mark boomer redmond

The Paradine Case (1947)

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The Paradine Case is often considered a lesser Alfred Hitchcock picture. The director himself practically disowned the completed product, which was heavily interfered with by producer (and screenwriter) David O. Selznick, who had produced Hitch’s first Hollywood film, Rebecca, and had Hitchcock under contract for the next seven years, which ended with the difficult production of this picture. It was also a financial failure, recouping only half of its budget. It’s mostly left out of the conversation of the director’s successes, but The Paradine Case, despite lacking some of the more exciting features of Hitchcock’s work, proves that even when the man was half-assing it (and fighting the execs), he could still make a damn fine feature. 

The film opens in London with the arrest of beautiful widow Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli, who would later appear as Miss Tanner in Suspiria) on suspicion of poisoning her husband, a wealthy, blind, retired colonel. The family lawyer, Sir Simon (Charles Coburn), enlists defense attorney Tony Keane (Gregory Peck in his second and final Hitchcock collaboration following Spellbound) to represent her in the Crown’s case against her. Sir Simon’s clever daughter Judy (Joan Tetzel) also happens to be best friends with Tony’s wife Gay (Ann Todd), but Simon insists that his selection of Keane has everything to do with providing the best counsel for Mrs. Paradine, although he admits that Keane has a tendency to lean more on playing to jurors’ sympathies than practicing purely legalistic law. With regards to Keane’s weakness, Sir Simon warns him that he won’t be able to pull off his normal emotional appeals if they happen to argue the case before Judge Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton, who had previously appeared in the director’s Jamaica Inn and would later go on to direct Night of the Hunter). At a dinner at the Hortfields’, the judge reveals himself to be an utter cad, belittling his wife, the Lady Sophie (Ethel Barrymore), taunting Keane about his upcoming defense, and sexually harassing Gay when the others aren’t looking. 

Matters become complicated when Keane and Mrs. Paradine, despite the latter’s professed love for her late husband and the former’s heretofore happy marriage, find themselves drawn to one another romantically while working on her case. As rumors begin to spread, Gay’s concerns about her husband’s potential for infidelity bloom, and although Keane offers to give up the case, she can see that asking him to do so would only make the tension worse and so spurs him on to see the case through to its end and save Mrs. Paradine from conviction. Keane latches onto the idea of convincing the jury that Colonel Paradine took his own life and goes so far as to suggest that suspicion be diverted to the late colonel’s valet, a French-Canadian man named André Latour (Louis Jourdan), for assisting in said suicide, but Mrs. Paradine refuses to allow Keane to involve him. Convinced of his client’s innocence and desperate for something that might exonerate her, Keane goes to the Paradines’ country estate, where he learns that Latour is still in residence, and is somewhat shocked to find that the man’s room is on the same hallway as the separate suites of both the mistress and the late master of the house, rather than residing in the servants’ quarters. He attempts to make contact with Latour by posing as someone simply looking to rent the house, but Latour evades him, only to come to his inn later that night and tell him that Mrs. Paradine cannot be trusted. Keane refuses to believe this, and returns to London, where he goes to the prison to visit Mrs. Paradine before going home and checking in with his wife. 

The film is essentially bifurcated right down the middle between Keane’s playing detective and the trial of Mrs. Paradine, with the audience heading into the trial without a clear idea of whether or not the accused is guilty of killing her husband. Old Hitchcock stalwart Leo G. Carroll appears for his fourth of sixth collaborations with the director as prosecuting counsel Sir Joseph, and although he only appears in the back half, he leaves quite an impression, and the repartee between the somewhat showboaty Keane, his more staid counterpart on the other side of the courtroom, and Lord Horfield, who does end up presiding over the Paradine trial, is quite a lot of fun to watch. As secrets are revealed over the course of several days of trial, the whole thing unravels, and by the end, Keane is a broken man, uncertain about his future. 

I’m not sure why this didn’t connect with contemporary audiences. In his movie guide, Leonard Maltin wrote of the film that it was “talk, talk, talk in complicated, stagy courtroom drama,” and a more contemporary review from The Nation’s James Agee in 1948 called Paradine Case “the wordiest script since the death of [18th Century ‘father of conservatism’] Edmund Burke.” Courtroom dramas were nothing new at this point, so I’m not entirely certain what could be expected otherwise, and the cheeky dialogue between the three verbal combatants in the courtroom is often much more wickedly funny than either of the aforementioned critics gave it credit for. Like Sam Waterston, Gregory Peck is one of those actors who was born to play a lawyer, and this film was made at the height of his marketability as a star; he got his third Best Actor nomination for Gentleman’s Agreement the same year that The Paradine Case was released, although he wouldn’t win until his fifth nom, for To Kill a Mockingbird. He gets to play a wide range here, from the confident barrister who thinks he can win any case, to a man who’s guilty about the emotional affair he’s fallen into, to an infuriated defender of a woman’s besmirched honor, and finally a determined man driven to excessive rhetoric while trying to save a woman from being hanged. He’s doing excellent work, and it’s a shame that this performance has fallen through the cracks as the film’s overall reputation has remained middling. 

Outside of Peck, the film largely revolves around the performances of Todd, Valli, and Tetzel, who are likewise excellent. Todd manages to invest Gay, who is clearly the less exciting character of the two women between whom Keane finds himself torn, with a lot of pathos. Her standout scene is one in which she acknowledges to her husband that she isn’t happy with the way things are going, but that she would rather Mrs. Paradine get the best possible defense, which she knows Keane is best suited to provide, than let her be sentenced to death and ascend to the point of becoming Keane’s lost Lenore. As she says, it will be easier to fight a free woman for her husband than the woman’s unimpeachable ghost. Valli does great work playing both sides of Mrs. Paradine; she freely admits that her life before she met the colonel was one in which she supported herself by latching onto wealthy men, but that when she met Paradine, she decided she could “be his eyes.” She convinces Keane that her love for the late colonel was genuine, but Valli gives Mrs. Paradine just enough ambiguity to make us wonder if she’s more cold and calculating than she appears, especially after Latour delivers his warning to Keane. Overall, however, I was most taken with Joan Tetzel, whose Judy is, despite being very much a supporting character, connected to all of the events and serves the important purpose of explaining the implications of the various court proceedings to Gay, and thus to us. The relationship between Judy and her father, Sir Simon, was quite an endearing one, with several scenes in which it’s apparent that the old man is consternated by his daughter because she’s already as clever and observant as he is and will only become more so with time. She reaches the same conclusions that he does even as he professes something else entirely, and it’s fun to watch him become flustered that his daughter is just like him. Even as he pontificates that her behavior is unladylike, you can tell that he’s having the time of his life having raised a daughter that he can spar with. Ultimately, the duo serves as the stable, warm heart that helps anchor the film while Keane’s wandering affection affects everything else. 

