Thoughts on Bed of Roses

   On Criterion, I watched Bed of Roses, a 1933 Pre-Code romantic comedy directed by My Man Godfrey director Gregory La Cava, and co-written by Wanda Tuchock (one of the few women directors to be credited on 1930s Hollywood movies), starring Constance Bennett and Pert Kelton as Lorry and Minnie, a pair of convicts just out of prison in Louisiana who steal and turn tricks to get ahead, often getting men drunk to pick their pockets. The movie is really blatant about their sex work, like Lorry turning down a ride from a priest so that she can drive a delivery truck while Minnie has sex with the driver in back as an exchange of favors. They make it onto a steamboat, without enough money to make it to New Orleans, and Lorry gets caught stealing $60 from a man she manipulated, and she jumps off the boat and swims to a barge led by Dan (a very young Joel McCrea, looking rougher than he would in his more clean-cut Preston Sturges era later), where they banter and fight, and she slowly falls in love with him.

    But she makes it to New Orleans, cons a rich publisher (John Halliday) she had passed by on the steamboat, and after some manipulation and blackmailing him, she gets him to rent her a fancy apartment, and he is essentially her sugar daddy. But Dan comes back into her life, and she has to choose between love or money, including the publisher threatening her back with blackmail about her own sordid past.

    Notably, Mildred Washington, who played Lorry's maid Genevieve, sadly passed away at just 28 the year the movie came out, of complications from appendicitis. She was an actress and dancer, performing in many California clubs, and was one of the stars of Hearts in Dixie, a 1929 movie musical featuring a predominantly Black cast.

    It's a short movie, at just 67 minutes long, and I had thought it started out fun, with two women friends using conning and sex work to get ahead, but it got less interesting when it turned into a story about a woman having to choose between two men, I wasn't as into the romance parts. And I really liked Pert Kelton, she was the typical snappy wise-cracking best friend, and I wanted this to be more of a girl buddy movie. Her as Minnie also gets married, marrying a rich guy out of convenience, though that also felt more like a sugar daddy/sugar baby relationship than being husband and wife.

    It's a decent movie, nice to watch for the pairing of Constance Bennett and Pert Kelton as friends, and seeing a Pre-Code movie that is just barely over an hour long.

Thoughts on Finishing School

    On Criterion, I watched the 1934 Pre-Code Hollywood film Finishing School, co-directed by George Nichols, Jr. and Wanda Tuchock, the latter who was one of the few women directors working in Hollywood in the 1930s. The film starred Frances Dee as Virginia Radcliff, a sheltered rich girl who is sent to a New York City finishing school by her parents (John Halliday and Billie Burke), and gets an education in rebelling as a regular teen girl, with Ginger Rogers as a "bad girl" type named Pony who opens up her world. Virginia also falls in love with a medical intern (Bruce Cabot), Mac, who works as a waiter for a living, and the school and her mother oppose the relationship.

    It's a really interesting movie, and it feels more modern as a "teens rebelling against authority" kind of movie, as well as being a movie about how older women can force younger women to conform to society, suppressing and policing them, shaming them for indulging in sex and alcohol, and are more interested in keeping up appearances than caring about the girls' well-being.

    Dee, who married Joel McCrea around this time and retired from her Hollywood career in the 1950s, is really good as an innocent girl who starts off seeming like a square, refusing to drink alcohol and throwing her roommates' bottle of liquor against the mantel, but earns the respect of the "bad" girls for not snitching on them when caught passing notes in class, who frequently writes letters back and forth with her beau whenever she gets in trouble for seeing him, and is rightfully angry and terrified when the headmistress tries to have her physically examined without her consent by the school nurse. (I was unsure if she was being checked to see if she was a "virgin," but the violation was clear). I love when she is defiant about being proud of having sex with the man she loves, regardless of it being premarital sex, and standing up to the headmistress. 

    Ginger Rogers was fun and charming as Pony, a girl from the same rich background, but who refuses to be held back by the rules on vices. She tells Virginia that the school doesn't really care about what the girls do, only that they don't get caught. So the school is harder on Virginia not because she went out with a man, but because he dropped her off at school, being seen with him. Rogers was on her way up as a star, and I like that the film depicts a caring friendship between the girls that is more sympathetic, and not demonizing Pony as a bad influence that would get punished in a Hayes Code-era movie.

    I recognized Theresa Harris, a Black actress of the 1930s who had an uncredited role as Mrs. Radcliff's servant, because I had also seen her in 1933's Baby Face, another Pre-Code movie, where she played a close friend of Barbara Stanwyck's character, and is treated as an equal friend and not as a servant in the film. Due to Hollywood racism of the era, she wasn't given the right roles to shine in, but she was a lovely actress who stood out as a charismatic beauty.

    One of my favorite actors in the movie was Anne Shirley as this dorky, enthusiastic girl named Billie, who keeps trying to be Pony's friend, only for Pony to see her as an annoying nuisance and shutting her out. She was just this adorable kid, and looking her up, I realize that I had seen her in 1932's Three on a Match, as the younger version of Ann Dvorak's character. Shirley was credited as Dawn O'Day back then, with her real name being Dawn Paris. She was best-known for starring in Anne of Green Gables in 1934, and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Stella Dallas in 1937, before she left the industry at age 26 in 1944.

