You’d think a lot of distributors wouldn’t dare open their film against the last Tom Cruise “Mission: Impossible” outing this weekend.
You’d be right. But “The Last Rodeo” is opening as counter programming. And our friends at Magnolia are offering up this Subcontinental comedy May 23.
Looks cute and edgy, liberating and fun.
“Breathless” didn’t start the cinema and world pop culture’s youth movement. It didn’t launch the French “New Wave” that brought Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut and others to fame and glory as they upended cinema conventions back in 1959.
But Richard Linklater (“Boyhood, ” “Dazed and Confused”) remembers all that it did, and here’s his version of that scene, the making of “Breathless,” and the impact American actress Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) had with that performance in that film.
Doing it mostly in French? Un bisou de chef, non?”
Sony is handling this A24 release in some territories, a bloody tale of a disturbed, grieving foster mother (Sally Hawkins) who needs foster kids to help her revive a dead child.
Icky?
May 30 in North America, released over the course of the summer elsewhere.
The first time I pondered the “coincidence” of a classic film turning up on my TV at a particular moment in history was coming home from school in the ’70s and seeing the Cold War era gem “Seven Days in May” showing on a local CBS affiliate.
This was in the mid-70s, during the debate over one of the SALT treaties — Strategic Arms Limitations Talks. It can’t have been a coincidence that John Frankenheimer’s Kirk Douglas/Burt Lancaster/Ava Gardner and Fredric March 1964 thriller, about an attempted military coup staged when a president dared to propose such a treaty, was airing on WFMY-TV at this precise moment in time.
It wasn’t until years later, when I was making newspaper-sponsored movie review appearances on that same station, that I pondered what message a right-wing-owned-and-leaning TV affiliate in North Carolina was sending by dropping that movie in that time slot at that moment in history.
Since Jan. 20 of this year, BBC America has been slapping 1984’s America-taken-over-by-communists thriller “Red Dawn” in its lineup on a regular basis. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
And then the little-seen WWII classic “The Mortal Storm” turned up on Turner Classic Movies the other night. Showing that movie now is, again, no coincidence.
An MGM film that pretty much pulled off the gloves and bluntly called-out Germany, Naziism and what was going on there over a year before America entered the war, I remember being gobsmacked by its outspoken anti-fascism during a university film society screening in grad school.
You go to film history classes and read all that was written about Hollywood in the run-up to war, with Warner Brothers films the first and most prominent to call out fascism and big, heavily-invested-in-Germany-and-Occupied Europe markets MGM’s timidity on the subject. And then Mr. Mayer’s studio went and made the one film they’d avoided making, an all-star thriller calling blasting Nazi Germany and contrasting fascism with American values in the most direct terms imaginable.
It was MGM’s only anti-Nazi movie before the war. But it’s a doozy.
The courage and urgency that the studio lacked wasn’t reflected by the career of Oscar-winning director Frank Borzage. He’d already made “Little Man, What Now?” and “It Happened Here,” films with similar themes, settings and warnings.
The film’s infamous avoidance of using the word “Jew” as it depicts the early days of the Hitler regime, with its assaults on academics and ethnic minorities, may be the one cowardly thing about it. But much of what is in this adaptation of a novel by the wife of a British diplomat, who viewed this history from postings in Austria and Germany during that period, still stings.
The film was banned by Hitler. Because big conservative and sentimental MGM lands some political punches, for once.
” I think peace is better than war. A man’s right to think as he believes is as good for him as food and drink.”
“We should be intolerant, of anyone who opposes the will of our leader!”
“Tell him peasants HAVE no politics, they keep cows!”
“They want to KEEP their cows, they’d better have the RIGHT politics!”
“May we not believe as we choose and allow others to do the same?
University science professor Viktor Roth (Frank Morgan) turns 60 and is feted by his admiring family and colleagues, and is treated to a verse of the university song (“Guadeamus igitur”) by his adoring students.
But on this Jan. 30, 1933, it’s not his birthday that’s big news in town. Adolf Hitler is named Chancellor of Germany, and smart academics, civil rights watchers and Europe’s Jews appreciate what that means, even if a lot of young people and the Roth family’s Hitler-loving maid do not.
“The Mortal Storm” is about the conflicts and moral stances taken under the roof of the Roth household, with adopted sons donning the swastika and a pushy student with a closet full of brown shirts, Fritz (Robert Young) insisting that daughter Freya (Margaret Sullavan) say “Yes” to his enthusiastic proposal even though she’s merely pondering the question.