As previously mentioned, this film is lacking some of Hitchcock’s trademark touches. The Paradine Case does not include any major spectacles or showdowns on or around exciting landmarks, unless one counts the trial itself and its location in an exact duplicate of a real courtroom in London’s Old Bailey. The set took nearly three months to complete and cost $80K (approximately a whopping $1.2M adjusted for inflation), and, since so many of the scenes filmed there would be shot at low angles, it included a ceiling. This no doubt was a technical and logistical nightmare, but even in these circumstances, Hitch was trying something new by running up to four cameras in different locations with each take, which (according to a now-dead link on the film’s Wikipedia page) served as trial runs for Rope and Under Capricorn. It’s not always effective. In many scenes in which Keane is speaking to the court, Sir Simon and another man are sitting in front of him, and it appears that they were superimposed into the shot, which is rather distracting. There are some other attempts at tricky camera work that don’t succeed, with the worst composition being the moment when Latour first enters the courtroom and the camera keeps Mrs. Paradine’s in center frame while it rotates to follow Latour’s entire walk around the cell in which she’s seated. As with Sir Simon, this is portrayed through superimposition of one image on the other, capturing a similar effect to a split diopter shot, but messier and uglier. 

That isn’t to say that there isn’t beautiful filmic storytelling or composition throughout. Although they’re as brief as they are pointless, we get several gorgeous shots of the English countryside when Keane visits the Paradine country home. Once he arrives, Latour’s face is kept in shadow for his entire introduction, and after that he is still seen only at a distance or otherwise unclearly for the entire time that Keane is present, fully revealing himself only when he confronts Keane at the latter’s inn. In that scene, the light fixture in the room, which features several dangling crystals like metaphorical swords waiting to fall, is always framed over Keane’s head. Several scenes find characters facing each other from one or the other side of a set of bars, whether they be the literal ones at the prison in which Mrs. Paradine is incarcerated or various room dividers or lattices. It’s not the most exciting camera work, but it rises far above being merely functional. 

One of the advantages that we have over the contemporary audience is that we have the director’s entire oeuvre to dissect and analyze while they did not. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the pushback at the time, in addition to a lack of confidence in the film from the general public as a result of behind-the-scenes squabbling, was that this is another one of Hitchcock’s forays into the psychosexual, pushing the envelope to see what he can get away with. Keane’s fascination with Mrs. Paradine seems to be at least somewhat stoked by her inaccessibility to him; they never have a moment of true privacy, as every meeting they hold to discuss her defense is in full view of a watchful guard. There’s some intersection of withholding and voyeurism there that deserves to be unpacked by someone who’s better versed in either of those prurient interests than I. When Keane goes to the country estate, he makes his way into Mrs. Paradine’s room, with the housekeeper apologizing for the mess, noting that she was in the process of packing the lady of the house’s things. Inside, Keane finds an intricately carved headboard with an inlaid portrait of the woman herself, and the soundtrack throws in a scare chord when the tracking shot that represents his perspective lands on an open case of her undergarments. Keane grows so uncomfortable that he has to move to a position where the portrait can’t see him. Following dinner at the Hortfields’, when the men in attendance emerge from the dining room after the requisite men’s only, cigar-smoking time, Lord Hortfield is so utterly overwhelmed by the sight of Gay’s bare shoulder that he immediately moves in to sit too close to her on the sofa and move her hand to his thigh under the pretense of admiring a piece of her jewelry. It almost feels like a set-up to have him be more antagonistic to Keane in the trial segment that is to come later, but it’s quickly glossed over instead and makes no reappearance as a plot driver in the second half. Maybe that plot thread was continued in the copious lost footage (the rough cut was three hours long, while the only extant version is 114 minutes), but there’s no way we can ever know. What we do know is that this film has a fair amount of grappling with one’s (and others’) raging sexuality that did make it to the final cut, and it might have been alienating to an audience that didn’t have decades of the director’s work to slot this into as a recurring creative fascination. All in all, however, I think a modern audience will find much more to enjoy here than the film’s reputation might imply. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lifeboat (1944)

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Author John Steinbeck composed four narrative screenplays in his career. One was a fictionalization of real events, two were adaptations of his own previous work (The Pearl and The Red Pony), but the first was drafted upon request from director Alfred Hitchcock himself. The resultant script became Lifeboat, which joins Foreign Correspondent and Saboteur as Hitch’s only wartime espionage thrillers (Sabotage, The 39 Steps, and The Lady Vanishes all involve international spycraft in the prelude to war, but do not explicitly name the Axis or any of its member nations as the antagonists, while Notorious follows a post-war sting on an escaped Nazi scientist). While Foreign Correspondent functioned as a call to arms and Saboteur is about refusing to give in to fascism on the home front, Lifeboat is a survival story about a group of castaways from a freighter that is sunk by a German U-boat and is more interested in the way that seemingly decent people can become bloodthirsty when faced with war, hunger, disease, and death. Steinbeck’s more commonly remembered body of work is mostly about people in the interbellum period dealing with the fallout of the Great Depression. When most people think of him, they remember reading The Grapes of Wrath or Of Mice and Men (or both) in high school, while fewer people are likely to recall Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, or The Moon is Down. (The last of these is, like Lifeboat, an anti-fascist text, about a rebellion against Nazi occupation; if you read it for your book club, it would pair well with a screening of Went the Day Well?) How does Lifeboat compare? 

Lifeboat opens by skipping to the concluding moments of one of Hitchcock’s trademark action setpiece spectacles, as the burning smokestack of a freighter sinks beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The camera pans across detritus in the water—a deck of cards, a crate of bobbing apples from the American Red Cross, a chess board, a New Yorker with a Eustace Tilley cover—before we land on our lead, a reporter named Constance Porter (Tallulah Bankhead). She’s sitting pretty in a lifeboat with a smashed-up sail, untarnished in her mink coat, seemingly only bothered by a run in her stocking. When she sees another survivor, she immediately takes his picture, concerned only with capturing the moment for her inevitable front-page story. He makes it to the lifeboat and introduces himself as John Kovac (John Hodiak, Maisie’s sweetheart in Maisie Goes to Reno, which released the same year), one of the crewmen on the now-destroyed ship. One by one, they collect several other survivors: Gus Smith (William Bendix), whose leg was badly injured when the engine room exploded; Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), the ship’s British radioman, C.J. Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), a wealthy American industrialist; an Army nurse named Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson); and Joe Spencer (Canada Lee, playing the largest role that any Black actor ever got in a Hitchcock picture), a steward. They discuss amongst themselves the war crime that was committed against them, as the German U-boat that sank their vessel also intentionally targeted and shelled many of the other lifeboats, just before they pull in one more survivor (Walter Slezak), who thanks them with a simple, straightforward “Danke schön.” 

This is the first of Hitchcock’s “limited setting” triptych, to be later followed by Rope and Rear Window, and is just as much of a technical achievement as either of his later career efforts. It’s certainly both paradoxically the most confined and the most open, as everything happens on the title craft itself, but also takes place in the biggest, emptiest space imaginable: the open ocean. The desperation of their situation hits early. When it’s just Constance and Kovac at the very start, a baby bottle floats by in the water and Constance immediately moves to take a picture of it, to capture the pathos of the moment, and Kovac calls her out on her macabre callousness, asking if she wouldn’t rather wait for the baby to float by so she photograph that instead. It’s only a matter of time before they rescue a woman and the infant she’s clutching to her, which didn’t survive. It’s grim, dark stuff, and isn’t shy about the hideous nature of war. The vessel itself is a microcosm, containing a couple of working class shipmen, a war nurse, an industrialist, and a steward, one who’s surprised to get a vote in what to do about the German soldier who’s technically their prisoner of war, despite the fact that they’re all trapped together and struggling to survive while waiting for rescue. 

