Paramount Summer Classic Film Series- Notorious (Hitchcock Week)

 

It's Hitchcock Week at the Paramount Theater and last night was a chance to see one of the best from the master of suspense, "Notorious", the 1946 spy thriller starring Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, and Claude Raines. Set mostly in Rio after the war, "Notorious" is about an attempt to penetrate a Nazi spy ring, operating in South America. Grant plays Devlin, an equivocating intelligence agent, who recruits the daughter of a German Spy, convicted of treason in Florida. For the romance element of the story to work, we have to believe that he is in the dark over exactly what his superiors want from Alicia Huberman. 

The world of espionage is particularly dark in Hitchcock's films. Although we want the American agencies that he vaguely refers to to succeed, they do so through one of the most unpleasant means available. In both "Notorious" and "North by Northwest", party girls with emotional vulnerabilities are asked to seduce the targets in order to gain intelligence. With Eva Marie-Saint we don't get a lot of backstory, but Ingrid Bergman's character is all backstory, especially for the first act of the film. Alicia has rebelled against her Nazi father and in drowning herself in booze, she has become a loose woman, who is taken advantage of by a variety of men. At the depth of her humiliation, Devlin, the character played by Grant, insinuates himself in her circle of friends and begins the process of luring her into an assignment in South America. I find it interesting, that Grant is the man who falls for the loose women turned spies in both films. In "North by Northwest" he is an innocent, caught up in plans beyond his ken. Here, he is a calculating cad, who learns the dangers of his own callousness. 

"Notorious" is at heart a love triangle, the third party being the erudite Alexander Sebastian,  a key member of the Nazi group. It seems that years earlier, when Sebastian was friends with Alicia's father, he had a massive crush on her, and the U.S. and Brazilin intelligence group wants to take advantage of that by inserting her into his life. In essence, pimping her out for Uncle Sam.  The fact that Devlin has fallen for Alicia and she for him, is a big complication. Devlin is cold to Alicia, as a way of distancing himself and her from the unpleasantness of her activities. Regardless of what Devlin says to her however, he is defensive on her behalf with the intelligence group in private. In an excellent illustration of true movie dialogue here is an example:

Paul Prescott: [about Alicia] I don't like this, I don't like her coming here.

Walter Beardsley: She's had me worried for some time. A woman of that sort.

Devlin: What sort is that, Mr. Beardsley?

Walter Beardsley: Oh, I don't think any of us have any illusions about her character. Have we, Devlin?

Devlin: Not at all, not in the slightest. Miss Huberman is first, last, and always not a lady. She may be risking her life, but when it comes to being a lady, she doesn't hold a candle to your wife, sitting in Washington, playing bridge with three other ladies of great honor and virtue.

Devlin gives himself away to his superior Paul Prescott, played by veteran actor Louis Calhern, with a dash of charm and a bureaucratic mind. Prescott has a clever scene revealing a little of his humanity when Devlin comes to him worried about Alicia, and the discussion takes place while he is prone in bed, eating cheese and crackers. Not the tightly controlled mission boss, but a man who has to kick his shoes off an dine alone in bed sometimes. He knows what he is doing with Alicia, but he is not the monster that he could be. A decade later, Leo G. Carroll will fill a similar role in the other spy film I mentioned.

My admiration for Claude Rains as an actor has been expressed before. In "Casablanca", "The Adventures of Robin Hood", and "The Invisible Man", Rains has been one of the consistent lights of the golden age of Hollywood. He is the sweetest and most vulnerable Nazi in films, as a besotted member of this cabal, he is both murderously awful and sympathetic. That is a piece of cognitive complexity that only an expert performer like Rains could pull off. The defeated resignation of his denouncement is perfect for the character and the film.

