Movie Nation

A low-budget Belgian thriller of a few years back becomes a lean if not wholly logical James McAoy vehicle of the same title in “My Son,” which has him and Claire Foy playing divorced parents frantically searching for their missing child.

Writer-director Christian Carion’s original film was notable for its spare plot and pace, both credited to the picture’s much-hyped, rushed six day shooting schedule. Here that hype has been shifted to the talented McAvoy, who the producers have told British newspapers “improvised” most of his performance.

Such backstories are usually neither here nor there, just part of the selling/”myth building” of another variation of “Taken” or “Ransom” or any film about a child’s kidnapping. But it helps explain the oddly disorienting character McAvoy plays, a man who keeps us off-balance because of the impulses we see him act on and the mysteries he keeps about who he is and what he’s capable of.

Edmond Murray is no Liam Neeson “Taken” cliche, no chap “with particular skills” that he can apply to this situation. Or IS he? We aren’t meant to figure that out.

Edmond dashes home, bleary-eyed, from whatever part of the world his vague “oil industry” construction/consulting job has taken him to. His “wee boy” was snatched from a camp he was attending in the gloom of early winter. And when Edmond gets there, authorities are dragging the lake beside that camp.

His ex, Joan (Foy, of “The Crown” and “The Girl in the Spider’s Web”), is devastated.
His questions — veering from sympathetic to accusatory — are no comfort. Yes, she checked out the people who run the “astronaut/astronomy” camp. Yes, the idea for the camp may have come from her current beau (Tom Cullen). No, little Ethan (aged seven) didn’t want to come.

The police officer in charge (veteran character actor Gary Lewis) is the first to use the word “kidnapping.” His questions of Edmond are just as personal, just as barbed as the ones Edmond asked of Joan. They’re about his work, the “dangerous” places he sometimes has to perform it. Yes, they’d like to search his phone.

Edmond’s guarded helplessness takes an abrupt turn when he talks, for the first time, with Joan’s new man. Frank seems removed from all this, relieved he has the sort of job (a builder) where he can take the time off to “be there” for Joan, quick to medicate Joan to calm her down and callously eager to show off the plans for the house he plans to build for them, a house that Edmond instantly realizes “has no room for my wee boy.”

As we’ve seen in McAvoy performances from “Filth” to “Split,” he likes delivering the shocking, sudden flip-out. It starts with a “Are ye f—–g KIDDING me?” It climaxes with a beating and his arrest. If Edmond had any prayer of interesting the police in his new, concocted-on-the-spot “theory,” the copper isn’t having it.

“You’re in no position to tell me how to conduct this investigation right now.”

Joan’s unsettling underreaction to that beating speaks volumes. His “I’ve never KNOWN you to take a pill in your life” doesn’t excuse him or his behavior.

“You don’t KNOW me any more.”

The plot unravels in much more conventional ways after that, serving up a mystery with a solution that’s entirely too common in movies these days, a solution that’s arrived at in equally conventional “movie” ways.

But McAvoy keeps us wrong-footed, pretty much to the “Wait, what just happened?” (think about it) finale. There’s an exhausted brittleness to the relationship he and Foy conjure up and a genuine sense that a lot of what happens is what two desperate people leap into doing, without much forethought, on the spot. They’re grasping at anything that might get them their wee boy back.

Carion’s film has a gloriously foggy and rainy pall, and he stages the tense third act pursuit with enough verve to remind us he’s not a bystander in all this. “Improvised” or not, this is most certainly his brisk walk through the same movie he filmed four years ago in the Low Countries.

It’s not “Taken,” but that’s one of the chief appeals in McAvoy’s character and his performance of him. He ensures we don’t necessarily know what’s coming because he’s damned good at making us think he doesn’t know either.

Rating: R for language throughout and some violence.

Cast: James McAvoy, Claire Foy, Tom Cullen and Gary Lewis

Credits: Directed by Christian Carion, scripted by Christian Carion and Laure Irrmann, based on Carion’s 2017 film. An STX release on Roku.

Running time: 1:30

I’m guessing you have to know a lot more about the pre-history of the Spanish Civil War than I did going into “Gun City,” a sprawling multi-character muddle film noir take on those years titled “La sombra de la Ley” in Spain.

