Movie Nation

A modern day “mission gone wrong” combat thriller, also starring Milo Ventigmilia and Luke Hemsworth, this one makes it to screens right around Valentine’s Day.

Looks generic, and feels Aussie. Let’s see what we see.

This one really closes the deal, right? Might even erase memories of David Lynch’s more twisted and truncated “Dune.”

What a curiosity Bogart’s “Sirocco” is, a “bizarro” “Casablanca” that mirrors Humphrey Bogart’s definitive romantic lead performance, but sees this American meddling in the Middle East as an amoral cad, precisely the way noble cafe owner Rick Blaine described himself in covering up his past and not “getting involved” back at the Cafe Americain.

It’s so much like “Casablanca” that it could be a prequel to it — it’s set in 1925 Damascus, not Occupied Morocco on the cusp of Pearl Harbor — or a sequel, with an older, even more jaded Rick smoking through his bitter years, running guns to the Arab revolutionaries in French colonial Syria.

“Conspicuously lacking in charm,” a critic of the day called it.

But German-expat Curtis Bernhardt directed it and “All the King’s Men” and “A Lonely Place (later “From Here to Eternity” and “Bonnie and Clyde”) cinematographer Burnett Guffrey bathed the casbah, clubs and catacombs of Damascus in “Third Man” gloom and shadows.

And the cast, the mere fact that Bogart is in it just before his “African Queen” triumph, make this not-quite-a-classic worth a look.

After “The Great War,” the European Powers and Japan gobbled up German colonies and divvied up the former Ottoman Empire. That’s how France came to control Lebanon and Syria, with its ancient capital of Damascus not just a destination of the prophet Paul, but of Lawrence of Arabia.

But the Arabs who fought alongside Lawrence to free themselves from Turkish domination weren’t having this “mandate.” They fought it.

Everett Sloane of “Citizen Kane” plays Gen. LaSalle, the embattled officer in charge, struggling to keep the city under curfew — restricting goods from getting in or out, including guns.

Lee J. Cobb is Col Feroud, his intelligence chief, who summons the major traders — above and below board — to his office for a little persuasion. That’s how we meet such “businessmen” as Balukjiaan (a very young Zero Mostel) and this name-changed American, Harry Smith, a doughboy who went AWOL, went wrong and went underground after The Great War.

Harry (Bogart) is “an American in Damascus with no morals, no political commitments,” Feroud notes. Harry won’t give him any trouble.

But there’s this dame, see? Feroud’s “girl” (Märta Torén) was brought here from Cairo with him, and we’d assume she’s his wife, except well, they are French. Violette wants out, and in the worst way. Harry, being a chancer, spies that in an instant.

“How can a man so ugly be so handsome,” Miss Half his Age wants to know?

When he “saves” her after a terror bombing at the hot club in town, Moulin Rouge, she remembers. And he takes liberties. He’ll get her and himself out, no matter what her “ceasefire” preaching, high-minded negotiator, woman-slapping beau says.

“I’ll KILL you if you try to leave me!”

Harry finds himself making bribes, dodging the French and scrambling underground, trying to play all the angles between the revolutionary Emir (Onslow Stevens) and those “murdering” French.

Bogart had just turned 52 when the film came out and he and his Santana production company produced “Sirocco.” As the new biography “Bogie & Bacall” lays out, he was straddling the tail end of his romantic lead years, trying to cash in before character leads (“Treasure of the Sierra Madre” was a triumph a couple of years before) were all that was left to him.

He needed an easy hit, but no matter how redolent of “Casablanca” this was, this wasn’t it.

With every cigarette, every time he dons a trench coat, every exchange with shifty characters in fezes, Bogart leaned into what was already his iconic image — shaped by “Casablanca.”

The whole playing against Rick turn of the plot remains fascinating. Rick is noble, sacrificing love for doing the right thing. Harry is Rick’s cynicism cut loose, his opportunism mirroring America’s in the Korean years of the Cold War. He’ll do what he pleases, whatever is expedient. He’s take the Frenchman’s “girl” in a heartbeat, cash in when he can and flee, leaving the Middle East a bigger mess than he found it.

I got a kick out of Mostel’s kvetching and kvelling his way out of a jam, of reliable Greek-American character actor Nick Dennis as Harry’s rough and tumble partner and out of soon-to-be-veteran character actor Jeff Corey (“True Grit” decades later) showing up as an Arab middle man pricing out safe passage for Harry and “the girl.”

