The Robert Davi-directed My Son Hunter (2021) proffers an engagingly true performance by Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden. It fits perfectly a ferocious satire on political malfeasance and techno-age conniving. John James is also comically strong as Joe Biden. As amusing as it is barbed—very barbed about the laptop affair—the film eventually fails because of a changing tone and moments of agitprop. It’s a necessary piece which could have been good. Incidentally, if President Trump has been unprincipled about acquiring money, a film about this too would be necessary.
In the John Wayne Western from 1944, Tall in the Saddle, land seizures are interrupted when a man threatens to tell the authorities about the sell of marked playing cards. The man, never shown, is killed. John Wayne plays the newly hired worker and good shot who, naturally, discovers the truth.
Wayne plainly attracts the haters here, including an insufferable biddy. A saucy cowgirl (Ella Raines) believes Wayne has made a fool of her, and she intends to fire him from his ranch job, but—aw—she becomes infatuated with him. There is a pleasing little moment in Saddle when a fellow female looker, Raines’s competition, praises the cowgirl’s prettiness and Raines gives a verbal indication that she knows about her looks and intends to use them to her advantage.
Tall in the Saddle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Director Edwin L. Marin‘s movie is a fun romp in which Wayne’s character is refreshingly less contemptuous of certain people than some other Wayne characters. The cast is not wholly effective but it comes close, especially with the admirable fire of Ward Bond and Miss Raines.
I saw the Howard Hawks film, Ceiling Zero (1936)—or let me say I saw a particular print of it—on YouTube. It was the best I could do since the pic was never released on DVD.
Director Hawks did even better with airline workers in Zero than he did, years later, with cowboys in Red River. He organizes his scenes of active crews admirably, although this is in truth scriptwriter Frank Wead‘s show, for he adapted his own play.
Aviation technology of the Thirties is (to me) fascinating, and here we get that as well as a surprising amount of aircraft destruction. And death. There is no happy ending. Still, I was happy to be seeing the forgotten Ceiling Zero.
The Wind and the Lion (1975) is an adventure yarn with Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith) as one of the chief characters. If director-writer John Milius admires Roosevelt, as I have read, why did he fail to make him a serious man? Keith’s performance is fine; Milius’s writing is not. It turns ludicrous.
Wind also stars Sean Connery (good) and Candice Bergen (bad). Appearing as well is John Huston, whose presence produced in me the desire to see The Man Who Would Be King, for it’s a much better period piece than this.
Cover of The Wind and the Lion
Joaquin Phoenix is superlative, never making a misstep, as a small-town sheriff in Ari Aster‘s Eddington (2025), set in Covid Year 2020. The themes include the adequacy and inadequacy of legal and personal reaction to epidemics, internet deceit and folly, political fury and violence, marital thoughtlessness. It’s a pretty sturdy, and weird, tragicomedy until the last third of it serves up an unsavory, nihilistic mess. Semi-good work, then, from Aster; very palatable work from actors Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone and Austin Butler.