I know a little of that history, just enough to be just lost enough to not get much more out of than “Damn, they were trigger happy in 1921 Barcelona” and “Boy, those Catalans sure could suck down those cancer sticks!”

It’s a lumbering “ticking clock” detective tale/historical drama so slow and obsessed with “style” that it never gets going. Here’s the Hollywood film this Luis Tosar (“Eye for an Eye,” just seen in “The Vault”) brought to mind — “Mulholland Falls.” Like that one, it’s a murky tale of corruption, unclear alliances, of fedoras, trench coats, tommy guns and cigarettes — oh so many prop cigarettes.

Here’s what we know about early 1920s Spain in general and Barcelona in particular. It was a powder keg, a country swirling down the drain for the umpteenth time thanks to an idiot, high-handed king, a broken government, corrupt police and a newly-ruinous war in Spain’s last African colony.

A trainload of arms is ambushed and hijacked and the local cops are in so deep with mobsters they have know way of knowing if the mob or the “anarchists” organizing the strikes that are crippling an already invalid state are behind it.

Enter the big brooding bruiser nicknamed “The Basque.” Aníbal Uriarte silently strolls in from Madrid, barges in on the “Information Bureau” (police detective) chief Rediu (Vicent Romero) and his goons and starts riding along for “round ups,” witnessing torture and participating in extra-judicial murders.

“Welcome to Barcelona,” the cops growl as the Inspector “tests” his new “help” by ordering him to get his hands bloody. Rediu complains about the strikes, and the “more work” coming the police department’s way, with “fewer men” do carry it out. We wonder just what “work” means, in this context.

Toughest of the police toughs under Inspector Rediu is the cold-eyed killer (Ernesto Alterio) nicknamed “Tisico,” aka “T.B.” He’s quick to turn to violence, quick to suspect fellow cops of taking more than their fair share of shakedown money and sadistic to one and all.

The big local club owner and mob boss is The Baron (Manolo Solo), who dabbles in porn and sex trafficking and keeps his star stripper/singer/dancer, the sultry Lola (Adriana Torrebejano) under his thumb. Might the Baron have his hand in arms dealing?

And then there are the allied leftists and labor organizers led — barely — by Salvador Ortiz (Paco Tous). Young hotheads among his strikers want to meet the constant threats from factory owners and the repression, extra-legal violence of the cops with violence. At least his daughter, Sara (Michelle Jenner) is still all about “peaceful protests.” Until, that is, the cops murder a young woman in her movement.

The Basque must hide his hand, pick his spots to intervene (rape seems to be one place he draws the line), sniff around for answers and promise cooperation, loyalty and/or help to this or that faction as he races — ever so slowly — to locate the cache of military arms that could embolden whoever has them to start a civil war.

The actual Spanish Civil War didn’t erupt until another circuitous decade had passed, with changes in government and a fascist alliance with the army, the wealthy and the Catholic Church. It’s easy to feel the strain that director Dani de la Torre and screenwriter Patxi Amezcua went through to wrestle a coherent “Yojimbo” version of real Catalan/Spanish history out of this.

Tosar is our tour guide through all this. But as his “Basque” is a man of few — VERY few — words, that’s not a natural role for the character to play. There are too many other figures — military governors, a police commissioner, etc. — who further muddy up the associations, alliances and loyalties.

What does fit is the “Yojimbo” play-everybody-off-against-everybody-else model that the script toys with. The classic samurai film built on this plot was remade as a Bruce Willis/Walter Hill thriller, “Last Man Standing” back in the ’90s.

Tosar’s Basque doffs his jacket and joins in with a striker/strike-breaker brawl. But we can’t tell who he’s beating up, which side he’s on. This happens time and again, right up to the finale.

There are lustrous period settings (Santiago de Compostela doubled for 1920s Barcelona) and costumes, and showy bits of circling camera work to take in the sights, and the skin, of our star dancer character. There’s even a “Bonnie & Clyde” tin Lizzie car chase and Patty Hearst “political” bank robbery that the characters manage to sneak in between smokes.