Yuma, Arizona, and some convincing Columbia Pictures soundstage “Roman catacombs” give the picture a whiff of authenticity, but only a whiff.

The film’s darkness and fence-straddling cynicism make it an interesting companion piece to “Casablanca,” whose villains were clear cut, whose desperation was palpable and whose romance was one for the ages. A lighter touch may have been called for here. But nobody involved, especially not Bogart, just past his peak and starting to notice it, was in the mood.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lee J. Cobb, Märta Torén, Nick Dennis, Zero Mostel and Everett Sloane

Credits: Directed by Curtis Bernhardt, scripted by A.I. Bezzerides and Hans Jacoby, based on a novel by Joseph Kessel. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon etc.

Running time: 1:38

Make it stop. Because at this point, we’ve kind of given up on “make it better.”

Warner Brothers and DC finish the job of wasting the great casting coup of their “Justice League” era comic book film adaptations in a dead fish of an Aquaman sequel, “Aquaman and the Lost City.”

It’s a lifeless patchwork of comic book movie “world building” and tropes, pieced together by four credited “story” authors, shot and re-shot, surrounded by rumors that Amber Heard has been edited out of it (She isn’t, but haters gon’hate.) and almost zero buzz.

Even bad buzz might have been better than that.

Earnest efforts to make it jokier, probably at the behest of humorous he-man star Jason Momoa, come to naught. Trying to turn Aquaman’s (somewhat) evil brother (Patrick Wilson) into a sort of Loki figure/foil and object of Aquaman’s fun fail.

And the story is just a “payback” tale from the first “Aquaman” outing, the one where Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II ) was a villain foiled, and now he’s back to find ancient undersea tech that will end life on Earth and while he’s at it, “take from him what he took from you.”

Because Aquaman’s got a baby boy, now.

Aquaman’s dad (Temuera Morrison, the original Boba Fett) has little useful advice for his man-mountain son.

“Sometimes not giving up is the most heroic thing you can do.”

James Wan & Co. give us CGI sea-creatures voiced by Martin Short and fanboy favorite John Rhys-Davies, to little avail.

Randall Park plays the scientist no one believes in as he looks high and low for proof of Atlantis.At some point, there’s a scene in which he must have been given a bloody nose. Blood turns up in his beard in insert shots later in this edit.

But the people you kind of feel sorry for are Heard, given enough scenes to justify a paycheck, and Nicole Kidman. It’s been years and years since our favorite redheaded Aussie Oscar winner has been in a movie this bad.

There is some environmental messaging in here, which will annoy the same folks who’re made whenever Amber Heard gets work. Aquaman notes the state of the seas and the environment at large and mutters “I’m tired of nothing ever getting done.”

Yes, even Aquaman hates Joe Manchin.

But Momoa flexes, hops on a bike (his first, best destiny is anything with motorcycles in it) and does his damnedest to carry or will this picture into something worth watching — big laughs, macho joking around — “I’m gonna go start a fight.” – all of it looks like he’s trying too hard, and almost none of it works.

At this point, with Marvel over-saturating the “content” marketplace and out of ideas and DC almost never getting it right, make it stop, make it go away or maybe take a break and a breather on this over-exposed genre seem like the best options.

The technology to make these movies eye candy of the first order is here. But the people making them are at a loss for a decent story to put these superheroes in, much less a movie that matters.

“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” fails to answer, in any meaningful way divorced from corporate accounting, the question “Why does this exist?”

Rating: PG-13, violence, some profanity

Cast: Jason Momoa, Nicole Kidman, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Temuera Morrison, Randall Park, Dolph Lundgren, Martin Short, Indya Moore, Jani Zhao and Patrick Wilson

Credits: Directed by James Wan, scripted by David Leslie McGoldrick, based on the DC comics. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:04

A clumsy riff on Shakespeare with mismatched leads, a bit of nudity – only some of it sexual — and a busload of F Bombs, “Anyone But You” is about as close as Hollywood can get to a rom-com that works these days.

Which is to say, “Not terribly close,” even though it’s not exactly terrible.

It’s a star vehicle for “Euphoria” breakout Sydney Sweeney and “Maverick” supporting player Glen Powell.

Powell gives his best. But there’s a moment when a supporting character cracks wise about Sweeney’s character being a “Miss Mumbles” which feels improvised. You instantly wonder about that line’s origins and why it made it into the picture because it smacks of an on-set irritation.

“They must have shot multiple takes of her at times,” you figure, trying to get a clear and coherent version of a line or attempting to get something droll, snappy or emotional out of her performance of it.

