And all through the land, haters of “Top Gun” put their heads in the sand.
Not a “She Said” vote was ventured, nary an “Avatar” was panned.
Short Round’s the new Olivier, Poitier too.
Yeoh’s a cinch, Jamie Lee will ballyhoo…
“Elvis” has shot, but not “Babylon”
“Pinocchio’s” a lock, “Puss in Boots” we rave on
Cate and Colin and Cameron and…Spielberg too?
Let’s log in on in the AM and try to see just who
If anyone and any film manages a surprise or two .
Michelle Rodriguez, Chris Pine and support vs that rascal Hugh Grant villain. The tone seems right, flippant and swashbuckling. March.
At the end of World War II, members of the film unit of the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA — were put to work hunting down every scrap of film footage they could gather about Nazi Germany, the rise of the Third Reich, and the atrocities committed by officials who were to be put on trial at Nuremberg.
The officer that OSS film unit chief John Ford — yes THAT John Ford — assigned the job to was Budd Schulberg, son of pioneering screenwriter, film producer and studio executive B.P. Schulberg. Schulberg and his brother Stuart were sent to the ruins of Nazi Germany to find the filmed “proof” of who and what the Nazis were, film that would be used in court.
The idea, American prosecutor Judge Robert H. Jackson said, was “to convict” those charged “by using their very own words,” preserved in speeches, at rallies, and captured for posterity by German filmmakers and Nazi propogandists.
“Filmmakers for the Prosecution,” made for French TV under the title “Nuremberg: des images pour l’histoire,” is a documentary recounting that search, the efforts by the Germans to destroy much of the footage in the weeks and months after the war and before the trials, and the filmed evidence the Schulbergs and others found and assembled for the court to see.
But as that material, which includes heartbreaking and damning samples of the footage shown in court, only added up to a little over half an hour of screen time, “Filmmakers” director Jean-Christophe Klotz, gets into future producer Stuart Schulberg’s efforts to film the trial, make an official, government-backed “Lessons from Nuremberg” documentary and get it shown in an America that was rapidly sucked into a Cold War as the trials wound down and lost interest in punishing the villains of the last war.
So like the “Filmmakers” themselves, Klotz, working with film producer and former First Run Features co-founder Sandra Schulberg (that’s three generations in the biz, for those keeping “Nepo Baby” count) got lost in a bit of “mission creep” in recreating this “Monuments Men” moment of movie business folks in the military gathering evidence for the trial of those who committed “the greatest crime in history.”
There’s wrenching footage of “the first attempt at gassing” human beings, Germans filming their efforts to mass murder inmates from a camp for the mentally and physically-disabled using automobile exhaust in an airtight barn. We see grainy 8mm images of a Nazi pogrom, rounding up villagers in Ukraine.
Budd Schulberg was already screenwriter, and a famous novelist thanks to his scathing “What Makes Sammy Run?” The film business insider in him informed what he was seeing in the hours and hours of footage, including German soldiers carrying out mass burials at death camps. We see portions of a speech he gave at the Justice Robert H. Jackson Center, where he noted an image that brought home the scale of the crimes committed, up and down the German Army hierarchy and the Nazi chain of command.
As Schulberg saw footage of those emaciated bodies pushed down a slide into a lime pit where scores were already piled up, the cameraman shooting that scene catches another soldier-cameraman down in the pit, having crawled there to get “good shots” of the murdered bodies sliding down at him.
That’s about as inhuman as it gets.
The most interesting portion of this film is footage itself, much of it quite grim, and the search for these German cannisters of film, seeing snippets of how it was gathered up and edited by editor, actor and later director Robert Parrish, among others (mentioned in a letter of Stuart Schulberg’s read in voice over) and was used in the Nuremberg court.
It’s one thing to rely on witnesses and dry mountains of detail-obsessed German government paperwork to convict mass murderers. Jackson’s gamble on making the motion picture evidence the Germans themselves provided was a tipping point, showing this or that “not a member of the Nazi Party” or “not in the inner circle” defendant singled-out for a close-up in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.”
Heinous crimes that the German government ordained, condoned and then paid to film were exposed in front of a court filled with mostly-doomed defendants, lawyers and judges and hundreds of members of the press.