At the time, the film was criticized for being insufficiently critical of the Nazi regime, embodied in Willi, the man they rescue who eventually manages to commandeer the lifeboat, especially with regards to the fact that he retains his physical strength longer than the other characters (which is because he’s been hoarding his own provisions). Other pieces I’ve read take the film’s final moments, in which the survivors unanimously agree that all Germans have to be wiped out, as a strong finale that overcomes the film’s apparent “soft” treatment of Willi. I was a bit surprised by this, since I found the film to be utterly condemnatory of both Willi (as a person and a representation of Nazis as a whole) and also of the radicalization that the characters feel in the end, becoming as filled with hate as their enemy. When I first started to compose this review, one of the notes I made was that the film tackles the alien and inhuman nature of the Nazi mind, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was more important to acknowledge that the evils of fascism aren’t alien, they’re very, very human. The enemy in this film, of which Willi becomes the face, is monstrously evil, but not dependably so; they target civilian vessels and even shell the lifeboats as they depart in violation of international law, they lie to protect themselves while stealing shared resources to maintain their strength while others suffer, and they kill those they perceive as weaker than themselves as a matter of course. 

Yet, while Willi is responsible for all of those things, in whole or in part, he also makes an attempt to save Gus’s life by performing the operation to amputate the man’s leg before his gangrene can spread. He also possesses his own warped sense of honor, demanding that Gus remember that his name is not the Anglicized Smith that he changed it to because of anti-German sentiment but Schmidt, a name to take pride in … moments before he pushes the amputee overboard while the others sleep. His occasional demonstrations of apparent compromise and conciliation are all part of the greater act that he’s putting on, and he has a sociopathic sense of righteousness in his nationalistic pride. Even though he ends up dead before the credits roll, any catharsis we might get from it is undermined by the fact that the characters we’ve spent all this time getting to know are capable of being reduced to the same animalistic cruelty as their enemies. My interpretation of this text is that it’s a warning not to become the thing one hates, and not the uplifting ending that others have found it to be. We must not be cruel, must not let the barbaric things our enemies enact upon us cause us to become them. It might be easier to denounce the mind of the fascist as alien to distance ourselves from it, but we may all be a few missed meals and a lack of fresh water away from violence, we just don’t think that we are because we’ve never been stranded on the ocean. 

Lifeboat is very strong. As the master of suspense’s final WWII era feature, it fits in nicely with Foreign Correspondent, a piece that demands the world not look away while fascism swallows Europe, and Saboteur, which serves to remind that fascism at home supports evil elsewhere that will come home to roost eventually. Lifeboat is the story where we get to spend the most time with the face of evil, to look deep into it and see that it looks like us. Truly excellent stuff. Bankhead is an absolute marvel here in her first return to film acting in over a decade, and her casting is pitch perfect. This one isn’t readily streaming anywhere outside of Amazon, but wait around a while and it’ll pop up on Tubi, TCM, or Criterion sooner or later; it always floats up somewhere. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Spermworld (2024)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Lance Oppenheim’s compulsive sperm donorship documentary Spermworld (2024).

00:00 Welcome
01:31 Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
10:29 Double Indemnity (1944)
18:10 Black God, White Devil (1964)
27:15 Lifeboat (1944)
37:00 Spellbound (1945)
47:00 The Paradine Case (1947)
1:02:13 Rope (1948)
1:08:39 It Ends (2026)
1:13:10 Coyote vs Acme (2026)
1:21:33 Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
1:24:32 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

1:41:17 Spermworld (2024)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Spellbound (1945)

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Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with psychoanalysis and the complex workings of the human mind inarguably peaked with Psycho, but fifteen years earlier, he made an initial foray into the inner lives of psychotherapists and the patients that they analyze with 1945’s Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Spellbound finds Dr. Constance Petersen (Bergman, in the first of three collaborations with the director) in residence at the Green Manors psychiatric facility, where she is the only woman on the staff, and as such often finds herself having to fend off the unwanted advances of her insufferable colleagues. The hospital is in the process of being handed over from long term head of staff Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carrol, in his third of four collaborations with Hitchcock) to the incoming Dr. Anthony Edwardes, following an event in which Murchison was found to be negligible, possibly as the result of the early stages of senility. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives, and a romance blossoms between him and Constance almost immediately, although their early interactions are fraught with tension when he seems to change into a different kind of man altogether whenever he sees images of parallel lines against a white background: the tracing of fork tines in linen, the pinstripes in Constance’s white dressing gown, train tracks, etc. In short order, it becomes clear that “Edwardes” is an impostor, and he reveals to Constance that he is an amnesiac with the initials J.B., and he flees to New York from Green Manors just before the arrival of the police, who confirm that the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and his unknown travelling companion is suspected of killing him. 

Spellbound decidedly falls into the realm of Hitchcock’s domestic crime thrillers, as opposed to his espionage-oriented ones, but it’s also an example of one of his lesser-considered genre films: melodrama. One needs to look no further than the film’s opening to see this, as this is, to my knowledge, the director’s only film in which there is an overture. It’s certainly a much more successful one than a certain later Hitchcock/Bergman collaboration, however, as the film never quite loses its thriller edge. Although the picture occasionally flirts with going for a full-on soap opera plot, there are enough touches of malice and menace to carry it to the finish line, and the thrills of the second half more than make up for some of the occasionally plodding romance scenes in the first. Although the contemporary audience may not have been primed to view Peck as an actor who was consistently known for portraying characters of high moral fiber (To Kill A Mockingbird was still seventeen years away) to the same extent that a modern audience would be, they certainly would have been able to see the vulnerability, confusion, and occasional hints of danger in his handsome face. We trust that Constance knows the inner workings of the human mind but are less convinced that she’s a strong judge of character, especially as she falls in love for the first time in her life, blinding her to the pieces of evidence that J.B. may, in fact, be exactly the dangerous criminal that the police think him to be. He’s certainly capable of turning malicious in an instant, and when he begins to stalk about the home of Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov), in which they’ve found shelter, with a straight razor, we’re not certain that either Constance or Brulov is safe. As such, the film’s narrative structure is superficially similar to that of Suspicion, although Spellbound is a much stronger film. 

Often, when a Hitchcock film becomes hard to find or is somehow neglected, it’s because it contains some problematic element that has caused it to fall out of favor. Secret Agent, which sees Peter Lorre doing a racist caricature in brownface, seems to only exist on bargain bin DVDs with transfers that look like they were remastered by being thrown down the stairs. Even on the Criterion app, no one attempted to quality check the subtitles for Young and Innocent, and one can only conclude that it’s because whoever was working on captioning the thing saw the grotesque Blackface at the end and threw their hands in the air. Spellbound has fallen out of print and isn’t streaming online anywhere, and I wondered over the course of the film if this had anything to do with what could be perceived as pervasive sexism throughout the narrative, although I would argue that the prejudice is on the part of the characters, not the text, since all of the people who underestimate Constance are proven wrong. Her male colleagues at Green Manors all consider her frosty, cold, and unwomanly. When she makes her way to the Empire State Hotel, she is first harassed by a drunken man who propositions her before he’s turned away by the hotel’s staff detective, who incorrectly diagnoses Constance as either a schoolteacher or a librarian and credits himself as being “a bit of a psychologist.” Constance, who actually is, is able to prey on his hubris and play the part of the repentant wife looking for her husband, thus tricking him into revealing what room J.B. is staying in. Among her peers at Green Manors, she’s also the only one to spot the thread that reveals that someone there knew the real Edwardes and thus knew J.B. was an impostor all along, eventually resulting in the downfall of the true culprit and the liberation of J.B. from prison. It’s another example of Hitchcock’s messy relationship with women and feminism. He may have been a terror to women who worked on his sets, but he also never passed up an opportunity to show a woman’s mind was more than capable of matching wits with a man. I’m not sure why this one isn’t more easily accessible or well-remembered; I only managed to catch it the first time on TCM years ago, and was only able to rewatch it on the VHS tape that I used to record it, lo these many years ago now. 