    Wanda Tuchock wrote for over 30 films, directed three, and produced one. She was one of the few women to be credited as a director on a Hollywood film, next to Dorothy Arzner and Dorothy Davenport. She also co-wrote Hallelujah (1929), directed by King Vidor, and being one of the first Hollywood films with an all-Black cast, including Nina Mae McKinney and Daniel L. Haynes.

    I really enjoyed watching this movie. It's short at just 73 minutes, and packs a lot of story in, and is fun to watch.

Thoughts on High Spirits

    I wanted to like 1988's High Spirits more than I did. It had a fun high concept, of ghosts haunting an Irish castle and the owner (Peter O'Toole), the descendant of the ghosts, trying to save the castle from foreclosure by bringing in American tourists to stay in the hotel and have the Irish staff pose as ghosts to create fun hauntings.

    But then the movie decides to focus more on "romances" between an American couple (Steve Guttenberg, Beverly D'Angelo) and the 200-year old ill-fated ghost couple that ended in murder-suicide on their wedding night (Daryl Hannah, Liam Neeson), and the ghosts quickly are in lust for the people, with obvious green-screen effects every time the ghosts do something ghostly, and it gets icky to watch.

    Liam Neeson's character was a smelly, farting brute who murdered his wife, and he immediately pervs on Beverly D'Angelo's character, and after she's initially scared, she starts to like it. Similarly, Daryl Hannah's ghost immediately falls for Steve Guttenberg's character (typically playing his bland 80s self). The ghosts fall for them because the couple accidentally interrupts the loop of their murder-suicide, playing out every day for 200 years, and start thinking more independently and wanting forever love with the couple, which plays out in an ending that I found off-putting and gross, especially with emotional manipulation and using sexual assault to get what they want.

    Meanwhile, the side characters get wasted, with a pre-fame Jennifer Tilly being underused as one of the tourists, and the Irish staff mostly seen as comic relief instead of focusing more on them trying to do ghost antics to save the castle. And there is a fun part where a kid gets pulled into a painting by an octopus and turns into a painted figure himself, reminding me of The Witches, where a little girl gets trapped in a painting by a witch and slowly ages there until she disappears.

    I did like the set of the castle, it looked lived-in and had a fun historical, ancient feeling to it. And I did like how O'Toole's mother was still in contact with her husband's ghost, continuing to live a happy life with him in the castle.

    I felt like this movie wasted its potential, and could have been more fun, but it spent way too much time on the romances with the couple and the ghosts, and it turned sour for me.

Thoughts on Between the Temples

    On Monday on Labor Day, I went to see Between the Temples, a 2024 indie film directed by Nathan Silver, co-written by Silver and C. Mason Wells, and starring Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. I really liked it a lot, even if I felt it could have been 90 minutes instead of two hours. It’s a comedy that’s very steeped in Jewish culture and customs, and even though I work at a Jewish nonprofit, I grew up Catholic, so I know I’m not going to get all the nuances of life in the synagogue and preparing for a bat mitzvah.

    Schwartzman plays Ben, a cantor in a synagogue who is struggling to sing again because he is grieving the death of his wife from a year ago, and moved back in with his mom (Caroline Aaron) and stepmom (Dolly de Leon from Triangle of Sadness) in Sedgwick, NY. At a bar, he happens to meet his childhood music teacher, Carla Kessler (Carol Kane), who drives him home after he gets punched in a bar fight while drunk on mudslides. They are both widowed, and she comes to one of his classes where he is preparing kids for their rites of passage. She explains how she never got her bat mitzvah because her parents were Communists and wouldn’t allow it, so Ben agrees to teach her to prepare for her bat mitzvah in her 70s.

 

   From then on, it becomes this quirky, funny movie, that feels like a mix of Harold & Maude with Ben developing feelings for Carla, and with Ben feeling pressured by his family and his rabbi to date the rabbi’s daughter (Madeline Weinstein) to move past his grief, as well as Carla’s adult son, who is Ben’s age, weirded out by their seemingly platonic relationship and seeing his mother getting into being Jewish after living a Catholic life with her late husband.

    I really liked this movie, especially watching the fun and warm chemistry between Schwartzman and Kane, and seeing de Leon in a very different role from Triangle of Sadness and watching her be more relaxed and funny. The climax of the movie set at a dinner scene was hilarious, and I liked how the movie ended on a hopeful, sweet note.

Thoughts on Strange Darling

I saw Strange Darling today at the Angelika Film Center in New York City. It’s a thriller, directed by JT Mollner, and I went into it cold, not wanting to be spoiled, and liked the subverted expectations of the movie, centering on a serial killer and their victim, stemming from a one-night-stand. Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner were the stars, and I got invested in their dynamic, especially when they are talking with each other in the car before going into a motel, trying to size each other up and measure the risk of this hookup.