Flat line readings do nothing for lines that don’t sit “trippingly on the tongue” to start with.

The two “Much Ado” connections here are a testy, feuding couple whose “meet cute” has a pratfall of two in it, and a one nighter that left hard feelings on both sides, and assorted quotes from the play — “Men Were Deceivers Ever” — used as chapter headings for the attempted sex farce.

Bea and Ben (the Bard’s “Beatrice” and “Benedict”) are thrown back together when they’re in the wedding party of her sister (Hadley Robinson) and his best friend’s sister (Alexandra Shipp) in far off Sydney, Australia.

Ben has an ex Margaret (Charlee Fraser) he’d like to reconnect with, but she’s living with a hunky himbo (Joe Davidson). Bea would like to shake off her parents’ (Rachel Griffiths and Dermot Mulroney from “My Best Friend’s Wedding”) efforts to force her to make up with her own ex.

So these feuding frenemies, whose battles threaten to “f-up” the nuptials, fake a “wedding trip romance” to throw off all those people making unsubtle attempts at throwing them together.

Hilarity ensues. Rarely.

The “My Best Friend’s Wedding” connection extends beyond the Mulroney/Griffiths casting. Inexplicably, the filmmakers try to make Natasha Bedingfield’s featherweight pop confection “Unwritten” into a running gag, and a sing-along, the way “Say a Little Prayer” was in “Best Friend’s.”

That goes over like, “What, the rights to Nickelback’s ‘Photograph’ weren’t available?” Nickelback jokes always land.

Nudity is deployed for the two outrageous laughs, one of them provided by Davidson’s dopey surfer-beefcake Beau, the guy wholly aware, in the most Australian surfer dude way, of Ben’s past with Margaret.

“You had a bit of a go back when, didya? Good ON ya!”

He rattles through a collection of Aussie slang expressions for penis that’s the funniest bit in the picture. “Donger” and “tally whacker” and “the main vein” were in there somewhere.

Bryan Brown is the standout in the supporting cast, the goofy Aussie stepdad of Alexandra Shipp’s bride to be. And he’s the one who lets the “mumbles” line slip out and stick to the vivacious but colorless Sweeney like glue.

I hate to lay a film’s failure on an actor, as this script is feeble, with most of the supporting players have trouble finding a laugh either. But Sweeney is put into one plunging neckline outfit after another to keep us from noticing how drab and badly-played every line out of her mouth is.

She looks an overripe teen paired-up with Powell, and sounds, first scene to last, like an actress ill-suited for comedy.

Rating: R, sex, nudity, lots and lots of profanity, much of it gratuitous.

Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Glen Powell, Alexandra Shipp, Rachel Griffiths, Mia Artemis, Gata, Nat Buchanan, Josh Bonello, Hadley Robinson and Dermot Mulroney.

Credits: Directed by Will Gluck, scripted by Ilana Wolpert and Will Gluck. A Sony/Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:43

The Christmas box office this year won’t be one for the record books. A few big films that might have been bigger, a family treat that keeps on giving and nothing spectacular among the titles with lower expectations.

“Aquaman 2: The Lost Kingdom is opening with a $40 million four day plus previews weekend.

All that’s due to Jason Momoa, and the comic book movie crowd’s never-miss-an-opening hardcore cadre. The movie doesn’t play, struggles to find anything new to do with the character and is littered with leaden humor.

But Warner Bros cannot sweat that shot and reshot clunker. “Wonka” is doing great business, looking at another $28 million this weekend.

“Migration” isn’t one of Illumination’s must see pictures, which audiences could tell from the laugh free trailers. It aims at a very young audience and should be better than the $17.5 million it is projected to take in this Christmas. That’s a mediocre take, but the film is somewhat starved of laughs and with six-and-unders lobbying to see it.

The almost raunchy Sony Rom com “Anyone But You” is benefiting from a lack of date movie competition, which Sony gambled on by moving its release up to Christmas. It’s a lame “Much Ado About Nothing” modernization (barely) with a barely there leading Lady wearing barely anything at all. $8 million over four days is a decent return for a picture with little to no star power.

Indian cinema has become a reliable source of high per-screen averages in the markets where that audience lives (Orlando, where I live, is one such hot spot). A film with the unedifying title “Salaar: Part One” is the latest overlong targeted-audience picture to roll in and open big — $6.9 million on under 800 screens.

A24’s Zac Efron wrestling picture “The Iron Claw” was set to wrestle over fifth place with that one, also looking at an $6.5 million take.

