Movie Nation

“The Killing of Two Lovers” is a break-up story as stark as its Utah-in-winter setting, as brutal as its title.

The debut feature of writer-director Robert Machoian throws us into the seemingly quiet aftermath of a split, the calm after what appears to have been a just-as-calm “we need to work through some things” parting.

But there isn’t any “working through” whatever is going on here. That “calm” is an illusion, “no fault divorce” a myth. A family has been torn in two, and here’s a movie about the psychic violence that all-too-often dissolves into physical violence.

We meet David, given a simmering-before-the-boil energy by Clayne Crawford of TV’s version of “Lethal Weapon,” as he’s standing over a couple in bed, a revolver in his hand and wondering what to do with it.

We come to learn it’s his bed. Or it used to be. That’s his wife sleeping in it with another man. Those noises in the rest of the house are their four kids, getting restless just before dawn.

David gets as far as cocking the trigger before slipping out a window and sprinting down the street.

In a small town (This was filmed in Kanosh, Utah.), there’s no such thing as a “quiet” break-up. Everybody knows. David’s sprint ends at his pickup. And he only has to drive it another block or two to wind up at his dad’s house, where he’s staying. That’s how big this town is.

As David tries to get a handle on walking the kids to school and entertaining them on weekends, we meet soft-spoken wife Nikki (Sepideh Moafi of “The ‘L’ Word” and “The Deuce”). She sounds reasonable. But we also figure out how recent all this is, how quickly she worked the “see other people” into the equation, where she met the guy in her bed now and just how she and David ended up together, how young they were.

Nikki has late-awakening dreams, only some of which she’s articulated.

“So what did you have planned before Jess ruined it?”

That’s how she puts the question on “date night,” describing their oldest — their daughter — as a mistake, a trap they fell into.

She wants to know if David’s looking at places to rent. No wonder he’s confused. This isn’t “date night” banter. It’s tidying up and moving on.

But David? His dream is to get everything he had back. That is literally “all I think about.”

Machoian paints this portrait in pain in sound. We hear metal-on-metal, clinking and thunking noises as David drives around, grasping at what he should do. Confront? Kill? That’s his mind grinding its gears.

It’s a film of perfectly-observed moments — their three boys abandoning their still-rolling bikes as they dash for the school bus, Dad trying entirely-too-hard to make a snowy Saturday in the park, trying out model rockets, engaging, losing more ground with the oldest child, their daughter Jess (Avery Pizzuto, terrific).

And it’s a story of blunt counseling, some of it coming from that rebelling teen.

“You know, Dad, you need to FIGHT for us.”

That’s what we’re worried about. Amid these fully-rounded characters and vividly-recognizable lives, the threat of violence, of David’s frazzled state and the fact that he has a gun hangs over everything. What form will this “fight” take? Will he and “Mom’s new boyfriend (Chris Coy)” have a conversation, or have it out?

The situations are documentary-real, the acting barely feels like “acting” at all as we invest in the story, feel its pain and fear its outcome.

Machoian never lets this lapse into melodrama, never allows the reality of it all to lapse. The fact that he can take such an intimate, over-familiar situation and discover surprises and twists in it may be his most impressive feat of all.

MPA Rating: R for language (the MPA doesn’t care about “violence,” apparently)

Cast: Clayne Crawford, Sepideh Moafi, Avery Pizzuto and Chris Coy

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Machoian. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:24

When you’re mute, nobody can hear you scream.

That’s the horror hook for “The Djinn,” a generic but well-executed tale of a little boy who makes the right wish of the wrong genie.

The standard ingredients of such a tale are almost laughably over-familiar. A tweenage kid left alone in an apartment by his “double shift” all-night DJ dad. Mom “left” because of the child’s mutism. The previous tenant “died here.”

And what did the deceased leave behind, other than a framed photo of himself? A version of a “Book of Shadows.” Because of course he did.

That’s what young Dylan (Ezra Dewey, quite good) stumbles across when older-than-average Dad (Rob Brownstein) isn’t around. Dad may reassure the kid that “You’re perfect the way you are,” but Dylan has his doubts.

Once he’s opened the burlap wrapping sealed with prayer beads, you know what he’s looking for in the Book’s index — “Wish of Desire.” And we all know what he’ll be wishing for.

Not that he isn’t warned — “Beware the djinn’s toll, for the gifts that you seek may cost your soul.” But kids, am I right?

