Movie Nation

Almost every Hollywood movie of “the war years” was an embarrasment of riches when it came to European expats decorating the cast. “Casablanca” was practically a make-work project for conflict refugees. British films with a patriotic bent — “The 49th Parallel,” for instance — were often filled with famous faces in small roles, getting across the idea that everyone was “doing our bit” to fight fascism.

But none of them, not even “Stage Door Canteen,” surpassed “Forever and a Day” for “Hey, isn’t that?” character actor delights. For a film buff, it’s a must-see movie, just for the parlor game pleasures it provides.

A cast of dozens and dozens, with seven directors, twenty-one credited screenwriters (Hitchcock allegedly wrote some of it, uncredited) make this must-see-cinema for anybody still playing “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.”

The story is simple enough, but downright soap operatic in all its characters and complications. An American with the poncy name of Gates Trimble Pomfret (Kent Smith) in London during The Blitz of 1940-41 has to deal with some old family property before rushing home.

“If I’m going to have to eat shells and shrapnel, I’m going to do it on my own country’s dime,” he says, cynically leaning into his homeland’s neutrality.

The property is an historic house in a city of such houses, this one built in 1804. A British woman renting it, Lesley Trimble (Ruth Warrick) wants to buy it,”for sentimental reasons,” she says. And for cheap. As he’s of a mind that this place isn’t long for this world, given all the bombing, he’ll hear her out.

The basement is an air raid shelter, filled with make-a-brave-face sing-alongs, led by a priest played by Herbert Marshall. Future TV icon June Lockhart appears as a teen in the air raid shelter, the last surviving member of the cast (as of this writing).

Upstairs, “serving tea in the middle of an air raid,” Miss Trimble tells the flirtatous Yank, whose middle name suggests “We might be related,” the story of this great house, which was built, a bronze plaque tells us, by Sir Eustace Trimble in 1804.

In four chapters, we’re taken back to the Napoleonic Wars, the early reign and last years of Queen Victoria and World War I, showing us Britain and the house under threat from Napoleon and external enemies, and changing times within.

C. Aubrey Smith plays the elderly Admiral Trimble who built the place, out in the country on the edge of London as “the Corsican” (Bonaparte) threatened Britain with invasion. He quotes this “young” poet, that “Wordsworth” fellow, about the need to defend this house and this land from authoritarian invasion.

“We must be free or die, who speak the tongue. That Shakespeare spake!”

The admiral’s son (Ray Milland), a Lieutenant, gets mixed up in efforts to marry a young woman (Anna Neagle) off to some rich older man (Claud Allister) by her guardian, the oily Ambrose Pomfret (Claude Rains, a grand villain). For the first time, the house must literally be defended from invading ruffians.

And the Pomfret family and Trimble family are thus forever bound by the house. A member can marry a brassy Cockney maid (Ida Lupino) and run off to America, but the connection remains.

We’ll see fortunes made as a family member is talked into manufacturing cast iron bathtubs (Buster Keaton is a silent plumber doing the installing). Snide servants (Charles Laughton) and monied aristocrats (Edward Everett Horton) will reside there, celebrating Queen Victoria, attempting to master the horseless carriage (early motorcars), hosting American servicemen (Robert Cummings) during The Great War (WWI).

Warrick’s Miss Trimble, as she narrates, notes that these were “all people I should like to have known,” these generations who sat in gardens (long gone) and note “Our gardens are worth fighting for.”

For everybody who figures The Hallmark Channel is too “edgy” and The Christian Channel too preachy, there’s UpTV, whose fare one hopes isn’t represented by “Something Brewing,” a bland, lifeless romance parked on Amazon Prime for the curious.

Suffice it to say I’m feeling a bit feline after sampling this drab, Kentucky-filmed misfire.

The performances have no spark, the situations are insipid and desexualized, the “plot” never more than plodding.

Kristi Murdock is Jane, a VP with a marketing firm who comes home on the day she’s laid off to find her boyfriend hooking up with another woman. It’s implied, as this movie wouldn’t care to take us into the bedroom.

Jane’s had it with this business world, “men” and “the city.” She’s ready to escape to the country.

But that would be a Hallmark movie, wouldn’t it? Here, a friendly barrista (Jason Cook) makes her day, flirts, and despite being a BARRISTA, she gives him a chance.

