1. Sinners— A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.
2. Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.
3. The Phoenician Scheme — Its violence is Looney Tunes, its business negotiations are Three Stooges, its religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of The Phoenician Scheme for any other director’s work. It’s another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.
4. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both. The film takes its title from a type of curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if time is standing still. The game it stages also plays out over an impossibly long time, an eephus hovering in the air while everyone hopes it will never end.
5. One Battle After Another — 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.
6. The Ugly Stepsister— A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous “villain” who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).
7. The Plague — A coming-of-age nightmare drama about hazing rituals at a children’s water polo summer camp. It might not fully qualify as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon among titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about boyhood bullying we’ve ever seen.
8. No Other Choice — Park Chan-Wook returns with another spectacular revenge thriller, except this time the antihero lead can’t actually fight the thing that’s wronged him. You can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure layoffs into a torture dungeon, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. So, he convinces himself that he has no other choice but to kill his fellow workers while competing for jobs, losing sight of the real enemy. Our relentlessly mundane & degrading corporate hellscape knows no borders nor mercy. Someone ought to do something about it … just preferably someone smarter & nobler than this guy.
9. Boys Go to Jupiter— Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, illustrating the listless ennui of unoccupied time between childhood school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Overflowing with killer music, adorable animation, and quietly hilarious characters, its Floridian otherworld is politically grim, but hanging out there feels like getting a foot massage while digesting an edible.
10. Rats! — A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but it’s doubtful any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.
While my partner’s father was in town, we planned to go out and see Eternity, which still sufficiently piqued my interest despite Brandon’s (admittedly semi-positive) indifference to it, and it seemed like something that would be palatable for this kind of outing. Unfortunately, either I or someone responsible for updating the local chain theater’s showtimes made an error, so we arrived ninety minutes earlier than the next showtime, and instead opted to wait only half an hour to check out the most recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle, The Housemaid. I admit that the trailer had me intrigued, as it looked like the kind of trashy erotic thriller that we don’t see many of anymore, but I’ve also soured on Sweeney of late, so despite my lifetime adoration of co-lead Amanda Seyfried, I planned to sit this one out. Fate put me in that reclining seat of the Regal this past weekend, and I have to admit, I was entertained. I missed his name in the opening credits, but by the midpoint of this film, I knew that it was a Paul Feig production, so it was no surprise when his name appeared at the film’s conclusion. It’s strange to be able to pick up on that despite having only seen four of his twelve features (including this one), but there’s a certain inexplicable essence that’s unmistakably his; this has the same energy as A Simple Favor and an identical star rating, which is solid if unremarkable. Not that I’m judging him, really. I’m probably the last living person who ever thinks about Other Space, which I rather liked.
Millie (Sweeney) is a recently paroled former inmate who was wrongfully convicted due to the friend whose assault she ended failing to corroborate her testimony. After serving ten years, she’s living in her car and can hardly believe her luck when her interview with Nina Winchester (Seyfried) to be the Winchester family’s live-in housemaid goes well and she’s hired. Although Nina’s eight-year-old daughter Cecilia is cold to Millie, Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) begins with puzzled courtesy that predictably escalates to some hot and heavy adultery. Millie only falls into Andrew’s charms, however, because of a constant campaign of gaslighting on Nina’s part. She tersely demands that she pick up Cecilia from ballet the same night that she’s supposed to sleep over at a friend’s in order to embarrass Millie. Nina instructs Millie to purchase Broadway tickets and an overnight stay at a hotel for Nina and Andrew in the city and then berates her for doing so for the date requested, when Nina will be driving Cecilia to camp. Andrew ends up taking Millie on the date night, getting them separate rooms when they’ve had too many cocktails to go back to Long Island, but they ultimately give in to their lusts. When Andrew finally throws Nina out after yet another outburst, Millie quickly moves into Andrew’s bed, but it isn’t long before she starts to wonder if she put too much stock in the local gossip about Nina’s past psychological history and their petty sniping about how Andrew was too good for her.
Since I didn’t expect I would be seeing this movie, I allowed myself to be spoiled by an early review for it. I’ll happily confirm that what one would probably expect based solely on the trailer for the film isn’t quite the narrative that you’re in for. It’s much like A Simple Favor in that it’s recognizably a narrative born of a mind that’s burdened with the knowledge of far too many Lifetime thrillers. Recurring tropes of that genre abound: the overbearing mother (Elisabeth Perkins plays Andrew’s with icy perfection despite very little actual screentime), the single mom easily entrapped by a wealthy man, the gaslighting employer, the new domestic servant’s room being an isolated place that may as well be a cell, the too-perfect husband, the backbiting PTA friends, the elaborate gambits that play out satisfactorily if not necessarily sensibly. You have until the end of this paragraph to jump ship if you want to go into the film with no foreknowledge. To his credit, Feig understands that the modern audience needs a wider array of eroticism. One of the things that I thought about while watching Dressed to Kill recently was that erotic thrillers of the bygone eras were designed to sexually stimulate only those who get a thrill out of watching a woman undress and shower. Feig is an equal opportunity titillator, as while the camera lovingly showcases Sweeney’s toned abs and voluptuous bosom, it spends just as much time ogling Sklenar’s chiseled abdomen and statuesque physique; we even linger on a shot that invites us to dwell on his sculpted derriere while he brushes his teeth, and let’s not even get into the muscle-hugging tank tops that leave very little of the actor’s areola to the imagination. While Sweeney sleepwalks through her lines, Seyfried is knocking it out of the park with a performance that vacillates between seemingly sincere remorse and seething, feral ferocity. She gives a performance that’s on par with Jennifer Lawrence’s in Die My Love, and it’s perhaps too good for the kind of movie that it is: elevated schlock from someone whose brain was warped by seeing Mother May I Sleep With Danger? one too many times after school. It’s nothing all that novel, but it’s twisty and entertaining enough, and if my packed screening is any indication, it’s effectively reaching its target market (BookTok teens).