The spooky stuff that starts happening, after Dylan’s ASL’d the incantation into a mirror, includes bumps and thumps, a boombox radio that tunes itself (the setting is 1989, for no real reason), a TV that goes to static and demonic reflections Dylan sees on the screen when the set turns itself off.

Inky smoke invades the apartment, the light turns crimson and suddenly the kid is being chased-stalked (by the camera). He’s locked-in, the cordless phone is dead and Dylan is scared out of his wits.

All this is going on, chased by a “presence” which one moment might be a dead murderer killed after an escape attempt, another the dead previous tenant of the apartment or even Dylan’s sad, disturbed mother (Tevy Poe), terrifying the child when he should be pissed.

Because Dylan’s getting the djinn’s threatened “side effects,” but doesn’t get the promised voice.

Dewey, who looks a little like the young Joseph Gordon Levitt, conveys plenty of alarm and terror at what’s confronting him. Dylan fights back on a very basic level, and he has a chance because, as any movie hellbent on hauling out a hoary “Book of Shadows” suggests, there are “rules,” things that allow him to compete, “until midnight” escape clauses.

This isn’t anybody’s idea of a new horror classic. But “The Djinn” takes a basic story and delivers the basic jolts and frights we expect from it. No more, no less.

MPA Rating: R for some disturbing violence

Cast: Ezra Dewey, Rob Brownstein, Tevy Poe

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Charbonier, Justin Powell. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:21

If a mere Madeleine could send Proust “In Search of Lost Time,” surely a bon bon of a movie can inspire a reverie of films and times past, trips taken and those that lie on every traveler’s elusive “Bucket List.”

“The Man in the Hat” is a gloriously simple unalloyed delight. Put an actor in a tiny, vintage car, plop him in the South of France, surround him with quirky recurring characters and stunning spring scenery, and take away his gift of dialogue.

Let the sight gags and oddball set-ups commence.

The great Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, who first gained notice on this continent in “Circle of Friends” and “Persuasion,” a star of “Road to Perdition” and more lately of “Red Sparrow,” the Harry Potter movies and “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” would seem an unlikely candidate to try his hand at material more suited to Mr. Bean. But here he is, vamping a little Jacques Tati, lightly mugging and reacting in a film that can only be summed up as “Monsieur Hinds’ Holiday.”

He has a couple of lines — sentence fragments. But that’s it.

He’s just a traveler in the the small towns of the South of France (mostly Saint-André-de-Majencoules and Le Vigan and environs), a silent man who samples the cuisine and motors between auberges (inns), cafes, food trucks and pubs in a 1960s sun-roofed Fiat 500.

He wears a plain blue shirt and jeans, which match the Fiat. And he wears a hat. So that’s what he’s attired in when he finishes off his anchovies, asparagus and wine at a picture postcard harborside Cafe in the opening scene.

That’s where he spies five mugs piling out of ancient Citroën  2CV — an unlikely sight to start with — pulling out what looks like a body and dropping it into the bay.

They spy him, too. As he makes his getaway, little can they know that he will spend the movie eluding this clown car and its inhabitants all through France.

Every town is prettier and more quaint than the last, every narrow back road half as scenic as the next.

But that’s the way things work in this world. He’s forever stumbling into such locales, into two government employees (Amit Shah, Zoé Bruneau) in yellow traffic vests simply measuring things, into the striking woman (Maïwenn, of the horror classic “High Tension”) on a bicycle in a red dress, the very essence of “France” every time we see her.

There’s a chef (Muna Otaru of the brilliant but little-seen “The Keeping Room”). And then there’s the helpful, downcast and equally silent bearded stranger, played by the sturdy British character actor Stephen Dillane (“Game of Thrones,””Darkest Hour,” “The Greatest Game Ever Played”).

The bearded stranger helps The Man retrieve his hat, which he’s dropped into a river under a tiny, Romanesque bridge.

That’s the level of “action” this charming film serves up — a lost hat, stepping in dog doo and losing a shoe, an attempt to return a forgotten purse to the woman on the bike (she keeps running into him, and wanting nothing to do with him), a Fiat surrounded by Alpine goats on the edge of the Pyrenees, car trouble as he makes the Fiat climb those mountains, a shared meal with two screwball brothers whose cuisine and home brew make The Man wince.

The Man overhears conversations, a woman gossiping with a girlfriend about cheating on her man, an innkeeper telling her tale of lost love to a visitor who’s attempted suicide in her establishment.