Freya has another option. Martin (James Stewart) is savvy enough to know what the Nazis will do and what it means to peace, and to “freedom” for Germans in Germany. Martin stands up for Professor Roth in front of Nazi bullies, and for others similarly threatened.
That doesn’t mark him. Not right away. But as Professor Roth and others are rounded up and sent to camps where they wear “J” badges, the gauntlet is thrown. Martin must join or face consequences and Freya and family had best take the next train out.
The Nazis don’t say “Not so fast.” But as every move they make is aimed at obliterating independent thought, burning books and banning the teaching of Einstein and other scientists with the wrong surname, we and the characters know what’s coming.
One thing that impresses about this classic 85 years since its release is the fervent commitment of the cast to their parts in this anti-fascist passion play.
Stewart is fiery and fiesty as the unbending humanist and anti-fascist. Morgan, the one and only Wizard of Oz, is properly saintly and martryed. And Sullavan manages to seem confused, despairing and put-out, sometimes all at once.
A Nazi’s assuming she’ll marry him as her dad is among the first rounded up? The nerve!
But it is the actors playing Nazis who stand out in the “fervor” department.
Young has no trace of his future as “Father Knows Best” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” He’s gleefully hateful. Robert Stack’s clipped, efficious cruelty is a few years shy of leading “The Untouchables.” Dan Dailey‘s future as a song and dance man (“There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “My Blue Heaven”) is nowhere to be glimpsed in the wide-eyed fanatic he portrays in his MGM debut.
Ward Bond? Considering his later coming-out in far right politics and Hollywood “Blacklist” mania, he slips into his Nazi guise the most easily.
Character actors were the backbone of every studio in Hollywood’s Golden Age. But it’s still jarrring when the familiar, cracking whine of the busybody neighbor commenting on George Bailey’s inept courting of Mary in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the future mayor of Mayberry, Dick Elliott, demanding to see “Your PAPERS” as a Nazi passport clerk.
Borzage won two Best Director Oscars, including the very first one ever handed out — for “Seventh Heaven” (1929). “The Mortal Storm” isn’t his or screenwriters Claudine West, Hans Rameau or George Froeschel’s subtlest work.
But in 1940, that was very much the point. Europe was in flames and seven years after Hitler’s ascendency as Chancellor, there could be no doubt of the threat he represented to democracy, personal freedoms and Western Civilization itself. Subtlety and “both sidesing” were out of fashion.
And there’s little subtle about showing “Red Dawn” or “The Mortal Storm” to American viewers in 2025, either, for very much the same reasons. This 1940 film is a stark reminder of when we had a surer sense of our values and the common sense to act on them when faced with a man and a movement antithetical to them.
Pointing out that ignorant totalitarians and their violent minions always go after academics, learning and books first is always a welcome first step, even if it’s a belated one.
Rating: “approved, TV-PG, violence
Cast: James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Robert Young, Dan Dailey, Anita Granville, Robert Stack, Irene Rich, Maria Ouspenskaya, Ward Bond and Frank Morgan.
Credits: Directed by Frank Borzage, scripted by based on a novel by Phyllis Bottome. An MGM release on Youtube, Roku TV, TCM’s Amazon Channel, etc.
Running time: 1:40
Yes, this trailer to the June 13 Apple TV+ release pretty much gives away the whole show. It’s an 83 minute long thriller, guys. TOO MUCH PLOT is spoiler alerted in this.
Domhnall Gleeson, Fiona Shaw and Kyle MacLachlan join the Oscar winner and the “It” girl of the moment for this thriller from the director of “Beast.”
This French period piece/fantasy stars and Suzanne Lindon, Julia Piaton, Zinedine Soualem, Cécile de France and Paul Kircher.
François Berléand plays Victor Hugo, which tells us where director and co-writer Cédric Klapisch (“The Spanish Apartment,” “Rise,” “Chinese Puzzle,” “Family Resemblences”) is going.
I’ve seen a few of his films, and interviewed Klapisch once. This has me intrigued.
May 22, “Colours of Time” begins its run in theaters.
A sequel/reboot of “Final Destination: Bloodlines” relaunches a 25 year old horror franchise in style. Warner Bros/New Line is looking at an over $40 million opening weekend, based on a robust Thurdsay night ($5.5 million) and hefty Friday ($15.5 million more) opening day. Good reviews may give it a boost.
The final tally, provided by The Numbers on Sunday, is a whopping million opening weekend.
The other wide release — “Hurry Up Tomorrow” — isn’t in the same class as that, as pop singer The Weeknd (billed as Abel Tesfaye in the film) rolls out his critically-drubbed Perils of Pop Stardom star vehicle (with Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan) and just over $3 million in ticket sales Wed/Thursday through Sunday.
