Movie Nation

“Sundown” is a lightly regarded “all-star” action picture that gets lost in the history of that cinematically storied year, 1941.

When “Citizen Kane,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “Sullivan’s Travels,””High Sierra,” “The 49th Parallel,” “Sergeant York,” “Meet John Doe” and “The Lady Eve” come out the same year, it’d be pretty hard to make anybody’s Top Ten list.

But “Sundown” is an American WWII movie from just before Pearl Harbor, one where “Germans” and “Nazis” are never mentioned, butin which the World War has reached into East Africa and British colonialists must contend with Italians and Nazis arming restless native proxies to tie down British forces.

It collected three Oscar nominations for its score, art direction and cinematography. The settings are just underfilmed enough — New Mexico — to be striking and “alien” looking, passably doubling for East African deserts.

The film was directed by Henry Hathaway, who’d one day earn John Wayne his Oscar (“True Grit”). It doesn’t “erase” Africans from an African story, goes easy on the racist patronizing that was common in American films of the day, and gave work to African American actors like Dorothy Dandridge, Emmett Smith and Jeni Le Gon even if the Islamic African villain role was reserved for veteran heavy Marc Lawrence, appearing in not-quite-blackface.

And “Sundown” is built around a top-flight cast — Gene Tierney, Bruce Cabot and George Sanders, with screen legends Harry Carey and Cedric Hardwicke in key supporting roles and nice showcases for veteran character players Reginald Gardiner and Joseph Calleia.

An independent woman (Tierney) flies into a remote corner of Kenya and “Somaliland” and is welcomed like the local shaker and mover she is. But her place in the story isn’t clear for the first act, which settles in on a remote outpost where the Canadian Crawford (Cabot) is district commissioner, a beneficent and curious do-gooder whose military counterpart (Gardiner) is intent on curbing his plans to explore and make contact with a troublesome tribe, the Senshi.

That earns a brusque visit by army Major Coombes (Sanders) whose orders are to “replace you, old boy” and to find out who is arming the Senshi via capturing one of those rifles they’re now using to shoot their neighbors and the Brits with.

An Arab trader (Lawrence) is getting those guns in, and is behind plots to ambush the local British garrison and take over this corner of Somaliland/Kenya. He and whoever is supplying him must be outed and foiled.

That’s how the region’s queen of trade, Zia (Tierney, immortalized as “Laura”) figures in. Half-French, Western educated, she inherited her father’s trading post empire and now is walking a tightrope between rival factions — Allied and Fascist — hoping to throw in with “the winners.”

The natives are, um, restless, with the ghostly rumor that one of the “six white men” in this African troop’s outpost will “meet his death” on this night. Will it be Crawford, Lt. “Roddy” (Gardiner), Coombes, the jovial Italian history teacher turned army officer and now “prisoner of war” (Joseph Calleia, terrific) or the Dutch mineralogist (Carl Esmond) whose country fell to the Germans the year before? Or might it be the “White (elephant) Hunter” Dewey, played by veteran Western star Harry Carey?

The action is well-handled even if the script struggles to reach for deeper meaning in the existential struggle between fascists, colonialists, the colonized and “Christianity” in all of this.

Tierney is showcased in all manner of belly dancer wear as Zia, who is respected by the Natives, ogled by the Brits and doted over by the Italian who knew her as a child.

“King Kong” veteran Cabot is properly stoic and idealistic, Sanders was well on his way to becoming the droll, bitchy wit famed for acrid put-downs in every movie that followed his turns as “The Saint,” “The Falcon” — “Laura,” “All About Eve” and “A Shot in the Dark” included. The laconic Carey adds credibility to his long in-country “hunter” who has seen it all and anticipated the changes in the wind.

But what remains striking about this aging actioner are the beautiful screen compositions of cinematographer Charles Lang. Principals and supporting players walk from inky darkness into pools of light at Crawford’s high-pitched thatch “hut,” in caverns or skulking about canyons others gather around a campfire.

