For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 adaptation of the Tennessee Williams-penned Southern Gothic stage play Suddenly, Last Summer, starring Katherine Hepburn & Elizabeth Taylor.
When preparing my review for Eddington, I couldn’t remember the bizarrely specific Pokémon-themed name that was going to be given to the AI data center being built outside of the titular town. In searching for a script for it online in order to get this name, I stumbled across a Reddit post that contained the screenplay for both that film and Weapons, and I inadvertently read a spoiler about Weapons in the beginning of the post before I could click away. To be honest, I didn’t believe it when I read it. It seemed like too much of a departure from what the advertising had presented, and I couldn’t reconcile the images that were already rattling around in my head from the trailers with the spoiler, let alone with the discourse already surrounding the film, all of which had firmly already centered itself around (pre)reading the “disappeared kids” narrative as being a school shooting metaphor. The spoiler didn’t ruin the overall experience for me, but it did mean that I knew what the motivation was behind the film’s events before the film revealed itself, and I wish that I could have experienced this for the first time without that foreknowledge.
The film’s poster tagline is also part of its opening narration: “[One] night, at 2:17 am, [almost] every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark … and never came back.” We see this first school day with most of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)’s class having failed to show up, all except for timid Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). A month later, there are still no clues as to the children’s location, and the community is still in a state of perpetual outcry, with particularly outspoken local contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) calling for Justine’s arrest until she can explain what happened, a conflict that Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) attempts to prevent from escalating. We learn that Justine has had previous trouble with alcoholism and that this event has led her to drowning her sorrows once again, which leads her to have a one-night stand with an old ex, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Based on the pre-release information we had, one would assume that Justine would be our sole main character as we follow her along her investigation into the disappearance of her students (or that perhaps she is responsible and that the film will focus on Archer’s discovery of the extent of her involvement), but the film takes a different narrative approach, instead breaking its story into multiple sections that each focus on one character.
Justine’s is first, of course, so that we can watch her struggle with facing the community of Maybrook while having no more answers to the children’s disappearance than they do, up to the point when she’s attacked by an apparently possessed friend, at which point the film then switches points of view to follow Archer. We see him waking up in the bed of his missing son, apparently regretting all the love he failed to show the boy when he had the chance (as we see later in Alex’s point of view section, Archer’s son Matthew is an outright bully, perhaps because of this lack of affection). He’s losing track of things at work, placing wrong orders and forgetting others entirely, and this scattered thinking can only refocus on one target: Justine. He’s frustrated with what he feels is insufficient investigation on the part of police captain Ed (Toby Huss), so he begins to follow Justine and vandalizes her car, but he comes to see that she’s just as lost in all of this as he is. I don’t want to get into all of the ins and outs of what we learn from each of these intersections between the character-focused sections because they’re much more interesting to see play out non-linearly, almost Magnolia style (which director Zach Cregger has admitted is an inspiration), before they weave into one another. It makes the whole thing feel grounded, filling in little realistic details through naturalistic dialogue — conversations about the excitement of coming home early from a business trip because it means that you’ll be home when you’re ovulating, Archer’s wife’s exasperated “I’m going to work” when she finds him asleep in missing Matthew’s room yet again, and the way that homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) spins a threadbare web of transparent but plausible lies to try and extort tiny bits of cash from friends still willing to take a call from him. There are large swathes of the film where you’ll completely forget that there’s a potentially supernatural mystery at play here because you’ll be more invested in the lives of the characters. That’s good filmmaking, baby.
Weapons is doing pretty well on the discourse circuit. The film’s barely been out for a couple of days as I write this (on the Monday after the film’s release, having seen it in a packed theater Friday evening), and there are already many different takes on the film’s themes. I barely looked at social media today and saw more than a dozen memes about the meal that Marcus and his husband have prepared for their TV time (it includes seven hot dogs, ruffled potato chips, baby carrots, an ungodly amount of what I presume is ranch dressing, and chocolate chip cookies — iconic), and YouTuber Ryan Hollinger has already put out a video in which he claims that the film’s overall thesis is about alcoholism (even though I don’t completely agree with his analysis). Although alcoholism and addiction in general are running themes through the film, I think that the presence of these diseases is more about showing character through the ways that addiction can compel people to be the worst version of themselves. That compulsion isn’t limited to drinking or shooting up, though, as we see with Archer and how his vandalism and lack of focus are the result of his grief. If anything, the film is about parasitism and the way that parasites can compel their hosts, with addictive compulsion (i.e. the proverbial monkey on one’s back), sexual impulsivity, and grief themselves acting as metaphors for having a parasite that controls you, as the film’s villainous force does. I won’t say more than that to save you from being spoiled the way that I was.
In discussion about the film over the weekend, a friend brought up that one critic’s complaint was that Cregger will always opt to go for a joke rather than a scare, and while I think that’s an oversimplification of the director’s style, I also don’t think it’s inaccurate, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. This is a movie about children disappearing, parents bereft of answers, communities in mourning, leaders navigating grief and expectations, and finding solace in feeding one’s diseases while also being very, very funny. Sometimes, Cregger will just throw in a little piece of weirdness just for the hell of it (the giant floating AR-15 with 2:17 shining out of it in LED alarm clock letters being the most obvious example), and that’s also a delight. It’s a rich vein for evaluation and re-evaluation, and I could possibly be enticed to see this one a second time while it’s in theaters. Recapitulating the jokes would be just as bad as giving away the ending (which is itself very cathartic and bloodily hilarious), so I’ll just give this one a whole-hearted recommendation and send you on your way, dear reader.