The frustrating efforts of the nascent filmmaker Stuart Schulberg to make his “Nuremberg” under tight court restrictions and navigate Cold War politics to get the film finished while losing a race against a Russian filmmaker who got the Soviet version of the historic trial out first are interesting, but only as an afterthought. His “trial” film, finished and 1948 and restored over a dozen years ago by Stuart’s daughter Sandra, is historically important, but dry. Stuart Schulberg would go on to a career producing films and TV shows, mostly documentaries.’Sandra, is historically resonant, but dry. Stuart Schulberg would go on to a career producing films and TV shows, mostly documentaries.
“Filmmakers” makes the case that these two brothers shaped the way the world viewed the atrocities of World War II thanks to their gathering of filmed evidence and the way they presented it, the horrific images that sent Nazi leaders to the gallows. That seems somewhat narrow, an overreach neither brother claimed while they were alive, even though — oddly — they filmed “recreations” of the hunt for film cans and the two of them, and their editors, looking at the footage. What was that for, a documentary about them making a documentary?
That looks self-Schulberg serving, and probably isn’t something the brothers themselves would have condoned, which is why we’ve never seen it before now. But Stuart’s daughter produced “Filmmakers,” so here it is.
Rating: unrated, disturbing images of the violence and mass murder of the Holocaust
Cast: Sylvie Lindeperg, Stuart Liebman, Victor Barbat, Niklas Frank, Budd Schulberg and Sandra Schulberg
Credits: Directed by Jean-Christophe Klotz, based on a monograph by Sandra Schulberg. A Kino Lorber release.
Running time: 1:00
“In the Heat of the Night” is one of those classics that does not fade in the memory. Yes, it’s a thriller with a murder mystery at the heart of it. But “whodunnit” is immaterial to the film’s thrills, and the one thing I seem to forget every time I watch it anew.
Re-watching this five-time Oscar-winning time-capsule of the 1960s South during Oscar season is a reminder of how sometimes the Academy gets it right, even on a Best Picture winner which they made a collective blunder on that hangs over it more than half a century later.
How in the Hell did they not nominate Sidney Poitier for this, the jewel in his acting crown? Even if he had a statuette already on his mantelpiece, the omission is as glaring as the film’s Southern Racism — then and now — messaging.
Senior citizens, especially in the South, still gravitate to the Carrol O’Connor/Howard Rollins TV series that took this movie and watered it down for 1980s and ’90s audiences, almost a “post racial” take on a movie that was all about race. But Norman Jewison’s film exists on a whole other plane, an acting showcase that made the smartest cop, the most educated and articulate man in town a Black visitor, played by Poitier at his Matinee Idol peak. So yeah, he was the best looking man in town, too.
An outsider with money and a plan for a factory that will bring jobs to backward Sparta, Mississippi is murdered. The gum-snapping police chief (Best Actor Rod Steiger) is new enough on the job to be frantic for suspects.
One of the people rounded up is a Black man in a suit. It’s hard to imagine the jolt this movie provided to audiences in the ’60s when it turns out the visitor, waiting for a train to go back home, is a Philadelphia police detective. He withholds this information from the yahoo cop (Warren Oates) who picked him up, and delays it just long enough to humiliate the racist chief.
The film’s genius is having the chief self-aware enough to recognize, based on a couple of the Black man’s simple observations, that this is a much smarter cop than him. And if he won’t admit it freely, he’s sure as shooting talking Det. Virgil Tibbs’ Philadelphia boss into making him “assist” in the investigation.
Tibbs, through gritted teeth, shows up the cops, the “doc” doubling as coroner, and the South in general with his professionalism and willingness to put personal antipathy aside in investigating this murder.
But for the first time ever, the “noble” Black man archetype has an edge. There’s only so much he’s going to take. An infamous slap famously is returned in kind, his unspoken disdain for “sleepy time Down South” laziness and small town venality and incompetence, Poitier’s Tibbs was an indictment of “the way things have always been.”
It’s left to the wealthy industrialist’s widow from “up north” (Lee Grant) to say out loud what Tibbs must be muttering under his breath.