There are several moments of tension in the movie. Bergman's acquisition of a key without her husband discovering it is one of those sequences. Of course the search for the secret in the wine cellar is gripping as well. You could hear the audience last night, collectively inhaling and holding their breath, as a wine bottle teeters on the edge of a shelf. Finally, the elegant bluff and turning of the tide with Grant rescuing Bergman from the clutches of Rains, and his loathsome Mother. The mother, played by actress Leopoldine Konstantin, is one of the Mother's that Hitchcock used as a tool for manipulating his male leads in the movies. While not as famous as Norman Bates mother, Mme. Sebastian, would certainly belong in a rogue's gallery of villains. 

As usual with a Hitchcock film, the production design is impressive. Although the scenes set in Rio rely on rear projection, they still look convincing. Alicia's house in Florida, and her apartment in Rio, swim in the deco elegance of the era and her outfits do the same thing. The camera work is impeccable, I liked the trick with the coffee cup in the foreground as Alicia is in the background, both in focus. There are a number of moments shot from above that also establish the pecking order of power in the household, but allowing us to track the activities of the characters as well. The final descent on the staircase is an excellent visual complement to the plot tension in the script. 

From 1945 to his death in 1980, Alfred Hitchcock made 24 films and in that thirty five year period, a dozen of them are essential and another half dozen are excellent. "Notorious" deservedly belongs on the top shelf with a cast of stars that were at the height of their powers. A big screen visit is always called for when a Hitchcock film is involved. Tonight, two more of the top tier films. 

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series Double Feature-Romancing the Stone/Three Amigos

 

Robert Rodriguez is a local Austin hero. As a film maker, he has worked extensively in the Austin area and used local crafts people and locations for his films. He has been able to select a group of movies for the Summer Classic Film Series, and present them to the audience with a live introduction for a few years now. This last Sunday, he had three films that he wanted to talk about that featured Mexican Actor/Director Alfonso Arau. Rodriguez was inspired by Arau when he was just starting out and he got a break, which allowed him to spend a week or so as a young man, assisting and hanging out with Arau. They have since become friends and it is fitting that Rodriguez selected his friend to feature in this summer's presentations.

There were actually three features on Sunday that concerned Arau, unfortunately, we could not stay for the film he directed "Like Water for Chocolate". I have it in my collection and we will catch up with it soon. The two films we were able to see were movies that Alfonso Arau had an acting role in. He is not the star of the films but he is an important featured player in both of them

Romancing the Stone

"Romancing the Stone" was 20th Century Fox's entry into the Indiana Jones clone films. Everyone was looking for an adventure film with comedy, romance and stunts, to pull in audiences the way the Steven Spielberg films had done. The movie was a big success and it cemented the stardom of Kathleen Turner and created a partnership with Michael Douglas that would continue up to today. If you are interested in a more detailed look at the film, let me direct you to my post on the 30 Years On Project. This movie is a delightful summer entertainment, and holds up pretty well.

First lets talk about Alfonso Arau's part in the film. He plays the role of a drug smuggler, who controls the local area that Romance Writer, Joan Wilder (Turner) and her guide/partner, Jack Colton (Douglas) find themselves stuck in. Through one of those wonderful movie coincidences, he knows her work and becomes a quick ally in her goal of escaping from the evil pursuers that are hot on their trail. The vast majority of his role involves him grinning as he drives them in his off road truck through the fields and jungles as they are chased by jeeps with machine guns.  Arau is probably not in the movie for more than seven or eight minutes, but like most good character actors, he makes those minutes count. 

I also have to say that Kathleen Turner was the draw in the film. Douglas was the producer and first listed star on the film, but Turner is the character that we spend the most time with. She starts off as a mousy pawn in the story, but as her successes in confronting complications grow, so does her self confidence and natural beauty. By the end of the film, she has truly become the heroine of her own romance novels. It's pretty obvious that Michael Douglas also worked in the film as adventurer Colton. This movie set him up as a romantic lead for the next twenty years, in thrillers and dramas as well as comedies. 