Spoilers ahoy. I can’t sufficiently divorce the film as I saw it from the plot outline I already knew to parse exactly how I would have felt if I had seen the film in a vacuum with no prior knowledge. It certainly felt to me that Nina’s treatment of Millie was within the realm of reality of what it must be like to be a contemporary housemaid for a privileged family, even if the narrative requires that Millie either stick it out or go back to prison in order to justify why she tolerates the escalating tensions. On the other hand, one doesn’t go into a thriller without expecting the other shoe to drop eventually, and I don’t think that anyone in the audience is going to make it to about the forty-five minute mark and think that Millie is going to live happily ever after with Andrew and Cecilia after Nina is banished from the Winchester estate. One might think that Nina might then return for revenge, perhaps with the assistance of her groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone), or that Millie herself has been lying to us in her narration all along and she’s going to play black widow to Andrew now that Nina is out of the way. But to get to that conclusion, one has to ignore (what feels like) heavy-handed foreshadowing of Andrew’s hidden sociopathy. Sklenar pulls out the same charm that made him such a magnetic romantic lead in Drop, and its effectiveness is going to vary depending on whether or not he seems too perfect to be believed from the very beginning. Even knowing that going in, I didn’t have all of the details of how Millie would get the upper hand and how the power dynamics would further shift between the relevant trio. (It’s worth noting that the ending is changed from the source novel as well, meaning that even fans of the book are in for some surprises.) My desire for a twisty thriller was satiated. It’s not one that I would rush to see in a theater, but once it’s available for no-additional-cost streaming on one of the services you already have, you’ll have a better time than if you watch one of David DeCoteau’s twenty-eight (and counting) The Wrong… films.
When we discussed our conflicting feelings about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Brandon likened it to how Spanish critics have had to explain to English-speaking audiences that Pedro Almodóvar’s work in his native language has always been purposefully arch & overly theatrical. Specifically, the discourse revolved around allegations that English speakers perceive Almodóvar’s Spanish language works through a kind of veil of European exoticism while accurately identifying the more over-the-top and camp sensibilities in his recent films for audiences in the Western Hemisphere, which may also be the case with del Toro’s filmography. I’ve occasionally wondered about this in relation to last year’s Mickey 17, which was an overall disappointment to me as a Bong Joon-Ho fan, and which I dismissed as an example of his tendency to talk down to Western audiences that didn’t work for me this time, as it had in Snowpiercer. Was it possible that I was viewing Bong’s works in his native tongue through some kind of reverential veil and that Memories of Murder and Parasite were also over the top (outside of the moments of levity that were obvious across cultures) and I wasn’t picking up on it because I don’t speak Korean? Luckily, a viewing of Bong’s 2006 film The Host assuaged these doubts; when he’s going over the top, there’s no way to miss it.
Half a decade after an American pathologist orders his Korean assistant to circumvent safety regulations about the disposal of toxic chemicals by directing him to pour (hundreds of bottles of) formaldehyde into a drain that eventually empties into the Han River, a mutant river beast emerges, killing dozens of people and abducting others. One of the abducted (and presumed deceased) is Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), the daughter of single father Gang-du (frequent Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho), a lazy manchild with bleached hair. Gang-du assists his father Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) in the operation of a riverside snack bar that they occupy as well, but his “assistance” is hampered by his apparent laziness and frequent napping, and his overall flaws are further communicated by his ill-advised choice to give his daughter a beer. The two of them are excited to watch Nam-joo (Bae Doona), Gang-du’s sister and Hyun-seo’s aunt, in the Olympic archery competition, but her primary character traits of being extremely proficient but hesitant and timid are telegraphed by her receipt of “only” the bronze medal as she allowed her time clock to run out. Hee-bong’s third child, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is the only one to have gone to college, but his academic achievement has not netted him a job offer, and he’s taken refuge in the bottle.
When the monster first emerges from the river, Gang-du manages to put up a pretty good effort, assisting a nearby American soldier who charges into the fray. He grabs Hyun-seo by the hand to flee and makes it some distance before falling, grabbing her again, and continuing to run, only to look down and see that he’s grabbed the wrong child in the fracas and is forced to watch helplessly as the monster brings her to the other side of the river and disappears. The Park family comes together in the wake of this tragedy, but during a mass memorial for the victims, a disease control team arrives in hazmat suits and advises that American scientists have theorized that some of the wounds left behind on survivors may indicate that the animal is a carrier for an unknown virus, and all present are shuttled off to a hospital for quarantine. Gang-du gets a call from Hyun-seo that indicates she’s still alive, and the Parks have to escape quarantine and work together to try and find the beast’s lair in the sewers before it’s too late.
This is an unusual turn for Song Kang-ho as this is the first time I found it difficult to like him (at least in Bong’s filmography; he’s had a few effective villainous turns when working with Park Chan-Wook). It’s not his fault that his entire generation of the Park clan seems to be afflicted with narcolepsy, but his frequent sleepiness aside, he still does a lot of things that make him seem like a goofy old stoner in an American film about a guy who’s refused to grow up, even after having a child. That did not endear him to me as a character, especially when he later tries to explain to the authorities that he received a phone call from his presumed dead daughter and can’t hold it together long enough to explain this clearly. Instead he simply insists that “She’s deceased, but she’s not dead,” which doesn’t do him any favors, and not even the presence of his famous Olympian sister is enough to get anyone to listen to him. It’s in all of this that Bong is going very broad with the comedy, if it wasn’t already clear from the awkwardly long sequence in which Gang-du causes such a scene at the memorial that the rest of the Park family get involved in the bawl/brawl and security has to step in. It’s as campy as his movies for a Western audience, which comes through at the end when a forced lobotomy seems to suddenly make him hypercompetent. It’s not subtle, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and rest assured I’m not simply elevating his Korean language films out of ignorance.
There are other hallmarks of Bong’s work here, of course. It wouldn’t be a Bong Joon-Ho feature without some political commentary; it’s no surprise that American interference is the initial cause of the problem. On the cover of the DVD for the film is a pull-quote that says The Host “is on par with Jaws!” and while that’s a decent point of comparison, the film is much more like the original Godzilla in that it’s about an amphibious kaiju awakened (or in this case mutated) by American negligence, with tragic consequences for the respective coastal/island Asian nation states. Here, American interventionism continues throughout as a narrative thread, from the appearance of U.S. soldier Donald White at the first emergence of the beast from the river, to the American C.D.C. getting involved in quarantine and containment, eventually taking over the assault on the creature with a chemical weapon called Agent Yellow. That this deployment does virtually no long term damage to the creature (it’s up to Nam-il dousing it in gasoline, Nam-joo setting it ablaze with a burning arrow, and Gang-du stabbing it with a broken traffic post to bring it down) while harming if not killing the dozens of protestors who are opposed to the release of dangerous chemicals is, as always, a fun insight into Bong’s politics. Even when he’s doing a silly one, he’s still unmistakably at the helm. It’s worth noting as well that Gang-du’s aforementioned lobotomy was performed when he understood enough English to overhear a conversation in which an American scientist admits that there’s been no additional evidence of a virus and that they’re all in over their heads.