“My God, WHAT kind of people are you? What kind of place is this?”
There will be no railroading the first “likely” suspect (Scott Wilson of “In Cold Blood,” “The Right Stuff,” “Junebug” and “Monster”). Not this time. Not with a sharp cop who can see through the prejudices and police “profiling” and general eagerness to grab someone and make the charge stick, no matter what.
Watching the film now, with the racial slurs often edited-out even though white supremacists and Twitter have brought them back, it’s impossible to miss the messaging that the film still hammers home. Nothing will change for the better in the still-backward corners of the country until bigotry is set aside and every voice heard from, every citizen’s potential is allowed to flourish.
Steiger makes Chief Gillespie a simmering stew of resentment, sarcasm, outrage and panic. He’d like nothing better than to drop a few more “n words” on Tibbs and pack him on his way, maybe even let the redneck mob have a go at him.
But no, he needs him, and Steiger never lets the viewer forget how much that infuriates and dismays him.
Poitier didn’t get an Oscar for this, one of the all time great screen performances. But that seems small potatoes 55 years later. Wherever else his career had been, wherever else it would go, “In the Heat of the Night” would make him an icon, mourned the world over when he passed away last year.
He was a big enough star to ensure this movie was not filmed in the still-deadly-for-Black-people South, so Sparta, Illinois doubled for Sparta, Mississippi. He fought to ensure the slap heard all over America stayed in “every print” of the movie, no matter where it played.
And he is the reason to try and talk the elderly relatives into eschewing the namby pamby murder-of-the-week TV version of “We all get along now” Sparta. If Poitier’s name isn’t over the title, and Ray Charles isn’t singing the title tune, move along.
Rating: “approved,” violence, innuendo, racial slurs
Cast: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Lee Grant, Warren Oates, Larry Gates, Scott Wilson, Matt Clark, Quentin Dean, Arthur Mallet, Larry D. Mann, William Schallert and Anthony James.
Credits: Directed by Norman Jewison, scripted by Stirling Silliphant, based on a novel by John Ball. A United Artists release on PosiTV, FreeVee, Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:50
The scores of Anglo-American movies about World War II leave a lot of the history of that global conflict uncovered, especially the episodes that don’t flatter the domestic movie markets of the English speaking Allies.
But there are riveting stories to be told, of an air raid gone wrong in Copenhagen (“Bombardment”) and of the brief liberation of “Narvik,” Norway during the Allies’ darkest hours — the spring of 1940. Some of the smartest money Netflix is spending these days is on these riveting history lessons in an always popular film genre.
“Narvik” is a Norwegian production about how Norwegian neutrality was violated, and not just by the Germans, and about the coercion used by even the good guys in a desperate struggle to keep Swedish iron ore from turning into German Panzers.
It’s compelling, compact and action-packed, a thriller that begins with testy negotiations and tense stand-offs in the Norwegian port city where Swedish ore was being shipped to both the Germans and the Brits, showing us the difference between Norwegians who chose to surrender to “save the town” and those who chose to fight.
That’s both text and subtext in this up-close-and-personal take on the Norwegian and Allied effort to retake the city from the Germans, a futile fight, history reminds us. But as the historian David McCullough reminded me in an interview once, “The folks making history don’t know, going in, how things will turn out.” That goes for the officers leading the battle, and the civilians struggling to survive the slaughter unleashed on them and all around them.
Erik Skjoldbjærg’s combat thriller personalizes the story by focusing on a Norwegian corporal, Gunnar (Carl Martin Eggesbø), a member of that one company of garrison troops whose commander (played by Henrik Mestad) refuses to surrender, a young man who as a civilian worked on the railroad with his father and thus has experience with explosives.
As his unit marches out of town under the threat of German machine-gunning, Gunnar’s hotel waitress wife Ingrid (Kristine Hartgen) is pressed into service by the Germans as their translator, but also coerced into helping the local British consul escape the enemy’s clutches, hiding him and even pressed into intelligence work.
Because the Allies can ill afford to give up Sweden’s ore and Norwegian access to it. The Brits mine the harbor, and when the Germans attack Norway, the Royal Navy shows up with French and Polish troops to help the Norwegians take it back.