The performances are of passing interest, but Tosar gives us little to grab hold of and while Jenner provides much of the passion of the piece, many others — especially Toerrebejano — are given short shrift.

Perhaps, as the no-help-at-all closing titles fill us in on the “true” aftermath of this somewhat “true” story, the filmmakers felt more bound to “facts” than this stylized, violent formula noir lets on.

“Gun City” doesn’t do either the true or the film noir riff on it enough justice to matter.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sexual assault, near nudity and lots and lots of smoking

Cast: Luis Tosar, Michelle Jenner, Vicente Romero, Manolo Solo, Adriana Torrebejano, Paco Tous, José Manuel Poga and Ernesto Alterio

Credits: Directed by Dani de la Torre, scripted by Patxi Amezcua. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

A filmmaker of rare sensibilities, a genuine “actor’s director” who helped Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto win Oscars, and after “Wild,” became Reese Witherspoon’s go-to filmmaker for her acclaimed cable series “Big Little Lies,” then “borrowed” by Amy Adams for “Sharp Objects,” Jean Marc Vallée has passed away suddenly, the apparent victim of a cold weather heart attack in rural Quebec.

He was just 58.

Vallée gained notice with the Canadian indie dramedy “C.R.A.Z.Y.” in the early 2000s, and became a marquee filmmaker with “The Young Victoria,” a glittering Emily Blunt star vehicle and bio-pic of Queen Victoria.

The Jake Gyllenhaal dramedy “Demolition” stands out among his credits, although I can’t see a film or series that Vallee had a hand in that wasn’t thought-provoking, challenging and very very good.

He nimbly transitioned to limited series work, the most popular form of filmed storytelling these days and the surest source of employment for directors, and had a couple of projects in the works at the time of his sudden demise, in a cabin outside of Montreal. He won an Emmy for directing “Big Little Lies” and was nominated for an Oscar for “Dallas Buyers Club.”

An awful thing, and a real loss to cinema.

Today’s Around the World with Netflix offering is a first year residents med school comedy from Brazil. “Lulli” borrows its premise from the “What Women Want/What Men Want” mind-reading comedies. But in situations and dialogue, in Portuguese or in English, cast and crew find laughs hard to come by over the course of their 90 minute “journey of self-discovery.”

“Lulli” (Larissa Manoela) is a driven, self-absorbed and bubbly redheaded pixie who has a hard time listening, she explains in the film’s opening narration.

“Listen closely,” she says. Because straight away, we hear her med student boyfriend Diego (Vinícius Redd) fret about not just his uncertainty about medicine (surgery) as a chosen profession, but his problems with them as a couple and some all-too-obvious health symptoms he’s been having of late.

Lulli, raised by a widowed mom, determined to be the star of the class and dismissive of his fading affections, if not his medical career doubts, doesn’t hear him. Then she lets him have some of her salad.

As Diego seizes up, as an ambulance is hastily-called, she blurts out “How come you never told me you were allergic to shrimp?”

“I told you a thousand times,” he gasps.

OK, he’s exaggerating and yes, maybe they’ve reached the “tuned-out” part of the relationship. But that’s his final straw.

“We’re done.“

Lulli’s narcissism plays out making rounds, distractedly “treating” patients while their head resident (Paula Possani) tries to keep everyone focused on a different patient so that they absorb these teachable moments. She misses clues patients give her and her fellow residents as they make their diagnostic quiz rounds. Lulli is headstrong and cocky, if empathetic. We’re waiting for her to accidentally kill somebody.

But no. It’s a patient stuck in an MRI who is her undoing. She ignores the thunder storm power failure procedures, ignores warnings from Diego, and bolts into the scanner room to “free” the “trapped” patient. Diego chases her. And both of them get a life-altering shock when the power surges back on.

Diego loses short term memory. He forgets that he’s broken up with his “beloved.” Lulli? She touches somebody, and hears their thoughts.

Her best friend in med school Vanessa (Amanda de Godoi) may tell her what she wants to hear, but her inner thoughts are more damning. Patients, Lulli discovers, lie about their drinking, their contact with cats, lots of things that might help speed up a diagnosis. She starts to impress her supervisor and her classmates, especially the re-smitten Diego.