“The Color Purple” musical and “Ferrari” headline actual Christmas Day openings, with the musical expecting a big take on one of the best moviegoing days of the year.

As always, I will update these figures as more data comes in.

His was an unlikely stardom, arriving late as fashions and tastes in movie manhood changed to suit him.

“He wasn’t very tall,” Humphrey Bogart’s sometime co-star Mary Astor wrote. “Vocally, he had a range from A to B, his eyes were like coal nuggets pressed into his head and his smile was a mistake that he tried to keep from happening.”

Then there was the beauty queen turned model, half his age when they met, set off sparks onscreen and off. The newly-renamed Betty Joan Persky had an indifferent screen career, for the most part. It wasn’t until Lauren Bacall buried Bogie and became the permanent guardian of his legacy that she truly came into her own as an actress and regal presence, on stage and on the screen.

But her guardianship of that legend covered-up and otherwise misdirected the world into printing that legend, and not the truth about Bogart — the upper class drunk with self-esteem issues he took out on many a co-star, director or even close friend.

That’s the case William J. Mann makes in his crackling new bio, “Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair.”

If there’s a classic film buff on your holiday shopping list, this is the film book to buy this year. Digging into studio archives, letters and archival interviews of those who knew them, Mann tears apart every “sanctioned” and “Betty Bacall-approved” biography that preceded it to give us a clear picture of two screen icons and the romance that blossomed when “wife number four” showed up, and the history various film publicists and later she spent decades minimizing or simply erasing.

Mann tracks through the years of Broadway, touring show and summer stock struggles of Manhattan doctor’s son and prep school dropout Humphrey, the “dandies” and “cads” he played as a young stage actor, the myths invented about his military service, his torn upper lip and the like.

The earlier marriages are remembered and deconstructed. He and third wife Mayo Methot might have been caricatured in the Hollywood press as “The Battling Bogarts,” two hard-drinking, loudmouthed brawlers. But she was his champion to Warner Bros. and Hollywood at the key juncture in his career, as much responsible for Bogie achieving stardom at 40 as anybody.

Bogie’s widow had the biggest hand in rubbing her and two other earlier marriages — all were actresses — right out of the picture.

“Official” versions of how Leslie Howard insisted Bogart get the role of Duke Mantee in “Petrofied Forest” so that they’d reprise the roles they’d had in the Howard-produced Broadway blockbuster that became Bogie’s big break, are broken down with “facts.”

Movies and plays are sketched in, Bogart’s succession of career setbacks, and personal ones, are listed and laid bare.

And his character comes through, if not wholly unscarred, at least rendered in realistic strokes, foibles and all.

It’s time to accept that those “Release the Snyder Cut” t-shirts aren’t aging well. Because as Joseph Campbell taught us, the most important element in any “hero’s journey” is to pick a hero worth following. Writer-director Zack Snyder isn’t that hero.

The clumsily-titled “Rebel Moon: Part One — A Child of Fire” is a sci-fi epic crippled by the limits of big budget sci-fi movie imagination. Whatever one thinks of Mr. “300,” “Justice League” and “Watchmen,” his “Rebel Moon” is corporate content engineering at its most cynical.

Campbell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces” re-iterated the idea that there are only so many plots and basically only one heroine or hero to lead the reader, listener or viewer through them.

Fine. The “quest” can’t help but feel familiar.

But this Snyder exercise in “world building” for a new “Star Wars” or its ilk is basically “Star Wars” with fewer fresher faces.

It’s a humorless mash-up of “A New Hope” and “The Seven Samurai” (and its Old West remake, “The Magnificent Seven”) a tale of imperialism and brutal repression, with lawless towns and saloons (cantinas), Brit-accented robots, shoot-outs, swordfights and rumors of a “chosen one.”

The villains wear Soviet Bloc uniforms and Nazi attitudes, backed by the silent, acquiescent red-robed priests of conquistador Spain.

The tech is just a re-jiggering and somewhat more art moderne “streamlined” redesign of all the “rebels” vs. “empire” futurism of every sci-fi movie of the past 50 years.

There are gladiators and bounty hunters and farmers in bib overalls and undisciplined goons as soldiers wearing recycled “American Gladiators” armor, insectoids and humanoid insects and hints of inter-species kink.

Supernaturalism? Fascism? Native mysticism? Fantastic Beasts and where to find them? Sure. They’re mixed-in with gigantic “planet killer” space Dreadnoughts and Ed Skrein as a pasty-faced sadist out to foil a rebellion.