The Man in the Hat keeps the framed photo of a woman in the car, even as he offers the occasional lift to strangers.

Every so often, he stumbles back into the Bearded Man and The Chef. He’s stopped by the measuring team. And he’s got to escape another “trap” when he runs into those five thugs in the 2CV.

There’s not a lot to this, but what’s here can feel like carefully curated comic perfection. Hinds is downright adorable as the lead, taking us on the dream French vacation foreigners hope for. Even car trouble drops him into a garage run by women who sing “The Song of Forgotten Cars” (car models make up the lyrics, in French) and “The Song of Forgotten Cigarettes” as they work.

“Gitane...Looooooky STRIKE!”

A tenor breaks into a romantic Italian lament at dinner, joined by a guitarist — a female vocal trio joins the Man in the Hat in the Fiat for an acapella dream sequence.

I don’t want to oversell a film so slight in its charms, one that relies on the most basic of sight gags. But something about “The Man in the Hat” and its timing, at the tail end of a travel-banned pandemic, makes this petite picture a postcard-shot delight.

The co-directors are a fellow (John-Paul Davidson) known for filming British celebrity travelogues with Stephen Fry and Michael Palin, and a composer (Stephen Warbeck), which explains the film’s musical quality, and its buy-this-soundtrack score of ballads, classics and pop.

I’m already pining for a sequel. Round up everybody, put Monsieur Hinds in a Triumph Vitesse, and follow him through his native Ireland. What say, kids?

MPA Rating: unrated, threat of violence

Cast: Ciarán Hinds Stephen Dillane, Maïwenn, Muna Otaru, Brigitte Roüan, Amit Shah, Zoé Bruneau

Credits: Scripted and directed by John-Paul Davidson, Stephen Warbeck. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:35

“Iceman” is an attempt to create a back story for the frozen, mummified caveman found in the Ötztal Alps, on the Italian-Austrian border, in 1991.

He was nicknamed “Ötzi the Iceman” by researchers, and was found with a full complement of kit — all the gear one needed to survive as a Neolithic European — furs and flints, bow and a copper axe blade. He was 45 when he died.

We know what he ate for his last meals — Ibex and chamois, grains and beans.

What we don’t know is who killed him.  An arrowhead was embedded in his shoulder and he bled out in the alpine cold.

Felix Randau’s version of how he met that end is mostly plausible, and movie-genre conventional. “Ötzi,” named Kelab (Jürgen Vogel ) here, was a hunter from a mountainside hamlet who came off to see that barbarians have slaughtered his family and everyone he knows, and torched the place.

The raiding party (André Hennicke, Axel Stein et al) hear his howls of grief, but don’t go back to kill him, too.

This feels odd, as their raid left pelts and livestock, and seemed mostly aimed at rape, murder and destruction. There is one object they got their hands on, which when it is revealed, later, is the second instance worth a “Come on, that’s preposterous.”

Kelab — no, we don’t actually hear his name and everybody here speaks an untranslated Rhaetic dialect, remnants of which survived into later history — finds the baby that his little boy was able to spirit from their lodge before the boy caught an arrow himself. Kelab grabs a goat, and with mewling infant in hand, sets out to stalk the murderers and have his revenge.

There are encounters on his quest, his first tastes of revenge. A little convenient “let’s hand the child off so I can continue my hunt” business aids the relentless pursuit.

I like the untranslated period-correct dialect choice by writer-director Felix Randau (“Northern Star”). But while there’s lots of stunning scenery, there’s too little detail added to the life science has reconstructed out of the forensic evidence.

We see a little hunting, a little eating. Still, you’ll be relieved to know that sex hadn’t yet gone out of fashion.

But much of what happens from the pitiless and under-motivated murder-raid onward is too conventional to be of much interest.

Think of the “characters” that developed in “Quest for Fire,” the far more tactile sense of that world, the far more interesting encounters and struggles of the principals. Granted, the phrase “story arc” hadn’t been invented, but come on.

For a moment — and just a moment — I thought maybe there’ll be something truly clever done with all this. If we’re making a point about the eternal violence of man with this story, maybe it’ll turn out that the guy stuffed into a museum in the Italian Tyrol is...the bad guy!

Think of it. We’ve followed this victim’s quest, seen him dispatch murderers and get distracted by others via tracking that is taken for granted, not even implied much less displayed. And then he kills the last guy and…it’s ÖTZI!

Yes, the first critic was Neolithic, and she also declared “This is how I would have done it!”