The cast also included Danny DeVito, who was a buddy of Michael Douglas after appearing in the Academy Award winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" which Douglas produced. He later directed both of the stars in the excellent but sometimes forgotten "War of the Roses". So it was a fortuitous collaboration for all involved. Director Robert Zemeckis had had a hand in three films that had bombed for Steven Spielberg and his production company. He took this job to try and get a hit outside of the Spielberg umbrella, so his career did not dissipate. Robert Rodriguez told us as part of his introduction to the film that Zemeckis had said this was the hardest location shoot he had ever done, and that he instructed his agent that if ever he was given a script that started "Exterior:   A vast Jungle", the agent should just automatically pass. 

The Three Amigos !  

The second of our Double Features includes a much bigger role for Alfonso Arau. He is the antagonist in the story, a bandit named El Guapo, modelled after the character played by Eli Wallach in "The Magnificent Seven". Of course this is a comedy, so the character will have a number of features that would not likely appear in a real bandit of this ilk, including a love of sweaters. John Landis directed this film and it is a loose adaption of "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Seven Samurai". A village, terrorized by a gang of bandits, seeks outsiders as defenders. The conceit in this film is that the woman who contacts the supposed heroes, has misunderstood what a movie is (the film is set in 1916). The three actors who star in a series of Westerns set in Mexico during the silent film era, are playing landowners who are heroically on the side of peasants in many of their films. When the actors lose their jobs at the studio, they take up an ambiguous offer from the woman in the village, a heavily edited telegram leads them to think they are putting on a show, not that they are confronting real criminals.

Of course the film is pretty silly at times. There is a singing bush, a singing tortoise and singing horses in the film. There is also an invisible swordsman, and the actors skills as action stars in the movies, turn out to be useful. The cross cultural jokes are not offensive, and it's hard to be put off by anything the three leads do. Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short  are the three actors who get in over their heads. The sequence where they realize the reality of their situation is quite amusing, and they do a nice cowardly retreat that will provoke a smile or two. The consistent smile generator however is the Amigos salute, you can probably do it yourself if you have seen the movie. 

Alfonzo Arau gets to ham it up as the leader of the bandit gang, and he gets a lot of mileage out of his broad smile and subdued line readings. If you have seen this movie before, you will probably remember the dialogue that features a "plethora" of jokes about the meaning of the word. Actor Tony Plana plays "Jefe" the second in command to "El Guapo" and he and Arau have some nice timing in their scenes together. 

This is a lightweight movie, that has nothing on it's mind other than making us laugh at some absurdities, and it does that just fine. It is the only screenwriting credit that composer/songwriter Randy Newman has, that may be in large part because of the songs he contributed to the story, although he is also credited as contributing to the payoff joke of the birthday presents for El Guapo, so I won't say he was not writing outside of the songs. 

It was a minor hit at Christmas time in the year of it's release, but it has never been a critical favorite. It is probably fair to say, that like a lot of other 1980s movies, it achieved a reputation because of repeated cable showings and now has a cult following. It's nonsensical and sweet, with enough energy for it's running time. 

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series- The Goonies

I never thought of myself as the biggest fan of "The Goonies", in spite of the fact that it came out in the mid 80s, and was directed by Richard Donner from a script by Chris Columbus, and produced by Steven Spielberg. Those would all be things that would be going in its favor, and seem to make me the target audience for the film. The big exception being that I was probably 10 years too old to experience the movie the way it was meant to be consumed. This is a movie for kids and teens, and although my adult self often feels nostalgia for adventure stories like this I've always been a little detached from it. After today's screening, I'd say that's a little less true, I liked it a lot but it still seems slightly off base to me.

The biggest problem for me is that the kids who star in the film are made to be overly loud, and talking over each other constantly. This was a choice that was done I'm sure to create energy for young people, but it had the opposite effect on me. I have the same problem with Steven Spielberg's "Hook", too many Lost Boys yelling over one another. However when we do get to moments where Sean Astin's character is trying to figure out a clue, or young Josh Brolin is engaging in some physical activity designed to show his alpha male status to a bunch of kids, the film works pretty well.