After all, she’s about to move away — turned in her notice on her apartment, the works.

“Things can’t get any worse, right?” her real-estate agent bestie (Tammy-Anne Fortuin) insists.

They do, just as soon as Jane pokes around into the background of Mr. Knows All About Coffee David.

There’s no spark between the attractive leads, and no surprise in this modest blunders’s “twists.”

The message isn’t faith-based, but more of a “to being happy where we are” kind of acceptance of the hard breaks life doles out and the laughable good luck that intervenes for those who like their romantic entertainment to have a dose of magical thinking ladled on top.

It’s not hatefully bad. But story to acting to settings to direction to sentimental Muzak score, nothing’s “brewing” here. Nothing at all.

Rating: TV-13up

Cast: Kristi Murdock, Jason Cook and Tammy-Anne Fortuin

Credits: Directed by Nadeem Soumah, scripted by Adam Rockoff. An UpTV film on Amazon Prime.

Runing time: 1:29

The lady priest tells the support group that “Grief is love that has become lost.” But Sara doesn’t want to hear it.

Her last conversation with her husband, Daniel, was him telling her — by phone — that “This isn’t working” and that he’s taking a few weeks off with a friend. She slept on the sofa, he slept in their bed.

And that’s where she found him, dead the next morning.

She has a five year-old, Eliot, whom she didn’t know how to give the news. She has an overbearing mother-in-law that she threw her phone at (“Two stitches.”), which is why she’s in this support group. Mother-in-law Helen is a psychologist, minoring in manipulation.

Sara had a hasty funeral to plan, telling the priest about her life with her husband, and it doesn’t sound like he was any piece of cake to live with. And she told that same priest that she has no family, that her parents are dead.

Sara’s Dad isn’t dead. Her estranged sister Linda, is the one who checks in on him at the nursing home.

Oh, and Sara’s eight months pregnant. Throwing a phone was all she could manage.

“Thank You, I’m Sorry” is a downcast and dark Swedish comedy about grief, the victims our parents sometimes turn us into, the lies we grew up with replaced by lies we live with, and healing. It’s amusing, touching and downright therapeutic, parked as it is on Netflix right in the middle of The Holidays.

Sara (Sanna Sundqvist, terrific) is a scabbed-over wound of a woman, in shock and not helped at all by her over-helpful mother-in-law Helen (Ia Langhammer, never lapsing into caricature), whose shock manifests itself by insisting on recording their meeting with the coroner. Helen’s practically accusing Sara of having something to do with her boy’s death.

But she doesn’t. That’s the theme here, the running gag and the meaning of the title, “Thank You, I’m Sorry.” Everybody’s too polite to be direct. Unpleasantness is brushed over, covered with a lie or what have you.

Sara’s emotionally shut-down. Older sister Linda (Charlotta Björck, subtle and earthy), the one left checking on their disabled, alcoholic, cheating father, has her own “politeness” issues. She can’t shake her controlling, clingy and mooching live-in lover Jasse (Pershang Rad, quite funny).

“We’re on a break” means nothing to him. He simply won’t be chased out of their flat and her life. Every problem of hers somehow wrongs him. And everything we need to know about him is in how he takes the news that Linda’s brother-in-law died and left her sister with a child and a baby on the way.

“It’s just that you haven’t asked me how I’M doing!”

The sisters reconnect, reluctantly. They reveal the secrets of their distant past and the unfamiliarity of the recent events of their lives. They clash and run afoul of Helen, each in her own way. Linda has a big dog, but no clue how to deal with a five-year-old boy. Sara has unresolved rage about their childhood, their estrangement, her manipulative mother-in-law and the husband who died just as he was about to ditch her with two kids.

Director Lisa Aschan (“Call Mom!”) and screenwriter Marie Østerbye (“Almost Perfect”) find a lot of sweet spots amidst the melancholy laughs. Five-year-old Eliot (Amaël Blomgren Alcaide) meets Linda’s dog “Zlatan” and keeps pronouncing his name “SATAN” (in Swedish with subtitles, or dubbed into English). At the funeral.

And Sundquist and Björck mesh in a wonderfully arms-length, sisterly way. No hugs, just a shoving match and kick-fight or two, “bonding” without overt “forgiveness.” Almost everything is left unsaid.

It’s entirely too predictable some of the time, but this film has some warm things to say about sisters, the lies families live with and the scars those lies, and decisions made to tell them, leave years later.

