: it comprises only documentary footage of a ballet performance. It's a recording of an evening with the Bolshoi. But, as I say the Giselle sequence is sublime, and this is therefore a kind of treasure. The Bolshoi Ballet captures a beautiful moment in the mid-twentieth-century ballet repertoire with one of its great stars.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is a comic bit of fluff posing as a western. It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek fantasy version of the story of Judge Roy Bean – not that there are serious versions of the man's story. But John Huston's film reminded me of all of the most farcical sections of John Ford's movies. This is just a series of silly scenes intercut with the occasional sentimental scene.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean might, however, be notable for the fact that it came out in 1972 – the same year as Deliverance – and Bill McKinney and Ned Beatty each play one of Judge Bean's deputies.

Souls at Sea (1937)

Souls at Sea is an intriguing 1930s film by Henry Hathaway about a man working as a kind of one-man army against the African slave trade in the 1840s. What's sort of weird about this – aside from Gary Cooper's more-than-a-little-wooden performance – is that the main import of the film is an explosion and shipwreck that have nothing at all to do with the slave trade. Cooper's character is on an anti-slavery mission, sure, but the boat that sinks is not a slave ship at all, and so the main thrust of the drama is about something else entirely. 

The film's script seems designed to avoid Black actors. We get a few images of enslaved Africans killing a slaver, but although we know that the two heroes of the film disobey orders and unlock everyone enslaved aboard the ship, Souls at Sea doesn't show us any scenes of Black freedom, preferring to jump ahead in time to the men explaining what they've done to the enforcers of maritime law. 

It's a strange movie – probably because it is produced for a segregated film industry that will distribute the film to segregated theatres during Jim Crow.