I remember waiting at the bus stop at Republic Square in Austin in early 2020 when a friend texted me about the controversy surrounding Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, and the alleged plagiarism that the film committed against a smaller indie title, The God Inside My Ear. He said that it looked very bad for Brie, and when I read the list of supposed direct lifts that Horse Girl took from God Inside, it did seem pretty damning. Months later, Brandon nominated Horse Girl as a topic for the podcast, and I mentioned that I had read it was heavily plagiaristic, but when I tried to follow up on it at that time, it seemed like those allegations had been dropped (although I can’t seem to find an article confirming that anymore, since Google is essentially useless now). I remember reading through all of the comments on a message board where people had taken the opportunity to take potshots at Brie and how assured everyone had been that she had definitely stolen some valor, only for a post to come up a year later with screenshots that seemed to disprove every contention that the creator of God Inside had made, and what a turnaround there had been on what people thought she had done. I remember the satisfaction that came with Brie’s vindication, that I could rest assured that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not my Annie Edison! Not my Trudy Campbell!
I hadn’t heard of Together at all when Brandon mentioned that he was trying to find a screening of it in New Orleans. Coincidentally, a friend in town sent a message in one of our group chats that a friend of his had highly recommended Together and organized an outing, although when we got to the theater he realized that he had spent all of that time confused and thinking about the upcoming Weapons instead. Somehow, I missed all of the marketing for this one, and when I mentioned it to another friend, he said that there was again a plagiarism scandal circling around it. I read the article from The Wrap summarizing the similarities between Together and a 2023 indie script titled Better Half; both texts are about a heterosexual couple who end up beginning to physically merge with one another, featuring “two central couples […] composed of one codependent partner and a commitment-phobic artist,” and the use of the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1.” And that does seem kind of damning, doesn’t it? I’m of two minds about this, because the last time this happened, it became clear that the director of God Inside was grasping at straws and whether they were doing so to get more attention for their film or their efforts were earnest and in good faith, Horse Girl was very much its own bizarre, beautiful thing. Any similarities were superficial at best.
As for the points of comparison between Better Half and Together, I’m not at all convinced that a low angle reverse shot on two actors with their heads tilted toward one another constitutes plagiarizing an image, and if you’re a millennial making a movie about two people merging together (an uncommon but not unique concept) then the use of “2 Become 1” seems like a perfectly natural creative choice for multiple creators from the same generation to make. And why the vague language around “commitment-phobic artist”? Franco’s character is a musician who’s having issues with intimacy because he’s haunted by having discovered his parents’ decomposing bodies and has his doubts about uprooting from a life spent entirely in the city and relocating to a wooded rural area. The “artist” in Better Half could be anything—a painter, a sculptor, a playwright—whose commitment issues could be characterized in a completely different manner. On the other hand … it’s weird that this has happened twice, right? That Wrap article indicates that the producers of Better Half intentionally sought out Franco and Brie’s involvement with their production, which does paint everything in a slightly different light. I’m not really sure what to think at this point, other than to say that I absolutely lovedTogether.
The film opens on an homage to The Thing, as two dogs assisting a man in a woodland search for a couple of missing hikers drink from the same underground well and begin behaving strangely, then begin to merge into a single horrifying dogthing that night in their kennel. Elsewhere, Tim (Franco) is rummaging around in some boxes of records when he comes across some photos of his parents, which rattle him. Girlfriend Millie (Brie) has gotten a teaching job in a small town, and she asks him to come back to the going away party that their friends are holding for them, mentioning that people think that it’s cute that the two are in matching outfits; when Tim returns to the party, he’s changed clothes. Millie performs a (not so) mock proposal to Tim at the party which goes poorly, and the air is still thick with tension when they’re settling into their new home, as the change of scenery hasn’t alleviated Tim of the horrifying image of his rotting parents, and Millie’s increased frustration with his resultant impotence, combined with his poor reaction to the proposal, make her doubt their ability to go the distance. The two get caught in a rainstorm on an intended romantic hike and end up collapsing into the same underground space that we saw the dogs exploring in the film’s opening, and the two of them end up reluctantly drinking the water. When they uncouple the next morning, they seem to be sticking together, and things only get worse from there.
There’s a lot to be grossed out by here, certainly, but it’s not nearly as gross as other recent genre entries like The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, and, like those films, the “horror” part of the body horror genre is the least important part. Stepsister’s examination of the presumed protagonistic gaze of the fairy tale as a genre is the destination while the lengths to which the title character is physically molded and the resultant revulsion thereof is merely the vessel to take us there. As for The Substance, I have a hard time calling that one “body horror” at all because it’s not a “horror” movie, but a comedy that happens to use self-mutilation, unwashed hands molesting shrimp, and pulsating tumors as comedic beats. Together is the same body horror* with an asterisk because the point here isn’t to make your stomach churn; it’s to tell a love story, with the fact that the way that the characters “come together” is nauseating being much less relevant than the emotional core of Tim and Millie’s relationship. To reach back further for a different example, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was created in the wake of his acrimonious divorce from Margaret Hindson, and that subtext is present in the film in the way that Cronenberg’s marriage is reflected in Frank and Nola Carveth’s, but it never feels like The Brood is about that. The film rushes headlong toward the harrowing body horror images of its final act, with the Carveth family’s dissolution serving as the scaffolding on which the meat of the film, its imagery, hangs. The narrative is merely the means to the film’s haunting visuals’ end. The reverse is true in Together, where the scenes in which Tim nearly chokes to death on Millie’s hair in their sleep or the two wake up to find that their sharing a single forearm are the set dressing that surrounds the primary focus, which is what it really means to take “the plunge” with someone.
What a lot of people don’t seem to be talking about is just how funny Together is; it got a lot of laughs out of me. In a scene following the first time that Tim’s separation anxiety from Millie is made physically manifest, he sees a doctor who prescribes him valium (“It’s called diazepam now,” the doc says, which Tim repeats later to Millie in one of the film’s many repeated dialogue gags) and tells him about a hiker couple who went missing in the woods near Tim and Millie’s house, calling it “big news” at the time. Tim, snobbishly, asks if it was bigger news than “Local man waters garden”; later, when reading an article on the local newspaper’s website about the missing hikers, the side-pane article on the website has that exact phrase as its headline. (Admittedly, I was the only person in my screening who laughed at this bit.) There’s an insightfulness about relationships and their awkward moments that are cleverly captured in the dialogue and make for some quality humor. That same cleverness carries over into the way that certain lines are repeated between the film’s first and second halves, like “If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder down the line,” and the changing context of that screenplay symmetry.