I like how Christopher Grøndahl’s script paints most of the players, nation-actors and characters caught up in the fight in shades of grey.
The neutral Swedes are doing more than just shipping iron ore to any and all buyers. They’re supplying the Germans with ammunition. The Brits were violating Norwegian neutrality every bit as much as the Germans.
And the Norwegians, united as they seemed, didn’t all have the spine to fight. One of the war’s first contributions to global slang was “Quisling,” another word for “traitor” thanks to the Norwegian Nazi (not mentioned here) who helped turn the country over to the Germans.
The only characters who aren’t “grey” here are the ones clad in grey. “Narvik” reminds us that then as now, there’s no such thing as a “good” or “very fine” Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.
Like most war films, “Narvik” ends up over-simplifying the murky politics of survival under occupation. If you’re trying to save yourself, your family and your child, “patriotism” and “national sacrifice” are flowery sentiments that could get you killed.
Skjoldbjærg, who directed the Norwegian thrillers “Pioneer” and “Pyromaniac,” gets maximum suspense out of the stand-offs and visceral action out of the firefights and a tense attempt to dynamite a bridge. The measure of a combat thriller director is how she or he stages the harrowing business of “taking out that machine gun nest,” and Skjoldbjærg passes that with ease.
Convincing digital backgrounds show us the small town as it was in 1940, with much of the fighting staged under grey skies in the deep snowpack of April and early May.
There’s a bit of Norwegian flag-waving in this, another thing that makes “Narvik” different from the hundreds of widely-seen World War II genre thrillers that preceded it — seeing a different flag
But Skjoldbjærg and Grøndahl keep the tone bittersweet. And their stars remind us that for all the maps, strategies and geopolitics taught about World War II, for everybody on the scene and on the ground, the stakes were life and death, and there’s little romantic about that.
Whatever else Netflix is financing these days, they’re getting a great bang for their buck out of every Scandinavian WWII combat film that they back.
Rating: TV-14, violence
Cast: Kristine Hartgen, Carl Martin Eggesbø, Christoph Bach, Henrik Mestad
Credits: Directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg, scripted by Christopher Grøndahl. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:49
The third James Cameron film to clear the $2 billion mark at the global box office, the second one from the “Avatar” franchise.
So much for people like me who figured he waited too long, the movie was too much a copy of the first, etc. Nearly $600 million in the US alone.
“Missing,” a non sequel follow up to “Searching,” pulled in $9.3 million.
And Tom Hanks reasserts his box office clout as “A Man Called Otto” collects $9 million in wider release.
Figures and graphic from @boxofficepro on Twitter.
I had time to kill before catching up with “Skinamarink,” thanks to the inevitable online showtimes not matching up with the teens who operate the theater.
So I thought I’d sit through Spielberg’s fictionalized version of how a great filmmaker — himself — is made, the sort of family and life he grew up in, the support that gave him a chance to become a self-taught auteur, a “wunderkind” who broke into directing shortly after he started shaving.
I thought “The Fabelmans” was, when I first reviewed it, an uneven, indulgent but pleasantly idealized “This Boy’s Life” leads him to making movies, and remains a pleasant way to kill a couple of hours in a cinema. Seeing it again, looking around the periphery for a fresh take without taking notes, the things that bugged me initially stood out more — the fantasized version of being bullied yet making your mark in a new high school, the stereotypical Jewish Uncle played by Judd Hirsch, the sanitized version of his mother’s personality, illness and betrayal, the pleasant but charmless Bennie played by the pleasant but dull Seth Rogen.
Sammy’s first romance with a devout but dim Catholic girl seems cloying and played for broad, low laughs and not all that credible.
There are scenes, shots and situations in “The Fabelmans” borrowed directly from Spielberg’s early life, as it was related in the 2018 documentary “Spielberg,” which you can watch here if you missed it. But the contradiction that is Spielberg’s life story, which he has spun into myth in assorted “show business” embellished legends, grates. We know he lied about his age, for whatever reason, lied about how he faked his way onto the Universal Studios lot, grabbed an empty office, etc.