“It was like watching ‘House!'”

Confessing to Vanessa only gets her admonished — at first.

“That only happens in the movies!” Right. To Mel Gibson (“What Women Want”) or Taraji P. Henson (“What Men Want”).

One obvious place “Lulli” could have produced laughs is when she realizes her once-dated/now platonic pal is gay. Another is when her friend forces her to see a tarot card reader. Only one of those kicks up a giggle.

The rest is just a lot of scenes of a cute and perky redhead medical resident and her supporting cast not being funny.

Rating: TV-14, adult situations, profanity

Cast: Larissa Manoela, Vinícius Redd, Amanda de Godoi, Sergio Malheiros, Paula Possani

Credits: Directed by César Rodrigues, scripted by Renato Fagundes and Thalita Rebouças. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

The latest “Spider-Man” fell off a bit on its second weekend, pulling in another $81 million in North America alone.

Biggest hit of the pandemic, buggiest (autocorrect is your friend) hit of the year, biggest Sony blockbuster ever.

Everybody else picked up scraps. And I do mean “Scraps ”

“Matrix Resurrections” bombed. A $12 million opening, this is a “West Side Story” level miscalculation. “West Side” squared.

As I said in my review, the director didn’t want to go back there, and punished Warners and the audience for making her.

Respect Lana’s wishes and skip it.

Only “Sing 2” made any sort of dent in the “Spider-Man” money minting machine. It earned $23 million, a decent animated sequel opening.

“The King’s Man” beat out a better man, and better film, edging “American Underdog” $6.3 million to $6.2.

“West Side Story” got a decent holiday bounce, to over $2.8 million.

“Licorice Pizza” finally opened wide Xmas Day and managed a $2.3 million two day weekend.

“A Journal for Jordan” manages $2.2 million on its opening.

“Encanto” finally faded to black, in the $2 million range.

Figures from Exhibitor Relations.

“One of Our Aircraft is Missing” has plenty that labels it as dated, a combat film of simple set-ups, primitive effects, plucky characters and attitudes easily seen as morale-boosting propaganda today.

But what’s striking about this early production of The Archers, as the productions of co-writers/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were branded, is its stark modernity, a lean story told with artful touches and unfussy performances, all in a film that was produced at the tail end of “The Darkest Hours” of World War II.

That mid-war (1942) pedigree, the lack of a musical soundtrack, un-subtitled conversations in Dutch and German and workmanlike “keep calm and carry on” professionalism of those playing a trained and drilled bomber crew make this one of the most striking combat films made in the thick of the last World War.

The story the filmmakers, years away from their “Red Shoes/Black Narcissus” technicolor glories, cooked-up was another variation of that classic “behind enemy lines” quest first served up in ancient Greece by Xenophon in “Anabasis.” It’s the Allied airmen flipside of Archers’ German sub crew quest of the more action-packed, more entertaining and timeless, “The 49th Parallel,” their previous film. An RAF bomber crew bails out over Holland, and has to find its way to the coast and possible Royal Navy rescue. In “Parallel,” the fleeing submariners must threaten, coerce and shoot their way to neutral America. In “Aircraft,” the British aircrew must depend on the enterprise of the defiant, friendly, “Let’s have some wine, first” Dutch.

Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, Hugh Williams and Emrys Jones are identified, right in the opening credits, as the various specialists in the aircrew — from pilots and navigator to “observer” and radioman.

There’s an old soldier/rear-gunner (Tearle), a “diplomat” turned pilot (Burden) who speaks a little Dutch, a footballer/radio operator (Jones), a working class front gunner (the great character actor Miles), the officious co-pilot (Portman of “49th Parallel”) and an actor-turned-navigator (Williams).

They get their twin-engined Wellington off the ground, make a little small talk about what Stuttgart, their target this night, is like, note the topography passing underneath them, cope with flak, futilely shoot at German spotlights and dip down low to hit their target.

But they don’t clear the city without getting hit, and eventually limping along on even one engine won’t work.

“Stand by to abandon aircraft! Stand by to abandon aircraft!”