Visually, this is also one of Hitchcock’s finest. The slow establishment of J.B.’s fugue states when he sees parallel lines leads to an utterly fantastic two-minute dream sequence that includes images that were created by Salvador Dalí, and they are utterly beautiful and surreal. When Dr. Brulov tricks J.B. into drinking drugged milk, we see the image from his point of view as he raises the glass and drinks from it, the creation of a pure white horizon foreshadowing the revelation that the traumatic incident that caused his amnesia took place on a ski slope. The entire film is in black and white, save for two frames of red when the camera takes on the point of view of the end of the barrel of a gun as it fires. It’s great stuff, and given that Hitch was feuding with Harry O. Selznick at the time and wasn’t as invested in this as he was in films he was more passionate about, it’s a great insight to just how good the man could be even when he was only half-assing it, at least at this point in his career (his half-assery in his later works does not compare). I’m not sure where you might be able to find this, dear reader, other than perhaps through your library or browsing the thrift stores, but when you do, you’re going to enjoy it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rope (1948)

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I was a little concerned that returning to Rope after not having seen it since I was a teenager would be a disappointing experience. The Jimmy Stewart version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was a dull, plodding slog, especially in comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier version starring Peter Lorre, and a recent viewing of Hitchcock’s other experiment in crafting an entire film out of long takes, Under Capricorn, was a similarly dour, unengaging experience. I was pleasantly delighted to find that not only does Rope hold up, it was even better than I remembered in many ways. 

The film opens with a murder. Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and his meeker “roommate” Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) strangle their old prep school chum David Kentley as the ultimate expression of their Nietzschean philosophy that there are Übermensch and underlings, and that they are solidly members of the former. After they hide the body in a chest, Phillip seems to immediately regret their actions, but Brandon can hardly contain himself, and sets about reorganizing their prepared table, already set for that evening’s dinner party, to the top of the chest. One by one, their guests arrive: Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), the fourth member of their school days quintet; Janet Walker (Joan Chandler), Kenneth’s former girlfriend and current fiancée of the now-deceased David; David’s father Mr. Kentley (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), who has come to look over a set of books that Brandon and Phillip have set out for him and is accompanied by his sister-in-law Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier), attending in place of her ill sister, David’s mother. The final guest, whom neither of the two boys is certain will actually appear until he does, is Rupert Cadell (Stewart), an eccentric philosopher and the former housemaster of the prep school that Brandon, Phillip, Kenneth, and David attended. 

Stewart is the nominal star here, and although he claimed in later years that this was his weakest performance in his Hitchcock collaborations (although I would disagree; see above about The Man Who Knew Too Much), it may be because he failed to fully understand Rupert, a character whose hypocrisy and high-handedness makes him more detestable than the actual murderers with whom he shares dinner. Brandon and Phillip’s belief that their membership in an intellectual elite class gives them the right to dole out death to their “inferiors” is entirely born out of being groomed to believe this by Rupert when he was an adult and they were children under his care. Despite the fact that everything the two younger men do is merely the ultimate enactment of Rupert’s own professed beliefs, which we see him expound upon at length during the dinner party, when he realizes what they have done, he accuses them of “twisting” his words. I can see how this would be a difficult thing for an actor to parse, because it’s not terribly believable, and it’s also the film’s primary weakness. In the present, we would call Rupert an “edgelord” who realizes too late that his rhetorical exercises have resulted in the death of a human being, but there was no real roadmap for that kind of character in 1948, and Stewart seems much more comfortable playing the amateur detective element of the Rupert character while struggling to play that opposite side.  

This also makes Rope one of Hitchcock’s more class conscious thrillers, if not the most class-aware. His thriller films generally fall into one of two categories: his domestic thrillers (like The Lodger, Rebecca, Suspicion, I Confess!, and, if one is being generous, Under Capricorn) and his espionage pictures (which are too numerous to name, but include Saboteur, The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, and The Lady Vanishes), with some, like Sabotage and Notorious, straddling the line. All of them have some political statements to make, especially with regards to Hitch’s lifelong antipathy towards the police, his morally correct hatred of fascism, and the occasional jingoism of his wartime features, but he rarely bothers to tackle the inherent violence of a society that is divided into different economic classes. Although there are clear exceptions, like the middle-class focused Shadow of a Doubt, his domestic thrillers usually default to focusing on characters of wealth and status. I don’t think it was necessarily a conscious decision; rich people simply have large houses and estates that come with inherent, built-in gravitas and atmosphere. In Rope, however, the core of the film is about some rich boys thinking that they have the right to choose who lives and who dies, and although there’s much discussion of this being a reserved right of individuals whose intelligence raises them above the cattle of most of mankind, it’s very clear that this is purely a matter of wealth and social station. 

When Janet gets Brandon alone so that she can dress him down for inviting both her ex and her fiance, he teases her (incorrectly) that she had left Kenneth for David because the latter’s family was richer, but this is really only a matter of degrees of wealth. Neither Brandon nor Phillip is employed, but they occupy a multi-bedroom apartment, employ a domestic servant, Mrs. Wilson (Edith Evanson), and they’re all very young adults, given that David is (or rather was) an undergrad at Harvard and that all of the boys went to school together. Thus, we’re talking about a group of rich men, Rupert included, who were born into wealth and perceive themselves as elite because of their supposed brilliance, when in fact this is simply a case of the idle rich justifying their fantasies about having the freedom to murder the poor. It’s incisive stuff, and it’s all played subtextually, making the film all the richer. At the end of the day, Brandon is no more than a bully who kills a lifelong friend less for the thrill of the act itself and more so that he can delight in the positive attention he presumes he will receive for how “clever” he was, despite the fact that he’s not really that smart at all; even with all of his preening and innuendo, the duo would still likely have gotten away with it if he hadn’t forgotten about David’s hat. Phillip is a pushover who can’t hold his liquor and allows himself too many outbursts that arouse Rupert’s suspicions in the first place. As for Rupert himself, he’s quite insistent that he believes in his moral certainty that the brilliant elite should be allowed to commit murder (of the working class, of course — hotel clerks, waiters, and others who are all identified solely by their servile role in society), even when it upsets others, only to be shocked and appalled when the victim is someone he knows personally; he’s almost utterly lacking in empathy, and is no less monstrous than his former pupils. 