In 2006 when the film was released, it was undoubtedly a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of his other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the first major theatrical release of the year: Johannes Roberts’s killer-chimp horror pic Primate (2026).
There’s a sequence in Megadoc that features Shia LaBeouf talking about the great respect that he has for Jon Voight as an actor, despite their extreme disconnect on politics. I didn’t realize it at that time just how far back their connection went, as I had not yet seen the 2003 film adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, which featured a then-teenaged LaBeouf in the title role of Stanley Yelnats IV, a wrongfully imprisoned child laborer whose adult enemies include overseer Mr. Sir, played by Voight. My blind spot on this topic came up in conversation at a recent post-New Year’s hangout, and I had to admit that although I had grown up reading Sachar’s work (my Scholastic book fair copy of Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger was so well loved it eventually fell apart), I had never read or seen Holes. Not only did I not realize that the film was chock full of movie stars, but that the text itself was notably complex, textually intertwined, and much more thoughtful than most fare made for children.
Generations ago in the old country, Stanley Yelnats IV’s great, great-grandfather Elya brought down a curse on his bloodline by failing to deliver on his promised payment to Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) that he carry her up a hill to drink from a spring. At the end of the nineteenth century in fertile Green Lake, Texas, the son of the town’s wealthiest man, Trout Walker, is spurned by kind-hearted schoolteacher Katherine Barlow (Patricia Arquette). When he later discovers that she is in love with Black onion farmer Sam (Dulé Hill), he leads a mob that burns down the school and results in Sam’s death while he is rowing across the lake from his onion farm. Sam’s death seems to curse the town, as it never rains again and the lake dries up. Heartbroken, the former schoolmarm rechristens herself “Kissin’ Kate Barlow” and avenges Sam’s death by becoming an outlaw, eventually robbing a stagecoach occupied by Elya’s son, the first Stanley Yelnats. Stanley survives, but his stories of “taking refuge on God’s thumb” make little sense to his descendants. Kissin’ Kate buries all of her loot somewhere in the salt flats that were once Green Lake and allows herself to die from the bite of a yellow spotted lizard rather than allow Trout Walker to try and torture the location out of her.
A century later, Stanley Yelnats III (Henry Winkler) is trying to create a perfect recipe for foot odor, and his son is overjoyed when a pair of cleats belonging to a major baseball star seem to fall from the sky, but he’s caught with them and the shoes turn out to have been stolen from a charity auction, with young Stanley taking the offer from the judge to go to Camp Green Lake instead of juvenile detention. Once there, he meets his bunk’s “counselor,” “Doctor” Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson) as well as the aforementioned Mr. Sir, whose role at the “camp” is unclear other than to be a brute and a bully. He’s also introduced to his fellow inmates and their typical kiddie novel prison nicknames: “Armpit,” “Zig-Zag,” “X-Ray” (Brenden Jefferson), “Magnet,” “Squid,” and most importantly, “Zero” (Khleo Thomas). Each day, the boys are driven a distance from the “camp” to dig a hole, five feet in diameter and just as deep, to “build character,” with the tantalizing promise that if they find anything interesting, they might get the rest of the day off. Despite being the smallest of the inmates by quite a bit, Zero is the fastest digger, and he offers to help Stanley with his hole every day in exchange for teaching Zero to read. When Stanley finds a small metal tube engraved with the initials “K.B.,” he’s bullied into letting X-Ray take the credit, which finally gets Camp Green Lake’s heretofore unseen warden (Sigourney Weaver) out of her house to lead a thorough excavation of everywhere around X-Ray’s hole, indicating that they’re not just digging holes for carceral punishment, but because she’s looking for something out there.
The construction of this little narrative is surprisingly elegant for something made by Disney in the twenty-first century. Most of that intricacy comes as a result of having the novel’s author write the screenplay, which ensured that all of the rich subtext that characterized the Newbery Medal-winning book made it to the screen. All of that plot synopsis above is doled out in beautifully concise increments, with all of the planting of future payoffs feeling completely organic and real. The story of Elya Yelnats is related as if it were no more than a typical family story that playfully scapegoats an ancestor for the clan’s current financial predicaments, and the reveal that Zero’s real name is Hector Zeroni, sharing the last name of the woman whom Elya failed to close the loop with before heading to America, comes late enough in the film that the primarily young audience has probably completely forgotten about her by then. Although the film doesn’t show Trout Walker calling Sam any racist epithets, it doesn’t shy away from demonstrating the dangers to a star-crossed mixed race couple in the 1880s, or the fatal outcome of racist mobbery; the only concession it makes (other than sanitizing its language) is filming Sam’s death at a distance, as Kate stands on the shores of the lake trying to warn him before the peal of a gunshot and Sam’s distant figure collapsing in his rowboat. It’s dark stuff, and the kind of thing it’s hard to imagine a major studio adapting a book with such serious subject matter at such a huge scale in these more mealy-mouthed, faux-progressive times. There’s a mature sincerity about the whole thing that really makes Holes stand out.