It’s a lovely looking black and white film, and it demonstrates why Lang thrived during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and went on to light and shoot such classics as “Sabrina,” “Charade” and “Some Like it Hot.”

The deserts, augmented with process shots and fortress sets, show the work of three-time Oscar winning art director/production designer Alexander Goltzen (“Touch of Evil,” “Spartacus,” “The Beguiled,” “Play Misty for Me”).

“Sundown” may not make enough of the idea that fascism must be fought, even in sleepy backwaters like this corner of Africa. An epilogue/sermon by someone (Cedric Hardwicke) recognizing the sacrifices necessary to make every corner of the world safe for decent people doesn’t deliver the punchy pathos of similar moments in “Casablanca,” for instance.

But there’s something to be said for a movie that gives voice to the irony of a war being fought “everywhere,” where even the combatants can’t figure out the import of struggling over a place so out of the way that each day’s gin’n tonic time can’t come soon enough.

“Best part of the day, sundown. Nothing more to do in a place where there’s nothing to do anyway.”

Wait until Gene Tierney shows up.

Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast: Bruce Cabot, Gene Tierney, George Sanders, Harry Carey,
Joseph Calleia, Reginald Gardiner, Marc Lawrence, Dorothy Dandridge, Jeni Le Gon, Carl Esmond, Emmett Smith and Cedric Hardwicke.

Credits: Directed by Henry Hathaway scripted by Barré Lyndon and Charles G. Booth, based on Lyndon’s novel. A United Artists release streaming on Tubi, et al

Running time:

The last thing you want to sense in an animated movie for children is cynicism, filmmakers and financiers who make no effort to hide their desire to turn over an easy buck by selling something to kids.

The “Space Jam” movies reeked of that, product placement (the NBA, Looney Tunes characters) masquerading as “movies.”

There’s plenty of cynicism in the trippy bore “Sneaks,” a film that tries to tap into “sneaker culture” and the hoop dreams attached to footwear, especially among inner city African American youth.

It’s not the Converse, Nike and Adidas jokes and plugs alone that make this Briarcliff Entertainment enterprise dubious. But there’s so little entertainment value that throwing a long list of famous, semi-farmous and used-to-be-famous voices at it looks and sounds like desperation. Which it is.

A couple of animation filmmakers with Disney credentials — writer and co-director Rob Edwards scripted the delightful “Princess and the Frog” — and a production that hired a “Sneaker Culture Consultant” turned out a modestly animated quest about two designer sneakers separated from each other and their rightful owner, a baller with “dreams,” in the big city.

Anthony Mackie voices Ty, half of the pair of Alchemy 24s (with sister Maxine (Chloe Bailey) that teen baller Edson (Swae Lee) hopes will help him make his mark on the basketball court. A hulking villain, The Collector (Laurence Fishburne) with a thing for designer athletic footwear steals the pricey shoe Edson could only acquire by winning a contest.

Maxine is to be put on display in a high-rise flat packed with rare shoes and a sea of Converse boxes. Ty, stumbling around until he hooks up with J.B. (Martin Lawrence), the sort of streetwise shoe that hangs from electrical wires in cities and towns all over America, can guide him through uptown towards his goal.

A Greek chorus of hanging sneakers comments on the quest as Ty and J.B. venture through a shoe underworld of dumpsters and nightclubs, where they mix with stilettos and swells from other strata of society. They even encounter a Brit-accented Broadway type in sneaker form.

“Perhaps you saw me in ‘The Taking of the Shoe.’ ‘Twelfth Nike?’ Much Adidas about Nothing?”

Rats must be fought off, skateboards and buses ridden and clues collected to track down Maxine.

Meanwhile, Maxine and other “collected” shoes await their fate as The Collector fights with The Forger (Roddy Ricch) for legitimacy in a world of stolen, half-shredded, worn-out and even counterfeit footwear.