That won’t crack the five. “The Accountant 2” is still earning nearly $5 million . “Hurry”won’t hit $4 million. Pretty humbling for the self-described “cinephile” Canadian pop star who sang “Call Out My Name.” “Accountant” will probably finish its run @$70 million, all-in. The Weeknd won’t even reach $10 million, serving up the biggest bomb on Jenna Ortega’s resume, I dare say.
The underwhelming “New Avengers” “Thunderbolts*” is still making money, fading at a steady but somewhat steep and predictable rate. It sold another $16.6 million in tickets to take second place, just ahead of “Sinners” ($15.4) which has been out weeks longer.
No way will it match the original, non-comic book derived“Sinners” overall, as “Thunderbolts*” is in Marvel’s “Eternals” territory for underperforming comic book superhero movies. “*” just cleared the $150 million mark. “Sinners” will end Sunday night with over $240 million in the bank.
That stupid “Minecraft” movie cleared another $5.8. “Chicken Jockey” fans have pushed that over the $400 million mark and are still showing up as it finishes its second month in release.
Horror movies used to be money in the bank for even the smallest distributors. The bigger ones — franchise installments — would open in the $25-30 million range, but even middling titles would hit the teens.
This past year saw that reliable audience seem to lose interest, en masse, in visiting the cineplex. A few outliers performed. And then “Sinners” backed into the genre (the vampires are the stupidest element of that) and blew up. And now throwing a decent amount of money and adding horror icon Tony Todd to the “Final Destination” franchise is paying off.
I’ve always had a soft spot for “Final Destination” as a franchise. The original film’s focus on the “I’m going to live forever” heedlessness of youth and “Death’s grand design” as it introduced the elaborate coincidences which the grim reaper sets in motion to take out those perceived to have “cheated death” made it stand out.
Remember how the kids who skipped a class trip that ended in a plane crash? One of them heard a John Denver song on the airport’s Muzak system and noted, “Didn’t John Denver DIE in a plane crash?”
This latest “Final” is more of a comedy, earning decent reviews and I hope to get around to it this weekend myself. But I’m still shaking off the ugly aftertaste of that Weeknd wank of a “Hurry Up and END Already” movie.
Horror has lost some of its audience, but horror franchises go on and on — “Insidious” to “Annabelle,” “Saw” to “Halloween” to “Final Destination.” People like knowing what they’re coming to see more than being shocked and surprised.
This gonzo Lionsgate release is getting “early Tarantino” hype coming off the film festival circuit.
A Lakota Ghost Shirt is the MacGuffin, with characters stealing it, shooting each other over it with guns or bows and arrows, and generally making mayhem all over America’s Country Music and Cowboy Boots Belt.
Toby Huss, Zahn McClarnon, Harriet Sansom Harris and Simon Rex star in it.
As it’s being released on the next to last weekend of August, a dumping ground where unpromising studio pictures go to die, don’t get your hyped hopes up.
This looks different.
Well Go USA has this thriller from the director of “Ali Topan” slated for June 17 release.
Some decades ago, I was ensconed in the archives of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, researching one of the university’s most famous alumni for a news article appreciation of his life and film career on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
And there, tucked into the papers of “National Velvet” and “The Yearling” director Clarence Brown were several screenplays, the filmmakers’ own copies of his scripts. There were notes and hand-written strike-throughs jotted on most every page of every one of them.
On the margin of one script — it probably wasn’t “Flesh and the Devil,” but might have been “Anna Christie”” — were the letters “GG” and a four-digit number. It took my breath away the moment I figured out what the hell it was I was looking at.
It was Greta Garbo’s Los Angeles phone number circa 1930. MGM paired up Brown and Garbo for four films, beginning with the silent blockbuster “Flesh and the Devil,” and including “A Woman of Affairs,” the Eugene O’Neill adaptation whose advertising tagline was simply “Garbo Talks!,” “Anna Christie, and the Tolstoy romance “Anna Karenina.” Of course Clarence Brown would have had her number.
That was April of 1990, when all the world had one last go at Greta Garbo mania. It was the month the reclusive Swedish screen icon died at 84. She’d retired half a century before, but thanks to endless media coverage of her passing, that phrase the critic Kenneth Tynan coined about her in 1954 was one many could quote.
“What when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.”
But it’s been decades since she died, and as almost nobody watches old films any more. Who remembers much more than a pose, a stare, a reputation built on a line from one of her films that she took to her grave?