I was quite taken with the way that all of the different narratives were eventually braided together into one larger, grander story. Eventually, after one piece of abuse from Dr. Pendanski too many, Zero hits his oppressor in the face with a shovel and runs off into the barren wasteland around Camp Green Lake, prompting the warden to tell her men to get rid of his files since, as a ward of the state, no one will be looking for him after her disappears. After a few days, Stanley takes off after him into the desert, eventually finding him camping out beneath onion man Sam’s overturned boat, where the younger boy has been managing to survive on jars of Kate’s spiced peaches, still preserved there after all this time. It’s from this vantage that Stanley spots a mountain peak that resembles a thumbs up and, recognizing it as “God’s thumb” from his great-grandfather’s survival story, the two of them make their way toward it. Zero almost doesn’t make it, but Stanley carries him the rest of the way to the top, where they discover one of Sam’s onion patches, still thriving, and regain their strength. Just as importantly, Stanley’s rescue of Zero has at last fulfilled the Yelnats family’s responsibility to the Zeronis, lifting their curse. Stanley teaching Zero to read likewise ensures that the latter is able to read the former’s name (or rather, Stanley I’s name) on the trunk that they unearth and keep it from falling into the warden’s hands. With her dying breath, Kate had told Trout that he and his children could dig for a hundred years and never find her treasure, and with the warden’s arrest upon the arrival of the Yelnats’s new lawyer and a couple of Texas Rangers (as it turns out, having a child prisoner with no record of him—Zero’s files were destroyed to cover up his presumed death—is bad news), Trout and his descendants wasted their lives on a treasure they never got to possess. At last, for the first time since Sam’s death, rain comes to Green Lake.
This is an impressive film cinematically as well. The fades between the verdant Green Lake of the past and the dusty plain of the present that is featureless other than its thousands of holes are concise and effective visual storytelling. Zero and Stanley’s ascent of God’s Thumb is very convincing, full of very expensive looking helicopter shots, and it looks fantastic. The locations are, overall, gorgeously photographed, so that even the desolate area around the camp/prison looks beautiful. Never having seen the movie before, I always assumed based on the presence of LaBeouf, who was a Disney Channel sitcom performer at the time, that Holes would be on par with their direct-to-cable original movies, functional and utilitarian rather than thoughtfully arranged and aesthetically interesting. It has some weaknesses of that genre, notably in the film’s soundtrack, which is full of inspirationally titled tracks (“Keepin it Real,” “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” “Don’t Give Up,” etc.) that sometimes literally describe what we’re seeing on the screen, which feels like an over-explanatory narrative crutch for a film that otherwise trusts in its audience’s ability to pick up on nuance and subtlety. This extends to having the young actors perform a mixed hip-hop/pop track that plays over the film’s credits and is, respectfully, embarrassing. I probably saw the music video for it on television at the time of release, and that colored my perception of what I thought the movie was for a couple of decades, so I chalked up the frequent recommendations of it as little more than my peers’ nostalgia. I’m pleased to discover I was wrong.
There’s a section in Megadoc wherein director Mike Figgis interviews Star Wars creator George Lucas about his early career partnership with Francis Ford Coppola, and he discusses Coppola having served as producer on Lucas’s first film, THX-1138. My viewing companion and I realized we had both never seen it, so with the weather in flux and nothing to do in the dwindling days of the holiday season, we checked it out. To our delight, we found that it was actually a fantastic film … mostly. The only readily available version at this time is Lucas’s 2004 director’s cut, and if you saw the director’s name next to the year and panicked, you probably know what I’m about to say. Other than rare VHS and Laserdisc releases that might be floating around at a flea market out there, there’s never been a release of this film that didn’t feature Lucas’s late nineties/early aughts CGI meddling. It’s as intrusive as it is unnecessary, which is particularly frustrating when the restoration of Lucas’s actual seventies footage looks fantastic.
THX-1138 (Robert Duvall) is a worker on an android assembly line, putting small, volatile pieces into place via remote control from behind a radiation shield. Of late, he’s started to lose focus, and the consequences are dire, as there have been over 150 deaths at the plant that year alone. His is a dystopian world where the police have been replaced by chrome faced robots that are just as likely to dole out unnecessary violence as their flesh forebears, and other than the robed priests of state-enforced religious figure OHM-0000, everyone is dressed in identical white clothing and have their head shaved or buzzed to the scalp. OHM’s automated confessional booths are, of course, linked directly to the center of the city’s Orwellian panopticon, so all confessions are recorded and monitored to ensure that no citizens are engaged in criminal drug evasion, as the populace is completely controlled in every facet of their lives, down to being assigned roommates for companionship despite strict provisions against sex. THX’s recent disaffection is the result of his withdrawal from one of the state’s main mind control drugs, as his mate LUH-3417 (Maggie McOmie) has secretly been removing them from his provided supplements.
Although he loves the physical intimacy that the two can suddenly share since she’s removed the veil from his eyes as it has been removed from hers, their changes are observed by SEN-5241 (Donald Pleasence), who has figured out how to make small changes of his own using the computer access that his position allows. He attempts to use this to blackmail THX into becoming his roommate as LUH has already been taken away upon discovery that she’s pregnant, but this backfires when THX reports him for his activity. After an industrial accident caused by an ill-timed application of a “mind lock” by the authorities while THX is in the middle of a delicate moment at work, he’s tried for being an “erotic” and put into a white void of a prison, where SEN is already imprisoned himself. After there’s a lot of puttering around in this space, THX sets out to walk to the edge and get out so that he can find LUH, with SEN following him. The two manage to get to the outside world with relative ease after meeting another escapee named SRT-5752 (Don Pedro Colley), but the not altogether lucid SEN is found fairly quickly. THX eventually manages to escape to the “outer shell” after a car chase with the police in a nifty jet car based on the Lola T70 as the cost of pursuing him eventually becomes higher than the cash value he adds to society, crawling out into the sunlight at the end after learning that LUH’s designation has been “recycled” and applied to her fetus, implying her death.
It’s a dark ending, and this is a surprisingly bleak film for a filmmaker whose career has never really been marked by (and I mean this with kindness in my heart) much in the way of depth. THX-1138 is surprisingly experimental and surreal. It’s cribbing from a long list of dystopian sources for its narrative and thematic inspiration, notably the aspects of Big Brother’s state-enforced belief systems of 1984 and the drugged populace and sexual taboos of Brave New World. Interestingly, the presence of an automated recording of a confessor in the form of OHM (who is represented visually by a backlit poster of Hans Memling’s 1478 painting Christ Giving His Blessing) presages the current “race for an AI Jesus,” which is so inherently heretical in concept alone that I expect its completion to be heralded by a pillar of fire of a type unseen since the melting of the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Visually, the film incorporates a lot of shots of computer monitors and readouts that are shot with such extreme closeup that their meaning is lost, while recordings of THX and LUH are played over and over again in command centers while being illustrated on an oscilloscope. The film’s climactic car chase scene takes place in the BART underground system, which was still under construction at the time, and it looks fantastic. That is to say, it looks fantastic once it gets there.