This was a crowd pleaser, as well as a crowd grosser-outer. All of the group with whom I saw Together were delighted by it, and no one seemed particularly excited about hugging one another as we went our separate ways. Although it has a couple of instances of all out shunting, it’s pretty palatable for anyone who wouldn’t identify themselves as squeamish. If nothing else, I’m making damn certain that I take my LifeStraw with me the next time I go on a romantic hike.
Civil engineer Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) finds himself alone in Anselmo’s Bar one night with two tickets to see the Broadway’s Chicka-Boom-Boom musical revue. He approaches an equally lonely woman (Fay Helm) in an extravagant hat and convinces her to accompany him, as he has been stood up. At the show, prima donna performer Estela Moneteiro (Aurora Miranda, sister of Carmen) is wearing identical head garb for her performance and grows incensed when she spots that a woman in the audience is wearing the exact same hat. The theater-going couple also get the attention of accompanying drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook, Jr.), who makes eyes at the woman. As Scott walks the mysterious woman back to the bar where they met, she refuses to give him her name, saying that “It’s better this way.” When he returns home, he finds himself greeted by Inspector Burgess (Thomas Gomez), who is curious as to why Scott’s wife is dead in the next room. Scott admits that he and his wife argued that evening, their anniversary, and that he left to let off some steam. The only person who can confirm his alibi is the woman that he was with all night. Although his presence is confirmed at the bar by the bartender (Andrew Tombes) and his delivery to the theatre is collaborated by the cab driver, both of them—rather sweatily—proclaim that he was alone and that there was no woman with him, with or without an elaborate hat.
It’s here that the film switches gears and our true protagonist appears: Carol Richman (Ella Raines), Scott’s secretary, whom he has nicknamed “Kansas.” She knows he’s innocent, and when he’s convicted, she continues to try and find the “phantom lady” who can testify to Scott’s location. First she stakes herself out at Anselmo’s and gives the bartender the evil eye for nights on end before finally following him through the streets to confront him about why he lied about Scott being alone; when the bartender breaks free from the mitts of a group of men who intervene when he threatens Carol for following him, he winds up straight in front of an oncoming car and is killed. Things really come to a head when Carol, now assisted by a recalcitrant Inspector Burgess (who now realizes that a guilty man would never have hung onto the specific alibi that Scott did), poses as a “hep kitten” in order to go home with Cliff the drummer who, in a drunken state, admits that he was bribed to pretend he never saw Scott’s oddly-adorned companion. While Carol goes to summon Burgess, Cliff is confronted by the man who bribed him, who disposes of him before Burgess and Carol can return. The last hope is to try and get the truth from Estela Moneteiro, but the diva is so vain about her headwear that she had her own version of the hat destroyed upon seeing a copy in the audience and proclaims that she never saw the woman. But if they can find out who made the hat . . .
I’m not sure that I could name another single noir where the protagonist is a woman. Sure, there are always femmes fatale and ladies with gams that go all the way up to heaven, but it’s a rare surprise to see one leading the investigation, tracking down leads, and working tirelessly to prove the innocence of their love. That it takes so long for Carol to enter the picture is hardly worth mentioning, since the film moves at a breathless clip from the moment she appears until the film’s conclusion, and we move at a good pace since we’ve only got eighty-seven minutes to tell this tale. The only time that the film starts to feel a little slow is when Carol finally manages to track down the phantom lady, discovering that she’s named Ann Terry, and the woman is in a state of period-appropriate heartbroken mourning. Her fiance died mere days before they were to be married, and the night that she attended the theatre with Scott was apparently the only time she’s left her home since the incident. When Carol finds her, she’s only half there, behaving as if she’s been dosed with downers to keep her from hurting herself (which, given the state of medicine at the time, very well may have been the case). The conversation between the two is, then, naturally stilted, but watching Carol talk to Ann like she’s a child and only getting half answers is a bit frustrating to watch, and really throws a speed bump into the mix. The only thing that ensures that the film’s momentum continues is the knowledge that we in the audience have that the co-investigator who has joined her by this point is the murderer of the late Mrs. Henderson (and Cliff), and that keeps the suspense alive. Their final confrontation once she discovers the evidence is effectively tense, and I genuinely wasn’t sure that Carol was going to make it out alive.
Robert Siodmak directed this picture, one year before The Spiral Staircase and two before The Dark Mirror. He partnered on this one with producer Joan Harrison, a name I’m quite familiar with from seeing it in the opening credits of every episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, as well as her screenplay credits on Foreign Correspondent, Rebecca, and Suspicion. A contemporary reviewer stated that “Miss Harrison is doing nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better,” and although this film doesn’t hold a candle to the consensus classics that her longtime collaborator created, it’s quite comparable to a fair bit of it (and much better than some of his later works, or even some of his middle period clunkers). I’d like to think it’s Harrison’s involvement in this one that made it a woman-centered uniqueness, which transcends mere novelty. Of course, that same bent is likely the reason that we have the protracted sentimental scene between Ann and Carol, but that cost is well worth the reward of just how much more interesting this one is than a lot of other noirs of the period, many of which were cheap and disposable, putting it in the same category of excellent genre representatives that have withstood the test of time, like D.O.A. I’ve also found myself stumbling into a bit of a Siodmak retrospective this year, and he continues to impress. There’s visual flair here that sets this one apart from its contemporaries as well, as one would expect from a film that has an opening credit for “Phantom Hat design,” and there’s a fantastic sequence late in the film set in the apartment/studio of a sculptor, where ominous heads of various sizes oversee the events as they play out, which makes for a foreboding feeling. The sequence in which Carol poses as floozy “Jeannie” to catch the eye of Cliff and try to get more information from him includes a detour where he takes her to a cramped room that appears to be little more than a storage space where some of this other musician friends play frenzied jazz. The quick cutting of the film to match the energy of the music, combined with the isolation of the location and the buckets of sweat that everyone’s shedding, give us the sense that Carol is in real danger, even if the text contains no actual peril, just the general vibe of it.