He likes to present himself as a put-upon loner, doggedly pursuing his ambition and art. You can’t round up legions of “actors” and extras for your teen extravaganzas if you aren’t the opposite of a loner. He was a popular, enthusiastic showman, even as a kid.
He is, at best, an unreliable narrator, and hiring Tony Kushner to fictionalize an already dubiously-sourced life doesn’t correct that. The film blurs fact and fiction even further, recreating young Spielberg’s “End of Nowhere” 8mm WWII movies made with his many Boy Scout friends as cast, almost shot by shot, as a quick viewing of the “Spielberg” documentary reveals.
That probably won’t impact the film’s expected haul of Oscar nominations, but it should. A lesser work by a long-lionized, Oscar-winning filmmaker that didn’t connect with audiences, why burn through the prestige and extra box office Oscar nominations confer on a movie I’d liken — at best — to Spielberg’s good but not great third-tier films, “War Horse,” “Terminal,” “The Post,” and far less ambitious than any of those?
Michelle Williams is the stand-out in the picture, and a nomination for her is not worth quibbling over, even though the embarrassment of riches of fine turns by actresses this year mean that several are sure to be left out when nominations are announced Tuesday morning.
I liked Paul Dano‘s performance, too. But nobody is seriously talking this up.
If Spielberg gets a directing nomination for being “Spielberg” and for making a “personal” indulgent and I’d argue inconsequential film, he will be depriving some less lauded but more worthy of her or his due.
I’d also hate to see nominations spent on Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun Maverick”) or James Cameron (“Avatar: The Way of Water”). Their films aren’t on a par with “Women Talking,” “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “Elvis” or “TAR.”
Sarah Polley (“Women Talking”) and Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”) made more deserving films, and Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front”) out-Spielberged Spielberg with his World War I epic.
Martin McDonagh seems more of a cinch for “Banshees of Inisherin” than Park Chan-Wook for “Decision to Leave.” Both of their films were more intellectually ambitious and interesting films than those delivered by The Blockbuster Trio.
How can you nominate Spielberg and leave Baz (likely) or Sarah and Gina (almost certainly) out and be OK with that?
I got just as much of a kick out of “Fabelmans'” version of how little Sammy (Steven) discovered “Spielberg light,” figured out low-cost ways to fake everything from explosions and train wrecks to gunfire the second time I sat through the film.
But the guy made “E.T.,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Close Encounters,” “Schindler’s List,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Sugarland Express,” “Lincoln” and “Jaws.” “Personal” or not, his latest isn’t in the same league with those epic, artful and occasionally high-minded entertainments. It’d be a shame to waste Oscar acclaim on a movie this slight, no matter how “personal.”
And Oscar nominations and wins probably won’t help the bottom line, either. The deathly silence of this second viewing, none of the the laughs the film got when I saw it in a preview showing back in Nov., suggest word of mouth is a big reason it’s not doing better, because it’s just not “playing.”
So here’s hoping the Academy doesn’t Meryl Streep this movie and nominate it to high heavens because it is Spielberg’s “due.” Nominate others this Oscar season, send people off to better movies by being more generous to the other contenders than you are to this lesser effort by one of the greatest ever.
One of the pleasures and indeed responsibilities of movie reviewing is remembering the lesson of a Hans Christian Andersen folk tale.
Some folks review films based on their hype, the “director’s statement” of what it’s about, or a careful consideration of the releasing studio’s press release about it. But some of us approach the film fairly blind and review exactly what’s on the screen and our interpretation. We take notes to buttress our arguments with direct observations and facts.
And sometimes, it’s our job and our pleasure to point out “The Emperor has no clothes.”
“Skinamarink” is a horror tale that arrives with web-stoked notoriety, a no-budget Canadian indie that who knows how many folks saw when it leaked online and was uploaded to Youtube, its opaque images and meaning parsed by the teeming fangirl/fanboy masses before critics in numbers started weighing in on it.
It is a patience-testing, minimalist and “immersive” film, withholding information, withholding characters’ faces, withholding clarity and withholding light itself. It’s 100 minutes of grainy, pre-digital VHS tape quality footage of toys, ceilings, wall outlets and paneling, of children seen from behind or from the knees down, distracting themselves with (public domain) ancient VHS copies of 1930s cartoons.
