Christmas in July (1940), by Preston Sturges, is a nice short story of a film. It isn’t novelistic, yet it is a feature film. Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell) is tricked by co-workers into believing he won a commercial slogan contest. He can’t possibly afford the purchases he then makes; enter the police, etc. As in other Sturges movies, a pendulum swings from being poor to being rich or vice versa, and it happens one way or another.
Film critics are offended by the “fascism” and the politics of Uwe Boll‘s Citizen Vigilante (2026), but it doesn’t matter. Nobody is reading these reviews, few though there are, and scores of people are renting the film from Amazon Prime and Apple TV; and it’s resonating with them. Yes, the film is irresponsible—and agitprop—but it makes the point that the authorities in Western society are also irresponsible. They cruelly represent progressive indifference to rampant immigration, incompetence about immigrant crime (and crime in general), and wimpy permissiveness.
Banned in Germany, where Boll was born, the English-language CV is pulpy, gory, grim, and even sexy. Armie Hammer‘s performance probably cannot be improved on. Margarita Mladinic is never false as a prostitute and has a clearly comely body.
The nineteenth century in Stanley and Livingstone (1939) is much like the twentieth century in that the work that men do takes them far from home and into remote areas, and the men aren’t even soldiers. One of them, Dr. Livingstone (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), is a missionary who might have died in Africa, but didn’t. Henry Stanley (Spencer Tracy) is a newspaper man assigned to hunt down Livingstone if rumors of his death are false.
What would be corny in movies today, such as some stuff involving Walter Brennan, was not considered corny in 1939, although there is not that much corniness at all in this absorbing Henry King film. Much of it is quite mature (there is intelligent talk) and well-meaning, with some captivating, Kenya-provided safari footage. Even the less than believable hot pursuit of Stanley and his helpers, who have virtually no arms, by many hostile natives is something to see. As for the acting, a lot of grounded work gets done. Spencer Tracy is just Spencer Tracy—but this works. Hardwicke is truly fine as a man of God, while Brennan, Charles Coburn, Nancy Kelly and others are exactly right. Congrats all around.
Cover of Medium Cool
In the 1969 picture, Medium Cool, Robert Forster skillfully purveys a TV photographer’s calm extroversion and no-nonsense defiance. He is true, and Peter Bonerz, as the sound man, is even truer. Verna Bloom (as Forster’s love interest) does everything possible to create a complex character, and shines with authenticity and poise.
There. I comment on the acting because, seemingly, far less has been opined about it than about everything else in this Haskell Wexler film. Highly topical in ’69, it is partly about social agitation and, especially, violence in what used to be present-day America. Its flaws have been well explained by critics like William Pechter, which flaws, I believe, sink Medium Cool. Though very imaginative, it’s a New Lefty political film which goes almost completely awry.
It is set in Chicago, indeed the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Talk about violence. Consider today’s violence in Chicago, New Lefties. Murder on top of murder.
A teacher named Rolfe narrates his older brother’s story in the Russell Banks novel, Affliction (1989), and even if he is not likely to be a wholly reliable narrator, he can surely be trusted in pointing out his brother’s deepening affliction. Wade Whitehouse, the 41-year-old sibling, is divorced from Lillian, the only woman he has ever genuinely loved, and painfully misses having his young daughter in his care. He struggles against the wrath of his half-mad father and harbors unreasonable suspicions about the men around him, at the risk, it turns out, of losing his job.
Wade’s life starts going down the toilet. For him to be is not really to live, for he is living with a “dumb helplessness.” Or he begins to live with it. Being is all that Wade has. A helpless man is not free. A Christian couple, Wade’s sister Lena and her husband Clyde bring to the family a set of traditional religious beliefs that their relatives don’t know what to do with. Lena and Clyde can be fatuous, but that they live lives distinctly separate from those of Wade and his father is understandable. The men’s behavior creates a maelstrom increasingly difficult to control.
Affliction is cohesive, thrilling and mature. It is better than much of Faulkner, and although it is not as profound as the best of Faulkner, to me it is just as powerful as it.