Corey Feldman and the other two kids who form the core of the Goonies are the most fun characters, but they are also the ones that do the most shouting and that's really what puts me off a bit from the movie. Chunk, the pudgy kid who makes friends with the giant member of the bad guys family, is pretty sympathetic as the conduit between "Sloth" and the rest of the characters. The late John Matuszak manages to give a sympathetic reading to the misshapen Fratelli brother. The make up overwhelmed his face but the small movements combined with some animatronics made it work anyway. 

A lot of the cast went on to solid careers in film. Astin starred in the "Lord of the Rings" films as everyone's favorite Hobbit,  Josh Brolin has been nominated for an Academy Award and played the ultimate antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Martha Plimpton continues to work and had her own TV series. The great surprise in the group is Ke Huy Quan who plays the 007 inspired "Data". He was largely absent from the screen after his child roles in this and the "Indiana Jones" film, but made a big screen appearance and won an Academy Award for "Everything, Everywhere All at Once".  So whoever was the casting director for the film, seems to have done a good job in assembling child actors.

The treasure map, pirate ship and the booby traps are the things that make this movie worthwhile. Kids on a treasure hunt is a fun idea, the traps are all Rube Goldberg style setups that give the movie some visual excitement. The production design for the caves and the pirate ship in a hidden cove look great. The backsrory about the homes of the kids is a little clunky, and the performances of the adult parents was weak. Robert Davi, Joe Pantoliano and Anne Ramsey are a bit over the top, but the tone they set is right. It's a solid and fun film. Maybe not the classic some of it's fans think it is, but definitely worth a watch. Oh, and I got to wear my shirt. 

Borderlands (2024)

(by the way, no ELO in the film itself, just lying to us here in the trailer)

I couldn't help but feel flashbacks to the 1983 film  "Space Hunter Adventures in the Forbidden Zone", and the 2017 movie "Valerian and the City of a thousand Planets", as I was watching this film about a dystopian planet that contains a secret pursued by all of the characters. This film is apparently based on a video game, and it feels like one of those early 1990s / 2000s films that used video games as their launch point. It has some of the visual panache of the game but can't overcome the simplicity of the plot or the obviousness of the characters. So it has a good look, but that's about it. The characters who are supposed to be quirky and unique, just miss the mark like they did in "Space Hunter" and "Valerian".

The unfortunate thing that this film will most be remembered for, is that it proves that Cate Blanchett can in fact deliver a bad performance. She is the lead character in this story and Blanchett approaches it as if she's completely bored and it's just waiting for the director to call cut so that she can go home and read something interesting or look for a better job in the next movie. She's an admirable stand in when they're grafting her into a CGI action scene, but outside of that she is just boring, and that's not something I thought I would ever say about Cate Blanchett. The material is weak, but she does nothing to elevate it.

Jack Black does the Voice of the robot in the movie, named Claptrap. It's an unfortunately prophetic name given the way this character feels thrown together and written. He's supposed to be the comic relief, but too often he comes across as the irritating exposition dump for the movie. The producers of this film hired Kevin Hart to play a part that would have been better cast with Dwayne Johnson. Why you hire a comedian like Kevin Hart to play part where he has no comedic lines and his delivery should be serious, but remains dull instead, is a mystery to me. I'm not saying that Hart should only be relegated to comedic roles, but I am saying that he is outside of his depth here, and there is somebody else who probably could have played the part better.

This is a chase/action film set on a planet that looks like it was designed to house the film extras from a Mad Max movie. In "Thor Ragnarök" we got a similar kind of planet but there were interesting characters and there was some funny bits with the inhabitants of the trash dump that our heroes found themselves in, that is not the case with this film. The people who populate this planet are barely represented at all, they're not particularly interesting, and the set design is inexplicably dull in spite of the fact that it is meticulously recreating a trash dump very much like we saw in that Thor movie.