We see the process of bailing out, through gun emplacement hatches or bomb bay doors, and hear the ironic sounds of the sputtering single engine sputtering back to life and continuing on, crewless, back to England.

On the ground, one member of the crew is separated from the rest. Dutch children inexplicably chasing all the family livestock (cattle, big and sheep) through the woods find them.

Thus does their escape odyssey begin.

A huge gathering of women led by the English-speaking schoolteacher Els (Pamela Brown) debate what to do and how to do it. There’s a testy interrogation of the “prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you are who you say you are variety.”

They’re disguised and led off, en masse, with the women (the “actor” dresses in drag for “my finest performance”) bicycling along with them as cover. The Brits portray their Dutch as still allies, worthy of liberation.

” Do you think that we Hollanders who threw the sea out of our country will let the Germans have it? Better the sea.”

They’re hidden in plain sight in a Catholic church service, something a couple of the Protestant Brits bicker about. They cope with a Dutch “Quisling,” a traitor (Robert Helpmann) who advocates collaborating with the Germans, and see a judgmental priest (future star Peter Ustinov) point to the error of his ways.

And they end up in the hands of another defiant Dutchwoman (Joyce Redman), who passes a mid-war assessment of Nazi era Germans that stings and rings true even today.

“They’re an unhappy people. I would rather be a Dutchman in Holland than any German soldier. They want to believe that somebody’s their friend, and that’s the whole trick.”

Thanks to a brisk script and the masterful editing of future director David Lean, “Aircraft” clips along, serving up genuine suspense, dashes of wit and limited bravado as the combatants put themselves in the hands of people who risk their lives to save them.

There are better prints of it than I saw, which impacts the airborne scenes more than those on the ground. The soundtrack is the first thing to go on older, unrestored copies of films of that era, and even in the inaccurate “quiet” of the notoriously noisy bombers, the dialogue is murky.

The film has entirely too much day-for-night footage to pass modern muster. That serves the film’s propaganda purposes. The crew can plainly see where they are, and bomb targets with pinpoint accuracy in the dark. The RAF bombed at night to avoid German fighters, and bombed cities because they were easier to find and hit that specific factories, railyards and the like. Even if they missed, they destroyed Germans and German infrastructure.

The footage of the “crippled” Wellington plainly shows both engines operating, and the optical effects — mimicking anti-aircraft fire, flak and tracers — is if anything slightly more primitive than in “The Dam Busters,” which came out over a decade later.

But Powell and Pressburger get fine, buttoned-down performances from one and all, and make great use of East Anglia locations — windmills, a Cathedral, rivers and woods — to create a convincing Holland.

And their scriptural problem solving, how to get these lads from A to B, is endlessly inventive, maintaining suspense and making the Dutch the true heroes of the piece.

That’s perhaps the most optimistic thing about this early 1942 production (it was released that July). Before Stalingrad, before El Alamein, before America’s impact could be felt and the tide truly turned, this film is shot through with the sense that “there’ll be blue birds over, the white cliffs of Dover” and that Europe will be liberated, even though the only one pushing that line as inevitable was Churchill.

As corny as it can seem, and the film generally avoids that sentiment on an overt level, this upbeat-in-the-face-of-adversity is kind of astonishing to take in now, given the speed at which gloom and doom about resurgent fascism spreads through Western Civilization these days.

As with “The 49th Parallel,” Powell and Pressburger show us that dated, “old fashioned” World War II movies can and sometimes do have a lot to say to later generations beyond a simple history lesson.

Rating: approved, some violence

Cast: Godfrey Tearle, Eric Portman, Pamela Brown, Bernard Miles, Hugh Burden, Joyce Redman, Hugh Williams, Emrys Jones, Robert Helpmann and Peter Ustinov

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Produced by The Archers for British National, available on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:22

There’ve been a few attempts, over the decades, to rewrite the history of Billy Wilder’s 1964 clunker “Kiss Me, Stupid.”

It’s “underrated” thanks to a winning Dean Martin as “Dino” kperformance, worth re-assessing because of a risque late scene Wilder was forced to edit out, somehow worthy of elevation because of its satiric intent.