Beforehand, in the available edition, there’s a poorly rendered sequence of THX’s stolen jet car zooming around on the streets. Everything about it looks cheap and tawdry, like a low-effort Speed Racer sequence thrown in because that was what Lucas imagined thirty years prior and couldn’t pull off, but now he “can,” so he will have his way come hell or high water. Every time some stupid updated special effect appeared on screen, it looked dated and awful, genuinely worse than the gorgeously shot film surrounding it. It’s as if Lucas was so focused on communicating the literal vision that he had (or remembered having after decades of having time to dwell on it) that he lost sight of the fact that he had a good movie already, and he did the revisionist equivalent of smearing feces on it. There is an upload of the Laserdisc edition online—it’s not hard to find—and I went back and watched the sequences where I remembered the CGI standing out, and it’s all completely unnecessary. Bad CGI is used to transition through several floors of workers milling about before descending to the lower level where SEN confronts THX in the director’s cut, whereas the original version just starts the scene there, and it’s infinitely better for not having garbage digital effects added in for no narrative purpose. There’s a scene where THX has almost made it to the outer shell and his potential freedom where he must fend off a “shell dweller,” a kind of simian monkey we had seen a previous specimen of in the white void prison. If you watch Lucas’s preferred version, they’re represented by what are basically hairy Gungans with no believable screen presence; in the original, we see what could perhaps be described as children in Planet of the Apes Halloween costumes, and yet that still looks better and would be preferable to the updated edition.
There’s nothing narratively groundbreaking about THX-1138, but as a piece of filmmaking, it’s a bold outing for a first time director whose reputation would diminish as his career went on. This may be the equal of Star Wars in just how good it is, minus Lucas’s ill-advised fudging of his early career work. It won’t have the same broad appeal, and it definitely sags a bit in the middle as we dwell a little too long on SEN’s meaningless babbling during imprisonment, but as a cerebral, artistic oddity, it’s worth checking out. At the same time, it’s also worth waiting to see if we ever get a restored version without the extraneous and distracting VFX.
There’s a moment early in Megadoc in which Francis Ford Coppola is giving a speech to his assembled Megalopolis actors on the first day of rehearsals, and it feels very much like the first day of a high school theatre course. He quotes Dante’s Inferno, specifically the quote “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” which is posted at Hell’s gates, but then says that he has his own version, which is “Abandon worry, all ye who enter here,” which he notes should be on a sign in there in the large rehearsal space. “I have a sign and you’ll see it,” he says; “It’s supposed to be up,” revealing that, even in these early moments, things are already off schedule despite all the decades spent preparing for the film. “In this space,” he adds, “during this time, nobody can be bad, nobody can get in trouble.” Here, filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) zooms his camera in on Shia LaBeouf, and I don’t know if that was a live decision or one that came up in the edit, but it’s prescient nonetheless.
Figgis was invited by Coppola to document the creation of Megalopolis, a movie that I ranted about at length starting about 29 minutes into our podcast episode about Destroy All Monsters. I won’t recount the whole thing, but I summed it up at the time thus: “Bloated, hollow, ugly, infantile, pompous, stupid, pretentious, hubristic, insipid, hideous, homophobic, talent-wasting, facile, nepotistic, provocative (derogatory), neoliberal, lifeless, inconsistently performed, self-fellating, tiresome, shallow garbage.” In its own way, Megadoc is a perfect metatext for the film around which it revolves, namely in that just as Coppola couldn’t help but write a flawless avatar for himself in the form of Cesar Catilinia, he of the riches of the Emersonian mind. Inserting himself into the narrative obtrusively, Figgis is also far too much a presence in this “documentary;” it is, at best, an elevated behind the scenes featurette, albeit quite a long one. Initially, all the subjects present seem put off by his camera’s presence, other than Aubrey Plaza, who was not only the only person in Megalopolis who knew what kind of movie she was in but also the only person in Megadoc who knew what kind of movie they were in. She moves in quickly and adopts Figgis’s viewpoint as if it were the omnipresent camera of her character Wow Platinum. She’s an early delight in the finished Megadoc as the first person to be willing to do candid interviews, although it’s unclear exactly where Plaza ends and Platinum begins here, all to the film’s enrichment.
After that first day playing warm-up theatre games, things get more serious. Megalopolis takes on a conceptual art designer who is initially over the moon about getting to work with Coppola, and her office is adorned with concept images of the various applications of Megalon. By the midpoint of the film, Coppola gets into an argument with the on-set art director where it seems like the director just isn’t understanding that it would be a good idea to put a blue screen at the rear of a shot. He mocks the man, saying “This gets back into why I like live effects, because although, in your opinion, they’re not as extraordinary and wonderful as the other kinds, I don’t agree with you.” The way he puts a little edge in on the words “extraordinary” and “wonderful,” you can tell that he’s just trying to needle the guy to make a point, and after he’s fired the team and brought on the kind of lean art department to which he was more accustomed, he sneers while saying “The last film they did was Guardians of the Galaxy.” We cut back to that concept artist in her office, and all the images have been taken down from the wall behind her, and you can tell that she’s drawing on a lifetime of practicing speaking very deliberately and politically about the egos she’s encountered as she says, “I’ve wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I do wonder if he didn’t communicate it as clearly.”
This firing of the art department and hiring of a new one is only one of many woes that contributes to Megalopolis’s budget problems. Although I didn’t care for Figgis’s insertion of some of his own on-set video diaries, one cannot say that he doesn’t have a good head for comedic timing, as he’ll often pair footage of Coppola making spur-of-the-moment creative changes and decisions that have major financial consequences with on-screen text revealing just how much money was spent on inconsequential fluff. There are several minutes of rehearsal and test footage from Coppola’s failed attempt at getting Megalopolis off the ground in 2001, and they’re some of the most interesting things on display here, as we get to see Virginia Madsen perform a scene as Wow Platinum and a sequence of Ryan Gosling as LaBeouf’s character Clodio, with (I think) Scott Bairstow as his flunkie Huey. There’s a table read attended by Uma Thurman at which Billy Crudup learns that he’s been cast as Cesar rather than as Clodio as he believed. This shows us that, at that point in his career, Coppola was actually doing screen tests and taking other necessary steps in the filmmaking process that seem to have been completely absent from the production of the Megalopolis that made it to screen. Coppola is old and grumpy by his own admission, sometimes directing from his trailer so as not to explode at cast and crew, but he’s also gathered a huge crew at his own great expense to stand about while he and his son Roman fart around with trying to make an in-camera effect happen, when that’s the kind of detail that should absolutely be figured out and locked down by the time you get actors into costumes and make-up. It’s the kind of colossal waste of capital that one would expect when spending a studio’s limitless funds, not one’s own money obtained by selling off vineyards.
