Movie Nation

So this April we can stream a new version of one of the hoariest plots in all of cinema, this one starring big names.

It’s “The Most Dangerous Game” time again. Yay.

David O. Russell got Christian Bale to Al Davis, the gonzo shark in shades owner of the Oakland Raiders, and Nicolas Freakin’ Cage to take the title role in this Thanksgiving 2026 — mid-football season — release.

Throw in Sienna Miller, Kathryn Hahn, John Mulaney and Joel Murray and you’ve got yourself a movie.

Looks…nuts.

A young man’s future is derailed by a callous chancer and a faithless woman and a disaster he foretold and might have prevented is sure to doom many in his small Northumberland mining town in “The Stars Look Down,” the breakthrough melodrama from future Oscar winner Carol Reed.

The director who’d go on to film “The Third Man,” “Odd Man Out,” “Fallen Idol” and the Dickensian musical “Oliver!” would show flashes of the eye and ear that became his signature style in this Michael Redgrave star vehicle, a black and white picture populated with colorful character actors.

Based on an A.J. Cronin novel, it’s got a high-minded, ambitious, rise-above-his-working-class hero, a talented orator who sees the evils of unfettered capitalism trapping generation after generation in fictional Sleescale in “the pits,” mining “coking coal” in dirty, dangerous jobs that the entire town has come to identify as its heritage and its lot.

Davey Fenwick (Redgrave) may have started there himself as a teen, alongside his union leader dad (Edward Rigby) and aspiring soccer star kid brother (Desmond Tester). But growing up with a labor leader has him seeing through the patronizing, self-serving mine owner (Allan Jeayes) for who he is.

Boss Barras minimizes the risks of a mine section doomed to flood and slips a coin in Davey’s hand as he condescends how he’ll put in a good word when the student doesn’t finish college so that he can come back and teach at the local school.

Davey gives the coins to children.

His dad (Edward Rigby, archetypally on the money) is optimistic, in between coal coughs.

“Some day you’re going to do something about this industry of ours.”

His mother (Nancy Price, terrific) treats him with a mixture of sentiment and scorn.

“None of my family needed no college education,” she grouses, “stuffin’ you ‘ed with that highfalutin nonsense!”

But go he will. The strike his dad calls over the objections of the mine owner and the compliant union leaders sets the whole town against the Fenwicks. Davey leaves just as his dad gets caught up in a riot in which the hateful local butcher’s shop is looted.

The instigator of that riot is Davey’s amibitious but no good thief contemporary, Joe (Emlyn Williams), who skips town with the cash from the butcher’s even as his father and Davey’s are tossed in jail.

Crossing paths with Joe in Tynecastle, Scotland, one goes to college and the other becomes “a turf accountant” ( bookie) catting around with a rich man’s wife and leading on the landlady’s theater usher daughter, Laura (Margaret Lockwood).

Joe sees “smart” Davey as the perfect chump to dump Laura on as he eyes higher prizes. That’s how Joe ends up thrown together with the heartbroken Laura, who talks him into leaving school, taking up school teaching and never keeping her extravagant-beyond-her-upbringing tastes satisfied.

The film’s mid-WWII socialist subtext is refreshing to hear in the age of government by oligarchs. Davey preaches that “natural resources are NATIONAL resources,” and that the mines ought to be owned and run by the state.

No, that didn’t save the doomed coal industry. But Davey’s thinking, about doing something for people and not to them, is bracing.

What’s most dated in the script is the gender stereotyping. Women are subservient partners to their men, and when they’re not, they’re gold diggers and opportunists easily swayed by a smooth-talker like Joe.

Slapping a woman earns an “I deserved it” and then further feminine manipulations that don’t do our hero any good.

The film’s classic status is earned in the mine and mining disaster scenes, which have suspense and pathos built into them, with Davey’s cautionary pleas ignored and the media bending over backwards to portray the gambling-with-men’s-lives mine-owner as a hero.

The details are better than most movies set in mining country at the time — blindfolded horses brought down for labor, unquestioning fatalism by the miners and stolid grief from those who stay at home.

Other touches include the hint of illicit sex when a cheater visits a married woman. Reed suggests this by showing rain against a window pane and two rivulets slowly streak down to join and become one.

I don’t know if there’s a newer restoration of this 85 year old jewel, but if there isn’t there should be. The darkest scenes are murky with age and show signs of too many generations transferred from the original negative. Reed would make inky black darkness his home and cinematic calling card, and that is prefigured here.