I’d always missed it, and it’s safe to say that the reason it never fell into “classic” TV reruns rotation is that it’s a serious stumble, and not nearly as entertaining as the run of Wilder/I.A.L. Diamond hits — “Some Like It Hot,” “The Apartment,” “One, Two Three” and “Irma la Douce”– that preceded it.

Let me say two things at the outset of this “reconsideration.” First, my favorite Wilder film, one that grows in stature and delirium with each re-viewing, is “One, Two, Three,” a Cold War spoof that was cute when it came out, with its satire and broad lampooning of capitalism and totalitarian socialism (communism) stinging more, the laughs landing harder with every passing year.

A manic, screwball farce with James Cagney’s staccato bark paced by Aram Khachaturyan’s “Sabre Dance?” Film comedy doesn’t get any funnier than that.

And secondly, I had to chase “Kiss Me, Stupid” with a Christmas Eve re-watching of “The Apartment” just to get the foul taste of the flop out of my mouth.

The most ingenious thing in “Kiss Me, Stupid,” is Wilder’s assistance in helping Martin perfect the most comically popular version of himself, the persona that would give his late career TV host years their bounce. Playing “Dino,” a “pop star,” Vegas mainstay and actor on his way to do a movie “with me, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Joey Bishop – it’s called “Little Women”.” When he adds Bing Crosby, we know that’s a “Robin and the Seven Hoods” riff.

Martin is a stumble-on-stage-for laughs drinker with drunk jokes and leering womanizer gags at the ready.

“I have an amazing mother, you know. She’s 85 years old and she don’t need no glasses…she drinks right out of the bottle.“

Rim-shot.

Dino’s act, interrupting his crooning rendition of Gershwin’s “‘S’Wonderful” in front of a leggy Vegas chorus-line, would be repeated by Dean Martin, ad nauseum, for most of the late 60s through the ’70s. It’s funny and “new” here, the peak moment of “Kiss Me, Stupid,” and it’s over just as the opening credits end.

The plot had cobwebs all over it long before Wilder and collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, adapting an Italian play, started typing it. Dino leaves Vegas in his Dual Ghia convertible, bound for LA and the start of filming. But he gets detoured into tiny dirt-road Climax, Nevada.

That’s where a wily mechanic (Cliff Osmond) conspires with his songwriting partner, the local piano teacher and church organist (Ray Walston) to waylay him so that they can pitch their mostly-inane/wholly-derivative songbook to a captive (a sabotaged car) audience.

The “wrinkle” in all this is that for their scheme to work, they have to satiate the incurable womanizer with “some action.” As Dino is put up in piano teacher Orville’s house, he’s sure to put the moves on Orville’s wife Zelda (Felicia Farr). And as Orville’s already insanely jealous and suspicious of her, that’ll never do.

Mechanic Barney recruits cocktail waitress Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak, slatternly slinging an amusing gum-snapping accent) to pretend to be Zelda, and Orville picks a marriage-threatening fight with his wife to send her “home to mother.”

The way’ll be clear for Dino to make his move, and for the song-pitchers to make theirs. So they think.

The sexuality in this movie was fairly daring for the time, even considering Wilder’s previous film (“Irma la Douce”) was about hookers in Paris. It’s implied that Polly puts out for a price, although she makes it clear she ain’t “easy.”

The comedy is pitched broad and low for a Wilder farce — lots of leering from guys (Osmond, Walston and Martin) who know how to mug. It’s as if they know the zingers need some help to land.

 “I need another Italian song like a giraffe needs a strep throat… If it weren’t for Venetian blinds, it’d be curtains for us!”

The best joke in it sounds like one Martin made up on the spot, at a police roadblock.

“What’sa matter? That Sinatra kid missing again?”

Although there’s a chuckle here and there, everything about “Stupid” seems hoary and moldy and dated before a camera ever rolled. It’s self-aware enough to recognize that tumbleweed Tin Pan Alley wannabe songsmiths were a thing of the past in a post-Beatles-and-Dylan young singer-songwriter age. But the transition was so rapid that “Kiss Me, Stupid” had no hope of a shelf life, even back then.