Still, that struck as a more interesting way to go than the drab Barbarian pre-Conan saga we’re treated to here.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Jürgen Vogel, André Hennicke, Susanne Wuest, Sabin Tambrea, Axel Stein and Violetta Schurawlow

Credits: Scripted and directed by Felix Randau. A Film Movement release on Tubi, Amazon and other streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:36

Guy Ritchie’s reunion for a not-quite-humorless/entirely-too-American and violent and “serious” heist picture with Jason Statham didn’t stir the box office much — $8.1 million was all “Wrath of Man” could manage. Decent reviews could have helped, but weren’t allowed to.

Billy Crystal’s sentimental comic-in-winter “Here Today” proved he’s over, and Tiffany Haddish is about 14 minutes into her 15. Well over a thousand streets, well under $1 million at the box office.

Another $3 million went to the anime “Demon Slayer,” another $2.4 or so to “Mortal Kombat” one-mo-time.

With the ongoing pandemic, movies without the fanatical fanbase that horror, comic book franchises or anime mainstays, etc (“Godzilla vs. Kong”) remain a very hard sell.

I don’t know what Sony could have done with Crystal’s comedy. His “crowd” has aged out of the habit and won’t be dragged into theaters for anything less than the comic second coming, which “Here Today” most definitely is not. Can’t have cost much, low risk and all, and I still wouldn’t have written him a check. Not for starring, co-writing and directing. Nobody to rein in that ego? Sure, NOBODY saw this coming.

Miramax releasing the MGM co-production “Wrath of Man” and imposing an after-the-last-minute embargo on reviews seems a dated, arrogant and in this case, wildly misguided effort to hide a movie that didn’t need hiding.

Welcome back to the game, Miramax. Embargoes are for losers. Not a great picture, not that bad, either. You had a winner, and labeled it a loser. Live and learn.

Elon and Miley and…Chad.

“High Ground” is a violent, vengeance-driven Western set at the end of the Frontier era in northern Australia. More intimate than epic, but gorgeous, stately and tense, it captures a last burst of tit-for-tat reprisals in a country starting to face its genocidal past and racist present.

This can’t-do things-that-way-any-more epiphany only comes as the country slides into the Great Depression and an uprising starts in remote Arnhem Land, one sparked by a massacre a dozen years before. Yes, this was going on as recently as that.

The film takes great pains to show Aboriginal life and the point of view of the continent’s native people as it tells its story from the point of view of a survivor of that massacre, a little boy (Guruwuk Mununggurr) whose life is shattered in mere moments when virtually his entire family/clan is wiped out.

Simon Baker plays a World War I sharpshooter turned law enforcement officer. In any potential confrontation, Travis always seeks the high ground, a vantage point where his accuracy can end a fight in a hurry. That’s where he is when a posse closes in on an Edenic watering hole in some of the most stunning Australian scenery ever put on film.

Little Gutjuk is too young to have absorbed all of the wilderness skills and folkways of his family. As the police-led posse shows up to question the family about stolen cattle, the kid picks the worst possible moment to panic over a snake. In a flash, the slaughter begins and ends.

Travis, appalled, sees all this play out through the scope of his Mauser. When he finally climbs down into it, he stops the murdering of witnesses with his gun and without hesitation.

And he’s the one who takes Gutjuk to the nearby Alligator River mission, where he leaves him with the pastor’s sister (Caren Pistorius of “Unhinged”) and the Aboriginal congregation there.

The bad blood between Travis and his colleague, formerly his wartime spotter/partner Eddy (Callan Mulvey) will fester for years, even if there are no legal consequences for this latest slaughter of the disenfranchised natives.

When an uncle starts an uprising, burning settlement “stations” and killing a white woman, adult Gutjuk, renamed Tommy (Jacob Junior Nayinggul) is ordered to lead police to his uncle (Sean Mungunggurr) to “bring him in” by Royal commissioner (Jack Thompson) in charge.

Tommy wants to know if Travis is there to “kill my uncle,” and Travis wants to know if this is yet another “punitive expedition” against the Aborigines. He’s the only white man in all of this who wonders “Why? There’s always a why?”

Uncle Baywarra is getting revenge for that massacre a dozen years earlier.

“High Ground” is the second feature and second film with an Aboriginal story (“Yolngu Boy”) of director Stephen Johnson, who works mostly in Australian TV. Much of the tale unfolds through the lens of a rifle scope, as Travis — a second father figure for Gutjuk — teaches him how to shoot, and to seek “the high ground,” where he can dictate the terms of a confrontation.