The famed filmmaker was not an overnight success. His 1930s films have glimpses of talent amidst the budget-driven competence that is about the best we can say for his early genre pictures.

But in 1940, he delivered “The Stars Look Down” and then the delightful “Night Train to Munich.”

Northern Ireland (“Odd Man Out”) and Vienna and Orson Welles (“The Third Man”) came not long after that and a master filmmaker came into his own.

“Stars” may be just a melodrama with a mining disaster payoff, but it’s worth watching for the depiction of that disaster, for Redgrave’s earnest turn, for the tasty villainy of Williams and Lockwood and for the clues to the thematically challenging and visually stunning storyteller Reed shows himself as destined to become.

Rating: “approved,” TV-PG

Cast: Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Edward Rigby, Emlyn Williams, Milton Rosmer, Cecil Parker, Desmond Tester, George Carney, Allan Jeayes and Nancy Price.

Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, scripted by J.B. Williams and A.J. Cronin, based on Cronins’ novel. A Grand National/MGM/Corinth Films release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:41

Love to get out and see “Song Sung Blue,” “The Secret Agent” and maybe “Marty Supreme.” Events mahy conspire to delay this binge, but you’ve gotta have goals.

A distraught, unstable, rules-breaking “maverick” cop is assigned a new partner to keep his demons at bay?

” I feel like I’m in ‘Lethal Weapon,’” the new partner cracks.

“I know, right?”

As action comedies go, the Mexican riff on the “Lethal” movies “A Time for Bravery” takes forever to truly land a laugh. An hour goes by with maybe a grin or a smirk at most.

But the last 40 minutes of “La hora de los Valientes” (in Spanish, subtitled, or in English) makes this high-stakes but inconsequential buddy picture tolerable.

Thank “Narcos: Mexico” star Luis Gerardo Méndez for that. As Dr. Silverstein, a psychotherapist forced — via “community service” — to babysit and ride-along with wife-just-left-him loose cannon Detective Diaz (Memo Villegas of the dramas “Sin Numbre” and “Prayers for the Stolen”), Méndez finds a few laughs in the fish-out-of-water absurdity of this situation.

And Damián Szifron’s script eventually makes its way to what might be funny about having a shrink on a ride-along — counseling the cop, facing danger himself, understanding how human nature can save your skin in a world of thieves, lowlifes and highly-placed corruption, all of whom are big on murderous threats.

“One more question and you’ll catch a stray bullet!”

Dr. Silverstein — even in Mexico, the stereotypical movie psychotherapist is Jewish — is forever trying to calm thugs down and make his not-quite-out-of-control partner/”patient” a little less prone to running every red light and pulling out a gun to get the “truth” out of this informant, that suspect or Dr. Silverstein’s might-be-cheating girlfriend (Verónica Bravo).

Detective Diaz is a little touchy about faithless lovers. And he’s got the arrogance of an armed, law-unto-himself and almost immune to prosecution cop.

There’s a ruthless, highly-placed villain (Christian Tappan) who makes people disappear. He has two soldiers he’s bribed killed in the film’s opening scene.

As the grizzled police commissioner (Noé Hernández) has no idea why two soldiers have gone missing how high up their disappearance reaches and how deadly the scheme that involved them is, he gives Diaz — with a shrink/partner — the case as “occupational therapy.”

The stumbling shrink asks a lot of questions as Diaz veers from despairing to reckless (red light runner), poking at the “confronation” the angry cop has avoided and the closure he won’t get until he has that.

But Silverstein is leery of the “Wild West out there,” in a country with criminals on the loose and police and officials at every level corrupted, all of them using the “but my salary” excuse.

Silverstein amusingly makes “in a well run country” cracks and lectures to bad guys. And of course he learns on the job how to fire a gun and talk tough. That business of sneaking into a secure facility with nothing but a street cop’s stolen uniform to get him to “the restricted area?” That’s improvised, and it plays an amusing set-up to start the final showdown.

I’m not seeing many comedies on the Villegas resume, so he’s far from a natural in this role. Even as a straight man he’s humorlessly humorless. Most everybody else plays things so straight that nothing much amusing comes out of their characters or their scenes, as written.

That only pays off in the case of the deadpan villain in charge.

But Méndez kind of makes this silly, coincidence-packed nonsense play. Sort of.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Luis Gerardo Méndez, Memo Villegas,
Verónica Bravo, Noé Hernández and Christian Tappan.

Credits: Directed by Ariel Winograd, scripted by Damián Szifron. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47