The partner-swapping stuff may have seemed “daring,” but the way it’s played here is tacky, not titillating.

It’s not until you reach into the film’s history and realize there were casting issues which contribute to its clunkiness that all becomes clearer.

Peter Sellers had the Walston role, and had a heart attack a few weeks into filming. Walston was a funny man, at home in musicals on stage and screen. But the singing wasn’t what made the character, and Wilder stupidly had him dubbed with another singer’s voice in any event. Walston was never in Sellers’ class as a comic. How would Martin have played off Sellers? It might not have worked at all, but we’ll never know.

Novak is game, and aside from Martin, the best player in the picture. But it’s a superficial turn in a role that demanded more Shirley MacLaine vulnerability. Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield were both set to play the part which delays, death and a pregnancy prevented. MacLaine was pitched the “Zelda” role, initially. Mrs. Jack Lemon, aka Farr, got the role.

All the detailed, contrast-rich black and white cinematography guaranteed was that future HDTV generations would notice how poorly the makeup hides how bad everybody’s skin was.

The Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the film, everybody kvetched about the “bad taste” of it all. But the satiric target — American mores — is broad and the laughs just don’t land.

The thing that’s obvious watching “Kiss Me, Stupid” now is that the passage of time and shifting of societal mores aside, “restored” scene or not, the damned thing just doesn’t play. It’s two hours and five minutes of compromised comedy that never finds a rhythm or a reason it needed to be filmed.

Rating: approved, quite racy and sexual for its time

Cast: Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr and Cliff Osmond, with Barbara Pepper, Mel Blanc, John Fiedler and Howard McNear.

Credits: Directed by Billy Wilder, scripted by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, based on a play by Anna Bonacci.

Running time: 2:05

Let Hollywood plunge headlong into the CGI animals who hear the “Call of the Wild,” the easier to manage computer-generated bears and wolves, Persians and Chihuahuas they’re shoving into more and more films.

In France, they still do things the old-fashioned and proper way. They know there is no substitute for actors interacting with and audiences marveling at a living, breathing, not-wholly-predictable animal.

“Vicky and her Mystery” is a “true story” of a child and her adopted wolf, talkier and more melodramatically conventional than the minor classic “The Fox & the Child (2007),” but similar in setting, themes and living, breathing canis vulpes or canis lupus.

A doctor (Vincent Albez) has taken a leave of absence and retreated to his family’s country modest country house in the foothills of the Alps. He lost his wife, and his little girl, Victoria (Shanna Keil) hasn’t spoken since her mother died. Maybe a little Alpine sojourn will help her recover.

But we’ve seen local shepherds taking to the nearby forests where father and daughter hike. The shepherds are zealous about wolf “culling,” killing the last predators in the region so keep the wolves from attacking their sheep. Plainly, Dad getting lost isn’t their biggest concern.

A friendly farmer (the great Tchéky Karyo) takes them in and offers to take them home after one misdirected hike. But Victoria spies what she takes to be just a cute puppy, orphaned and curled up in a basket in the farmer’s barn. Her silence comes to an end in an instant.

“Does he have a name?”

“Mystère,” the old man says. Take him home, he suggests. Old Men of the Mountains know exactly what little kids need.

And so, in the film’s most far-fetched plot point, Vicky tucks the pup into her backpack, sneaks him home and lets him stay in her room. All of this is done with father Stephane somehow being none the wiser.

He doesn’t discover her “dog…maybe a Husky?” until after he’s marveled at the fact that she’s speaking again and coming out of her grief and shock.

As we’ve not seen the 8 year-old feed or walk little Mystère, we wonder how keeping this rambunctious “secret” is remotely possible.

But that’s not as important as what the wolf inside their door represents. The shepherds are downright militant in their demands to exterminate the wolves, to change policy so that what they do is legal. A secret wolf pet isn’t something these guys are going to stomach.

And as cute as little Mystère is, snuggling with Vicky, shredding her shoes and howling, her keeping him is sure to run her afoul of the single mom (Marie Gillain) who has been flirting with Dad at school pick-ups and drop-offs. She’s a veterinarian, and has ties to local wildlife management.

