The Goddess (1958)

The Goddess boasts an incredible performance by Kim Stanley, the great method actress who did not make very many films. She rips into this role, which was apparently based on the career of Marilyn Monroe (while she was still working in Hollywood!). The script is also aces, but that’s what we all expect from a Paddy Chayefsky screenplay. In any case, this whole thing is note-perfect. Lloyd Bridges is great. Betty Lou Holland is fantastic. Steven Hill and Burt Brinckerhoff are very good. Elizabeth Wilson is excellent. And John Cromwell’s direction is tight and unsparing.

The Goddess is on the Criterion Channel until the end of August. I haven't seen it streaming anywhere else before this, so it might be a good time to check it out.

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 Horse's Mouth (1958)

I had no patience for Ronald Neame's The Horse's Mouth. This was a peak Alec Guinness moment in British cinema, I guess, and he apparently could sell anything to audiences. Well, not to me. He's doing this weird gravelly voice in this movie and his character is the most irritating, annoying person. I found this rather insufferable.

The Buccaneer (1958)

I was in the mood for some swashbuckling, and thought maybe I would watch The Buccaneer (the 1958 remake of the original Cecil B. DeMille film from twenty years earlier). This movie is a hot mess. In the first place, this movie is (bizarrely) directed by Anthony Quinn, the only film he ever directed. But the reason he did this was because his father-in-law DeMille was too sick to work on this movie.

This is a remake of the 1938 Buccaneer with Fredric March, but it's also clearly of a piece with DeMille's general interests – I recently watched Reap the Wild Wind from 1942, and it's also about pirates and going straight and comparisons between civilization and banditry.

But The Buccaneer might actually be dumber and worse than Reap the Wild Wind (though it certainly repeats most of its plot points). It stars Yul Brynner (who's great) and Charlton Heston (who is ridiculous) and Charles Boyer (who is perfect). Almost everything else is laughable. The screenplay is absurd. Just when you think the movie is done it introduces an entire stupid fourth act. The production design is awful. Every single scene looks like it was filmed on a cheaply made set. The costumes are perhaps the film's only redeeming quality. They're legitimately gorgeous.

Yul Brynner is delightfully shirtless on this movie's poster, but unfortunately appears with a shirt in all of the movie's scenes.

There is a most curious moment in the terrible fourth act that is relevant, perhaps, to theatre history. Jean Lafitte and his fiancée are dancing, and the blonde milquetoast fiancée is congratulated by Andrew Jackson on her dancing and he mentions his wife. What he says is something to the effect of: If my wife were here I'd have her teach you "Possum Up a Gum Tree". Everyone laughs and applauds. It's a really weird moment, mostly because no one today knows that song at all, but it was obviously a reference that many people were supposed to get (in 1958?). "Possum Up a Gum Tree" is a famous song that Charles Mathews used to sing in blackface in his show A Trip to America in the 1820s as a mockery of Black Americans (and Americans in general). Later, the African American actor Ira Aldridge would sing "Possum Up a Gum Tree" in his own act, incorporated into performances of Isaac Bickerstaffe's The Padlock. But The Buccaneer is set in the War of 1812, so the reference here is anachronistic. It's a very strange and gratuitous blackface reference in a film about the history of Louisiana.

Rusty Knife

Rusty Knife (錆びたナイフ) is a pretty good Japanese noir, but it's a little too wordy, and the big villain doesn't really show up until the end, so his big reveal isn't that interesting. I really liked the ending, though. The relationship between Ishihara Yūjirō and Kitahara Mie makes this an above average yakuza picture.

I, of course, watched this on the Criterion Channel as part of their series Japanese Noir. This series has been incredible.

Bell Book and Candle (1958)

With Judy Holliday in the main role Bell Book and Candle would have worked perfectly. As it is, it doesn't work at all. It's a broad, very silly comedy based on I Married a Witch, and yet Kim Novak is a downer in literally every scene. It's so weird because all the scenes that don't include Novak are silly. Jack Lemmon, Jimmy Stewart, and Elsa Lanchester all are playing very funny comedy, but Kim Novak is doing her usual Jennifer Lawrence thing. It does not work at all. 

P.S. I loved the cat.

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.

The Big Country (1958)

The Big Country – which William Wyler directed one year before Ben-Hur – looks like a giant, epic western. It's actually more of a melodrama. It does this very well, though, and Burl Ives, who won an Oscar, is really fantastic in this film. His first scene is clearly Oscar-worthy, but actually every scene he's in is amazing.

The most interesting thing about The Big Country, though, is the nominal non-violence it appears to preach. But, much like 1957's Friendly Persuasion (starring Gregory Peck's contemporary pretty-boy Gary Cooper), the non-violent man at the film's center proves his masculinity through violence after all. I am not sure why filmmakers were doing this non-violent thing during this period, but one does wish they actually believed in the product they were selling.

Charlton Heston: hot. (Listen. To each his own. He's sexy in this movie. I don't care what you say.)

Carroll Baker: the worst.

Village on the River (1958)

Fons Rademakers' Village on the River (Dorp aan de Rivier) is fine. It's not quite funny enough to really charm, though.

La Venganza (1958)

I was really into this film for most of its running time, and Jorge Mistral is so very handsome. La Venganza was a fairly good melodrama, and it has some smart aspects, too, particularly a charged sequences related to striking workers. But the vengeance of the title takes over a bit too much for my taste, and the film moves into territory that has nothing to say without histrionics.

The Year Long Road (1958)

Cesta Duga Godinu Dana (The Year Long Road) is really a stunning achievement. I loved this movie. It's a kind of socialist fable or fairy tale, which is probably why I loved it so much, but it demonstrates the value of working together, and has so many beautifully realized side plots and so much lovely character work, that it transcends its political utility.

Gates of Paris (1958)

Porte des Lilas (Gates of Paris) – which was released in France in 1957 and the U.S. in 1958 – was great.
But there is a sequence at about the 20-minute mark that is just luminous. It's an incredibly clever and beautiful section of film. Porte des Lilas is worth watching just for this sequence of storytelling. It's perfect.