“I want to be alone.”
Aside from the period piece “Queen Christina,” appreciated as “queer cinema” today, and the screwball comedy “Ninotchka,” her films are largely forgotten if not forgettable. It might be too much to expect Greta Garbo would still command public fascination. But has she disappeared from pop culture, five-going-on-six generations since her abrupt “retirement?”
The new documentary “Garbo: Where Did You Go?” asks this question. Filmmaker Lorna Tucker (“Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist”) leans on Swedes descended from Swedes who knew her, a Swedish stage director and Swedish journalist and a few Americans related to people who knew her well in her later years, as well as archival interviews with Orson Welles, George Cukor, Kate Hepburn, George Cukor and Marlene Dietrich. A sampling of a BBC/MGM appreciation of Garbo knowingly narrated by her contempary Joan Crawford also summons up a life, an unlikely career and the culture that shifted under the weight of her celebrity.
It’s an excessively gimmicky documentary, putting an actress in an unflattering Old Garbo mask at a dressing table for many voice-over-narrated scenes, using a willowy blonde actress (Ellyn Daniels) as “The Investigator,” the narrator who sets up the “acts” of Garbo’s life and tells her story through the journalists of her day. The great Swedish actress Noomi Rapace (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) voices Garbo’s own words in decades of letters, writing to relatives, drama school friends, lovers, would-be suitors and the Svengali director Mauritz Stiller who “discovered” hat counter clerk Greta Gustafsson, talked her into changing her name and took his “muse” to America with him when Hollywood and MGM talked him into moving.
But Tucker smartly sets up conflicting takes on Garbo’s best films, her best destiny, best friends and mental state and lets the viewer decide.
Was the working-poor girl who never went to high school “happiest” in drama school in Stockholm? Was the much-older (and possibly bisexual) Stiller the best thing that could have happened to her, or the worst? Was “Anna Karenina,” “Queen Christina” or her teenaged Swedish breakthrough film “The Saga of Gösta Berling” her best film? Was “Ninotchka” really “the role that was closest” to the “real Garbo?”
Taped phone conversations from the ’70s and ’80s and the recollections of who made up her circle of friends remind us that the media labels celebrities who don’t want to talk to them “recluses,” when that’s rarely the case. They’re simply media shy.
The paparazzi were invented for Garbo, who was stalked, “pursued, chased” and hounded by newshounds all of her adult life.
“Why must people talk about me?” she asked in a letter. Why couldn’t people — the press, in particular — allow her the privacy she craved?
“Where Did You Go?” sets the record straight (again) about the abrupt retirement (she gave one late-life interview to a veteran Swedish journalist who earned her trust over weeks and several vacations at a European hotel). That notion that she set out to “close the door” by leaving the cinema at her peak popularity and sex appeal is promptly dashed by that.
We see screen tests from movies she thought about making throughout the late 1940s. These provide a still glamorous contrast to her first Swedish film appearances — in a silent celluloid theater ad for bread and an educational/industrial silent or two.
Orson Welles regales an interviewer about being treated to those earliest clips via the Swedish Film Academy in the decades before home video, and marveling at how that plump (a LOT of people called her “fat” in her youth) child became “the most divine creature to ever be on the screen.”
We learn from a descendent of a little known Swedish suitor, and hear about the much younger men who angled to be her “walking companion” in New York, men who used her and sold gossip about her to scandal sheets and photographers aiming to score that rare “Garbo sighting.”
Much of what has become her legend is verified by Garbo’s letters — her depression, her loneliness in America, her dismay at the slick shallowness of Hollywood films, the heartbreak of losing her sister young and then her mentor Stiller shortly after he returned to Sweden to leave his “creation” to the stardom he helped give her.
“Garbo: Where Did You Go?” is content to “verify” much of what has come before in biographies over the decades. And the gimmicks suggest writer-director Tucker had to content herself to simply providing an entertaining overview of the first truly famous life spent seeking, then shunning the world cinema spotlight.
The costs of fame were readily recognized by a pioneering figure who sought to shed it even as she stayed obsessed with what people in and out of the press were saying about Greta Garbo.
“Why must people talk about me?”
And yet thirty-five years after her death, with just a couple of her films still celebrated as “classics” and evidence of her legendary beauty only viewable in black and white stills from those films littering the Internet, people still do.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Greta Garbo, Ellyn Daniels, Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn, narrated by Noomi Rapace.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Lorna Tucker. A Sky TV film on Netflix, other streamers.
Running tim: 1:30
Movie Nation 