“Sneaker culture consultant.” Right.

There’s barely a chuckle in any of it. The shoes “look” right, but no effort was made to make the eyes even “Cars” expressive, and that’s a low bar.

I kept thinking of the indie animated stinker “Tugger: The Jeep 4×4 Who Wanted to Fly,” another product placement in search of an animated story that would sell it to kids. I strained to make out the voice actors, who include Macy Gracy and Keith David.

And I kept a close eye on my watch. Because time stops when you’re grinding through a cynical bore like “Sneaks.”

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Anthony Mackie, Laurence Fishburne, Macy Gray, Swae Lee, Ella Mai, Amira McCoy, Roddy Ricch, Keith David and Martin Lawrence

Credits: Directed by Rob Edwards and Christopher Jenkins, scripted by Rob Edwards. A Briarcliff Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:32

A kiddie comedy about that special pair of sneakers who carry a young baller’s dream, separated by “The Collector,” with one Sneaker seeking his mate…

You’d expect to hear the voice of Martin Lawrence in it, but Anthony Mackie and Lawrence Fishburne?

I may not review it because it isn’t all that. (OK, I did review it.)

But with a “Sneaker Culture” consultant/tour guide listed in the credits, it’s the nuttiest idea to turn into a kiddie cartoon. Or one of the nuttiest.

“Squad 36” is a ponderous Parisian police procedural that never seems to get out of its own way. Staggering from cliche to contrivance, there’s little doubt what climax the stock characters who inhabit it are headed to, and that there’ll be an anti-climax after that.

Dirty cops, dangerous gangs, intrasquad romance and police who take care of their own, it’s a French variation of that tried and true hook of American cop pictures since “Colors.” That truism “The police are just another gang” bears repeating as much of the world seems indoctrinated to the “Law & Order/Bluebloods” myth of those who “protect and serve.”

It’s a milieu where French actor turned writer-director Olivier Marchal (“Rogue City”) has found a home. Perhaps he’s too comfortable in that home for his own good.

We meet the titular six-member Anti-Crime Ssquad as Sami (Tefix Jallab), Vinny (Guillaume Pottier), Walid (Youssef Ramal), biker Hanna (Juliette Dol), Richard (Soufiane Guerrab) and Antoine (Victor Belmondo) chase canny and tough-looking mob figure Karim (Jean-Michel Correia) all over the rainy streets of Paris.

A couple of things leap to mind in this opening sequence. Why are they pursuing this armed gangster, when they won’t arrest him? Why have Hanna — the lone woman on the team — lose control of her bike so that star Belmondo (the grandson of you-know-who) can take over?

And aren’t ALL police squads “anti-crime?”

Sami is the on-task boss of them all, answering to an impatient, CYA/C-his-A higher up (Yvan Attal). But Antoine is meant to be the “colorful” one. He’s seeing Hanna on the sly. And he takes out his over-the-top aggression on foes in underground, no-holds-barred brawling for bucks.

That’s what gets Antoine kicked out to the suburbs to “a department with less confrontation.” His colleagues may insist he got a raw deal, but we know better.

Months later, when members of the squad turn up dead and one goes missing, Antoine is lured back into this lurid world of nightclubs, overlapping jurisdictions, suspect cops and suspect mobsters. Because come what may, cops take care of their own.

Adapting a novel by Michel Tourscher, Marchal fills the screen with assorting police units with varying agendas with Antonoine running afoul of some and secretly supported by others.

The violence can be sudden and random and visceral. But once we get past the “cop in fight club” first act, the narrative settles into duller shoe-leather police work, following this tip, making that contact, working outside the law because the insiders don’t want him messing around in all this.

“You mind your own business and there won’t be any repercussions” is as menacing in French (with subtitles) as it is dubbed into English.

I like the suggestions of and open displays of corruption — stealing cash from an evidence locker, higher-ups shuffling wayward cops from job to job like pedophile priests.