Like Dark Mirror, where this one falls apart a little is in its fascination with the psychology of the killer. Burgess goes on a long-winded speech about “paranoiacs,” ironically delivered to the person that the audience is now aware is the killer, and how impossible it is for them to fit into normal society and how they’re perpetually distressed. All of this happens while the killer seems to be barely able to control his hands and then faints at the end of the conversation, yet Burgess takes no note of the obvious implication that the man feels guilty about something that Burgess has said (he does seem to be a little more paranoid about this after, but not enough to warn Carol to be careful directly). The murderer spends quite a lot of time with Burgess and Carol as part of the investigation, and while there’s a lot of fun to be had as they get closer and closer to the truth while he becomes less and less able to control his obvious anxiety, it also makes them look a little stupid. I would have bought the narrative that he simply killed Scott’s wife for the reasons that he eventually gives (that he flew into a rage when she admitted that, even though she was cheating on her husband with him, she had no intention of running off together) and that the rest of his killings were to cover his tracks. I haven’t been able to find specific information about what the original intended ending for the film was, but I have found a few offhand references to changes made to the climax because of the Hays Code, and it’s possible that this psychological focus was also a result of compliance with the Code’s mandates; maybe he was just a killer in the initial text and the rest was grafted on. It feels that way, but that doesn’t make this one any less enjoyable.
It’s a dark night in Quebec City. We move in, slowly, on one building in particular, gliding in through the window to find a man dead on a carpet. The beaded curtain that hangs over the door to the room is still moving, his killer having departed mere moments earlier. On the street, a man in a cassock emerges from the dead man’s house and moves up the street, slowly, until he enters Ste. Marie’s church. The killer, Otto Keller (O. E. Hasse), begs Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) to take his confession, and the young priest does so. Otto begins with an expression of his gratitude to Father Logan, who helped him and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas) find work and lodging in the rectory, before he admits that he accidentally killed local dirtbag lawyer Villette (Ovila Légaré), whom he initially only intended to rob so that Alma wouldn’t have to work so hard. Father Logan confirms that his confession is held in confidence and that he will not involve the law, but that Keller must return the money and turn himself in. The following morning, Father Logan makes his way to Villette’s house, where he meets primary investigator Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), who tells him that Otto discovered the body. Larrue observes Father Logan speaking to a woman outside and becomes suspicious, even though he doesn’t hear her say the words “Villette is dead? Then we’re saved!” to the priest. The woman turns out to be Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of local legislator Pierre Grandfort, who is close friends with Crown Prosecutor Willy Robertson (Brian Aherne), but her and Father Michael’s friendship goes back even further, and is deeper.
I Confess! gets off to a marvelous start, but then it ends up spinning its wheels for far too long, even for a film that clocks in at a mere 95 minutes. The story feels like it’s headed toward a conclusion at about the halfway mark, and by the time we reached the final third, I kept checking the time and finding myself startled to discover that only a minute or two had passed since I had last checked. The ending is sufficiently strong that the last twelve minutes were at least engaging, but it wasn’t enough to come back from the slump. Conceptually, it’s pure Hitchcock: the wrongfully accused man who must prove his innocence but for some reason cannot, the blonde who loves him, and a crew of police investigators who are at turns both foolish and malicious. As a narrative device, having a character who can’t defend himself against false allegations because he’s bound by the sanctity of the confessional is also a fresh idea, and complicating matters further by having the victim be a blackmailer extorting the priest’s ex-girlfriend in a way that potentially implicates the priest himself is a fun place to take that concept. Unfortunately, Clift is dreadfully dull in this role, Hasse’s turn as the villainous Keller is similarly underwhelming, and the apathy that Hitchcock allegedly had for this project comes through in the workmanlike nature of the cinematography.
When I told my mother that I had recently watched this one, she asked if it had been released before or after Montgomery Clift’s infamous car accident, noting that he might have been stiff because of the resulting physical and psychological scars (and the addictions that came in attempting to medicate the latter). That didn’t happen until 1956, and I Confess was released only a couple of years after A Place in the Sun, in which I seem to remember finding him very convincing. I don’t know where the blame for his stilted performance here comes from, and I can say the same thing about Hesse. Keller seems to reflect the era’s general antipathy to German immigrants, and taken as a sole piece of evidence in a vacuum, one would think that Hitchcock thought that all Germans who asked only for the opportunity to work and bemoaned their lot in life as “[men] without a country” were simply lying in wait for the opportunity to turn on their supposed benefactors, lie about their motives, steal, frame clergymen, and kill their own wives for trying to see justice done. He’s a factor in the plot, but he’s not a character, and the film is much worse off for letting us know who the manslaughterer is from the start but not making that person interesting. Baxter ends up the MVP here, and the best part of the film comes after Father Michael has been arrested and she decides she has to explain everything to the police at the cost of her social standing and dignity: years before, Michael went off to fight in the war and told Ruth not to wait for him; when he came back, she had already married Pierre. When their innocent reunion is interrupted by a thunderstorm, the two are forced to take shelter in a gazebo, where the blackmailer/victim discovered them the next morning and inferred they had slept together, which would be enough to ruin Ruth’s marriage, embroil her husband in a scandal, and (even though he wasn’t yet ordained) defrock Michael. When her testimony ends up doing more harm than good, as the hours she spent with Michael the night of the murder fall before the time of death but her explanation finally provides the police with a potential motive for Michael, she’s distraught, and Baxter sells it tremendously. It’s just not enough to save it.