Why are the kids “distracting” themselves? The two siblings, Kevin and Kaylee, wonder what’s going on in their house. They hear muffled noises, and eventually voices. Their darkness is pierced by a nightlight here and there, or the family’s big old cathode ray tube (non-HDTV) screen when they turn it on.
Many minutes pass before anyone deigns to switch on a light, even briefly. The third act is largely flashlight-lit, even though the glow of that “Poltergeist” Panasonic TV remains.
Over an hour passes before pieces of what the kids can’t quite assemble into “what’s going on” with their house becomes less opaque. Doors and windows, only seen in the corner of the frame as the camera is always angled to hide a fuller picture, are disappearing.
Toys are here one second, and vanish the next. Some of them turn up on the various textured ceilings the first-time writer-director Kyle Edward Ball is obsessed with. A child seeing a chair on the ceiling should produce something like a freak out. It does not.
“Faces,” what few we barely glimpse, are reserved for the third act.
Is this a nightmare, or the never-ending nightmare of “hell?” At one point, the title graphic “572 Days” pops up on the screen. Maybe it IS Hell, and “Skinamarink” is the only movie streaming there.
The standard horror shocks and jolts are rare. A lot of screen time is devoted to VHS-tape darkness, which is grey at best.
“Skinamarink” is ugly to watch, annoyingly repetitive and tedious to sit through, with eye strain a very real consequence of watching grimy, grainy, chronically-and-intentionally-underlit VHS quality images.
The sound is so muffled and muted it plays like an old cassette deck that needs the metallic oxide cleaned off its playback heads. A child is ordered to do something in a whisper, muffled screams follow.
But I don’t consider it “immersive” to feed the viewer sound so garbled it has to be subtitled. If this is a nightmare of hell, it’s worth asking, “Do your nightmares have subtitles? Does Hell?”
The title? Meaningless. As Ball puts most of the credits at the opening of the film, he tells us he relied on audio and video content “in the public domain,” which also applies to the word “Skinamarink.”
Genre fans are no doubt properly hyped to see this and the easy way out of reviewing it is to say, “I didn’t get a thing out of it, but have at it. Enjoy.” I saw it in a suburban Florida cineplex in which one third of the audience walked out at the 30 minute mark, and most of the rest left after an hour.
It’s borderline abusive in the way it wastes screen time and the viewer’s time.
To me, it was the quietly suspenseful “dull” parts of “Blair Witch” and “Paranormal Activity,” a gimmicky experiment with a little of the suspense and precious few frights or tactile terrors to hang those frights upon. I was also reminded of Derek Jarman’s late-career “experimental” film “Blue,” in which the filmmaker, dying of AIDS and having lost much of his sight, presents a limited-character radio play of what he’s living through with a blue screen his only image.
The glib way of reviewing “Skinamarink” would be to post Mel Brooks’ Oscar-winning animated short “The Critic” here, and let Mel do the dirty work.
Heaven knows that video judgement works for many an “experimental” film that one encounters at film festivals, which is how IFC Midnight found this one.
But let’s not back away from regarding the “new clothes” here, even if a one-word review would have done wonders for the legions walking out of it.
Nope.
Rating: unrated, implied violence
Cast: Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault as the kids, Jaime Hill and Ross Paul as the parents.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Kyle Edward Ball.
Running time: 1:40
Maja is a Danish actress who has found a new love, but who comes to realize her “Attachment” isn’t the one that rules her new lover’s life in this thriller that dabbles in Jewish supernaturalism.
It’s a mysterious, quietly suspenseful war of wills romance that builds towards revealing whatever is bothering Maja’s new love’s quite conservative if not quite Orthodox mother. And if this Danish film fizzles and fades away rather than delivering a big, harrowing climax, at least it succeeds in creeping us out with more genre reminders that Judaism has its own “Exorcist” traditions and its own versions of the demons that haunt the traditions of most every culture, and every religion.
Josephine Park, best-known from her many Danish TV appearances, is Maja, a Copenhagen actress who used to get work, now in her mid-30s and reduced to acting out book characters in Danish libraries.