All of this discussion probably makes the film sound heady and dour, but it’s quite the opposite; it’s electric, and often very funny. The innuendoes I mentioned Brandon delivering above are often smirk-worthy, but the screen really comes to life the moment that Janet appears. Rope may be one of the shorter films in Hitchcock’s sound career, but that doesn’t mean that the beginning doesn’t sag a little under the weight of the exposition of both Phillip and Brandon’s motivations and their relationships with the dinner guests; as soon as Janet steps through the door and into the apartment, she’s delivering her own witty remarks, even as she pretends that she’s only funny when she’s not trying to be. She’s a breath of fresh air, and it’s a disappointment that the actress had such a brief career. Equally delightful is Mrs. Atwater, who would be an utterly exhausting visitor but is quite fun to watch. Watching her try to remember the names of movies and plays that she’s seen or reciting the astrological signs of the era’s biggest marquee names is very entertaining. It’s less engaging to Rupert than it is to me, but one of the better subtle jokes is the way that he steers this conversation into a topic of his own interest, which happens to be inventing The Purge out of whole cloth, as if her frivolity about Ingrid Bergman’s horoscope is more vacuous that his pomposity about killing for better theater tickets. It’s also fun to see the way that Hitchcock gets around the censors’ insistence on making the two killers seem less gay. One nice bit is that when Mrs. Wilson directs a guest to the telephone, she says it’s in “the first bedroom,” while Brandon directs a different guest to the same location later by saying it’s “in the bedroom” (emphasis added), indicating that there’s really only one room that they sleep in but that Mrs. Wilson remains blissfully unaware. It’s quite good stuff, and the picture moves with such speed that you almost miss it. 

Rope was not terribly well received in its time, only coming to be considered one of Hitchcock’s better pictures by later audiences. It’s worth checking out, or even revisiting if, like me, you’ve already seen it. At eighty minutes, it’s a breeze to get through, even if your eyes will glaze over a little at the beginning and ending faux-philosophy of the main three players. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the latest feature from director Jane Schoenbrun, following A Self-Induced Hallucination, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and I Saw the TV Glow. In the film, Hannah Einbinder plays Kris Williams, an indie darling director whose most recent project—the last third of which “remade Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”—brought her to the attention of the studio in possession of the rights to the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise. Following the breakout commercial success of the first Camp Miasma flick, the film’s killer Little Death and their inexplicable air vent-shaped helmet became horror iconography on par with Freddy Krueger and his glove or Jason Voorhees and his machete. The drive to produce endless sequels led to creative rot (like the late sequel Little Death Takes Manhattan), gimmicks (like Camp Miasma 3-D), and diminishing monetary returns. Kris now finds herself at the helm of Camp Miasma reboot, which the studio wants to ensure is “elevated” in order to align with current horror film trends. The purpose is two-fold: the studio hopes to reinvigorate interest in a once-lucrative intellectual property while also redirecting attention away from the original film’s transphobia by hiring Kris, a queer woman. Supposedly seeking inspiration, Kris tracks down reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), Camp Miasma’s final girl, who invites Kris to meet with her at her home, which turns out to be the same abandoned campground where the first Miasma picture was filmed. Of course, Kris’s motivation to meet Billy has additional undercurrents that she herself isn’t fully cognizant of, stemming from an epiphanic experience she had while watching Camp Miasma as a child. 

The text within the film, the Camp Miasma franchise, is wonderfully detailed stuff: the mounting number of sequels on VHS that bear the distinct typeface of the Friday the 13th film series, from which Camp Miasma takes most of its aesthetic cues; the watering down of the genuinely menacing Little Death until they start to appear in 90s anti-drug campaigns; the moral outrage from concerned citizens’ groups, leading to picketing of the movie, resulting in even more attention from the public. It’s window dressing, but it’s so thoroughly realized that one can’t help but gawk in amazement at the level of attention to detail. It’s referential through reinterpretation and reinvention, rather than just recreation. Besides the Friday the 13th films, the most obvious inspiration is Sleepaway Camp. Instead of simply recreating that film’s twist ending, the original Camp Miasma’s Little Death (Jack Haven) was an avenging spirit of a genderfluid child who was killed by several other campers. This allows Schoenbrun to grapple with the transphobia of that film by using it as a vehicle to criticize the ignorance that led to its creation, while also playfully poking fun at the large amount of cinematic non-criticism that, instead of grappling with a text’s successes and failures, relies solely on pointing out older media’s flaws without anything more substantial to say. 

The meta-textual nature of the narrative draws comparison (even within the text itself!) to “Frightmaster Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” but an equally applicable comparison would be to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie that loves horror of a bygone era the same way that Galaxy Quest loves Star Trek. Of course, what was lacking from those films was a character using their media obsession to examine their sexuality or the nature of desire. Camp Miasma reflects, I imagine, what it feels like to experience sexual arousal only when it’s part of a fantasy mediated by a screen, rather than being aroused by touch, sensation, or intimacy. Kris admits to Billy that she’s allowed herself to be coaxed into opening up her relationship with her partner because she’s unable to meet their sexual needs because, like Owen in TV Glow, she’s more interested in TV/movies than she is in real life, and more comfortable with experiencing sexuality through the distance that a lens creates. Where this differs from Schoenbrun’s previous film is that the ending of TV Glow is considered a bleak, downer ending by most audiences, while Miasma feels like a much more celebratory endeavor, like Schoenbrun got out all of their negative feelings in Glow so that they could tackle the inherent eroticism of the slasher genre in a more fun, positive way. Owen’s narrative is one about what happens when one consigns themself to a box, while Kris’s is one that teaches her that it’s totally okay to be obsessed with a one hit wonder scream queen and only get off through fantasy — even a violent one, because that’s the point of fantasy, it’s not real. As the advertisements for the home video release of the original Camp Miasma note, “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” 

The major detriments largely come in the form of visuals. This is a film that is largely unconcerned with making sense of time. The on-screen date given in Roman numerals for the release of the original Camp Miasma is 1980, which would make Billy a solid decade older than she is said to be, and the area around the campground moves from winter to summer over the course of a single night. One can accept that as artistic license, and one must accept it when considering that, when we get to see Little Death’s rampage from the end of Camp Miasma, it’s set to “Long December” by Counting Crows, which was not released until 1996. One could even chalk that up to the idea that we’re not seeing that scene as it was in the film, but as Kris remembers it. What I can’t accept about that scene is how badly done the special effects imagery is. There’s a fun little homage to one of Jason Voorhees’s most famous kills, the sleeping bag scene from The New Blood, wherein Little Death picks up a camper and slams them against a tree, but the kill is farcical rather than sincere, because the victim flies apart and falls to pieces like a mannequin. This same “error” occurs throughout the Little Death massacre, and it’s distracting. I’m not sure if this is supposed to represent Kris’s point of view, as it’s made abundantly clear that she finds slasher film death arousing in a way that she doesn’t understand, but if it’s supposed to be funny, it falls apart. There are several special effects “failures” throughout that have intentionality and are open to interpretation (like the Thomas Kincaid-esque winter scenes, which also look awful but have narrative purpose), but this rampage feels as if it were generated using AI. I’ve searched high and low for confirmation of this and can only find minimal discussion of it from others who get the same feeling, but please bear in mind, dear reader, that if it eventually is revealed that this is the case, disregard the star rating above and consider this film radioactive, with a big thumbs down. With nothing proven at this time, it’s still a negative, as it looks like hot garbage, but it’s not enough to ruin what is otherwise a delightfully fun movie. 