The film almost does something interesting near its conclusion, when the jury finds that there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict Michael and he’s released. Although he’s not culpable in the eyes of the law, his verdict in the court of public opinion is much heavier, and it would have been interesting to spend a little more time with this narrative thread. Can he return to the church? How has his downfall affected the faith of his parishioners? Will some forgive but never forget? None of these questions get the chance to be answered, or even a moment’s breathing room, as Michael barely makes it down the steps before Mrs. Keller attempts to tell Larrue that her husband was the true killer, only for Keller himself to shoot her (so much for the whole motive of his theft being to spare her a life of servitude, I suppose). Oh well. A necessity really only for Hitchcock or Clift completists, I’d say skip this one.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two detective stories from the earliest and latest extremes of Rian Johnson’s career: the 2005 high school noir Brick and the ongoing human-lie-detector TV series Poker Face.
Eight summers ago, I attended nearly every screening of the Alamo Drafthouse’s summer series in my favorite genre, “Women on the Verge.” Two of those films, An Unmarried Woman and Puzzle of a Downfall Child, were such instant favorites of mine that they ended up as Movies of the Month the following year. I missed a screening of the difficult-to-find Joan Didion adaptation Play It as It Lays and have spent the intervening years cursing myself for the loss of this opportunity and eagerly anticipating another chance to check it out. Maybe it’s all that self-hype that left me cold upon finally getting the opportunity, or maybe it’s really not that great of a film, but I was not as captivated by this one as I was by the films alongside which it was initially brought to my attention.
The film version of Play It as It Lays was directed by Frank Perry, who also helmed a couple of previous Movies of the Month, having directed 1968’s The Swimmer (a Brandon pick) and Britnee’s pick Hello Again (1987), and the film’s failures may have something to do with his vision, but not with his style. Play It as It Lays is a film that can charitably be described as incoherent, and while that incoherence is, as it was in the aforementioned Puzzle, a filmic tool used to demonstrate the internal life and fractured psyche of the film’s point of view character, it ends up making the film a bit too messy to fully understand. When reading the film’s summary on its Wikipedia page, the plot seems relatively straightforward, but it also seems like it’s relying on extratextual information (in this case, the plot of the novel on which it is based) to contextualize the narrative into something comprehensible; that’s cheating a bit, in my opinion.
Tuesday Weld plays Maria Lang (nee Wyeth), an actress in her early thirties who narrates the film while walking the gardens of the institution in which she currently resides. In the flashbacks, she describes her early life, in which her parents moved from Las Vegas to a former mining town in rural Nevada that her father had won via gambling, a tiny nothing with a population of 28 which, by the time of the present narrative, no longer exists. She fell in love with and married Carter Lang (Adam Roarke), a respected independent director who cast her in his first film; he’s described as “a cult director with an eye for commerce” by one of his peers, and by the time the film’s proper narrative begins in the flashback, he and Maria are separated. There’s some implication that their falling out revolved around the decision to institutionalize their young daughter Kate, whose behavioral issues are on display when Maria visits her boarding school and witnesses her attack another child, which appears to be habitual. Maria’s only real friend is B.Z. Mendenhall (Anthony Perkins), a film industry friend of her husband’s with a family history of suicide and mental illness. Even if he weren’t already predisposed toward depression, his life situation, which sees him forced into a beard marriage to Helene (Tammy Grimes) at the behest of his controlling mother Carlotta (Ruth Ford), would make him miserable. Maria, who hasn’t acted in a while after damaging her career by walking off of a set a few years earlier, is convinced that Carter is having an affair with his new actress muse, Susannah (Diana Ewing), and she pursues a few lovers of her own, including a long term fling with widowed actor Les Goodwin (Richard Anderson) that results in a pregnancy, a brief affair with mob lawyer Larry Kulik (Paul Lambert) that ends unceremoniously, and an afternoon hook-up with TV actor Johnny Waters (Tony Young) that highlights just how self-destructive her behavior has become.
Again, this all probably sounds fairly coherent, and not all that dissimilar from movies like Puzzle and other “Women on the Verge” pictures. Like those, where this does succeed most is in the strong performances from its leads. Maria isn’t inherently unlikable, but her generally nihilistic outlook makes it hard to root for her, since it’s all but impossible to imagine a better world or life for her; even her dream of living somewhere quiet and pastoral with Kate is clearly delusional. That Weld is able to imbue Maria with a sense of the personality-that-was when current Maria is disempowered and passive to the point of lethargy is a testament to the malleability of her talent, and when this film works it’s because she and Perkins make their characters feel like real, tangible people. Perkins’s B.Z. is an even more tragic figure than Maria, even if the film spends less time on his personal life. Of all of the men on screen, only B.Z. sees Maria for who she really is and the situation in which she finds herself because their dual alienation makes them kindred spirits. For Carter, Maria is a burden; for Kulik she’s just some good-looking company while he spreads money around Las Vegas; for Goodwin she’s the stand-in for the wife who committed suicide; for Johnny Waters she’s just a receptacle for his expression of sexual egotism. B.Z.’s relationship with her could be seen as just as selfish, as he sees her as a mirror for his own demons, but that projection isn’t incorrect and they really are birds of a feather. When he finally decides to end his life, as his father and grandfather did before him, he offers Maria the chance to follow him into the dark, holding out the pills he intends to consume to share with her, and although she declines, she holds his hand as he slips away. This the final straw that ends with her being institutionalized by Helene and Carter, but it’s also the purest expression of love that any two people show each other here.