Sometimes, good manners and delicate denial just make everything worse, especially in Sweden.

Rating: TV-MA, death, childbirth, profanity

Cast: Sanna Sundqvist, Charlotta Björck, Ia Langhammer, Amaël Blomgren Alcaide and Peshang Rad.

Credits: Directed by Lisa Aschan, scripted by Marie Østerbye. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Less than a month before U.S. B-29s flew over Japan and leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the only two atomic bombs ever used in combat, a bomb was mounted on a tower in the Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico, and set off.

The Trinity Test made history, offering proof that America’s WWII dash to build a war-ending bomb, The Manhattan Project, was not in vain.

But “middle of nowhere” was in the middle of somewhere. Trinity, now in the White Sands Missile Range, was a desert with scattered villages and towns — Tularosa, Carizoso, Bingham, Ruidoso — 30 to 50 miles away, downwind.

And while the scientists involved with the Project weren’t sure about exactly what would happen with the blast, the levels of radiation and its short term and long term impact on the region and any livestock and people nearby, they made damned sure that Trinity was a couple of hundred miles downwind of where they were doing their work in Los Alamos.

“First We Bombed New Mexico” is about the “Downwinders,” the people in this towns which were illuminated by a flash and rattled by a boom that the military told New Mexico newspapers at the time was “an ammo dump” exploding. There were children who played in the “snow” of fallout, who faced rare cancers that erupted far out of proportion to the population in general, ranchers and farmers who got sick and died before their time, people who passed down this cancerous legacy in a place that wasn’t safe to remain in during an atomic blast or live in after the effects of that blast swept downwind.

Mostly Latino and Native American, they weren’t evacuated before, during or after the test. When the government finally started to acknowledge the damage nuclear research and testing had done to the unwitting victims in the U.S. with the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), these “downwinders” were left out.

Filmmaker Lois Lipman’s “First We Bombed New Mexico” follows victims, first generation and their descendents, as they meet, protest and try to draw attention to their plight as the RECA act rumbles towards a summer, 2024 cut-off date for recognition and claims.

Victim and activist Tina Cordova and others attempt to awaken the conscience of the country, and Congress, to their plight as “the first victims of an atomic bomb.”

A local doctor describes her efforts and those of earlier physicians to draw attention to the vast spike in infant deaths and the rare cancers that blew up in the months and years after Trinity.

An historian gives us an abridged context, as we hear then-President Harry Truman, and have his thoughts on some of the haste and carelessness that went on (a rainstorm coincided with the test) as Truman wanted to break the news to Stalin and the Soviets about the bomb at the summer, 1945 Potsdam Conference in Germany between the victorious European allies.

One activist describes the government’s refusal to acknowledge its culpability and racism in refusing to consider evacuating the working poor Native American and Latino residents before the blast, or after, as “atomic colonialism.” And the major barrier to getting Congress to expand RECA to acknowledge these victims has been and continues to be Congressional Republicans.

Meanwhile, the surviving “downwinders” testify and scramble to get RECA recognition before they all die out.

Documentaries about The Manhattan Project tend to focus on the achievement, with many parts of the country playing a part in the Race to Build the Bomb. I worked on one for a regional PBS affiliate right out of college.

But as Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” points out and we’re reminded, in archival intereviews with Dr. Oppenheimer, the brains behind the porject had misgivings, right up to and ongoing in the decades after Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The effects of all that radiation, plutonium’s insidious “half-life” that might impact “7,000 generations” living on contaminated land, weren’t grasped. And when they were, decades of evasion, obfuscation and denial followed the risks that were shrugged off, minimized and buck-passed during the urgency of World War II.

Lipman’s fine film shines a light on this tragic injustice and as it makes the rounds of film festivals and into release, attempts to light a fire under those still resisting efforts for recognition and justice.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Tina Cordova, Laura Greenwood, Paul Pino, Katherine Douglas, Joshua Wheeler, Kate Brown, and (archival footage) J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Credits: Directed by Lois Lipman, scripted by Lois Lipman and Joel Marcus. A 47th State film.

Running time: 1:38

It’s impossible to overstate the cat-fighting delights of George Cukor’s all-star adaptation of “The Women,” a title that often gets lost in the gilded glory of classic cinema’s greatest year — 1939.

