I did not like the Hal Hartley films Henry Fool and Fay Grim, but the third one in the director’s trilogy—Ned Rifle (2014)—is something else again.  It’s a characteristically oddball intellectual comedy about a young Christian, Ned Rifle (Liam Aiken), who is confused enough to want to kill his repelling father (Thomas Jay Ryan) for ruining his imprisoned mother’s life.  Not romantically Ned takes up with Susan (Aubrey Plaza) who, unknown to Ned, was once the victim of his father’s, Henry Fool’s, statutory rape.  Susan is aware of this too.

It seems we may infer from this movie that the twenty-first century is no different from any other century in that it is one of sin and one of enlightened religious self-interest, and religious commitment.  The century inevitably serves up America the saved and America the damned, as it were; and it is sometimes challenging to tell one from the other.

This is probably Hartley’s best picture, despite more striking characters in some of those earlier films (e.g. Trust).  But Ned Rifle is just as piercing and palatable as the early stuff, and its black-comic plot is free of the artist’s past adolescent jolts.

Having little character exploration, Rawhide (1951)—the movie—is nevertheless a good one about criminal men.  It wasn’t meant to be The Wild Bunch, though, and so it offers a hero in Tyrone Powers‘s Tom and, in fact, a heroine in Susan Hayward’s saucy Vinnie.  For good measure, Henry Hathaway’s film is one of the best I know about the holding of hostages:  Tom and Vinnie need to free themselves and Vinnie’s toddler niece from a pack of fugitive thieves.  One of them, smart Rafe Zimmerman, seems like a gentleman but isn’t (Who are you, Zimmerman?  Tom demands).  He will eliminate witnesses.

Hathaway’s directing is impeccable, with concentrated action in the frames and expert camera placement.  He gets real Westerner prowess from his actors—notable performances by Hayward, Hugh Marlowe (Zimmerman) and Jack Elam.  Dudley Nichols wrought what is apparently an original script, and it’s the kind of entertainment piece that makes you want to see the writer’s talent in other movies.

What Bettie Page, famous for pin-up posing, experienced in childhood and adolescence is far worse than what she herself did for the porn business in the Fifties.  As a child she was sexually abused by her father, which is almost ignored by Mary Harron’s film The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), and as an adolescent she was gang raped.  She went on to study acting and to be photographed for erotic pictures, even S&M stock.  Congressional hearings were held to determine if the stuff was socially damaging.  Bettie felt conflicted.  All this is in Harron’s dramatized film.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins (Amos 5:12).  This is in the picture too.  As a child Bettie goes to church; as an adult she accepts the concept of sin and converts to Christianity.  She believes God wants her to stop posing, but does not regard posing as a bad and shameful thing.  Quite naive, this Bettie Page; but she does convert, as did the real Bettie in 1959.

Not a terribly important film, Bettie is nevertheless beautifully made and straightforward.  The time is the Fifties:  at first Harron fashions the nice illusion that the movie itself is a Fifties flick.  Before long, however, the adults-only material intrudes, as does color (though only when appropriate).  Less lovely than the real Bettie, Gretchen Mol is nonetheless positively fine at portraying Page’s simplicity, cheerfulness, vulnerability, sex appeal, and religious awakening.

Cover of The Notorious Bettie Page

Ann Miller and Busby Berkeley—what a combination!  Doubtless this would be true even if Berkeley’s choreography in Small Town Girl (1953) was mediocre but, unable to judge this particular art form, I don’t know whether it is or not.  To my mind it’s pleasurable, as surely as Miller’s dancing is entrancing and forceful.  Another kinetic treasure in the film, however, is dancer Bobby Van, moving beautifully for “Take Me to Broadway.”  Miller whirls along on waves of percussion in “I’ve Gotta Hear That Beat.”

The book for this musical concerns a cocky New Yorker (Farley Granger) who spends time in a small town jail for speeding and insolence.  The titular small town girl is blue-eyed Jane Powell, who at first seems pretty vanilla but is later very acceptable.  And she sings well.  In a cameo, so does Nat “King” Cole, on a fine song called “My Flaming Heart.”  Ann Miller is the one to watch, though—and is adeptly used by director Leslie Kardos.

(Available for rent on YouTube.)

A Harold Lloyd picture, the 1932 Movie Crazy had many contributors to its screenplay and it paid off.

Funny, commendable antics bolster an engaging story about a clumsy aspirant (he wants to be an actor) who’s not a good fit for Hollywood but gains a contract there nonetheless.  Lloyd plays him with his usual appeal, providing the everyman’s desperate stamina.  Some first-rate humor during a downpour occurs in the film, and it is here that Harold meets Mary Sears, an accomplished actress who becomes the movie-crazy man’s unlikely lover.  She is played by Constance Cummings, who appeared in a host of films in the early Thirties and proves in MC her ability with nuance.

It was always good to see Lloyd take his comedy seriously.  Everything from Safety Last to The Cat’s Paw was the result.