I have little love for the late film critic John Simon (to quote Roger Ebert, “I feel repugnance for [him]”), but he wasn’t wrong when he called Play It “a very bad movie.” Ebert himself gave the film his highest possible rating, but even he criticized the film’s material as thin in comparison to its smart direction and entrancing performances. That seems to be the consistent criticism of the film in reviews that I have found: praise for Weld and Perkins as performers and Perry for his directorial eye, with failures across every other metric. I won’t be breaking free of that paradigm, personally, since I feel the same way. This one might pair well with any of other films mentioned above as a foil or a conversation piece, but its narrative scaffolding wouldn’t hold up to a breeze, and it won’t stand up on its own.
Last month, The New York Times published a list of what their contributors deemed to be the best films of the 21st century. I don’t subscribe to the NYT (their contribution to the regression of the Overton Window on the issue of trans rights is morally and ethically reprehensible), so I’ve only seen it in bits and pieces as screenshots and commentary made their way onto other platforms. A friend who’s more interested in the discourse than I am mentioned that the 2005 film A History of Violence was garnering a lot of late-blooming praise, and I said that I hadn’t really been all that interested in director David Cronenberg’s mid-career pivot from body horror to drama, but that I was willing to check it out (despite my overall apathy for The Shrouds, Crimes of the Future was excellent enough that I’m very pleased he’s returned to his roots). This particular friend and I do not always align on our feelings about films (he was the one who really hated Roger Corman’s The Raven), but by the time the credits rolled on this one, we were united in our bafflement over A History of Violence’s critical acclaim.
Small town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson) has a peaceful life with his lawyer wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two children, teenaged Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young Sarah (Heidi Haynes). In the film’s prologue, two hardened spree killers, Leland and Billy (Stephen McHattie and Greg Bryk), murder everyone they encounter at a rural hotel; when they make their way to Millbrook, Indiana, where the Stalls live, they make the mistake of attempting to rob Stall’s Diner and learn the hard way that Tom Stall is more than capable of defending himself and his customers. Tom’s heroic defense of his staff garners national media attention, prompting the arrival of mobster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) in Millbrook, claiming that he recognizes Tom as low-level Philadelphia thug Joey Cusack, with whom he shares a violent history (naturally). Tom holds to his declaration that he has no idea what Fogarty’s talking about for as long as he can as he finds his life closing in around him: the revelation of his capacity for violence has led his bullied son to fight back against his tormentors, placing them in the hospital; his daughter is threatened by Fogarty and his men; the friendly local sheriff he’s known for decades no longer trusts him; Edie doesn’t even know who he is anymore and is shattered that her life, up to and including the name she took from her husband, is a lie. As “Tom Stall” begins to fade while “Joey” reasserts himself, the loving husband and father begins to be subsumed by the hair-trigger, foul-tempered thug, who finds himself on a headlong collision course with his brother, mafioso Richie Cusack (William Hurt).
When this movie came to an end, my friend turned to me and asked why it was that so many film critics were taken with what he characterized as a “RedBox movie,” and I can’t say that I disagree. Although this film predates No Country for Old Men by a couple of years, its opening scene reflects an attempt by Cronenberg to echo the Coen Brothers’ western/neo-noir fusion as exemplified in 1984’s Blood Simple. This was happening at the nadir of the Coens’ career, in the wake of 2003’s fine-but-unremarkable Intolerable Cruelty and 2004’s atrocious The Ladykillers, and it almost feels like the Coens saw Cronenberg’s movie and were inspired to create a better version of this, spawning their resurgence that began with No Country. Additionally, while this film’s opening felt very much like “Cronenberg makes a Coen Bros movie,” the rest of the film settled into a “Cronenberg does Clint Eastwood” feeling. There’s a part of me that wants to give the very Canadian Cronenberg credit for attempting to tackle an inherently American genre and do so through an imitation of the viewpoint/lens of one of the most outspokenly “American” filmmakers, and while I think that’s at play here, that context doesn’t materially improve the film itself. I’ve never thought of Mortensen as being a good or bad actor, really, as I (like most people) think of him as Aragorn first and foremost, and he’s neither the strongest or weakest part of the Lord of the Rings films; at his worst, he’s still serviceable, and his very brief appearance as Lucifer in 1995’s The Prophecy is one of that film’s strongest parts. As much as I love large portions of Cronenberg’s CV, he’s never been an actor’s director, and the performances that he elicits from his actors has never been any of his films’ most interesting elements. No one is surprised by the depth of Stephen Lack’s characterization in Scanners or Oliver Reed’s in The Brood, and as he moved into the eighties the audience’s investment in Johnny in The Dead Zone and Brendel in The Fly comes from the natural charisma of Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum, respectively. If we’re being charitable, we could say that Mortensen’s portrayal of Tom/Joey here improves as he moves from one persona to the other, but he’s not the only person here giving a performance that doesn’t measure up to what we as an audience know these actors are capable of. Harris and Bello are the only people who seem to understand what the film requires of them, while Hurt is playing his role like he’s in a MadTV sketch mocking The Sopranos.
It’s perhaps not altogether fair to compare this film to others that followed it in this genre. The easiest points of comparison would be films like John Wick and Nobody, which also see a man who’s buried his assassin past (or his history of violence, if you will) beneath a new life and is drawn back into it when his old life reasserts itself. Those films are more concerned with their action elements than with emotional resonance or the effect on the protagonists’ family life (the Wick films circumvent this almost completely by having John’s wife already having died before the first movie opens) so it may not be a very fair comparison, but that’s all that this film has going for it when held up alongside other films of equivalent narrative shape, and it’s not a very strong argument in favor of History. It’s a pale preamble to the more emotionally effective neo-westerns that followed shortly on its heels like No Country and There Will Be Blood, a weaker film when compared to the director’s previous works as it forsakes his strengths as a director (eliciting fascination and disgust in equal measure) and highlights his weaknesses (a lack of character depth), and is ultimately an unsatisfying experience. I’m not sure what it is that I’m missing that others are seeing as so praiseworthy.
