Man of Conquest (1939)

I'm annoyed with myself because I've seen two classic Hollywood stinkers in a row. Last night was Man of Conquest, which is a hagiographic faux-western about Sam Houston and Andrew Jackson. As you might imagine, it is insane and full of ridiculous inaccuracies. Now, Sam Houston's life was also insane and absurd, so perhaps that all makes sense, but trying to make this guy into some kind of amazing, freedom-loving war hero is just nuts, although he did negotiate on behalf of the Cherokee nation. Sam Houston's life would make an interesting biopic, of course, but this one was invested mostly in convincing us all that "Andy" Jackson was one of the best presidents and best Americans ever to have lived (!) and that rebellion in Texas against México was somehow justified because the settler colonial state allowed individuals to own guns and México did not. Actually, this does make sense. These filmmakers probably believe that the South's secession was also justified and laudable. This is as much a bit of pro-gun propaganda and a redefinition of the second amendment as it is a pro-genocide Andrew Jackson film. No thanks.

Kentucky (1938)

There's a lot I don't understand about this ridiculous movie. In the first place, it's called Kentucky as if it's an old-school western film like In Old Arizona or something. But this isn't an old western - despite it opening with a shot of a weird map of the North American continent that doesn't have the United States carved out – only the state of Kentucky.

Then this movie begins in 1861 – Kentucky secedes from the Union, but a really terrible Union soldier steals a bunch of horses from a racing stable and kills a man. It's war, but it's awfully stupid. They're racehorses, so it's not like they can really help in the Civil War. Either way, the entire point of this sequence is to set up a family feud, but it's done so by making the Confederacy the good guys and the Union the evil, horse-thieving murderers.

Then all of a sudden it's 1938? Weirdly we jump ahead three-quarters of a century and now this movie is about the same two feuding families except of course the young man from one family and the young woman from the other are going to fall in love. This is now a horseracing melodrama set in 1938. And if you didn't believe Rebecca Schneider when she told us in Performing Remains that the Civil War is still happening, this movie is here to tell you that Rebecca Schneider was correct.

This is a bunch of Old South nonsense dressed up as melodrama. Two more gripes: first, there is only one horserace in this entire film – it takes place in the movie's final 15 minutes. Even the apparently very exciting race that takes place before the final Kentucky Derby race is narrated by an announcer as our main characters don't even watch the race. They're in the saloon, betting on their horse, and they listen to the race instead of enjoying it. We listen too. My second gripe is that Walter Brennan just yells through this whole movie. And he won an acting Oscar for all of this yelling. It's absurd. He's terrible in this movie. Kentucky is a melodrama, sure, and he's an old crotchety grandad in it (despite being in his early forties when they filmed it), but he just yells the whole time. It's so obnoxious. (Apparently, Brennan won because extras were allowed to vote back in the 1930s, and he was very popular with that contingent, since he worked as an extra for so many year.) 

Either way, this movie is dumb.

Identification Marks: None (1965)

Jerzy Skolimowski's Rysopis (Identification Marks: None) is an astounding 1960s film about malaise in contemporary Poland. This movie was released in Poland in 1964/1965 and the U.S. in 1968. I think what's so fascinating is that I just saw Ivan Ostrochovský's 2020 film Servants – a film that's also about 1960s Poland (and includes a scene in front of a military board that cites Skolimowski's film specifically) – but Identification Marks: None is so, so, so much better, despite being obviously made on a shoestring budget and without a cameraman half the time. This is a really stunning film. I have known nothing about Skolimowski until 2022's Io, but now (thankfully) every streaming service I get is showing Skolimowski movies, so I can watch a few.

Identification Marks: None is showing exclusively on MUBI.

Servants (2020)

Ivan Ostrochovský's Služobníci (Servants) is a gorgeously shot film about Catholic schoolboys resisting totalitarianism in 1980s Czechoslovakia. I don't know if it's because I (incorrectly) thought this was going to be a gay story, or because I really do not care about religious convictions, but I was bored. Sure, Ostrochovský's film is clearly inspired by the gorgeous spareness of Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida, and of course I adored that movie, but this film is all beautiful pictures without anything really to say. Central to this muddle is Servants' focus on the Communist operative who is killing the young men who are in the right, here. Why should the film focus on this character so much, examining his inner life? (He is played by Romanian film star Vlad Ivanov, and I'm glad they got such a great actor for this role, but... he's playing a terrible person, and the film isn't actually about him. This whole business is a confused mess. 

Servants was released in the U.S. in February of 2022, and it's currently playing on MUBI.

Blithe Spirit (1945)

You know, I never really liked Blithe Spirit on the page, maybe because I thought the ending really wasn't that funny, even if the first act of the play is hilarious. Well, I quite honestly laughed my ass off watching Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, and the rest of the cast of the 1945 David Lean–Ronald Neame–Noel Coward film of this play. It's delightful!

I've been watching films from the 1947 awards season, and I'd been postponing this one, but the Queer Cinema Archive posted about this recently as a bit of queer coding – the implication is that Margaret Rutherford's Madame Arcati character is coded as a lesbian – so I figured I'd catch Blithe Spirit tonight. Well, I've watched the film now, and I can't say I saw any such coding. However, a the end of the film there is some explicit queerness:

Elvira, the main character’s late wife, has been pestering him about her flirtations with a Captain Bracegirdle while she was alive. She had, apparently, been unfaithful to her husband with old Captain Bracegirdle, whom she tells us was very attractive. Well, at the very end of the movie, Rex Harrison has a monologue about how he’s always been picked on by women who have bossed him around. Harridans, he calls them. Then he says, “You were very silly, Elvira, if you think I didn’t know all about you and Captain Bracegirdle. I did. And what you didn’t realize is that I was extremely attached to Paul Westlake at the time!”

Incidentally, the poster, which is very sexy, doesn't have a thing to do with the movie, which isn't remotely sexy. Kay Hammond, the eponymous blithe spirit, doesn't wear anything approximating the sexy outfit of the woman on the poster, and her haircut looks nothing like this either. Honestly, I don't know who this is even supposed to be. In any case, although it is not at all sexy, Blithe Spirit is a very funny film, and I enjoyed it a great deal.