That’s how she meets the British grad student Leah (Ellie Kendrick). They tumble from a classic “meet cute” into a passionate affair, one Maja can’t bear to give up when Leah heads home. She abruptly flies with Leah back to London, back to the flat that’s just upstairs from Leah’s brusque, domineering mother, Chana (Sofie Gråbøl).
But Maja noticed that Leah sleepwalks back in Denmark. Then a seizure caused her to break her ankle. And now, Leah’s hovering mom is coming between them with phrases that set off alarm bells — “It’s too much for you alone.” Wear this amulet or drink that soup “for your own good.”
There are noises in the house at night, and Chana’s superstitions — leaving a particular type of candle lit, spreading salt along the walls, drilling a hole and rolling up a prayer to hide inside it — are a bit much.
That’s a clever touch in writer-director Gabriel Bier Gislason’s script, making Maja our surrogate, assuming that all we know about “Jewish mysticism,” “kabbala,” is what Maja knows.
“It’s the Madonna thing, right?”
Maja stumbles into an Orthodox bookstore whose “goy” avoiding owner (David Dencik) dials down the rudeness and starts explaining “golems” and “Dybbuk” to the out-of-her-depth Dane.
There’s something going on in that house, something that might explain why Leah’s dad fled, that pertains to her seizures and her mother referring to them as “funny little episodes.”
The “war of wills” lets us question just how accepting of her daughter’s sexuality Chana is while skimming over the much-older Dane’s connection to the early 20s grad student.
The film’s foreshadowing could not be more obvious, but it teases out the source of the “problem” adeptly enough to keep some of us guessing into the drab and over-explained finale.
“Attachment” doesn’t reinvent “possession” movies, and isn’t even the first of these to dabble in Jewish traditions and rituals and demonology.
But good performances, light touches in a movie with a gloomy tone, a romance we buy perhaps because of its impulsive “U-Haul Lesbian” cliche and a struggle in which we see real stakes make this familiarly-unfamiliar thriller work.
Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Josephine Park, Ellie Kendrick, David Dencik and Sofie Gråbøl
Credits: Scripted and directed by Gabriel Bier Gislason. A Shudder release.
Running time: 1:45
As I looked up the credits of this 1932 film, I stumbled across a 2022 remake I missed starring Casper van Diem and Judd Nelson, among others.
That’s hardly a surprise. “The Most Dangerous Game” is the most filmed, referenced, borrowed from and outright ripped-off thriller plot of them all.
The all-star TV series “Most Dangerous Game,” the Ice-T A-picture “Surviving the Game,” the more recent C-movie “Hounds of Zaroff,” the 1970s theatrical thriller “The Suckers” are all direct and occasionally uncredited descendants of this 1932 film and the Richard Connell short story that inspired it.
I remember running across the 1974 TV movie “Savages,” with Andy Griffith at his most murderous, and thinking “Most Dangerous Game,” even though pulp novelist Robb White “borrowed” the big game hunter hunting a man plot device for a somewhat different spin on the story.
Stephen King’s “The Running Man” to the YA blockbuster “The Hunger Games,” Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” and Cornel Wilde’s “The Naked Prey” and every other story about hunters hunting human prey owes a debt to Connell, who also wrote the story that “Meet John Doe” was based on.
I feel as if I’m referencing this thriller Urtext once or twice a year, most years. Screenwriters cannot resist the idea that some rich, entitled, trigger-happy hunter, unduly proud of his “skills,” would want to tackle “the most dangerous game” or prey of all, a cunning, desperate human being, someone with the wherewithal to fight back.
The first film made from it took advantage of jungle, “fortress” and island sets built for the classic “King Kong” to turn out a brief, brisk thriller whose plot points would loom larger than its own reputation. Co-star Fay Wray must have had deja vu, as she’d shoot chunks of “King Kong” on the same sets, and dash to wardrobe to change into her costume for “Most Dangerous Game,” as they filmed at the same time.
This was right after sound came in, just before the Hays Production (censorship) Code, exactly the sort of manic, factory-efficient work climate captured in “Babylon.”
This 63 minute RKO star vehicle for young Joel McCrea came a decade before his peak years, when “Foreign Correspondent,” “Sullivan’s Travels” and “The Palm Beach Story” cemented his stardom.