Consider the protagonists on offer. Rosalind Russell vs. Joan Crawford. Joan Crawford vs. Rosalind Russell. Joan Crawford teamed UP with Rosalind Russell against Norma Shearer, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Phyllis Povah and Mary Boland.

Recall the war of withering wit this gaggle of gossips engage in.

“Oh, you remember the awful things they said about what’s-her-name before she jumped out the window? There. You see? I can’t even remember her name so who cares?”

Forget the canine association that Crawford’s Crystal Allen serves up, one of the great put-downs of that PG-rated cinema age.

“There’s a name for you ladies, but it isn’t used in high society… outside of a kennel.“

Bitchiness this extreme could only come from a catfight to end all catfights.

What former liberal suffragette turned rich conservative Clare Booth, as she billed herself as a playwright, was getting at with this oft-revived and oft-filmed (in 2008, for instance) play is the ways women hold each other back and hurt one another — especially in the entitled and monied classes Clare Booth married into, more than once, most famously with rich magazine publisher Henry Luce.

Women are victims and victimizers, pawns and people with agency. Booth’s play and this script leave the testosterone at the office, as this entire cast of 130 backbiters, battlers, stoic survivors and their servants is female.

It’s a comedy about class — Booth cast a jaded eye on her fellow society doyennes — and gossip culture, already spilling over into the media of the 1930s. And famed “women’s director” and Cukor proved to be the perfect chap behind the camera to referee this catfight.

Happy, entitled and married-well Mary (Norma Shearer), mother of Little Mary (Virginia Weidler), is the very last to learn that her rich engineer husband Steven is cheating on her with a perfume salesclerk.

Her fellow-clothes horse Sylvia (Russell) got the lowdown from her breathless chatterbox manicurist (Mimi Olivera, a hoot for the ages). Sylvia cannot/will not keep a secret. Their whole married “ladies who lunch” gang is in the know, including Peggy (Fontaine) and Edith (Povah).

Sylvia goads Mary into confronting the scarlet woman named Crystal (Crawford). Helpful blabbermouth Edith tips a gossip columnist (Hedda Hopper). A scandal is born. There’s nothing for it but to take the train to Reno for a quickie divorce, despite the “do nothing” advice of Mary’s mother.

“It’s being together at the end that matters!”

On the train, Mary meets Miriam (Paulette Goddard), the elderly and rich Countess de Lave (Mary Boland) and is shocked to find her pal Peggy with them, all of them on the railroad to a Reno divorce.

The infidelity and ensuing divorce has a loser, Mary, and a primary victim, Little Mary. And it has a winner. That would be Crystal, whom Crawford plays with a lip-smacking delight in her unabashed man-eating.

“Can the sob story. You ‘noble wives’ and mothers bore the brains outta me!”

Other infidelities come into play. The battle lines are drawn, “friends” take sides and make alliances. Let the fur fly and the quips cut to the bone.

 “Well, heaven be praised, I’m on to my husband, I wouldn’t trust him on Alcatraz, the mouse.”

“I made him pay for what he wanted. You made him pay for what he didn’t want.”

“Oh, cheap Chinese embroidery! You know, I’ll bet Peggy gave her these.”

“It’s marvelous,” being single again and able “to spread out on the bed like a swastika!”

Russell and Crawford tear into this script and into each other with a sort of game-respects-game glee. Fontaine shows off comic chops that she’d rarely get to use once she became famous. “Modern Times” Goddard, at the time married to Charlie Chaplin, elbows her was to center stage, and literally scores of bit players land a laugh in a single scene, sometimes a single line.

Butterfly McQueen, in “Gone with the Wind” the same year, plays a housekeeper who has the temerity to comically bicker over how much she’ll be paid to do the cooking for Crystal when she wines and dines her married man.

The sets are MGM over-designed, the clothes jaw-dropping in a “Look what they’re wearing” way, some of them quite racy. And the saucy dialogue is matched with scenes that are vamped into something unlike anything else the movies were showing America in 1939.

Sylvia and Peggy’s regimen with a personal trainer of the day is archaic and sassy and comically vulgar in all the exercising contortions these women who dieted to stay thin manage to pretzel themselves into.

But “The Women” gives away its stagebound origins in a couple of important regards. It is deliriously, absurdly dialogue-centric. And it is groaningly long, with a sparkling, brisk opening followed by grinding middle acts leading into a lulu of a finale, which is somewhat spoiled by meandering on past its climax/drop the mike moment.