Johnson takes pains to show the unspoiled beauty of a land visited by all this violence, and screenwriter Chris Anastassiades (who wrote “Yolngu Boy”) has the testy, racist Eddy state the obvious about the root cause of this conflict.

“Two people can’t share a country.”

We’re shown the debates and rationalizations of the natives, speaking Jawoyn (with English subtitles) as some seek revenge and others look for a parlay, a negotiated way out.

Johnson’s devotion to shots of birds — in flocks and solo, screeching their various calls — suggests a nod to their symbolism in Aboriginal culture that won’t be obvious to most viewers.

Character motivations aren’t the clearest, and loyalties can seem to turn on a half penny. But the stand-offs are suspenseful, brutal and skillfully staged.

And the performances — from Baker’s resigned stoicism and Mulvey’s hotheadedness to Thompson’s cynical pragmatism — are first-rate, with newcomer Nayinggul holding his own with the veteran cast.

It’s not “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” but Johnson has crafted a striking look at Aboriginal life tucked into a most engrossing tale of racism that manifests itself in violence, violence which has consequences whose blowback can comes years and years later.

MPA rating: unrated, bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Simon Baker, Jacob Junior Nayinggul, Callan Mulvey, Sean Mununggurr, Caren
Pistorius, Witiyana Marika and Jack Thompson

Credits Stephen Johnson, script by Chris Anastassiades. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:44

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen Preston Sturges’ masterpiece, “Sullivan’s Travels.” Watching it again on Mother’s Day weekend (my mother had never seen it) reminded me of the fickle nature of memory, when it comes to movies.

That image of Joel McCrae watching a cartoon with his fellow inmates is what sticks with you from this film. Playing a filmmaker who has to be busted and dumped onto a chain gang before he figures out that his “light entertainments” are what the public craves — and not movies of Big Social Import because life’s hard enough — this is the “money shot,” the image meant to stick with you from the 1941 film.

For the life of me, I couldn’t recall the madcap opening act of the movie, the many abortive starts our self-important star director, John L. Sullivan, has to make before he actually hobos his way out of Hollywood. He’s hellbent on making a picture that matters, one that speaks to the human condition, one he’s titling “O Brother Where Art Thou.”

Nothing is sacred to those Coen Brothers. Nothing.

I didn’t remember the spirited teen in the “whippet tank” hot rod of his own creation outrunning the studio-provided “land yacht” that is to shadow our college-educated, privileged Hollywood icon as he slums on the bum.

“I’m going out on the road to find out what it’s like to be poor and needy and then I’m going to make a picture about it.”

But I vaguely remember the lecture his English butler and valet (Robert Greig, Eric Blore) give Sullivan about his patronizing “caricaturing” of “the poor and needy” and the very idea of faking homelessness, joblessness, hopelessness and abject poverty.

And I had forgotten the situation that allows Sullivan his epiphany, sitting with an audience of “just folks” as they roar with laughter at a Disney cartoon starring Pluto, the dog.

Whatever you take away from the film, the most moving scenes are “Grapes of Wrath” accurate depictions of homelessness and the African-American church the prison inmates are ushered into, the sheet dropping from the rafters as a screen, and a preacher calling for sympathy for “those less fortunate” as they’re led in, in chains, to watch the movie with his congregation.

Jess Lee Brooks was the uncredited actor who gives the film’s lesson in compassion. The fact that Sturges and Paramount left his name off is a stain that should sting, eighty years after it came out. All that attention for 19-year-old newcomer Veronica Lake, and Veronica Lake’s hair, and they leave a good contract player who acts and sings and just breaks your heart, off the credits because of racism.

The nattering studio execs and publicity folk characters don’t really stand out, although William Demarest as a crusty publicity chief, makes an impression.

McCrae, who embodied a lighter version of that innate decency that Gregory Peck projected on and off screen, is terrific. And Lake, unpolished as she is — Bacall was MUCH better and just about as young in her screen debut — manages a winsome way with a line to go with her luminescent shimmer.

“You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don’t have to listen to his jokes.”

Al Bridge, playing the archetypal chain gang “Mister,” is spitting, whipping perfection.

But Brooks is the one who makes the message work, the one who should have been credited and the supporting player who makes “Sullivan’s Travels” worth the journey. He’s the difference between a good film of the Depression Era, and a classic.