The fights are filled with slo-mo, the cast peopled with generic characters played by actors with skills and just enough cachet to merit their paychecks.

The story-beats follow The Book of George Lucas, almost to the letter, especially when it comes to dialogue.

“Kindness is a vice worth dying for.” “There is a difference between justice and revenge.”

The great Sir Anthony Hopkins voices an empathetic and utterly superfluous robot. Charlie Hunnam is an Irish-accented Han Solo substitute. Djimon Hounsou is a rebel general reduced to gladiatorial combat.

And fangirl and fanboy favorite Sofia Boutella of recent installments of “The Mummy,” “Kingsmen” and “Star Trek” is Kora, a space war survivor laying low on a Nordic-accented moon named Veldt, just a farm gal in overalls and a Parisian pixie haircut, waiting for the moment when we learn she is “the most wanted fugitive in the known universe.”

All that slo-mo as she fends off occupiers, imperial minions and treacherous locals of every stripe? It’s to minimize the incredubility of the fight choreography.

Kora’s village is visited by soldiers from The Realm who want their harvest. Don’t stop and ponder why this grain-“negotiation” would be carried out at an Eat Local level by a large, armed occupying force. It’ll give you a headache.

A murder or two and one vengeful slaughter later, Kora and sweet-on-Kora farmer Gunnar (Michiel Huisman) are off on a quest to find the Rebels, and get some help for their village.

They’ll need passage off-planet provided by a lovable smuggler-rogue (Hunnam).

As for other help. Toshiro Mifune and Yul Brenner aren’t available. Maybe this general (Hounsou), this sword-slinging vixen Nemesis (Bae Doona), a freed-slave Tarak (Staz Nair) and can be enlisted.

In flashbacks, Kora doles out bits and pieces of her past to Gunnar, and we see Cary Elwes as a bearded, uniformed heir to the Romanov crown, the powers of a possible “chosen one” “as prophesied,” and we never for an instant grasp anything resembling “what’s really at stake here.”

All these petty crimes against originality wouldn’t matter a whit if Snyder & Co. mashed it all up into something fun or at least more distracting.

I’ve liked some of these actors in other roles. But even with Hunnam’s down’tha pub accident, there is nobody here I’d care to follow down the primrose path of this heroine’s journey, no well-handled action beat that isn’t literally recycled from a thousand other action films and a dozen other “Star Wars” outings.

Not a note of this beast rings heartfelt, original and true, and I’m not just talking about the pedestrian, compose-by-numbers score.

With comic book and “Star Wars” content tumbling into over-saturation and finally losing their cultural currency, the timing of this imitation “galaxy far away” is pretty bad, as well.

But maybe “Part Two” of “Rebel Moon” will work better. If not, I’m sure some rocket scientist will start screaming for “The Snyder Cut” soon enough.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, sexual assault, bloody images, language, sexual material and partial nudity.

Cast: Sofia Boutella, Djimon Hounsou, Bae Doona, Ed Skrein, Sky Yang, Cleopatra Coleman, Ingvar SigurdssonCary Elwes, Fra Fees, Jena Malone, Charlotte Maggi, Cory Stoll, and the voice of Anthony Hopkins. kKurt John

Credits: Directed by Zack Snyder, scripted by Zack Snyder, Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten. A Netflix release

Running time: 2:13

Any resemblence between Shakespeare and the Polish rom-com franchise “The Taming of the Shrewd” is abandoned altogether for “The Taming of the Shrewd 2,” the sequel to the popular, franctious and almost-bawd rom-com of last year.

So I guess that’s something.

The sequel, a wintry bauble featuring Polish snow, Polish folk musicians and singers and renewed complications keeping our happy couple apart, is polished in every way save for the one that matters the most — the screenplay.

The script is a slapdash load of nonsense that includes a contrived trip to America, a contrived “cuckolded” crisis involving an ambush from our gal Kaska’s old flame “Bob,”contrived kidnappings, liquor smuggling, horse-drawn-sleigh racing and a bear.

There are two couples in trouble here, and in rom-coms, that means mixed-and-rematched “couplings” to make each others’ true loves jealous, a “polyamory” joke and a nude massage to sort of seal the deal and give the picture a TV-MA rating.

I wish I could say it all kind of comes together, but it doesn’t.