I’ll say that throughout half of the movie, I was convinced that there were two actresses starring in the movie, and it took me too long to figure out that it was one, Fitzgerald, because her eyes looked narrow in one part of the movie (told in chapters out of chronological order) and larger in others, as well as wearing a magenta wig for half of the movie. The last time I thought something like that was watching Mulholland Drive, and thinking a different actress came into the second half when it was Naomi Watts in a dual role.

I liked the indie synth music soundtrack, and Giovanni Ribisi was the D.P. and producer, and the movie looked stunning and bright and viscerally gory.

Ed Begley, Jr. and Barbara Hershey have cameos as an old hippie couple, but aren’t in the movie as much, it’s mostly dominated by lesser-known actors, which was good.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie, and liked that it felt a little different. And I think the director was really inspired by the final moments of King of New York for the last scene of this film.

Thoughts on Drive My Car

 

    On Criterion, I watched the 2021 Japanese film Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, screenplay by Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe, and based on the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami. It’s a three-hour drama that I found really compelling and engaging, about grief and loss and regret, and centering on a stage actor and director, Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) grieving from the sudden loss of his wife, and two years later taking a residency in Hiroshima to direct a multilingual stage production of Uncle Vanya, casting actors of Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese descent to perform their roles in their own languages, including a mute actor using Korean Sign Language.

    His wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) was a TV screenwriter, and came up with her detailed stories while having sex, narrating them out loud, and having her husband repeat them back to her later so she wouldn’t forget them. They had been married for over twenty years, and had the loss of their child at four years old, but despite their history, Oto seemed a bit of an enigma to Yūsuke, and he didn’t want to lose their dynamic as a creative artist couple.

    In his grief, he is staging the show, and he is assigned a personal chauffeur for insurance reasons, and meets Misaki (Tōko Miura), a quiet, independent young woman who is at first professional in being emotionally removed as a hired driver, then later bonds with Yūsuke, revealing the complicated history she had with her abusive late mother, and together they commiserate over their shared grief and complex feelings.

    I not only really liked the performance by Miura, as this introverted character working through a rough childhood to be financially independent through her driving skills, but I also really liked Park Yu-rim as Lee Yoo-na, the Korean mute woman who can hear and communicates in sign language. She had this quiet calm to her, and as more is revealed about her character, she becomes even more intriguing, with layers of depth. I’m surprised it was her film debut, as she really stood out in the film, and gave a stunning performance in the finale.  

    I had heard great things about this film, and I liked how quiet and peaceful it was, how it was sad without being depressing, just more contemplative on life and learning to deal with the past and move forward.

Thoughts on Last Exit to Brooklyn

 

   On Tubi, I watched Last Exit to Brooklyn, the 1989 film based on Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1964 novel of the same name, depicting the underclass and marginalized members of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 1952. Directed by Uli Edel (Body of Evidence, The Little Vampire, Christiane F.), with a screenplay by Desmond Nakano, the film had an incredible cast of character actors and up-and-coming stars: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephen Lang, Stephen Baldwin, Alexis Arquette, Jerry Orbach, Burt Young, Ricki Lake, Rutanya Alda, Mark Boone Junior, and a very young Sam Rockwell in one of his early screen roles.

    The film focuses on a union strike of metalworkers, and how the strikes affects the neighborhood, where the young and arrogant strikers spend most of their time getting drunk at bars and picking on people to jump for fights. The neighborhood is very old-school, working-class, Italian and Irish, which makes it a dangerous place for queer people, like the transgender Georgette (Arquette), the closeted union leader Harry (Lang), and the sex worker Tralala (Leigh).

    Stories between the union strikers, the queer characters, the sex worker, and military officers preparing to ship out to the Korean War all interconnect, and the movie has this roughness and griminess that makes it hard to watch, but gripping because of the excellent cast talent. The film was filmed in Brooklyn, and since parts of 1980s Brooklyn hadn't changed much since the 1950s, especially the remote parts of Red Hook, the movie feels lived-in and genuine, and uncomfortable to watch for its ugly and raw depiction of a bigoted and close-knit neighborhood of people.

    I hadn't seen this movie since high school over twenty years ago, and only remembered parts of it, and blanking out the rest of the film. When I was in my junior and senior years, I knew an acting teacher named Rob Kramer, who taught drama at the arts magnet school I went to half-day to do creative writing and playwriting, and he had a small part in this movie. I had watched it, and then asked him what role he was in the movie, and he went, "I'm the guy who instigates the gang rape on Jennifer Jason Leigh." Bold of him to be that blunt to a teenage student, but I appreciated the honesty.

    It's a really great film, and I came away really feeling for the marginalized characters, and impressed with what a powerhouse of an actor Stephen Lang is. I'm only casually familiar with him from Avatar and Don't Breathe, but he gave a knockout role as a closeted husband and father carrying on a secret romance with a gay man that uses him for his money than caring about him.

    And Jennifer Jason Leigh had already proved that she could take on tough roles, like her role in Paul Verhoeven's Flesh and Blood in 1985, and this role would further influence her 1990s career of playing sex workers, people with substance use disorder, and mental health issues, and bringing heart and honesty to them.

    It was a very bleak film to watch, but really good to revisit it after so many years and come at it with an older perspective.