It’s still a laugh-out-loud screwball comedy from an era when everybody produced a few of those, but few did with the style, sass and panache of the classiest, richest film studio of them all, MGM.

Rating: Quite racy for its time, but still “approved”

Cast: Norma Shearer, Rosiland Russell, Paulette Goddard, Mary Boland, Phyllis Povah, Joan Fontaine and Joan Crawford, with Hedda Hopper and Butterfly McQueen.

Credits: Directed by George Cukor, scripted by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, based on the play by Clare Booth Luce. An MGM release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:13

Sad news from South Korea today.

Lee Sun-kyun, one of the standouts from the Oscar winning parable “Parasite,” has died.

He was 48, and the cause of death was suicide, as he was caught up in a drug abuse/drug trafficking investigation at the time.

His turn as “the mark” of the predatory poor family in “Parasite” was a highlight of a career that showed no signs of slowing down.

A good actor and a life tragically cut short.

Adam Driver isn’t miscast in the title role of “Ferrari,” Michael Mann’s trek through a month or so of 1957, a make-or-break year for the racing institution supported by a bespoke Italian performance sports car company.

Driver is tall enough to be Enzo, wears a pair of Raybans and a white-hair dye job well and has the necessary arrogance and droll elan in this, his second shot at playing an Italian-accented icon. He was in “House of Gucci,” remember.

But it’s a joyless turn in a script that misses any opportunity to attach heart, wit or higher meaning to the the “commandatore’s” pursuit of auto racing excellence.

“Jaguar,” the cold-blooded racer-turned-builder and tycoon purrs of one rival, “races only to sell cars. I sell cars only to RACE.”

You should hear what he says about Maserati.

“Racing,” he intones, is “our deadly passion, our terrible joy.” Ferrari had seen a lot of death when he races, and more as he guided his still-young (founded 1947) company through various racing seasons. In 1957, blood would cover the Ferrari badge.

In 1957, Enzo was facing bankruptcy, desperate for a white knight “partner” to invest in the company and allow him to remain in complete control. He was hiding a very open affair with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), with whom he has a ten year-old son who doesn’t bear his surname, with only his wife and corporate partner Laura, giving a brooding, woman-wronged fury by Oscar winner Penélope Cruz, in the dark about this betrayal.

His accounting books being what they are, with Ferrari’s race teams prepping for LeMans and every other competition he could get them in — Formula 1 included — it’s down to one big make-or-break dash across Italy, the epic Mille Miglia — to boost the brand image for that pitch to Ford, Fiat or whoever might want to “partner” with Ferrari.

The racing sequences here are next-level intimate, putting us in the car better than most any film that preceded this one. The crashes in that no-rollbar, pre-seatbelt era are horrific. The open wheel racecars were death traps, even the open-top two-seater road racing cars were nobody’s idea of forgiving and “safe.”

We follow the young Spanish driver Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone) as he tries to get Ferrari’s attention, then lands a driving job at the very moment another driver has a fatal accident. Enzo is that cold-blooded.

After de Portago lands the gig, he has to contend with Ferrari’s fury that “When I win, I can’t see my cars (in the newsreel and photo coverage) for starlet’s asses.”

That’s largely because de Portago was dating Mexican actress Linda Christian at the time.

Mann, the action icon who made “Miami Vice” a cultural phenomenon and “Heat” the benchmark of modern heist pictures, finds himself pinned-in by history with this “true story” film. He’s competing not just with the far more fun and dazzling “Ford v. Ferrari,” but with Steve McQueen’s “LeMans” and the movie against which the entire motorracing movie genre is measured against, 1966’s very similar “Grand Prix.”

One thing the best films on motorsport have in common is a great score, and there’s no sugar-coating the fact that Daniel Pemberton’s music isn’t on a par with the music of “Ford v. Ferrari” and can’t hold a candle or a quarter note to Maurice Jarre’s glorious march in John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix.”

The stand-out in the supporting cast is “McDreamy” actor-turned-sports-car-racer Patrick Dempsey, going white-haired as veteran Ferrari driver Piero Taruffi (51 at the time), one of the drivers Enzo respected most. But even he suffers from the plot’s narrow attention on Enzo’s affair, potential heir and the financial troubles we hear about but don’t really see.

The man is still sparing no expense to campaign his racing teams.

I have to say, this characterization, this soap operatic (infidelity, etc.) story, has too much in common with Ridley Scott’s period-perfect but empty Adam Driver star vehicle “House of Gucci.” There’s a lot of well-turned-out style, a bit of intimate bickering, and pasta is served.

But here, that comes between heart-stopping crashes, all of which really happened.

The racing/car-building pedigree of the picture plays as more “Lambourghini: The Man Behind the Legend,” a malnourished indie, than “Ford v. Ferrari.”

Money was spent. Much of it shows up on the screen. But that story…

Rating: R for some violent content/graphic images, sexual content and profanity

Cast: Adam Driver, Shailene Woodley, Gabriel Leone, Giuseppe Festinese, Patrick Dempsey, Derek Hill and Penélope Cruz

Credits: Michael Mann, scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin, based on a book by Brock Yates. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:04

Danville, a small Virginia city on the state line with North Carolina, is a place I’m very familiar with as it is near where I grew up. And one thing I’ve noticed about it, returning from Alaska, Florida, and everywhere in between that I’ve lived since, is how it has been mighty slow to let go of that “Last Capital of the Confederacy” label.

The gigantic Confederate battle flags you’d see at the first stoplight entering town are mostly gone, their “defiant” but angry and often openly racist small business owners dying off, although some normal sized stars and bars are still displayed, next to the Trump ones.

I think about that as my girlfriend and I are only white folks who chose to catch the afternoon showing of the best of the Christmas Day releases, “The Color Purple” musical. The Danville GCC Cinema is packed.

“The Color Purple” had the biggest Christmas Day opening in almost 15 years — a whopping $18 million and change. EVERYbody, or a good sized sample of “everybody,” is going to see it, and everybody should.

We ducked into “Ferrari” beforehand, and it’s no better than “The Boys in the Boat.” There’s a good turnout for “Aquaman 2,” which is crap, with the smart families taking the kids to other holiday month openings “Wonka” or “Migration.”

As I say, this “Purple” matinee the day after Christmas in Danville, Va. is packed. It’s appealing to a wide age range, nationwide. I saw great grandmothers and great grandkids in the showing I attended. “Packed,” but not with local white folks.

You move away for decades, and you figure the One Big Confederate Monument notion of a city has changed as old industries –textiles — close and more backward generations die off. Maybe their more enlightened children move away, to college and greener pastures..

It’s a lovely old city, with a river running through it. Eventually new folks move in with new ideas in tech, re-configuring ancient buildings as housing. Newcomers and struggling Danville native-born voted for a Caesar’s Casino, of all things, which is now open and bringing jobs and reopened motels, presumably accompanied by the gambling problems that always follow such detours into vice.

But I must say Danville, this is disappointingly narrow-minded movie-going. Maybe you want the sort of history Alice Walker was summarizing and referencing in her fiction, a much-honored best-selling novel, erased. It isn’t.

Broaden your horizons. And grow up.

All this does is explain your gullible desire to follow any rich con man in an adult diaper or slick hustler in a down vest who makes you afraid of people who don’t look, think or vote like you.

Oh not, not ANOTHER “pretend we’re getting married” rom-com, tricking the relatives so that somebody can fake his way to an inheritance.

A “bet” is sure to be involved. The lies will pile on top of lies, as more and more people are either drawn into the deceit, or are fooled by it. And of course, the liars will eventually find themselves falling in love “for reals.”

“Miles and Lies,” the clumsy retitling of the Mexican comedy “Tangos, Tequilas y algunas metiras, (Tangos, Tequilas and some lies)” is a remake of “Spanish Affair (“Ocho apellidos vascos,” “Eight Basque Surnames”).

But this formula — with assorted variations — crosses many borders and turns up in many films. A lot of them starred Kate Hudson and/or Matthew McConaughey, back in the day.

It begins with a pathological liar who lies her way into a fake relationship with a rich, spoiled grumpy drunk. The narrative slowly passes through the digestive system already pre-digested. It overstays its welcome because the poor director doesn’t know how to grab that “drop the mike” moment.

And then…Espera por ello, amigos. Just wait for it. Damned if this ungainly, lumbering Mexican-Argentinian rom-com romp doesn’t almost romp. And play.

There’s a buy-in with rom-coms, a “give yourself over to it” that kicks in when enough ingredients gell. For me, that begins to happen when our mismatched couple — played by Cassandra Sanchez Navarro and David Chocarro — lean into cultural stereotypes.

The story’s about a scrambling, lie-on-the-fly bartender named Lu (Navarro) who bets her business “partners” in the bar which she never ponied up her third of the cash for that she can make a tipsy hunk (Chocarro) “fall in love with me.”

Tati (Pilar Santacruz) and Fer (Ximena Sariñana) will forget about what Lu-short-for-Guadalupe owes them if she succeeds. If she fails, well… As Lu is an old hand at “faking it until you make it,’ as the gringos say” (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed into Englosh), staging shots for a social media life that in no way resembles reality, how hard can it be? No, the ensuing “one night stand” doesn’t count.

Most importantly, they’re all Mexican, and their bar is in Mexico. And the dude is Argentine. Uh oh.

You don’t have to know the tsunami of stereotypes that Latin Americans hold about each other’s cultures — what the Chileans think of Colombians, why everybody hates Cubans, etc. — to be tickled by where “Miles and Lies” goes. But knowing a few common digs at Argentines is a help.

When Lu desperately cheap-flights her way to Buenos Aires to stalk this stranger she only slept with, she is confronted by the “arrogant,” “argumentative,” futbol-obsessed, carnivorous tango-dancing vermouth drinkers that the rest of Latin America recognizes as Argentinian.

Diego — Lu learns — is a a spoiled, ill-tempered trust fund 30something wandering from business to business and passion to passion. He’s in a mood at the moment because his fiance bailed on their planned nuptials. As Diego was “rushing” to the altar to placate his rich mom, who expects him to grow up, you can see his problem. And when the chips are down, so can Lu.

The guy needs a pretty, agreeable woman with mad lie-on-the-fly skills. If only Lu could do something about her “accent.”

When we meet the mom (Soledad Silveyra), we get it. She’s a steamrolling bully who inherited a meat-packing business and who had to butcher and gut her way to credibility. God forbid poor vegetarian Lu has to eat out with this woman.

Fortunately, she has one confederate in her side of this hastily-tossed-together scheme with Diego. Tona (Emilio Guerrero) is a relative of one of her partners, an elderly Mexican actor in Argentina.

Can he do the accent, put on the haughty air, discuss Argentine futbol and the finer points of the tango in polite conversation with his future “in-laws?” Of course he’ll play Lu’s dad.

Characters stumble into Mexican slang and Argentines break into their favorite stadium songs, and nobody is wholly fooled-by or wholly accepting of anybody else.

The “buy in” here is the great chemistry between Navarro and Chocarro. We believe her as a poseur and him as an unfocused, dreamy trust fund bro. Sileveyra and Guerrero are largely the icing on the cake.

Director Celso Garcia and screenwriters by Marco Lagarde and Patricio Vega, adapting the 2014 comedy this is based on, leave entirely too many laughs on the table for my taste. You’ve got a theatrical old Mexican actor “playing” Argentine. You’ve got a Mexican woman trying to “pass.”

And you’ve got Argentine arrogance, ready-made to go on display.

Playing this all more broadly, loudly and briskly would have been a BIG help. This is a 95 minute comedy trapped in a 115 minute movie. There aren’t really enough gags to make the 95 minute version pay off, either.

But a couple of scenes just kill. The eating-out gag reminded me of every Argentinian restaurant I’ve ever eaten in — meat, meat, meat. The only thing in the joints not dripping with blood was your napkin, and that was a temporary state.

A touristy “history of the tango” stage show sets up a lovely bit of camp, and a Big Romantic Moment. There are a couple of those, with maybe one of them working.

This almost comes off. If Garcia had the sense to end “Miles” on a lovely mariachi moment, and made that moment come 15 minutes sooner and hit his big jokes harder, all involved would have had a winner on their hands.

Rating: TV-16, sexual situations, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Cassandra Sanchez Navarro, David Chocarro, Soledad Silveyra, Emilio Guerrero, Ximena Sariñana and Paulina Patterson

Credits: Directed by Celso Garcia, scripted by Marco Lagarde and Patricio Vega, based on the film “Spanish Affair/”Ocho apellidos vascos.” A Sony International release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:54

Ernest Hemingway was famously grumpy about film adaptations of his novels, and the mere brevity of the first screen version of “A Farewell to Arms” must have raised his ire.