Beautiful and fiesty Kaska (Magdalena Lamparska) goes off to America to accept some dubious award she’s been given, and to make an appearance on West Coast TV. Hunky but hapless Patryk (Mikołaj Roznerski) is left behind, wondering if she’ll call, if she’ll renew her acquaintance with “Bob” (Martin Budny) and facing an entire town that feels the newlyweds are in trouble and that he’s being “cuckolded.”

If she comes back in time for the couples sleigh race, maybe it’ll all work out. Maybe not.

Meanwhile, RV drifters/extreme sports couple Wera (Agata Turkot) and Kacper (Piotr Nerlewski) find their never-ending search for slopes to snowboard and waves to surf and kiteboard coming to an abrupt halt when he accepts a steady job.

She storms out in a huff and a puff of raggedly old motor home smoke.

Events transpire that put Wera under Patryk’s roof, and Kacper grabbed by the returning Kaska. She’s furious at what Patryk thinks may have happened and at the fact that he appears to have taken up with another woman.

Concerned relatives intervene to save this couple, “the pride of Podhale,” their winter wonderland village. That’s when the kidnappings begin and the bear makes his entrance.

The cast is pretty all up and down the line and seems skilled enough to make the laugh lines and sight gags land. It’s just that there are so few of them, and virtually none of them take off, much less land.

I wouldn’t have figured a sequel could be as off-key as the original film. But that’s what I get for figuring.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, profanity

Cast: Magdalena Lamparska, Mikołaj Roznerski, Agata Turkot, Piotr Nerlewski, Tomascz Sapryk and Elzbieta Trzaskos

Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Hanna Węsierska. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

The knock on early sound movies has become ingrained in Hollywood lore and immortalized in films about the transition from silent cinema to “talkies” such as “Singing in the Rain” all the way to “Babylon.”

The sound gear was cumbersome and touchy, and the techniques for mixing sound were being invented as they went along. Films transformed from being kinetic, artfully-shot with ever-moving cameras and increasingly complex tableaux back to more primitive, static affairs, often shot in close-up, with fewer actors on set and fewer physical bits of business to avoid muddying up the sound mix.

The notorious 1929 Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks version of Shakespeare’s knockabout farce “The Taming of the Shrew” gives the lie to some of that reputation. It opens with striking, heavily-populated tracking shots, immersing us in Renaissance Era Padua and its noisy street life. It is packed with pratfalls, as that was forever the way of treating this “battle of the sexes” comedy.

There’s little evidence of any limitations imposed on this United Artists production thanks to the advent of sound. A mid-1960s restoration, with improved sound mix, sound effects and tidied-up musical score as part of the bargain explains some of that. Producer and co-star Pickford, the Canadian-born actress and silent cinema star who was the first to wear the label “America’s Sweetheart,” owned the rights, financed that restoration and rather inexplicably cut seven minutes from what was always a brisk and Big Scenes Only version of “Shrew,” an hour or more shorter than any other screen adaptation.

I approached watching this classic with limited expectations on a variety of levels. Many veteran screen actors making the leap to sound took a while to shed some of their silent “art” — broader gestures, exaggerated laughs and leers and the like. There’s evidence of that here, in the way Pickford, as “curst Kate,” holds a pose or a scowl, in the way her off-screen husband Fairbanks, the great action star of his era, throws his head back with every oversized laugh.

Fairbanks is all headscarf, big grin, broad strides and grand gestures, the exaggerated way one sees the character in community theater and high school productions pretty much to this day. Watch the old Britcom “Blackadder” and you can see Rick Mayall sending Fairbanks up in his various incarnations of Flashheart.

But all things considered, this shortened “Shrew” works well enough on a bare bones/mostly-laughs level. The “abuse” scenes which productions of the play leaned into, on screen and off, until the early ’70s, are here mostly Pickford’s ill-tempered Katherine slapping the boorish, overbearing but irresistable Petruchio — repeatedly.

Chances for supporting player mugging — Joseph Cawthorn, Clyde Cook and Charles Stevens are Gremio, Grumio and a servant — are vastly reduced when you simplify the plot and eliminate pages and pages of wordplay, the puns and general bawdiness. This “Shrew” even loses a couple of suitors for old Baptista’s (Edwin Maxwell) sweeter and “fairer” younger daughter, Bianca (Dorothy Jordan), which can’t help but feel like less-funny filler in most productions I’ve seen.

The plot? Men pine for young Bianca, but her father Baptista will not allow her to be courted and married until his mouthy, ill-tempered older daughter Katherine is married. A plot to find her a suitor brings Petruchio into the picture, a bluff and blustery braggart with very specific needs and desires.

“I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
 If wealthily, then happily in Padua.”