The film spends time on the conflict between Coppola and LaBeouf, and it is legitimately fascinating. Although I don’t think he’s a very good person and that his history doesn’t give him any excuses regarding his behavior, I also have sympathy for most former child stars who have a hard time maturing. It was once a VH1 reality show cottage industry to point and laugh at aged child actors of the seventies like Danny Bonduce and Peter Knight as they struggled with their demons (and frequently lost), which was gross then and remains so today. What we can learn from them is that although there are successes like the Fanning sisters and Scarlett Johansson, they are the exceptions to the rule that early life stardom is a machine that creates mental illnesses down the line. LaBeouf has a few moments of raw human vulnerability here about how this is his first chance to work with a director from the old guard rather than just taking a job because he was a “starving kid,” (I’m no Crystal Skull fan, but on behalf of Spielberg, ouch), but then he also spends a lot of his screen time arguing with Coppola, trying to perhaps stretch his acting muscles while the exasperated octogenarian is clearly just trying to get things done, either because he’s elderly and tired or because every second of this is hemorrhaging his wallet. Late in Megadoc, LaBeouf recounts the fact that Coppola told him he was the worst actor he had ever worked with; “He says, ‘You know, I have one regret on this show.’ I said, ‘Okay, what’s the one regret?’ He goes, ‘You. You have been the biggest pain in my fucking ass,’—the only time he cursed—‘You’ve been the biggest pain in my fucking ass of any actor I’ve ever worked with.’ I said, ‘Really? Really? Any actor? Did I show up fucking 700 pounds overweight in the jungle? Really, any actor? Did I quit ten days before we wrap? Really, any actor?” It’s relatively good stuff and the only thing that really elevates it above the kind of thing you would have seen in a DVD special features section fifteen years ago.
In his review of Megalopolis, Brandon noted that one of the modern ills that Coppola attacked via his fictional proxy was “journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes,” which relates to why this film barely counts as a documentary, if at all. Figgis and Coppola are, if not friends, at least amicable colleagues, and Megadoc does not address the allegations against Coppola, which first came to public attention roughly around the time of the film’s release. Although there’s been no resolution to the legal ramifications at the time of this writing, it’s telling that Megadoc ends its insight into the film’s creation not with the wide release to the public in September 2024, but at the Cannes premiere in May of 2024, with no additional dialogue or insight over what amounts to little more than cable red carpet coverage. It’s perhaps because Megadoc revealed moments before that Coppola’s wife Eleanor died in April of that year, right after footage of their sixtieth anniversary party on the set of Megalopolis. It verges on the disrespectful in its pre-emptive use of Coppola’s grief to end on a poignant note instead of addressing what is ultimately the most controversial thing about Megalopolis’s production. Tsk.
The most magnetic person on screen, however, remains Plaza. Even in her Zoom audition, she’s funny and fantastic, and it reminds you that she truly is one of the great comedic minds of her generation. There’s a quietly disturbing scene in which we get to see the result of her petitioning to improv a scene with Dustin Hoffman, which jumps immediately to the two of them arm wrestling and Hoffman is flirting with her, and although he might be doing it “in character,” it makes one’s skin crawl regardless. It’s the only thing that seems like it’s not completely tempered by a need to skirt around the edges of anyone’s ego, but it’s not enough to save it. As a documentary, it’s functionally informative but not very insightful, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have decent entertainment value, which is more than I would say about Megalopolis.
I had always heard Dressed to Kill discussed in conversation about transphobia in horror cinema of the past, alongside Psychoand Silence of the Lambs in that they contained some manner of attempts at empathy for their crossdressing psychosexual killers. Psycho ends with a psychological explanation for why Norman Bates did what he did, and Lambs includes a scene that explains that Buffalo Bill is not really trans; “Dr. Lecter,” Clarice says, “there’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.” As society has already started walking back the hard-won rights of trans people (of which they already had so very few, you pricks) in recent years, Dressed to Kill feels like an artifact of a different time, wherein Brian De Palma, as Jonathan Demme would a decade later with Lambs, takes the time to explain that being trans doesn’t make someone crazy or evil, but also can’t help imitating Psycho in a way that feels transphobic through a modern lens. Of course, this is of a kind with De Palma’s eighties Hitchcockian thrillers; Dressed to Kill is to Psycho as Body Double is to Vertigo, after all.
In typical Psycho format, we spend most of the beginning of the film with a woman we don’t initially realize is doomed: Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), a dissatisfied housewife whose husband fails to fulfill her sexual desires and whose young son Peter (Keith Gordon) bails on their plans to spend the afternoon at a museum together in order to work on one of his inventions. After a short check-in with her therapist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), Kate goes to the museum herself, where she and a handsome man flirt throughout the various exhibits before they grab a cab together and get up to some hanky-panky, which continues all the way up to his apartment. She leaves in a frightened state after realizing that her hook-up has syphilis and gonorrhea when she finds his notice from the state health department while looking for a memo pad to leave him a note and almost makes it out of the building before remembering that she left her wedding ring on his bedside table. When she goes to retrieve it, however, a person in a black overcoat and hat, shades, and sporting blonde hair enters the elevator with her and slashes her with a razor, quite graphically and viciously. When the elevator stops at another floor, high class call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) sees the body and screams; she reaches out to Kate as the doors start to close, catching a glimpse of the killer in the convex mirror.