At least in French cop movie funerals they don’t trot out bagpipes.

But when a picture bogs down into talky, relationshippy middle-acts like this one, the viewer gets ahead of it. The big mystery is easily guessed, and early. Characters don’t have motives or relationships that aren’t contrived, simply ordained by screenwriterly convenience.

Belmondo is convincingly tough and flinty, but has a generic screen presence that suggests “supporting player with a famous last name.”

Correia, as the 50ish mobster, brings weight and charisma and layers to his role. Everybody else here is just a cog in the clumsy collective presented here, cops and killers doing what they do the way they’ve done it in hundreds of pictures just like this, many of them better than the sedentary “Squad 36.”

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Victor Belmondo,
Tewfik Jallab, Yvan Attal, Juliette Dol,
Soufiane Guerrab,
Jean-Michel Correia,
Lydia Andrei, Guillaume Pottier and Youssef Ramal

Credits: Directed by Olivier Marchal, scripted by and Olivier Dujois and Olivier Marchal, based on a novel by Michel Tourscher. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:08

There’s ambition and a dollop of intellectual heft to the indie dramedy “Daddy.” Even if it misplaces characters, shortchanges its goals and fails to deliver much in the way of a satisfying conclusion, you can appreciate the attempt and the effort involved.

Arch, dry and dark, it’s an alt-future version of “testing” a quartet of candidates in their suitability for fatherhood. Toxic masculinity, religious dogmatism, hapless, hope-for-the-best slacking and daddy dilettantism come into play in co-writers/co-directors/co-stars’ Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman‘s not-quite-funny satire.

Jeremy (Sherman) sits for an AI interview with FRANN, the Fatherhood Research Aptitude Neural Network, who gives him a word association test to determine his fitness for fathering. Somehow, he hems and haws and insists “I’m ready, I’m TOTALLY ready” his way past this first quiz.

That means he gets to go on a Dept. of Procreating’s fatherhood retreat, where his final fitness will be determined.

Hapless, “fatherhood is a feeling” Jeremy is parked in a remote, mountain valley house with guitar playing cynic and possible INCEL Mo (Pomme Koch), piously religious and married Andrew (Kelley), and paranoid, pushy biz bro Sebastian (Yuriy Sardorov of “Argo” and TV’s “Chicago P.D.”).

They’re deprived of their cellular devices and dropped off. They meet and wait for their “monitor” to show up and evaluate them. They wait some more. And then they start to wonder if they’re simply being “watched” to decide if they’re fit to be fathers.

A couple of guys have a touchy edge, one uses his religion as comfort and rationalization for how he behaves and Jeremy just sort of steps into it and wings it as they prep meals, play cards, chat and make up their own DIY exercises (save your baby from a mugger and/or an earthquake) using a baby doll they figure was left there for that purpose.

They’re starting to fray, tensions are flaring and Sebastian’s bossy paranoia has put them all on edge. And then a “lost” woman (Jacqueline Toboni) shows up.

The performances work even if the deadpan “jokes” never quite land.

“I’m a runner.”

“Oh. I used to run track.” Pause. “800 meters.” Pause.

“OK.”

The dumbest Battle of Waterloo discussion/allegory ever is passed over for a debate about whether they should stay, try to hike out or whether indeed they’re being “watched.”

The players make their assorted character “types” somewhat distinct caricatures. But the choices the script has characters abruptly make or nonsensically dismiss doesn’t give the narrative manuevering room to settle someplace interesting.

The payoff is kind of predictable, and not in a good way.

But it’s worth dipping into the many “Daddy” issues here just to figure out what our first-time writer-directors were trying to say, even if they never actually say it.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Yuriy Sardorov, Neal Kelley, Jono Sherman, Pomme Koch and Jacqueline Toboni.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman. An Anchor Bay release (streaming)

Running time: 1:38