Topaz is the answer to the question, “What if Alfred Hitchcock made a James Bond movie?” Admittedly, Hitchcock had already been making spy movies for literal decades at this point, with this one premiering nearly thirty years after Foreign Correspondent. One of Topaz’s detractors, Pauline Kael, went so far as to write that the film was “the same damned spy picture he’s been making since the thirties, and it’s getting longer, slower, and duller.” I don’t know that I agree with her about the first part, as this one feels quite different in approach to his other spy films that I’ve seen, but it certainly feels longer, moves more slowly, and doesn’t have the same panache. I watched it just a couple of days after seeing Foreign Correspondent at The Prytania, and although that film had a few moments where it started to slow down a little, it was also enlivened by the excellent mid-film car chase and windmill infiltration as well as ending on a high note with the spectacular climax in which a commercial airliner is shot down by German U-boats. In comparison, there’s nary a moment of spectacle in Topaz, with the suspense arising from the tension of international conflict and potential violence. On a more granular level, both films feature a scene in which someone is killed via being thrown out of a window and the audience is kept in suspense about the identity of the victim. In Correspondent, we watch the body being flung from a cathedral and it’s possible that our protagonist may be the one in danger, while in Topaz the body is merely found after the fact by the main character, and we’re initially led to believe it may be his son in law. It’s still excellently filmed and aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also not very special.
The film is based on a novel by Leon Uris that was inspired by a real French-Soviet conspiracy that Uris’s friend had helped to foil, although the book took many liberties from reality and the film takes many from the novel. After an opening sequence in which a defecting KGB Colonel and his wife and daughter evade recapture by his countrymen in Amsterdam, he’s escorted to the U.S. in care of American secret agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe). None of these people are our main character, however. That’s André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), a French intelligence officer who operates under the guise of civilian business ventures. Before we even meet him, his colleagues confirm that they agree he is too close to the Americans, and he proves them right almost immediately by agreeing to help Nordstrom get pictures of a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba on behalf of the U.S., without looping in his own government. He hires a fellow French expat named Philippe (Rosco Lee Browne) to bribe the secretary of General Rico Parra (John Vernon) of Cuba to get this access, and he immediately sets out to Cuba himself following this, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife Nicole (Dany Robin). Nicole has heard gossip that Devereaux’s frequent trips to Cuba may have more to do with an affair he’s having with a woman named Juanita de Cordoba than with his duties to France and the free world, and although Devereaux denies it, we see that he goes straight to Juanita (Karin Dor)’s house the moment his plane lands. Some subterfuge happens on the island and Devereaux returns to the states to learn that his wife has left him and returned to Paris, that “Topaz” is the codename of a secret cabal of Soviet sympathizers within the French government, and that he’s being recalled to France to stand before a council regarding his extracurricular activities. With Nordstrom’s intelligence, he has to figure out who the leader of Topaz is before he’s called to stand trial.
Does that seem like it should take nearly two and a half hours? I’m not sure. Just two years prior, 1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice (my personal favorite Bond, albeit one of the more problematic ones), which clocked in at 106 minutes, and it certainly seems like a lot more happened in that film than in Topaz. And if that comparison seems like I’m leaping, bear in mind that one of the Bond girls in You Only Live Twice is Karin Dor, who’s one of the best parts of this film as Juanita. There’s a very clear attempt to ape the Bond house style here, with Devereaux having two love interests in the film, the focus on infiltration via impersonation, and most clearly in the prevalence of the gadgetry of spycraft, which the film spends a decent amount of time focusing on. When Devereaux arrives in Cuba, he brings along some cutting-edge photographic equipment along with long distance lenses and remote-control cameras with a range of half a mile. When he gets the information that he needs, information gets stored in a microdot disguised as a period on one of the keys of his typewriter, negatives are stored in the disposable razor blade cartridges, and film is hidden inside the spool of his typewriter ribbon. None of it is as outlandish as some of Q’s later gadgets, but it’s still neat to me, although I could imagine this kind of detail being tedious to others. Again, Kael wasn’t wrong when she said that Hitch’s spy flicks were getting slower.
That’s not the real weak element here, however, as the major problem is just how uninteresting Devereaux is. One of the more exciting sequences in the whole film happens as he literally watches from across the street, as Philippe poses as a reporter for Ebony (he would prefer to pretend to be from Playboy, and when Devereaux refuses, Philippe teases him for his lack of imagination) and infiltrates the hotel where Rico Parra is staying in Harlem as a show of solidarity with the Black community in America. Philippe lures Parra out onto the balcony to take photos of him waving to the throng that has gathered below so that Parra’s secretary can slink away with the case containing the Cuba-Russia memo. There are several tense moments in which it seems like Parra is going to notice the missing briefcase, and he always seems just on the verge of discovery, until Philippe has just enough time to get the information and deliver it to Devereaux. It’s fantastically tense and the performance from Browne is terrific, and it’s made all the better as this may be the only time I’ve ever seen a Hitchcock film in which a Black actor has been given so much to do. Vernon’s Parra is also an incredibly sympathetic character, all things considered, as Vernon very effectively conveys the internal turmoil that Parra feels when he realizes that Juanita, whom he considers above reproach as she is a “widow of a hero of the revolution,” has been involved with Devereaux’s activities. There’s an entire world happening behind his eyes when he kills her upon discovery of her assistance in Devereaux’s espionage, ensuring that she will not be forced to undergo the same tortures that he has overseen enacted on others. In short, despite this being a cast of less well-known actors than the caliber usually on display in a Hitchcock film, everyone is doing excellent work except for the lead, who’s about as interesting as a block of wood.