Einbinder and Anderson have absolutely excellent chemistry. Anderson puts on a delightful Southern drawl for the character, and every one of her line reads is magical. During their first meeting, Billy intentionally gives Kris a tiny fright, and the following morning, she encourages Kris to enter a room where a Little Death costume is on display, cackling like a cartoon witch when her prank succeeds. What fun! I don’t eat fast food, but Schoenbrun’s choice to shoot Billy and Kris digging into KFC in pornographic, erotic close-up meant that I ended up getting some myself less than 48 hours later. I also had my biggest laugh of the year when Kris is word vomiting about the problematic elements of art from previous generations; when she mentions a Mickey Mouse racial caricature, Billy responds “Mickey did that?” and I laughed until I choked. When watching Camp Miasma together, Kris excitedly says “This part’s transphobic!”, prompting Billy to merely shush her, even though this is the scene that gave the film its macabre, thoughtless, hilarious tagline, “They killed him. They had to.” Sleepaway Camp has been derided in the intervening decades for its blatant transphobia, but like Rocky Horror Picture Show (as we have been reminded by the think pieces that have sprung up in the wake of the death of Tim Curry), it was also transgressive, and those who may be part of the demographic that has the right to be offended by dissonant values of older media are also capable of finding something meaningful within it. Rejection of art that was, intentionally or unintentionally, textually or subtextually, and positively or negatively queer in eras past prevents us from examining them within the context of their time, and how people lived in that time. It’s not a defense of antiquated portrayals, but it is an invitation to do something more than have a knee-jerk reaction to the past. Schoenbrun certainly has, and I was pleased to join them on their journey. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Player (1992)

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Every time I search for a particular review from At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on YouTube, for the next month, the algorithm suggests other episodes from the duo for me. And I love it! After checking in to see what the two late film critics had to say about Miami Blues (normally, when the two are not aligned, I side with Roger, but Siskel liked the film and Ebert didn’t, surprisingly), their “Best of 1992” episode popped up in my recommendations. As one would expect, both men loved Robert Altman’s The Player, a neo-noir inverted mystery set amongst the wheelings and dealings of high profile Hollywood studio bigwigs. Although the film is very much a product of the early 1990s, with stars who were household names at the time (playing characters or cameoing as themselves) and may or may not be recognizable to a modern audience, the story itself is still very accessible even if the culture is somewhat alien to us now, nearly thirty-five years later. 

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is an executive who is respected at his studio for being the “writer’s guy,” liaising between upper management and the screenwriters who come into his office to pitch their ideas, preferably in twenty-five words or less. His long day of hearing concepts as scintillating as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” “Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate,” and a sequel about Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross’s daughter called The Graduate II (pitched by Buck Henry himself in a cameo) is interrupted by the latest in a series of threatening postcards from a writer who believes Griffin has blown him off. Sensing potential impending career troubles as the result of an up-and-coming exec, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), abandoning ship at Fox, coupled with the unplanned visit of tacky junior executives from the bank that finances the studio, Griffin combs through his files to try and figure out who might be sending the poison pen notes. 

Concluding it must have been a writer named Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), Griffin visits the man’s house and calls from his cellphone, surreptitiously spying on Kahane’s girlfriend, a painter named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), when she answers. He flirts with her, and she tells him that Kahane has gone to a repertory screening of The Bicycle Thief. Griffin then unconvincingly “accidentally” runs into Kahane there, and the normally teetotal Griffin agrees to talk business over drinks at a local karaoke place. There, Kahane grows increasingly frustrated with Griffin’s apparent condescension and the two part ways, but when they encounter one another on the street, a scuffle ensues, during which Griffin ends up killing the screenwriter. Coming to his senses, Griffin makes it look like a mugging and flees the scene. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Detective Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) tracks him down, and she’s clearly not convinced by his protestations of innocence. His girlfriend, story editor Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson), can also tell that something’s off, even before he goes to Kahane’s funeral and ends up beginning an affair with June. Perhaps worst of all, Griffin continues to receive threats from his stalker, which means he did it all for nothing. 

The film is, despite the presence of this murder, a fairly soft satire of the film industry. Mockery is made of the contemporary studio system’s flaws: an overreliance on test screening feedback, the inherent difficulties of trying to create art in a hypercapitalistic system, and the resultant way that catering to the sentiments of the lowest common denominator (especially with regards to demands for happy endings and uncomplicated morals) damages artistic integrity. It’s sharp, but it’s not necessarily cutting. As Altman himself noted, there’s not a single agent in the film, just actors, writers, executives, and the occasional director. Just like Griffin himself, he’s not “afraid of ‘political,’” only of “radically political [and] political politica.” Ultimately, it’s very cynical about the world that undergirds the movies that we all love so much, but it never quite becomes as mean spirited as it might have. Although he kills a man in a fit of paranoid, drunken rage, the most cutthroat things that Griffin does are cutting loose his the devoted, professional, and loyal Bonnie for the younger, more buxom, blonder June and deliberately allowing Larry Levy to take credit for signing on a film that Griffin recognizes is impossible, so that he can later swoop in and save the day, thus saving his own career. The most salient thing that the film does is have an intentionally absurd happy ending despite all that comes before, just as the film with the film, Habeas Corpus, originally a downer awards-baiter, ends with a one-liner and a kiss. 

The Player goes more for the darkly comic than the noirishly gritty, but what it sacrifices there it makes up for with its nearly constant stream of witticisms and dependably funny players. Fred Ward is a lot of fun as the studio’s fixer who also waxes poetic about the golden years of Hollywood; Richard E. Grant is as impeccable as ever as a director with a grand vision for an unworkable Oscar bait film (alongside a typically hyperactive Dean Stockwell as his manager); even country musician Lyle Lovett gets in on the action as the unsettling man following Griffin around the city in a role that feels like it was written for Crispin Glover. The only place where this really falls flat is in the performance of Whoopi Goldberg, who is not on her A-game in this picture. The actors who appear in cameo roles were encouraged to ad-lib their dialogue, which offers up great opportunities, like when an unprompted Malcolm McDowell insults Griffin, leading to real befuddlement on the part of Robbins, but Whoopi does several painfully unfunny bits that all seem to go on forever, especially the one about trying to find her tampons. It’s also worth noting that Greta Scacchi’s performance here is nothing to write home about either, but at least that’s potentially an intentional acting choice, as her general blank slate nature allows for Griffin to project whatever he wants onto her. In contrast to loyal, flat-chested Bonnie, June is forever dressed in silks and thin fabrics that do nothing to disguise her nipples. She is breasting boobily at all times, and she play-acts at having depth through her art. When speaking of her late boyfriend, she says that she never really thought of him as talented, ironically standing in the midst of several “artworks” that are composed of the word “ice” surrounded by cool colors. I might not be giving Scacchi enough credit for making her such an effective representation of a boring-but-hot woman trying to seem deeper than she is, but if it’s a deliberate choice, it’s relatively successful. 