The plot introduces some rich, big game hunting swells as they’re passing by this mysterious island in the Pacific when navigation lights misdirect them and their ship runs aground. The sole survivor is the adventure writer/hunter Bob Rainsford (McCrea).
He staggers ashore on Baranka Island, and thanks to the baying of hounds, comes upon a Gothic stone home of Count Zaroff, played by Leslie Banks, the original “Man Who Knew Too Much,” making his big screen debut.
The count is a Russian emigre, deposed along with his czar, living in solitude and comfort on an old Portuguese fortress with a few trusted “Tatar” servants and his pack of Great Danes.
But there are other survivors, from an earlier shipwreck, siblings (Wray and Robert Armstrong). Funny thing about all the shipwrecks around this “cursed” island.
And the count knows Rainsford’s work. He’s a fan of the one writer who does “not excuse what needs no excuse.” As Rainsford was bragging to his fellow swells on board the yacht that “The world’s divided into two kinds of people, the hunters and the hunted. Luckily, I’m a hunter,” we assume that’s what the count is talking about.
“God made some men kings, some beggars,” the Russian boasts. “Me, he made a hunter. My hand was made for the trigger.”
But he’s cagey about what he hunts on this private island, “the most dangerous game.”
That will become clear soon enough, as we glimpse the creep’s “trophy room,” with its shrunken heads of his victims. That scene is one place this movie was shortened from a pre-release 78 minutes to the 63 minutes it remains to this day. Pity.
When the jig’s up, the count gets his latest game of “outdoor chess, his brain against mine, his woodcraft against mine.”
Naturally, Bob has to take “the girl” with him.
The film has a pre-Code kinkiness in the slinky clothes the fellow hostage/prey Eve wears, and in the count’s eagerness to relate the thrill of the kill to “the true ecstasy of love.”
Banks milks this scarred, jodhpurs-clad villain for all that the character is worth. Filmed during the Great Depression, it can’t have been hard for audiences to root against the rich psychopath even as the glib, macho “big game hunter” hero was nobody’s idea of a working class hero.
That’s one of the reasons the plot remains an evergreen. The idea that the rich would blithely figure lesser mortals are merely here for their consequence-free sport never goes out of style. We see pasty-faced, coddled versions of this callous count, or their Arabic counterparts, on the news on a daily basis.
The film itself hops along, but is a tad crude and obvious in its manipulations — villainous, bottom-lit insert shots of the evil count underscore the archetype.
The tricks our hunter employs to try and foil or kill the count have become standard boobytraps in the many versions of man/woman-hunting-woman/man thrillers, the “Malay dead fall,” etc.
For such a short film, “The Most Dangerous Game” starts with a sort of leisurely languor, setting up our “hero” and his fellows as entitled creeps in their own right. We see the faceless crew perish in the sinking, sharks devouring them after a pretty convincing model of a steam yacht goes down.
The count meets Rainsford in tie and tails, Depression Era shorthand for how that alien species, the super rich, went through their days.
But directors Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, and “King Kong” editor Achie Marshek turn the third act into a bloody-minded sprint, so brisk that one can only wonder at the details of the hunt and chase and action that was whittled out to make this picture short enough to run with serials, cartoons and newsreels in 1932.
McCrea became an accomplished player in rapid fire films like this. It was good practice for his comedies and Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent.” Wray doesn’t have much to do, but she is the very face of the peril her character is in her, and in the palm of the giant ape she was co-starring with at the same time.
Although it was a hit at the time, “Most Dangerous Game” is not one of the outstanding films of its day, and nobody would confuse this for landmarks like “King Kong.” But it a classic in all the ways that matter, and essential viewing for anybody who doesn’t mind recognizing its plot, over and over again, in the 90 years of cinema that has followed.
Rating: pre-“Hays” code, unrated
Cast: Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Leslie Banks, Robert Armstrong, Hale Hamilton, William B. Davidson and Noble Johnson.
Credits: Directed by Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack, scripted by James Ashmore Creelman, based on the short story by Richard Conell. An RKO release on Youtube, Amazon, Tubi, etc.
Running time: 1:06
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