The film is full of energy that is misspent, acting that is indifferent, and creativity that is wasted on things that are unimportant. This movie just feels stiff from the very beginning. It's hard to put your finger on exactly what went wrong but it's easy to say that something clearly has gone wrong because I should be having fun and I'm not. I actually fell asleep for 5 minutes at a time in two different sections of the film one of which involved a chase and the other involved a shootout. If you can't keep me from dozing off during those kinds of sequences something is clearly wrong. Jamie Lee Curtis doesn't fix any of it. So it's easy to say about this movie,  "something is clearly wrong".  

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series- Oceans 11 (2001)

A good heist story is always entertaining as long as it is executed effectively. Stephen Soderberg's Oceans 11 is a big screen remake of a heist film from the 1960s, that had a hip reputation but was not a terrific heist movie. The remake corrects that. A heist movie depends on a clever plot, multiple complications in the execution of the heist, and usually a twist the audience didn't see coming. This version of Ocean's 11 has all of those in abundance, and it also has a great cast of characters to round out the story.

It may be true the George Clooney is not the star he once was, because his films have not drawn the box office numbers that they did Once Upon a Time. However he still has charisma, and this 23-year-old film demonstrates that in spades. Along with "Out of Sight" from two years earlier, Clooney was at the apex of charming criminal masterminds at the turn of the century. The plot here, involves a complicated intrusion into the vault that contains the cash flow of three major casinos in Las Vegas. The crew is attempting to steal the money from that vault, which is impenetrable and is protected by a vast security force. How will they do it, and will they get away with it?

The first two acts of the film set up the characters and the situation that they are faced with. We are given as much as possible to sympathize with them. The mark they are after appears to be a brutal, heartless, chiseler who has double crossed one of their team, and is stealing love of the team leader. Clooney, as Danny Ocean, is cool calm and collected as he assembles his crew with the assistance of his friend played by Brad Pitt. The two of them create enough cool in this movie to make it competitive with the Frank Sinatra movie that it's based on. When you layer on top of it, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, Elliott Gould, and as the villain, anxious cold-eyed Andy Garcia. You can put your beer in the refrigerator now because this film is cooler than anything you're going to see this year.

The twists in this movie are fun, and well plotted. Like all movies of this ilk, the plot depends a little bit on certain characters behaving in a way that is anticipated by the other characters, to a T. Other than that old trope, the movie works well in disguising what's really happening, both to the characters in the film and for us the audience. When we realize how they're going to get away with it we smile with indulgence because we have been fooled by the cleverness of the master criminal. It's just too much fun.

The screening was packed with a variety of people, many of whom had not seen the movie before, as you could tell by the way they were reacting to some of the twists. Don Cheadle's accent, Elliott Gould's cigar and robe, and Casey Affleck and Scott Caan bickering with each other, all add humorous moments to the film, that aren't necessarily cool but are clearly a lot of fun. The film combines some really basic physical comedy, with some sophisticated dialogue and plot devices which amuse us in a completely different way.

Matt Damon is sort of the standout in the film, because he's a young buck on the rise, but he's still naive enough to fall for some of the bits that the older duo of Pitt and Clooney engage in. He's capable of playing comedy given the right material, and boy is this the right material. I shouldn't neglect that one of the characters in the film, is played by Julia Roberts, and although she's not one of the 11, she is critical in the execution of the heist. When the follow-ups of "Ocean's 12" and "13" appear, she finally gets counted as a member of the team. I'd be perfectly happy if they counted to 20 in the next few years, so we can enjoy these clever heist movies in greater abundance.