Mystère should be wild, living in a preserve. It’s just that Vicky and her father, who has seen what the wolf means to his daughter, aren’t letting that happen.

“Mystère,” as the film is titled in France, has a simple plot, gorgeous scenery and adorable trained wolves of various ages depicting the titular pup as he grows up, faces his wildness and tries to reconcile this with his love for a little girl.

I cannot overstate how that living, breathing animal grabs the camera and holds our attention in scene after scene. Like his co-stars in the film, I was transfixed by everything he did, the intelligence in the eyes that no computer-generated canine has ever been able to mimic.

As someone who regularly bashes Hollywood for taking the digital shortcut, from Big Red Dogs to simple housecats, I naturally think it’s great when somebody takes the trouble to make a movie that backs up my point.

If you’re telling a story about a child and her dog, wolf or what have you, and you don’t have the patience to cast, train and work with a trained animal, don’t bother.

“Vicky and her Mystery” may just be a children’s genre picture, with a couple of disturbing, heart-tearing moments to challenge its youngest viewers. But thanks to a winning cast and a darned good dog wolf, it’s irresistible. It works.

Rating: TV-PG, some violence

Cast: Vincent Albez, Shanna Keil, Marie Gillain, Eric Elmosnino and Tchéky Karyo.

Credits: Directed by Denis Imbert, scripted by Deni Imbert, Mathieu Oullion, Rémi Sappe and Stéphanie Vasseur. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:23

“The Scary of Sixty-First” is a lurid, bloody and somewhat misguided exploration of the crimes and mysterious death of well-connected human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in horror film form.

But it’s hard to effectively comment on and condemn a notorious sex criminal with a movie this invested in shock and titillation.

Put a pair of gorgeous, snarky 20somethings as new renters in one of Epstein’s “pedophile sex slave” apartments, one not even properly cleaned out after his hasty exit. Introduce a mysterious, unnamed and equally sexy “investigator” to describe the crimes there and have or two of the young women possessed by whatever evil resided there.

Yes, that’s a promising premise. But its so mishandled as to be icky and repellent, as if the last people to exploit those “handled” by Epstein and the likes of Prince Andrew are the folks who made and starred in their sordid little movie.

Two of the stars of “Scary” — Madeline Quinn and Dasha Nekrasova — co-wrote it, and Nekrasova, who plays the mysterious “investigator,” directed it, mixing simulated news coverage of Epstein and his “pedo island” in with a mad jumble of conspiracy theories, explicit sex, gruesome murder and mystery.

Noelle and Addie (Quinn and Betsey Brown) are former college friends who somehow are able to afford to rent a tony townhouse on 61st St. Addie’s an aspiring actress, and Noelle? Either her invisible means of support is left out, or I missed it.

They puzzle over the “strange” layout of the place, bedrooms that can only be entered or exited through another bedroom, the fact that it’s “kinda dirty” and a lot of furniture was left behind, and rent it anyway.

Their saucy banter suggests a little “drunken” intimacy back in college, something they’ve outgrown…at 25. But their first night there brings nightmares and bickering.

Then this stranger (Nekrasova) barges in and Noelle becomes obsessed with her investigations into what happened — “Maybe he kept his sex slaves here!” — and what happened to Epstein in Trump/Barr administration custody.

As they do, poor Addie is sliding into a dark place, one that animates her sex life with boyfriend Greg (Mark H. Rapaport) to a kinky degree and pushes the other two further down the rabbit hole, from visiting the place where Epstein died to various crystal and witchcraft (apothecary) shops as they stagger towards their own sexual possession.

The story’s a hash of widespread (and widely accepted) conspiracies and excuses to show a little skin and a lot of coitus and a downward spiral into depravity and disgusting decay.

There’s the germ of something promising here, and the performances and dialogue are up to par. But the whole is kind of a mess that becomes the very thing it’s meant to be satirizing.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Madeline Quinn, Betsey Brown, Mark H. Rapaport and Dasha Nekrasova

Credits: Directed by Dasha Nekrasova, scripted by Dasha Nekrasova and Madeline Quinn. A Utopia/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21