If you can get past that protagonist-shaped void of charisma, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. The conspiracy itself is effectively convoluted, and there are a lot of individual moments that stand out. Juanita’s death scene, shot from above as her purple dress spreads around her like a flower or a pool of blood as she falls to the floor, is beautiful. There’s actual archival footage of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a sequence in which Devereaux attends a rally in Cuba, and that’s a lot of fun. The opening sequence, featuring Colonel Kusenov’s flight from the KGB, is marvelously tense, and although it doesn’t live up to the spectacle that we may have come to expect from the master of suspense, it certainly measures up in the suspense department. It seems that the presence of Devereaux’s daughter Michele (Claude Jade) and her husband Francois (Michel Subor) early on is merely incidental, only for them to come back in a major way in the film’s finale, with Francois’s remarkable skill at sketching portraits playing a huge role in the revelation of the identity of Topaz’s ringleader, “Columbine.” As a spy thriller, it’s constructed well, it just lacks the overall oomph that one expects from the director.
(Note: this review is of the 143 minute version of the film widely available in the U.S. and the U.K., rather than the 127-minute theatrical edition which doesn’t seem to have seen home video release in English-speaking markets since the 1987 laserdisc.)
I was recently in New Orleans for GalaxyCon 2025, so Brandon and I took advantage of being in the same place to go see the new James Gunn Superman and recorded a podcast about both it and M3GAN 2.0. Before we parted ways, he asked if I would be interested in joining him for The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Foreign Correspondent, and I’m glad that I was able to check it out. This isn’t the Master of Suspense at the very top of his game, but it’s damn near it.
It’s 1939, the final days before WWII, and crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) has been rechristened as “Huntley Haverstock” by the editor of the New York Morning Globe and sent to Europe to report on conditions there as well as interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman). Upon arrival, Jones/Haverstock immediately becomes smitten with the beautiful Carol (Laraine Day), but not before accidentally insulting her and her father Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), the leader of the Universal Peace Party. Carol ultimately steps in as a speaker at the event where Jones planned to interview Van Meer, as the statesman is stated to have taken ill. When Jones meets him again in Amsterdam at the next stop on his tour, Van Meer seems not to recognize him and is gunned down by an assassin posing as a photographer moments later. A chase ensues as the car Jones commandeers to pursue the killer is driven by British reporter Scott ffolliott (George Sanders, of All About Eve) and he is accompanied by none other than Carol Fisher. The car bearing the murderer away seems to suddenly disappear when the group enters a stretch of road that crosses a vast field, unoccupied save for abandoned windmills. Jones decides to search about on foot while Scott and Carol attempt to catch up to the police, and although he discovers the hidden car and that Van Meer has actually been spirited away for interrogation while a duplicate was killed in his stead, by the time the police arrive, all evidence is gone.
After recently watching the rather dour Frenzy(and following up this screening with a viewing of another dry Hitch picture, Topaz), the comedy in this one is refreshing. There’s a lot of hay made about the spelling of Scott’s last name, which is deliberately left un-capitalized. This is apparently a real English gentry practice, as the lack of consistent usage of capital letters across large swathes of British history meant that some documents utilized a double letter at the beginning of a name to indicate that it was a proper noun. When a more standardized capitalization scheme came about, some families worried that if their names were updated they might lose some deed or other if they were named “Folliott” and not “ffolliott.” Sanders is playing a wonderfully unconcerned dandy of a man who’s having a lot of fun with all of this espionage rigamarole, and although he’s serious when the moment demands it, he brings a light energy to the proceedings that is much appreciated given the subject matter. There’s also a delightful appearance from Edmund Gwenn (who would appear as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street seven years later) as a babbling, inept would-be assassin who’s sicced on Jones by the film’s twist villain. Rowley is theoretically supposed to act as Jones’s bodyguard but instead plans to lead him to his death, in a sequence that culminates in the steeple of a towering church, where Rowley’s attempts to push Jones to his doom are repeatedly interrupted by other sightseers and tourists. Jones and Carol are also quite charming together, even if it takes a while to move them past her initial antipathy toward him and their courtship, once this is surmounted, moves a bit too fast.
The tension here is excellently done as well. The scene in which Jones sneaks around in the windmill and discovers the real Van Meer is very tautly directed, as is the scene in which Jones must sneak from one upper-story hotel room on an elevated floor to another in order to escape being silenced. Both are spectacular, but nothing can top the film’s climax, when Carol, Scott, Jones, and the apprehended antagonist/instigator are en route back to the United States just as WWII breaks out in Europe. Their commercial airliner is almost immediately shot at by a German U-boat and goes down, and the sequence is utterly marvelous, like something out of Final Destination. One unfortunate woman stands to voice her distress at the situation and her intent to contact the British consulate as soon as the plane lands, only to be shot to death by bullets that pierce the fuselage mid-sentence. Aside from a potentially improbable number of survivors, the plane crash is frighteningly realistic, and it put me slightly on edge given that I had a flight out of MSY that same day. At the film’s climax, Jones delivers an impassioned plea over the radio that resonates just as much now as it did then, even if no one ever uses the word “fascism” outright.
The romance in this one is decent. It lacks the passion of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or the slow smolder between Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. There are elements of Notorious here in the parallels between Carol here and Ingmar Bergman’s Alicia in that film, but to say more would spoil a major plot point. This one is pretty close in the Hitchcock timeline to his 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes, and the romance here plays out at the same accelerated pace as Lady, with the major difference being that the romantic couple in that film spent most of their screentime together investigating and their natural chemistry was a strong factor in selling the breakneck romance. McCrea is fantastic as a leading man, even if he was Hitchcock’s second choice (after Gary Cooper), and he’s great in all of his scenes, while Laraine Day is absolutely delightful as Carol Fisher, but the two spend just a touch too little time together on screen to sell it completely, and as such they never quite mesh despite each individual actor’s excellence. Sanders’s ffolliott is also very fun here, and is the perfect comedic relief that the film occasionally needs, when that role isn’t being fulfilled by Rowley falling out of a steeple.
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