Liz ends up hauled in for questioning by scummy Detective Marino (a perfectly cast, despicable Dennis Franz), as is Dr. Elliott, who lies to Marino that he doesn’t have any clues, despite the fact that he came straight from receiving messages from both Marino and a patient named “Bobbi” on his answering machine, confessing to having stolen Elliott’s razor from his shaving kit and done something awful with it. At the police station, young Peter uses some of his audio surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on the various investigations. As Liz begins to see a woman stalking her all over the city, she eventually runs into Peter, who has been surreptitiously surveilling Elliott’s office to try and find out if one of his other patients was his mother’s killer. Can this unlikely duo stay one step ahead of the killer and figure out who they really are before the police pin it on Liz to close the case?
We’ve already established that the film apes Psycho in its structure, starting out with a decoy protagonist who ends up killed halfway through, only to pass off the leading role to another woman. It also features multiple shower scenes in reference to Psycho’s most famous sequence, complete with showerhead closeups and murders (even if only in a dream). Kate reaches out her hand in death the same way Marion Crane did two decades prior, and when Liz picks up the murder weapon, the string section of the orchestra goes wild in a familiar way. Finally, and most notably, the killer is a man with a split personality, with “Bobbi” taking over their shared body in the same way that “Norma Bates” took over Norman’s. Where it differs is in its typical De Palma sleaziness (although recent viewings of latter day Hitchcocks like Topaz and Frenzy, which were unpleasant in a similar way, have made me question whether Hitch would have been as depraved as De Palma if he had been active in the same, morally loosened era). Kate Miller literally drops her panties in the cab ride following her cruising of the museum, and there are several sequences that spend a lot of time on loving close-ups of areolas and blonde pubic hair; this is an erotic thriller after all.
Perhaps it’s that which makes its gender and sexual ethics feel so weird to the modern eye. The film is unusually sympathetic to sex work for its day, showing Liz as a smart woman who happens to be a prostitute; she invests in art and is even on a first name basis with her stockbroker, with whom she communicates about insider tips that her clients let slip. The film also takes the time to include a segment from The Phil Donahue Show in which the host interviews an MTF transgender person (then-contemporary term “transsexual” is used universally throughout) to establish that trans folks are just like you and me. But that all of this is present in a film that also spends so much of its runtime being sexually titillating makes the film feel tawdry in a way that trivializes its presumably sincere attempts to pre-emptively defend itself against accusations of bigotry. On the whole, it feels more old-fashioned than offensive, which is fine, because it works rather well as a suspense thriller outside of all of these elements.
The film also feels very much like it’s in conversation with the 80s slasher boom, even if it couldn’t have been intended as such. Psycho is often cited as the prototype for the slasher genre, and with good reason, and this film was released less than twenty months after Halloween, the generally agreed upon catalyst of the next decade’s horror subgenre dominance. One of the ways that the film manages to subvert audience expectations is by having a summation sequence following the climax in which Dr. Levy (David Margulies) explains the irrational rationale of what caused “Bobbi” to split off from her main, male personality and how their shared body’s sexual arousal prompted “Bobbi” to emerge and try to destroy the objects of that desire. It’s textually very similar to the scene in which a psychiatrist explains Norman Bates’s “possession” to the survivors of Hitchcock’s film, but instead of ending in that moment, Dressed to Kill still has 10 minutes left. We get to see “Bobbi” in a hellish mental institution, where she kills a nurse and escapes to stalk Peter and Liz; Liz has another shower scene to bookend the one at the start, only to emerge and realize that Bobbi is in the room with her, then gets killed, only to awake screaming. I have no doubt that the asylum scene here was a visual influence on a similar sequence in A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors, and that double fakeout ending of “the villain escapes for one last kill” followed by “the final girl dies but it’s only a dream” is familiar in retrospect but was probably novel in 1980.
As another Brian De Palma visual spectacle, this one is top notch. The split personality narrative is echoed in the use of countless split diopter shots that look fantastic and are perfectly suited for when they appear; a sequence in which it’s used for a close-up of Peter listening in on Det. Marino’s conversation with Elliott so that we can pick up on the details that Elliott is lying while also watching Peter’s face fall is particularly excellent. There’s also a great scene in which Elliott comes home and starts watching TV while Liz calls her stockbroker, splitting the screen between them. As we get to see both what Elliott is watching (the aforementioned Donahue interview) and his face as he does so, Liz calls her madame from a second landline in her apartment so she can negotiate for a specific amount for the night while telling her broker when to expect her with the money the next day. The screen and the soundtrack are suddenly very busy, and it feels like it’s building to a frenzy, but despite all of the overlapping dialogue and crosscutting, one never really loses track of what’s happening. It’s masterful.
Iris (Molly Gordon, who also has a “story by” co-credit) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are on their first romantic weekend away together after seeing each other for four months. The two abscond to a rented farmhouse in High Falls, NY, where things seem to be going really well. They have great sexual and conversational chemistry, and they end the first lovely day together with a scallop and pesto pasta meal that Isaac prepares before they head to the bedroom, where they use the bondage gear that they discovered in a locked closet to cuff Isaac’s wrists and ankles to the bed. Afterward, when Iris starts to talk about their relationship, Isaac tells her that he never assumed that they were exclusive, and the conversation they previously had about their status was interpreted differently on both ends; she thought that they were dating dating, and he assumed that she simply didn’t want him to have unprotected sex with other people. Hurt (and more than a little drunk), Iris leaves Isaac chained up while she spends the rest of the night frantically googling ways to make him realize that she’s the one. The next morning, she tells him that she’ll uncuff him after twelve hours but that she intends to spend that time convincing him that they are meant to be together. After this time elapses, however, Isaac still isn’t won over, so she refuses to release him and calls her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) for help, not realizing that she also brought her own boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), whose Law & Order expertise means he knows that what Iris has done is a felony, and she’s now made Max and Kenny accessories.
Molly Gordon is a lot of fun here as the deranged Iris, whose actions are unjustifiable but also ultimately sympathetic. If you had Logan Lerman chained to a bed, would you ever let him go? I didn’t think so. At one point, Max explains to Iris that Isaac is a “soft boy,” a variation on the fuck boy archetype who uses apparent emotional vulnerability and openness as a manipulation tactic to make women fawn over them, and she’s not wrong. Although we get a hint that Isaac is a bit of a dick in the film’s opening scene, wherein he flirts with a roadside strawberry stand worker with little to no regard for Iris’s feelings as she watches the whole thing go down, his actions once they get to the farmhouse are openly romantic and sweet, playing the part of the perfect boyfriend through and through. The cracks show once he’s been chained to a bed for over half a day, but one can hardly hold it against him that he resents the position that he’s been put in, even if what’s happening to him is not totally undeserved. Iris is doing something that we all have fantasized about doing at one point or another in our lives: forcing the object of our yearning and affection to spend enough time with us that they realize that it’s foolish not to give things a real chance. Although my daydreams about getting a heartbreaker to settle down have never involved a bound Logan Lerman (that’s filed under a completely different section of my fantasy catalog), one can’t help but appreciate the feelings that Iris has, even if we can’t justify her actions.