In a modern context, the most off-putting thing that an audience may have trouble with isn’t the murder of Kahane, but getting lost in trying to keep up with the cavalcade of stars in the film, and tracking who’s playing themselves and who’s playing a character within the film itself. I’d also wager that an uninitiated viewer may find themselves distracted by the never-ending series of cameo appearances, especially for those whose stars have diminished in the intervening decades. Any audience would still know Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Burt Reynolds, and Cher, of course, but Sally Kirkland, David Alan Grier, and Robert Wagner? If you’re reading this, then those names are probably at least somewhat familiar to you at the very, very least, but to the under-thirty set? Probably not so much. The best advice I can give to someone coming to this film so long after the film’s release is to just go with the flow and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Harry and Tonto (1974)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Art Carney’s Oscar-winning performance as a roadtripping old grump in Harry and Tonto (1974)

00:00 Welcome

02:02 Marx Bros blind spots
10:41 Hitchcock blind spots
28:50 Coyote vs Acme (2026)
34:00 Still of the Night (1982)
41:42 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
50:23 Miami Blues (1990)
58:12 The Player (1992)
1:09:00 Sherman’s March (1985)
1:16:07 Maps to the Stars (2014)
1:25:05 The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)
1:33:44 The End of Oak Street (2026)

1:48:00 Harry and Tonto (1974)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The End of Oak Street (2026)

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The best movies for kids are usually films that meet them where they’re at, movies which capture the feeling of childhood experientially and textually, and that tell a story that a child might imagine for themself. What if an alien were my best friend? What if my friends and I built a spaceship in our garage? What if I could enter a magical world by reading a book? What if I got shrunk to a tiny size in my backyard? What if an evil carnival came to town? What if I got taken by a UFO and came back eight years later? All of those were film plots from the 1980s; several were developed and distributed by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, while others were greenlit and produced by other companies that were seeking to capture the essence of what came to be known as “that Amblin feeling.” E.T. is the most memorable keystone for that entire genre, and the intervening decades have been spent trying to recapture it, with mixed success. One of the most obvious and blatant examples was J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 in 2011, which, despite technically being set in 1979, set the unfortunate trend going forward that all any media attempting to recapture the feeling of Amblin would get stuck as period pieces set in the eighties, and thus mostly end up recreating the texture of those films without the substance thereof, or understanding what made them special. 

Updating the narrative of Stephen King’s IT to be set in the 1980s and the 2010s instead of in the 1950s and the 1980s respectively is a logical choice, but one need look no further than the general public outcry about the downward spiral of Stranger Things and the fact that we’re now producing media about how an overly nostalgic generation has deprived contemporary youth of anything new to know that the well has been pulling up naught but dust for a while now.  As such, it’s a refreshing surprise that another film that is shameless in its evocation of the Amblin style, set (partially) in 1982, manages to pull off that feeling by just as shamelessly aping one of Spielberg’s biggest films of the 1990s, Jurassic Park. The End of Oak Street’s imaginary play catalyst is “What if my neighborhood got transported back to dinosaur times?”, which is as perfect a jumping off point as one could hope for in a film like this. Even the film’s eightiesness is understated. Other than a scene in which Audrey finds solace in Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” and another in which the opening credits for The Love Boat are playing on the family room TV, the predicament in which the Platts and their neighbors find themselves isn’t one that lends itself to the “Remember this?” pop culture references in which nostalgia slop normally traffics. I did appreciate that the art department stuck a Battlestar Galactica poster on Brian’s wall so that we would know his dog is named for Dirk Benedict rather than Herman Melville, but it’s reasonably subtle for this genre. 

The suburban Platt family is going through a rough patch. Patriarch Greg (Ewan McGregor) has recently been laid off and is keeping this a secret from his wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), who can sense that something is off and that he’s not being honest with her. At the very least, she’s frustrated with his inconsistency, like bailing on a promised family day at a neighborhood block party and undermining her by allowing their son Brian (Christian Convery) to bring his disruptive Blue Heeler, Starbuck, to the cookout. The family’s precarious monetary situation is already somewhat known to daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a budding astronomer who longs to go to Cornell and study under Carl Sagan (relatable) but knows that her family can’t afford it. For his part, Brian is entering puberty and beginning to show signs of adolescent rebellion and is hiding from his parents that he was responsible for seriously injuring another boy in the neighborhood. Denise has a friendly relationship with elderly neighbor Mrs. Huddleston, who was the uncredited editor of her novelist husband, and the older woman has been giving Denise feedback on a manuscript that she’s been writing, through which Denise is working out her mixed feelings about her life as a suburban mother. All of this familiar domestic malaise is interrupted by bizarre phenomena, like the inexplicable presence of a plant that’s been extinct for millennia in Mrs. Huddleston’s yard, or the sudden appearance of a mound of animal dung in the yard of the Platts’ hostile neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrnes). It isn’t long before the family is awoken one night by thunderous noises and blinding lights and discover that everything within a one-mile radius of the center of their neighborhood has been moved to 200 million years in the past, and the area is being infiltrated by the hungry megafauna of yesteryear. Can their family survive this crisis? 

There are many things that are flawed about The End of Oak Street. The dialogue is frequently cheesy and often outright treacly; Anne Hathaway continues to prove that she has a generational talent for interpreting some of the hokiest lines imaginable with genuine pathos (see also: Interstellar). Several sequences in which the family talks about their situation feature increasingly unhinged framing choices that make extensive, inexplicable use of split diopters for no thematic reason that I can comprehend. There are editing choices that are likewise baffling. In an early scene in which Denise and Mrs. Huddleston are discussing the former’s writing, their conversation plays out with one character occupying the left third of the frame while the other two-thirds are filled with a bay window that looks out over the block party festivities, with hard cuts to an inverted ratio of the right third of the frame containing the party who’s speaking while the left-two thirds is taken up by the window. If what is being communicated thematically is that Denise sees a potential reflection of herself in Mrs. Huddleston, a woman who subsumed her life into caring for a man who expressed no gratitude, then that’s a shot that’s begging to be framed symmetrically with the women mirroring one another. If that’s not what’s being communicated cinematically, then why not take advantage of the talent and throw in some shot/reverse-shot close-ups to break it up? I also didn’t quite love the technobabble explanation for their general predicament, but it’s a necessary evil and is decently actualized from a visual effects standpoint. 

The film’s most glaring flaw, overall and narratively, is that it never lands on a solid understanding of who its audience is. I mentioned a lot of eighties kid flicks up at the top, but it’s worth noting that The End of Oak Street is not suitable for children despite the childlike imagination inherent in its premise. In some ways, this film bears a strong resemblance to nineties classic Jumanji, but the violence there is mostly fantastic in nature; you might see a child forcibly turned into a monkeyboy or be bloodlessly sedated by a mean-looking barbed plant, but you’re not going to see that film’s animals feeding on the viscera of corpses or a blood-stained roof where a neighbor unsuccessfully challenged winged predators. The film, as also cited above, takes inspiration from Jurassic Park, but the dino violence of that movie almost feels quaint in comparison to the computer-generated gruesomeness of Oak Street, in which we witness dozens of people being ripped to shreds by prehistoric beasts, all while fleeing and screaming, first from fear and then from pain. It’s decidedly not for kids, and even a little extreme for a PG-13 film, but the film’s overly pat, sentimental ending also means that any child over thirteen is going to find it corny. 

Although the script’s dialogue is laughable, it adheres to the specific structural guidelines of screenplay instruction so precisely that it’s impossible to fault in its construction. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) knows this formula like the back of his hand, and he never overlooks a chance to let the rule of threes play out. It’s most noticeable with regards to Brian’s toy bow and arrow, which he attempts to use twice without success before managing to finally get a good shot in when his home threatens to become the new lair of a white worm. Both parents are realistically flawed; Greg’s hesitancy to tell his wife about his newfound unemployment comes from a place of patriarchal pride, but it also prevents her from being able to pitch in and help out by finding work herself before their financial straits become any more dire, while Denise has realistic conflicting emotions as a midlife stay-at-home mom to two children who are finding their independence. The conflict arises from their lack of communication without either being a villain; the film mostly lacks one, other than the neighbor who threatens to shoot Starbuck if the Platts don’t become more responsible pet owners. 