MPA Rating: Approved, violence

Cast: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, William Demarest, Jess Lee Brooks, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Robert Warwick, Eric Blore, Robert Greig and Al Bridge

Credits: Scripted and directed by Preston Sturges. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:30

John Frankenheimer made his leap from “Golden Age of Television” TV director to big screen Big Name director permanent with “The Young Savages,” a flinty, gritty courtroom drama dressed up as a street gang murder thriller.

He’d just turned 30 when he dove into this Burt Lancaster star vehicle back in 1960-61. And he never looked back, pounding through “All Fall Down,” “Seven Days in May,” “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Train,” “The Fixer,” “Seconds,” the epic “Grand Prix,” “The Gypsy Moths” and the bomb “The Extraordinary Seaman” before the ’60s ended.

He went on to direct “The French Connection II,” “Black Sunday” and a genuine modern action “classic” — “Ronin” — before he was done.

“Savages,” a non-musical companion piece to “West Side Story,” has Lancaster as a one-time Italian street punk turned assistant DA, grabbing a political hot potato of a case — the broad-daylight/witnesses everywhere killing of a Puerto Rican kid, right in front of his sister on the stoop of his tenement.

ADA Bell has to fight his politically-ambitious boss (Edward Andrews), his “bleeding heart” wife (Dina Merrill), the court-appointed psychiatrist (Milton Selzer) and the rival gangs — the Thunderbirds and the Horsemen — to get at the truth.

His past is thrown in his face in the form of the mother (Shelley Winters) of the youngest of the three accused killers. She’s the fiance he outgrew as he worked and married his way out of the Lower East Side.

The mistrust and New York cynicism comes at Hank Bell from all sides.

The shrink — “I understand they’re building a kid-sized electric chair upstate!”

The wife — “Why don’t you just tell her you’re going to burn her son, for old time’s sake?”

The uncooperative cop (Stanley Holloway, briefly seen and unbilled) on the other end of the radio — “In which order do you want these requests turned down?”

Telly Savalas makes a ferociously dogged New York cop more than a decade before he took up the “Kojak” lollipop, Luis Arroyo becomes a Hispanic gang-banger archetype as Zorro, the smart, smooth and ruthless leader of the Horsemen.

And John Davis Chandler turned his leering, blond and clammy looks to a career of heavies as the ring leader of the Thunderbirds hit squad, striking the victim “in self defense. He had a knife!”

“He must’ve been better with a knife than anybody in the wooooorld,” Bell smiles, in that Lancasterian purr. “Roberto Escalante was BLIND!”

Frankenheimer stages the violence with an in-your-face verve, tilting and turning the camera in fights and foot-chases, hurling us into a brawl on a crowded subway car at one point.

He can’t do but so much with the courtroom portion of this saga, so his solution is to cut that to the bone. It feels truncated and half-abandoned for a reason.

There’s an unfiltered quality to the racial slurs slung about here. In 1961, you could make the case that Italian and even Irish slurs had something near-parity with Hispanic and African-American ones. Not any more.

The story is more melodrama than anything else, with the whole “used to be a couple” business with Winters, the tipsy wife’s liberal politics embarrassing the “job-to-do” ADA and infuriating the man’s all-powerful boss and the many wrinkles in the murder victim and his family’s “complicated” relationship to the gang warfare and vices of the day.

But “Young Savages” is more than just “West Side Story” without the singing. It took another Lancaster movie or two for the rest of Hollywood to catch on, but this kid Frankenheimer? He had style to burn and an eye for big, brawny material that only the big screen could do justice to.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, smoking, drinking, racial slurs

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Dina Merrill, Telly Savalas, John Davis Chandler, Luis Arroyo, Pilar Seurat, Stanley Kristien, Neil Byrstyn, and Shelley Winters

Credits: Directed by John Frankenheimer, script by Edward Anhalt and J.P. Miller, based on an Evan Hunter novel. A United Artists release.

Running time: 1:43

I interviewed Romero once or twice, interviews that always turned toward why he wasn’t able to get his films financed.

As indie and DIY as the “Night of the Living Dead” icon was, little he managed to get in front of audiences came easily.

“The Amusement Park” was one he got made but couldn’t turn into a release back in the early ’70s. Frankly, the trailer makes it look like distributors would have laughed him out of the room. Even drive-in theaters had some standards, after all.

Still, curious to see it.

Shudder has this, streaming it on June 8.