Paramount Summer Classic Film Series-Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Let's get this straight off the bat "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" is a terrific film, hugely entertaining, written in a style that was fresh and well researched. There is nothing about this film that is problematic. Which makes it so much easier for me to spend this post focusing on just a single element of the film, instead of finding a new way to evaluate a movie that people already love. So this post will be dedicated to the consistent crime that is committed by one of the world's greatest character actors, he not only steals the scenes he often steals the movie, Strother Martin.

It should be tough for an actor like this to make a big impact on a movie that is over 2 hours long and in which he appears for only about 10 minutes. However, when William Goldman is the screenwriter and the actor is the late Strother Martin, it's easier than a pickpocket lifting a wallet from an inattentive subway rider. Martin plays Percy Garris, the mine operator who hires Butch and Sundance to be payroll guards while they are down in Bolivia. This sequence takes place more than 80% of the way into the film, but it has the consistent humor, and dramatic heft that the film has sustained up to this point, and the gets elevated by the Percy Garris character. .

Percy Garris is diminutive fellow with an ill-fitting vest. a military style hat and a habit of burying his hands in his pockets when he's not quite sure what to do with them. However, when he is sure what to do with them, Strother Martin uses them like instruments to pull us into the story. When trying to test Sundance to see if he really can shoot accurately, he first asks to see the firearm that Sundance wears on his hip. Garris handles it efficiently, but without the flourish of a gunfighter or someone who knows how to brandish a weapon effectively. He takes the gun admires it and hands it back to Sundance, but puts his hands up in the air and pushes down when Sundance tries to put the gun back in his holster. All Garris wants to see is whether or not he can hit a target. He then reaches into his own pocket, pulls out what looks to be a small package, maybe of chewing tobacco, and tosses it about 20 ft away. Nothing flashy is being done here, but Martin actually dominates the scene when he is playing against Robert Redford and Paul Newman. The character constantly spits, and frequently without the force necessary to hit a target himself. When he does however hit whatever target on the ground he is eyeing,  Garris announces "bingo". We never see exactly what it is he hit, we just know the satisfaction that he gets from saying the word.

When Redford misses, Martin gives us a bemused look, when Sundance wants to draw on the target down on the ground, but he also gives a look of amazement as Sundance moves quickly and hits the target twice. Garris announces immediately "you start tomorrow". Martin's timing on all the comedic lines in the scene is perfection

As they begin their Journey down the mountain, Garris on a mule and Butch and Sundance behind on their horses, Garris sings a song full of innuendo, and old-fashioned cadences. He leans back in his saddle, comfortable and confident because he knows no one is going to rob them going down the mountain. Which is why he thinks of Butch and Sundance is being morons when they are being overly watchful on the trip to the bank. As he puts it, "I've got morons on my team". This is his key line in the movie. He is an old hand in Bolivia and feels superior to the two rookies he is hired to prevent a robbery. Of course later on, we do discover that he is capable of making a mistake. That mistake comes immediately after he explains to the two, that he's not crazy, he's just colorful.

This is a 55-year-old film so it's probably too late to worry about spoilers, but Percy Garris does not make it to the end of the movie. He is the one character who dies, before the end of the film, that we care anything for. He's hired our anti-heroes, he's passed on some wisdom, and he's engaged in some jocular conversation with the two outlaws he has hired to guard against robbery. This makes it a poignant moment when he is killed so suddenly, without much of an exit line. The character is well written, but it is the delivery of those lines, and the unique voice of Strother Martin that makes these scenes work. Martin worked with Paul Newman a half dozen times or more, this was his only collaboration with Robert Redford. He almost certainly would have been in "The Sting", had he not been shooting another picture. That's because he also worked with director George Roy Hill multiple times. Having an acting ensemble is one of the things that made these movies from 50 years ago so much more memorable.

Oh yea, he is fourth billed, right after the three stars.

Lambcast #742 1984 Movie Draft

 

I don't usually post the Podcast on my personal site, but this was a lot of work and I want people to watch.