The thing about all of the film’s issues is: who cares? This is a movie about what it would be like if your neighborhood got sucked through a wormhole to the Jurassic period. You get a (semi) modern family encountering every kind of Mesozoic monster you can imagine: chicken-sized raptors capable of taking down a family pet, a Spinosaurus capable of knocking a car through a house, aerial reptiles that don’t take kindly to being shot at, horse-sized feathered bipeds that are surprisingly fast and always hungry, and the obligatory visit from the perennial favorite T. Rex. There are also beasts in this movie that I hadn’t even contemplated before, with the standout being some kind of albinic, amphibious, limbless tetrapod thing that made my skin crawl. The family dog reappears in the climax to fight off a Pteranodon! What more could one ask for, really?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Miami Blues (1990)

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What happens when a sociopathic California criminal flies to Miami to start a new series of con jobs and thefts and is surrounded by the most absurd people on earth (i.e., baseline Florida residents) in a film that proves 1990 was still basically the 1980s? You get Miami Blues, the second of four films adapted from Charles Willeford’s novels, and the only adaptation that came from his popular series of novels about hardboiled detective Hoke Mosely. Directed by the late George Armitage, one of Roger Corman’s many disciples, fourteen years after his last film (1976’s Vigilante Force) and seven years before his most famous (1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank), Miami Blues is a bizarre picture that combines elements of neo-noir, erotic thriller, dark comedy, crime drama, and action flicks into something fascinating, funny, and thrilling. 

A man calling himself “Junior Gottlieb” (Alec Baldwin) arrives in Miami, and he’s barely made it off the plane before he’s stolen a stranger’s suitcase and broken the finger of an obnoxious Hare Krishna. He slips onto a courtesy shuttle and checks into the luxurious hotel that it takes him to, where the lead bellhop offers to send up a prostitute, and Junior accepts. When the young woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) arrives, Junior reveals that he has no interest in her sexually, and that he was hoping to instead convince her to purchase some of the clothing in the luggage that he stole. Junior sees through her sex worker alias and tricks her into revealing that her real name is Susie, and the two end up sleeping together anyway, as the naive girl from Okeechobee falls for his dubious charms. Unbeknownst to Junior, the cultist that he assaulted at the airport died of shock, and the case falls into the lap of homicide detective Hoke Mosely (Fred Ward), a grizzled oaf of a man with terrible fashion sense, sharp observational skills that bely his slovenly appearance, and false teeth. He catches up with Junior at Susie’s apartment in less than 24 hours, implying that he knows the young man is guilty and highlighting the telltale signs in his behavior that indicate he’s served time, but also drinking up most of the young couple’s beer and (maybe) playing the dumb drunk in order to ingratiate himself. Junior sees through the act and tracks Hoke down to his residence, where he savagely beats the cop, stealing his badge, gun, and dentures, making him more dangerous than ever. 

It’s here that the film takes a fascinating turn. It’s very funny from its earliest moments; when Susie tries to beg off of spending the night together because she has a “lot” of homework that night—she has to write a haiku—Junior robs her neighbors while she takes a bath, all while extemporaneously composing several of them like “Breaking, entering / The dark and lonely places / Finding a big gun.” But once he has Hoke’s badge and gun, he opens up a whole new way to terrorize and rob people, which he gets away with for quite some time largely because he just … behaves like a cop. After shooting a would-be smash-and-grab thief at a dockside restaurant (only calling out “Freeze or I’ll shoot” after pulling the trigger) and realizing the power he wields, he tries to strongarm the bellboy/pimp who sent Susie to him by pretending that she was underage, at which point the man claims that he knows this isn’t true because her ID was checked by the cop he’s already bribing weekly. Junior interrupts several crimes in progress and takes advantage of the situation by “allowing” the perps to get away then making off with their loot, but what one notices the longer this goes on is that a violent psychopath is consistently responding to burglar alarms, purse-snatchings, and drug deals when the real police are nowhere to be found. At one point, Junior “busts” two musclehead drug smugglers and has them handcuff themselves to a metal bar, then he steals their product; Hoke’s soon-to-retire partner Henderson (Charles Napier) informs him that one of the two men was the killer in “The Dumbbell Murders,” a homicide that Hoke has been working for over a year, and jokes that maybe Hoke should let Junior close a couple more cases before apprehending him. 

The performances here are excellent. Jennifer Jason Leigh is almost unrecognizable, sporting a blonde pixie cut and an equally audacious southern accent, and although Susie’s under-written and dim-witted to a fault, Leigh still imbues her with a sense of pathos that demonstrates her understated abilities as an actor. Fred Ward is one of the great unsung character actors of his generation, and he is an absolute delight in this role. There were three more Hoke Mosely novels published after Miami Blues, and one gets the feeling that there was an attempted franchise in the making with this film that simply never continued, which is a shame; I would have loved to see him play this sleazeball a few more times. Perhaps the reason this never came to fruition is that Alec Baldwin simply steals the show here as the dangerous, deranged Junior. Miami Blues may be the best non-Jack Donaghy performance of his career, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so effectively utilizes his icy, cold eyes as well as this one does. His ability to flip back and forth between dealing out unhinged violence and playing house with the beautiful young woman he’s conned into falling for his sob stories is truly something to behold, and he plays every scene with Leigh with a bizarre glee, as if he can’t believe he’s getting away with such an obvious farce. He thinks he’s hit the jackpot, but his cons mostly succeed because he’s facing off against deviants, simpletons, and deviant simpletons. It’s also worth noting that this is a film that isn’t hesitant to play on Baldwin’s contemporary sex appeal; he’s clad in nothing but his underwear or otherwise shirtless for long portions of the film, and the camera spends more time ogling his semi-nude form than it does Leigh’s. Fred Ward is also quite attractive (this was only two years after Big Business, after all), but the film keeps him covered up in tacky screen-printed silks and hospital neckbraces so as not to distract from the fact that this film is partially selling itself on Baldwin’s taut torso. 

The smaller roles here are also delightful. Charles Napier has a lot of fun playing off of Ward; their introductory scene finds them arguing about who has to break the news to the family of the deceased Hare Krishna, with Napier’s Henderson begging off even though it’s his turn because he took “the fat lady who sat on the kid,” which he claims “counts for two.” The exposition that he’s only one week away from retirement sets up the expectation that he’s going to die in the final reel, but he makes it to the end intact, firing off bon mots as he heads into the sunset. Nora Dunn gets less to do as Hoke’s new partner, Ellita Sánchez, but she’s memorable nonetheless, and it was probably more surprising to see her in a more serious role in 1990, fresh off of her five season run on SNL. Miami Blues is also a film that’s chock to the brim with one scene wonders. Paul Gleason, probably best remembered as the principal in The Breakfast Club, is a lot of fun playing against type as the vice cop who’s on the take with regards to the hotel prostitution ring, who finds and beats up the real Hoke after Junior tells the bellhop pimp to send money to him at Hoke’s apartment. The best minor performance, however, is probably the Honeymoon Killer herself, Shirley Stoler, as a no-nonsense pawn shop matron who sees through Junior’s act almost immediately and is one of the only characters who ever manages to get the better of him. 

Near the film’s end, there’s a scene in which vinegar pie, a nineteenth century custard pie that allowed for vinegar to be substituted as an acid for the more difficult to obtain lemon, plays a vital role. For contemporary critics, Miami Blues seems to have been a vinegar pie in and of itself, something that was almost unpalatable, too sweet and too sour at the same time, but it’s managed to become a bit of a cult classic, as indicated by its current presence on the Criterion streaming service. It’s definitely worth finding the time to enjoy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond