Movie Nation

America’s penchant for conspiracy theories can be traced back to the nation’s founding. And as recent events confirm, our thirst for embracing ideas that unseen forces and assorted nefarious boogeymen are pulling the political strings and killing those who might change the status quo like the Kennedys or those who know too much like Jeffrey Epstein remain unquenched.

Hollywood, like America, took a few years to process the too-deadly-to-seem random political assassinations of the 1960s.

Sinister, unseen “secret programs” and megalomaniacal tycoons or bureaucrats turned up in thriller after thriller in one of the cinema’s greatest decades, the ’70s. From “The Conversation” to “Winter Kills,” with “The Anderson Tapes,” “Marathon Man,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Odessa File” just a few of the more famous examples, the movies set out to make us paranoid in “The Me Decade.”

When the best conspiracy picture of them all, “All the President’s Men,” arrived and put an exclamation point on this subgenre, we were excused for that unsettling feeling that unseen forces were manipulating our future. Because in that true story, they were.

“The Parallax View” (1974) isn’t the only political picture Hollywood icon Warren Beatty ever tackled. But it’s the most despairing.

A “somebody is recruiting assassins and patsies” tale, it arrived just as Watergate was consuming the country and the Nixon Administration, the scandal’s nefarious perpetrators. The film didn’t make much of a splash, then. But it’s fascinating to dive into it now, after all that’s changed and hasn’t changed in 50 years.

A Seattle political appearance at the famed Space Needle ends with a sitting senator murdered in front of a crowd of admirers and press in an enclosed, high-rise location from which there’s no escape. The alleged shooter, a waiter, doesn’t escape. Chased, this “lone gunman” falls to his death.

Years later, after a “commission” has investigated and settled on yet another “lone nut/gunman” conclusion, a TV reporter present (Paula Prentiss, excellent) shows up, frantic, at the house of her ex-boyfriend, newspaper reporter Joseph Frady (Beatty).

Both of them were there “that day.” But Frady dismisses her paranoia over the number of people who “witnessed” that shooting who have died in the three years since.

“Whoever killed them will try to kill me!”

When she turns up dead, as she expected but he wrote off to her troubled psyche, Frady starts poking around where she wanted him to look, seeking that campaign manager (William Daniels) she was sure had his suspicions.

An attempt on Frady’s own life gets his attention, and brochures and paperwork from this “Parallax” corporation gives him a lead. If only his too-understanding editor (Hume Cronyn) would pay him to keep digging.

“You go expecting these things to happen,” the skeptical Bill notes of Frady’s agenda-driven style, “and they do.”

It’s only after surviving another murder attempt that Frady has the freedom to change his identity and see if he can get closer to this mysterious firm and those who do its dirty business.

Director Alan J. Pakula makes this thriller his warm-up to the details-must-be-accurate adaptation of “All the President’s Men.” “Parallax” is a picture of puzzle pieces, which only Frady seems to have in his head. He’s not sure about those pieces, and not sharing everything he knows.

He doesn’t tell his editor a corrupt sheriff tried to murder him. He never fills anybody in on all he suspects. Frady is ambitious, and sure he’ll be able to break this story all alone.

“I’m dead, Bill,” he says after an attempt on his life allegedly succeeded. “I just want to stay that way for awhile.”

“Parallax” becomes a picture of episodes, one that demands attention and which Pakula guarantees by setting, for instance, a “meet” with an ex-FBI agent (Kenneth Mars) on the kiddie train at an amusement park. A couple of the killings are on camera, and if they’re not shocking now, they must have been then.

The signature image of this picture, the one that sticks with you, is of Frady/Beatty getting a sample of “Clockwork Orange” style “brainwashing” via image-and-word associations projected in a cavernous room as he sits in a comfy chair.

Beatty plays this guy as amoral and guilt free. Reviews that suggest “guilt” is his reason for starting to dig into this story are imposing something on the performance that Beatty doesn’t play.

But there are intriguing cultural artifacts — curiosities of the time — that stand out today. Frady tracks a mysterious piece of luggage onto a plane. A bomb? He boards, without clearing security because you could PAY the stewardess for the flight on BOARD the plane.

Airport security and security around the various senators and senate candidates is laughably lax by today’s standards. That works against the film because even back then this had to seem “off.” The last big killing is almost surreal in the under-reaction of one and all.

That’s how Parallax wants it.

Like all good clockwork thrillers, this one sets up problems and then works the problems. Pakula and Beatty, working from a script by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. (Beatty pal and “Chinatown” genius Robert Towne had an uncredited hand in it), reduce the Loren Singer source novel to a string of dilemmas and narrow escapes.

Frady has to hold his own in a fight with a homophobic deputy, get away in a car chase, learn how to be a convincing sociopath from an academic psychologist (Anthony Zerbe, terrific as always) who plays the video game “Pong” with a chimp he’s trained and figure out how to get off an airplane that he’s pretty sure has a bomb on it.

Unlike modern thrillers, this journalist isn’t just after the story. He has a conscience and sees the need to save innocent lives. He uses simple methods to throw a monkey wrench into this “Parallax” outfit’s planned murders.

Having just watched yet another thriller about an ex “special” agent performing almost superhuman feats of cunning, strength and spycraft (“The Beekeeper”), it’s nice to remember the ’70s, when a desk jockey (Robert Redford) might have to learn survival skills on the fly when professional evil-doers with government badges and guns target him in “Three Days of the Condor,” or a lone reporter has to live by his wits when confronted with evidence of organized political killings as he runs afoul of those Parallax alumni who pull the triggers.

In leaving out remedial pauses for explanation, that big scene where the Hero lays it all out for us, “The Parallax View” frustrates as much now as it must have in 1974. Even a close reading leaves one with questions and “What ifs,” then and now.

But nobody in 1974 had a distracting, 5G digital form of crack at their disposal when watching it.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Warren Beatty, Paula Prentiss, Hume Cronyn, Jim Davis, Kenneth Mars,

Credits: Directed by Alan Pakula, scripted by David Giler and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., based on the novel by Loren Singer. A Paramount release on Amazon, Netflix etc.

Running time: 1:41

“Reflect” is a “find yourself” odyssey about five 30ish Angelinas who travel to Sedona, Arizona, for a spiritual/self-actualizing “obstacle course” weekend in a place the Tarot-card-reades/Astrology-believer/crystal-consultants of Flakey America consider a spiritual vortex.

Writer-director-star Dana Kippel might be exploring the psychic scars of the mother-daughter bond (she herself is adopted) via the characters and their trippy encounters and hallucinations on this vision quest.

She might be serving up a parable of emotional winners and losers and how losers can discover what is holding them back by exploring mother-daughter trauma, and connecting with something greater than themselves in a literal “Game of Life.”

Or “Reflect” might be a parody of everything described above and the sort of indulgent, ditzy narcissists who believe in this multi-layered nonsense.

A hint about that last possibility is that for all the over-the-top characters and bitchy “girl” on girl bickering amongst the five female friends — Kippel, and Grace Patterson, Ariana Brown, Jadelyn Breier and Marissa Patterson — very little that happens here could be objectively described as “funny.

Even the flashes of rank amateruism in some of the acting among the loopy “guides” who run this retreat (Joe Filippone, Campbell Crates), the wiccans/Satanists (Dash Katz, Maya Knell, etc) they encounter, the father-son “Game of Life” “show” hosts (Robert Enriquez and Ryan Jack Connell) who appear to be manipulating events and experiences in these self-discover “courses,” are never more than broad, mirth-free cartoons, not amusing or realistic three or even two dimensional characters.

The “insights” are trite, the characters thinly-sketched irritants and the indulgent, self-absorbed “journey” story makes too little sense to be easy to “trip” through. Not that there’s any motivation at all for the viewer to make that effort.

But perhaps the filmmaker got more out of the experience than the viewer was ever meant to. At least she and her cast and crew got to spend time in some of the loveliest desert scenery in North America.

Rating: unrated, profanity, suggestions of hallucinogenics

Cast: Dana Kippel, Grace Patterson, Ariana Brown, Jadelyn Breier, Marissa Patterson, Joe Filippone, Robert Enriquez, Dash Katz, Campbell Crates and Ryan Jack Connell.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dana Kippel. A Cranked Up release.

Running time: 1:24

Tina Fey gets to turn the Broadway musical based on her generation-defining teen comedy onto the screen in a January release.

This looks repetitive — same basic plot, no Lindsay Lohan/Rachel McAdams, et al. — but fun.

Jon Hamm, Jenna Fischeer, Busy Philips and and Tim Meadows join Tina F among the adults in this Friday release.

The teens — mean or otherwise — include Reneé Rapp, Avantika, Bebe Wood and Angourie Rice.

We don’t shave for J. Stay movies, right mate?

Unless it’s our scalp.

We confine the chatter to a low Cockney growl.

We take our tea with honey with because that’s the way Jason Statham LIKES IT and “it’s flammable,” or so we hear.

And we wear the white-soled sneakers, because they make the blood stand out better.

Director David Oryan and screenwriters Isaac Fahed and Doris Saba reached for sentimental, low-hanging fruit in their Lebanese childbirth dramedy “C-Section.” And every now and then, they got their hands on a sweet fig or a tart tangerine.

But this clash of classes and family cultures chomps at the bit to be a romp, a loud and fractious farce that we feel is about to take over, here and there, but never does.

Apparently the phrase “Maratan ‘ukhraa! ‘Asraeu!” isn’t common currency among Lebanese filmakers. That Hollywood direction common on comedy sets, “Again! Faster!” never crosses anyone’s mind? Not even in French (“Encore! Plus rapide!”)?

This is a gentle, downright sweet at times story of class and cultural divides showing up in a tony private hospital, divides bridged by the shared ordeal of childbirth and the commitment to give one’s children a better life than the one you have.

Awww.

Any edge the story begins with is rubbed off, and the unchallenging plot works out in such predictable ways that film’s dragging pace becomes a terminal failing.

The Dorians, Raya (Pamela El Kik) and Carl (Chadi Haddad) show up at Capital Boutique Hospital by appointment. They leave the car with the valet, tip the doorman and make their way to reservations, where their birth “suite” is ready, they’re told (in French and Arabic).

All is quiet, calm and customer friendly, despite developer Carl’s constant contractor issues, quietly argued-out by by phone.

Sonia (Rola Beksmati) and Sabeh (Ramy Atallah) blow in in a sea of wails, shouts and threats in Arabic. She is in labor, and he’s in a panic.

No, they don’t have a “reservation.” No, their doctor is back in the village. No, they don’t have insurance. Or a deposit. No, you CANNOT transport her to the “hospital on the hill.”

Sabeh creates chaos, shouts at the staff and puts the Dorians on the spot about “letting (Sonia) go first.”

And hell, he’s not even her husband. When burly, brutish carpenter Massad (Ammar Shalak) shows up, the REAL shouting and bullying begins.

What kind of hospital IS this? “A private one,” the older administrator, Mr. Vahe (Gabriel Yammine) tells them all in his calmest indoor voice.

They want to haggle, he wants to avoid a shaming scandal in the media. But with every concession, “hours” to come up with a deposit, “changing hospitals” right after the birth, etc., Massad raises his voice, ups the threat level and entitles his way into special treatment.

When his whole family shows up to celebrate the blessed event as his many impositions and demands wash over on the Dorians, things are sure to escalate. Which they do.

Shalak, Beksmati, Atallah and Yammine are the players here who “get” comedy, in a Western sense, and play their parts big and loud and as fast as they can get away with. While the sentimental scenes play to the rest of the cast’s strengths, they stop the movie cold.

A cute touch — having Vahe, the administrator who can’t remember Massad’s name and whom Massad refers to simply as “The Armenian” is a Siri novice and a big fan of the Franco-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour. Arabic, American or French, who doesn’t love Aznavour?

The narrative’s sympathies lie with Massad, but the film tests that by making him a boorish bully who can’t be reasoned with or forced to face the consequences of his many liberties and threats. He comes off as a working poor, uncouth and entitled jerk, but maybe that’s just me being brainwashed by America’s own two-tiered health care system.

“C-Section” is rarely surprising, but at least its affable in all the too-predictable ways. If only director Oryan had picked up on what was actually working and pressed for that energy level and pace throughout.

But to do that, you’ve got to precede every “ACTION!” with an “Encore! PLUS RAPIDE!”

Rating: TV-14, violence, smoking

Cast: Ammar Shalak, Pamela El Kik, Rola Beksmati, Chadi Haddad, Ramy Atallah and Gabriel Yammine

Credits: Directed by David Oryan, scripted by Isaac Fahed and Doris Saba. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

The latest film from the Oscar-winning writer of “Dead Poet’s Society” is a sordid, torpid tale of violence and revenge set against the pulse-pounding (cough cough) sport of keno-pool, that oddball boardgame variation of billiards.

“Double Down South” is a languid, drawling bore that’s about as interesting as the games that are its centerpiece. In the 1998 “present” of this picture, keno is explained and explained, and games unfold and we see results, and hear more explanations.

Damned if we don’t know less about this arcane game at the end than we do the first time our lithe, tight-tank-topped heroine (Lili Simmons) shows up at an antebellum mansion gone to seed and turned into a diner and pool hall and asks to be taught the sport.

“Holy s–t! That’s a double AND a Montgomery!”

The hell you say?

Diana (Simmons) rolls up to Nick’s place in a rusty pickup, her own pool cue in hand. She’s come to “the keno capital of the world,” BFE Georgia, to pick up keno from the pot-bellied, Confederate-flag fetishizing locals.

Diana is a born distraction, with her highlights, tattoos and belly button ring.

“You come to shoot pool?” One-eyed “Little Nick” (Igby Rigney) wants to know

“Didn’t come to adopt a puppy,” she purrs. Yeah, she’s a tough-one.

But is she tough enough to hang with the veteran players, and with Nick-the-owner, given a venomous, lecherous edge by horror movie/biker series (“Sons of Anarchy”) icon Kim Coates? He’s on her like racism on a redneck, because he sees dollars in the dish that played her first-ever keno in his joint.

“I just kind of lost my ass out there,” she protests.

“Still quite the ass.”

She will be “schooled” in this pool-hustle variation by Little Nick, Nick and Old Nick (veteran character actor Tom Bower), the owner who passed this set-designed-gone-to-seed mansion/pool parlor on to middle-aged Nick.

That Nick is scary. That Nick carries a bottom half of a pool cue he uses to beat customers, foes and proteges who get out of line. That Nick lost his fingers recently because of some deal with went South (“further” South). And that Nick sees this “distraction” as an “attraction” for his business.

Players in this “man’s game,” a billiards variation that is “all finesse,” will flock to Nick’s when they hear about Diana and decide to match up against this Southern fried sexpot in the flesh. Or so Nick thinks.

Writer-director Tom Schulman, who counts “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” “Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag” and the epic Eddie Murphy bomb “Holy Man” among his scripts, hasn’t had many credits in this millenium. He scripted the badly-reviewed “Anatomy of Hope” TV movie for J.J. Abrams, and wrote the flop that drove Gene Hackman into retirement — “Welcome to Mooseport.”

This isn’t anybody’s idea of a comeback. He’s lost whatever he knew about “pace” and seems mostly content to collect cliches to adorn this leaden, formulaic pool hustle movie with, and share the ever-changing “rules” on how one bets on keno.

Racist, sexist Nick has secrets Diana must learn. Little Nick is the one who passes them on. But Little Nick has his own story to tell — how he ended up with one eye.

Simmons, a veteran of series TV (“True Detective,” “Westworld,” “Ray Donovan” and she was Catwoman in “Gotham”) doesn’t embarass herself here, despite playing a character both nakedly obvious and badly underwritten.

Coates always gives fair value, with that trademark dyed mop of curls and goatee signaling the menace he’s often called on to portray.

“DROP the psychoanalysis of the psycho,” he says, as everybody tries to fill Diana in on one S&M foe she faces.

Justin Marcel McManus plays Nick’s kryptonite, Beaumont DuBinion, a Black man who is better at this arcane game than Nick. But is he better than Diana, now that Nick’s lost a lot of fingers?

One big problem here is the simple fact that the game Schulman built this around isn’t interesting or exciting on the screen. Keno, as we hear, isn’t a “power” game with billaird cues and balls. So there’s no dramatic “CLACK” to the break, no way to whiz-bang photogragh and edit the dull-but-difficult shots, the putt-putt/bingo style put-the-ball-in-the-big-right-hole nature of it all.

The games are staged, blocked, scripted and “called” in ways guaranteed to rob the narrative of its “Why should we care?” requirement. Curling has more thrills.

That’s not the only reason “Double Down South” crawls along, 70 minutes of story sloppily packaged in a 124 minute movie. But it’s a big one.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Lili Simmons, Kim Coates, Igby Rigney, Justin Marcel McManus, Rebecca Lines and Tom Bower.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tom Schulman. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 2:04

“Foe,” based on a novel by Iain Reid, is a dreamy and forlorn science fiction parable about the evolving nature of personality, the imperamence of relationships and the limits of science and technology.

Set in a very near climate changed future (2063) in the middle of the Next Dust Bowl, it’s basically a three character play about the conflicts that arise as an even more unpleasant future than their unsustainable present is faced.

Those in charge have determined “It’s time to move on” and the contrary voices that we hear now and are still protesting in that future “then” have been apparently shouted down.

“Why would you spend money ‘up there’ instead of fixing things down here?”

A stranger rolls up to a remote, arid and weathered farm homestead in the Breadbasket of the World, America’s Midwest.

The trees have all died, save for one that “Hen” (Henrietta) waters as she wonders “What if the rain never comes?”

Hen, played by Saoirse Ronan, gets by working as a waitress in one of the vast swaths of America that were already emptying-out before the Earth’s ecology reached its tipping point.

At least she has Junior (Paul Mescal), her husband, the heir to this “fifth generation” farm. But he’s not farming. He works in the gigantic chicken-raising and processing silos down the road.

He’s a bit limited, short-tempered, instinctively mistrusting and ready to greet any unexpected knock at the door with his shotgun. Not that Hen lets him keep it loaded.

“I just don’t want to catch anything” suggests that they’re still cautious after the latest pandemic.

Then Terrance (Aaron Pierre) comes in, an all-knowing bureaucrat who addresses them by name, and once he’s inside, is full of questions, all of them leading to a proposition.

He’s the one that prods them with “It’s time to move on.” His offer, from the higher ups (allegedly) is that they’ve been “selected” for Outermore space station — “a new planet” project. It will be the final destination for humanity, one last move at the end of decades of the “climate migration” that has so roiled Planet Earth.

But it turns out only Junior has been “selected,” owing to some “specific skills” Terrance insists he has. As the thoughtful, intellectually-curious piano-playing Hen is plainly the brains in this house, Hen and the audience may wonder about that.

It’s just that Terrance is gently insistent, claiming their spare bedroom as he moves in to “test” and train and prepare the mercurial Junior, who veers between being flattered and being furious.

“Are you THREATENING us?”

Australian director Garth Davis earned the viewing audience’s benefit of the doubt with his very fine and emotional “Lion,” so we should be willing to mull over the various sets of “Foes” in this allegory — Hen and Junior vs. Terrance, humanity vs. The Earth, science vs science-doubting “Middle America” and Hen vs. Junior, as he is now, as he was then and as he might be forever into the future.

Because the film opens by defining this New Age’s “human substitutes,” “conscious” thinking artificial intelligence. As we suspect, Terrance isn’t who he seems and his mission isn’t what he says, although it still has a lot to do with Junior.

The film’s science fiction trappings — chicken “processing” taken to its logical “efficiency, climate change and migration computer-modeled out, The State’s new tech for control and new strategy for survival — are interesting, just not novel enough to feel fresh and engaging.

“Foe” bears the telltale signs of a “Twilight Zone” episode — complete with jolting “twists” — that got out of hand and went on for two hours, despite having 45 minutes to an hour’s worth of ideas.

Pitched in the same, flat, abandon-hope tone, doling out information necessary to simply understanding what the hell is going on in the most grudging ways, “Foe” bores the viewer to tears on the long march towards getting to its point. Points.

Henrietta can sum it up for us, the nature of the relationship of whatever “Junior” she lives with now vs the one she married and the Junior who may be somehow returned to her.

What’s missing is “affection,” “possibilities” and “curiosity” that come with new love, the hope of a better future, of love-making that leads to children, building their lives and a family.

Novelist Reid, who co-wrote the script with Davis, may be talking directly to a generation that across continents and cultures is abandoning hope and institutions like marriage, life goals like raising children, and embracing nihilism and the short term indulgences of narcissism thanks to systemic income redistribution via tax laws written to benefit the few, almost none of them young.

And the movie they wrap messages like this and rising fury over a rigged, oligarchical system that enables the not-smarter-than-us super rich to spend their billions “up there instead of fixing things down here” is a package so downbeat, dreary and hopeless that this message falls on deaf ears and sleepy eyes.

Rating: R, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal and Aaron Pierre.

Credits: Directed by Garth Davis, scripted by Iain Reed and Garth Davis, based on Reid’s novel. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:51

A little righteous payback for online predators, served up by our fave bald Brit bouncer?

Pints all around, mate.

“The Beekeeper” opens Thursday night, review posts Wednesday afternoon.

It’s taken a lot of intestinal fortitude to remain a Nic Cage Completist over the years.

An Oscar winner for “Leaving Las Vegas,” great in films all over the spectrum — from “Raising Arizona” and “Peggy Sue Got Married” to “Con Air” and “Face/Off” and scores of titles in between, you had to be a bit of a masochist to track down “Bangkok Dangerous” or “Jiu Jitsu” and their ilk.

I almost always do, because even the titles between “National Treasure” movies, even the indies that aren’t “Joe” or “Pig” are made interesting by his presence.

I’ve interviewed Nicolas Cage several times over the years, and something he said during a chat in the middle of a run of not-quite-firing A-pictures (“Lord of War,” “Weatherman,” “Ghost Rider”) that eventually pushed him into B movies stuck with me.

He worked, he said, to “get out of the house and stay out of my head.” Making movies didn’t just settle tax bills and keep him solvent. He’d work through failed marriages. He’d take on other characters to distract himself from a career that seemed to wane more than wax, and whatever demons ate at him.

All the fanboy love over the decades — “Vampire’s Kiss” (in which he famously ate a roach on camera) and “Face/Off” made him a “legend” in convention-goer terms, “Kick Ass” and “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” chiseled that in stone — couldn’t make him forget whatever was eating him in his most troubled times.

You’ve got to respect that. That’s the classic, if not exactly healthy way an American man copes — escape to work.

“Pig” brought him back, and even though he’s still sneaking bad Bs onto his resume, we all sleep a little better at night knowing ol’Nic is out there, getting a dirty job done — beloved and ridiculed, and always in on the joke.

Happy birthday.

What a delightful little French-flavored English bon bon this is.

“Sleeping Car to Trieste” may be a corny, old-fashioned “Orient Express” rail-bound thriller, peppered with intrigues both deadly and quaintly silly. But by the time this sleeper hits the third act, it’s chortling along, leaving us unprepared for the laughs and a shocking jolt as a punchline.

The formula was already so tried and true by 1948 that viewers then and now don’t need to know it’s a remake of “Rome Express” (1932) to know how this goes. But when it gets up to speed, my how it “goes.”

A cunning, socially-connected “agent” of some sort (Albert Lieven) breaks into an embassy in Paris, steals a book and shoots a man who sees him do it. It’s only when we meet Zurta’s confederate Valya (Jean Kent) that we realize “the information in that book” “means revolution,” should it get out.

But they are double-crossed by a middle man, Karl (Alan Wheatley), who absconds with the book and onto the Orient Express, bound for Zagred and someone who pay a higher price for this book, “revolution” be damned.

There’s nothing for it but for the duo to board the train themselves, hunt him down and retrieve “the book.”

Married lawyer George (Derrick De Marney) is also traveling, with Joan (Rona Anderson), who is not his wife, something they go to extremes to conceal. That problem is made far more difficult when George’s boorish old classmate Tom (oft-employed character actor David Tomlinson) turns up.

There are sisters trying to avoid “declaring” purchases to customs, availing themselves of a skirt-chasing American GI (Bonar Colleano) to hide their contraband, who finds himself sharing a berth with a bird-watching bore (Michael Elvin).

By coincidence, a famous florid, solicitous French policeman (Paul Dupuis of “Passport to Pimlico”) is taking this trip as well. And then a famous political scientist and writer (the venerable Finlay Currie) checks in, with his secretary (Hugh Burden).

That’s a full complement for chef Poirier (Coco Aslan) to feed. If only this English blowhard (David Hutcheson) wasn’t job-shadowing him for the trip.

The first acts are all about Karl, aka “Poole” trying to get a berth all to himself and avoid being seen, George and Joan trying to share a berth despite Tom’s insensate berth-blocking and our agents Vayla and Zurta trying to get their hands on Karl, “the book,” or both.

Veteran director John Paddy Carstairs, the son of an actor, brother of a producer and director of comedies and thrillers with a comic touch (“Trouble in Store”) all the way into the TV era (“The Saint”) ensures that this train gets out of the station in a timely manner, and that the lighter touches all land.

The pompous Brits are set against the eye-rolling French at every turn, especially in the well-mannered put-downs of Detective Inspector Jolif.

“Tell me, can an Englishman even ‘sin’ with honesty?”

Dupuis is a stand-out in the cast, with Tomlinson at his irritating best and Currie harrumphing his way through his scenes.

The infidelity business isn’t played for laughs, and even the changing mores haven’t added amusement to that part of the story. There’s a laugh or two in American actor Colleano’s embodiment of British notions of every Yank “over there” during the war and after it — over-sexed and gauche.

“Really mee-shurrrr,” a French lass has to tell him. “I don’WAN to be ‘leeberated’ any more!”

‘Sleeping Car to Trieste” is light entertainment, nothing more. But even if the action scenes (fights) lack a lot, even if it takes a while to get up to speed, the production design, lovely matte painting backdrops, card-game standoffs and the like make this trip back to an era, a place and the sorts of movies that came out of it worth your time.

Rating: approved

Cast: Jean Kent, Albert Lieven, Paul Dupuis, Finlay Currie, David Tomlinson, Rona Anderson, Derrick De Marney, Bonar Colleano and Grégoire Aslan

Credits: Directed by John Paddy Carstairs, scripted by Allan MacKinnon, based the Clifford Grey script to “Rome Express.” A Two Cities/J. Arthur Rank release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:35