But Frank Borzage, the first two-time Best Director Oscar winner, gives us an Expressionist montage for the ages in the film’s third act, five solid minutes of Lt. Frederic Henry’s AWOL escape through the northern Italian combat zone.

The newly-restored film serves up smoke and fog, wounded men in close-up and silhouette stumbling towards through the dark towards the rear, armored cars and wrecked ambulances and bodies and stylized horrors, air raids and the like. This black and white nightmare has a chilling immediacy and it adds credibility and an artistic touch to what feels, from the very start, like one of the most adult, uncluttered and spare Hemingway adaptations.

Borzage, an actor’s director who did “Bad Girl,” “Seventh Heaven,” the terrific anti-Nazi thriller “The Mortal Storm” and the jolly stars entertaining the troops “Stage Door Canteen,” doesn’t do much to keep the incongruous pairing of the towering Gary Cooper with the petite, 15 inches shorter Helen Hayes from looking like a sight gag in a couple of walking and talking scenes.

But we don’t mind because Borzage and the screenwriters give us a streamlined plot that zeroes in on the characters. The film was also based on an uncredited 1930 stage adaptation that narrowed the tale’s focus. Building on that, Borzage lets the cast give this romance set against the epic tableaux of war an intimacy that allows Cooper and Hayes to just break your heart.

The story has a pre-Production Code edge to it, with pregnancy out of wedlock, an English nurse (Hayes) who “gets in trouble” thanks to a handsome young American ambulance officer (Cooper) who impulsively seduces her, impulsively tells her he loves her, impulsively turns his ambulance around on the way to the Front to come back to reassure her it wasn’t just a “conquest,” and impulsively goes AWOL from a combat zone to track her down after she’s gone to Switzerland to have their baby.

There’s a live-for-the-moment immediacy and resignation to the story and the performances that gets at the fatalism of life and love in a war, where promises that “I’ll never get hurt” ring hollow, where Catherine’s jaded friend Fergy (Mary Philips) has a better grasp of what’s happening here, this nurse’s creed that “we must bring solace to the men who fight” that’s perhaps gotten out of hand.

“You’ll never get married. Fight or die, that’s what people do” in places like this.

Taking its inspiration from Hemingway’s own experiences driving ambulances in the Italian/Austrian campaign, the film gives us just enough combat sequences — barrages and bombardments, hospitals, advances and retreats — to be credible. The story’s really about a young man’s first real love and a (slightly) older woman’s touching, reluctant acceptance of that at face value, because of the combat crucible this romance comes to life in.

Hayes makes us believe Catherine’s leeriness of Lt. Henry, her sad love-in-wartime recognition of what’s happening and her grim embrace of this man and this affair, because losing a fiance at the Somme taught her that life is as impermanent as it gets in war.

Cooper, very young (just a year younger than Hayes) and not yet settled into his relaxed, folky persona or the stoic hero he became in his 40s, was never more vulnerable than he comes off here. The smitten earnestness feels real, the irresponsibility that has him abandon his duty seems almost heroice.

Adolphe Menjou, who’d make his greatest mark on screen in another World War I film, Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” twenty-five years later, plays Capitano Rinaldo, a rakish Italian surgeon who loves having the American along as his wingman, comically calling himself “your best friend and your war brother” right up to the moment Henry steals the fetching Catherine away from him.

Rinaldi’s reaction to their love affair is masked in nobility, looking out for his cannot-afford-to-be-distracted “war brother,” but has a sinister romantic sabotage feel.

The film’s simplified plot and cast of characters, coupled with all the information, symbolism and emotion Borzage gets across in that epic combat zone montage allowed the director to manage something few other filmmakers did — make a movie as spare, stark and moving as Hemingway’s prose, not so much the definitive “A Farewell to Arms” as a movie that “gets” the novel and delivers it without a single minute of screen clutter getting in the way.

Rating: unrated, fairly adult for its time

Cast: Gary Cooper, Helen Hayes, Mary Philips, Jack La Rue and Adolfe Menjou

Credits: Directed by Frank Borzage, scripted by Benjamin Glazer and Oliver H.P. Garrett, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway. A Paramount release on Roku, Tubi, Plex, etc.

Running time: 1:28