Max and Kenny arrive at the midpoint of the film, and they’re delightful as well. Max is all-in on helping Iris get her man, even after she realizes that her U.S. visa is endangered by her presence at the scene of the crime, and Kenny’s devotion to her is admirable and charming to watch. John Reynolds calls to mind his characters from Horse Girl and Save Yourselves! here, and it’s an archetype he’s quite good in (so much so that he’s able to leverage it into something more sinister, as he did in the second season of Yellowjackets); he feels settled. After having to play second fiddle to Margaret Qualley in Drive-Away Dolls last year, Viswanathan gets to roll out the comedic chops that she demonstrated on Miracle Workers, and even though she’s billed lower this time around, it’s great to see her having so much fun. Her absolute insistence that her witch cousin’s spell to make Isaac forget the last two days will work is a delight to watch, especially as it spells out just how desperate the situation has become and Viswanathan’s conviction sells the scene. It doesn’t work, of course, but a playing-along Isaac does have a dream about Iris that indicates although Iris’s attempts to make him hers aren’t likely to be successful, Isaac’s faux self-reflection may be replaced by actual inspection of the issues he has that lead him to treat relationships as casual and disposable. Lerman isn’t called upon to do too much heavy lifting, acting-wise, but his underplaying of the scene in which he plays along to finally escape and his heartfelt conversation with Iris once she helps rescue him in the woods after he injures himself demonstrate that he’s more than just a toned chest and a pretty face.
A nice, easy, fun romcom for anyone in the mood for it, Oh, Hi! is currently available on Netflix.
By the time he started playing the title role in the 1951 season of The Adventures of Kit Carson, actor Bill Williams was thirty-six and had a respectably rugged face. A mere five years earlier, when playing dim-witted himbo sailor-on-leave Alex Winkley in Deadline at Dawn, he was so baby-faced I wouldn’t have believed he could transform so much in such a short time. This is a pretty important part of the plot, as the boy has to be so guileless that hardened city gal June Goffe (Susan Hayward) believes his innocence in the death of Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), even when he’s not too certain himself. We in the audience, of course, know that Edna was alive enough to trade barbs with her blind, pianist ex-husband Sleepy Parsons (Marvin Miller) after she realized “the sailor” had taken her wad of cash and skittered off into the night, much to Sleepy’s annoyance. Deadline is another film in The Criterion Channel’s recently curated “Blackout Noir” collection, and the blackout experienced in this one is Winkley’s; he comes to his senses at a NYC corner newsvendor’s stall with way too much money in his pocket on a blisteringly hot night, and all he remembers is going up to Edna’s to fix her radio after being plied with alcohol. Alex Winkley stumbles into a dance hall and meets June and confesses that he stole money from a woman for no reason that he can recall, and she accompanies him back to the place so that he can return it, only for them to find her dead. To ensure that Alex doesn’t get clapped for the murder, they have to figure out who really did it before he has to catch his bus back to his naval base at dawn.
Deadline at Dawn was the only film directed by Harold Clurman, a name I didn’t recognize. He was a stage director primarily, directing over forty plays for Broadway, and entered into an artistic partnership with playwright Clifford Odets early in his career, directing Awake and Sing! in 1935 for the Group Theatre, which Clurman had co-founded. Odets was a name I did recognize, if only from theatre department shelves; it is the nature of theatre that its writers’ legacies are longer and have more reach than its directors do. It makes sense that this film was penned by a playwright, in that it has a tighter ear for dialogue than it does for narrative coherence and consistency. Early in their overnight investigation, June and Alex meet a kindly cabbie named Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas), who has a bit of a verbal tic that causes him to preface his observations with “statistics say” and derivations thereof. Better still, when June and Alex buy a cup of orangeade on the street but don’t drink any of it, the cashier bids them to come see him again by saying “Don’t drink our grapeade next time.” The film is peppered with all kinds of fun New Yawker types whose brief appearances tell a whole story about their offstage life: the irascible superintendent who doesn’t get paid enough, the lonesome man seeking to make a wife out of a dance hall girl, a frantic man with an injured cat, the boarding house matron who doesn’t want to rent to a woman because “Girls want kitchen privileges and they wash their things in the sink.” That’s the good stuff.
The noir stuff, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. The death of Edna Bartelli ends up having too many red herrings. The late Edna turns out to have been a blackmailer whose extortions eventually took her down. Our unlikely trio track down a woman who was seen leaving Edna’s building and confront her, but she was only there to confront Edna for blackmailing her husband and couldn’t have committed the crime. But did her husband? Did Sleepy Parsons? Could the killer be Edna’s lover Babe Dooley, a washed-up baseball player who periodically calls up to her window from the street like a drunken dog? Over the course of the film, the characters make far too many of what could charitably be called “Bat-deductions,” so named for the way that Adam West’s Batman could often parse together incomprehensible and unrelated “clues” into accurate conclusions despite no logical connection between the things. There’s a sequence in which Alex and June walk down to the corner from Edna’s place “because the killer might have done something like that,” then get drinks that they don’t finish, saying “Hey, maybe the killer would have bought a drink and then failed to drink it too!” It’s nonsensical, but how well the film plays for you will depend on what you want out of it. As a conveyance for delivering quippy dialogue and to show off Lukas and Hayward’s respective talents, it’s effective and fun. As a mystery film with a satisfying series of clues and payoffs, it’s less so. Perhaps the big reason for this is that the killer is someone we’ve come to like and trust over the course of the film, which means that the investigation, such as it is, was being guided by the guilty party for decent portions of it. It’s an emotionally convincing ending, even when it’s not necessarily a narratively convincing one. Enjoyable, but not a must-watch.
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