Most of today’s screen musicals deserve to be left alone.  They’re not even as satisfying as the music video for Michael Buble‘s “Haven’t Met You Yet” (2009), a song-and-dance mini-musical in which a lovelorn Michael enters a supermarket and meets his future wife-actual wife, Luisana Lopilato.  Employees and customers alike become hoofers, and, well, people in the store somehow multiply, dancing admirably to a delectable pop song.  Michael has met his one and only, and yet in this fluffy “video” it’s just a fantasy.

Although it differs much from the Buble routine, the music video for the Evanescence song, “Call Me When You’re Sober,” is another happy-making effort better than most contemporary musicals.  Gothic and garish, it proffers red capes, candles, wolves, and a great rock ditty sung by Amy Lee.  There are dancing creeps—I don’t know what else to call them—surrounding Amy before she rises into the air; and then the creeps rise into the air and start twirling.  The song is better than the visuals, but the whole thing is weird fun.  It’s rather cheap, but less so than much of Moulin Rouge. 

Once again in a Western, bloody conflict revolves around cattle theft, albeit the 1957 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, serving up the stuff of (mere) legend, also forces Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) to contend with cold Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) before seeking the killer’s help.

It’s a world of stouthearted men disinclined to talk too much, gutsy toughs who walk away without responding to somebody’s utterance.  Directed by John Sturges, the film is not quite tidy enough:  it lets unattached Earp lose Rhonda Fleming—I mean Laura, whom Fleming plays—almost as an afterthought.  In addition, one ought to object that insufficient sympathy is shown for Kate Fisher (Jo Van Fleet), the harsh Holliday’s mistreated lady-friend.  All the same, there is an attractive look, decent dialogue and enjoyable action.  And the early tension between Earp and Holliday is so interesting it alone makes the movie watchable.

The full title of Scott Seward Smith‘s debut novel is Red Line Blues: The Passion of Owen Cassell, Closet Conservative (2018).  Close to middle age, Owen Cassell is divorced from Lisa, drinks heavily, and eventually has sex—with one woman, Audrey.  That he is a closet conservative (and Republican) certainly matters inasmuch as Audrey is a callow liberal and would be bothered by any boyfriend hiding his political outlook from her.

Smith gives only so much space to the subject of this relationship, focusing as he does on Owen’s connection (as speechwriter) to Mitt Romney, the life and doings of his grandfather, and other things.  But it is all too bad that happiness through being loved must remain at bay.  We are meant to believe, I think, that Owen should not be the coward he is, and that Audrey should not dismiss a man because of his political outlook.  This, however, is, or may be, “the popular current,” to use Alexander Hamilton’s words.

There is no fluid prose in Red Line Blues but it is ably written.  It’s straightforward.  It harbors a good attitude toward America, wherein, in fact, Owen is not a ruined man.  Smith writes that “everything to him [Owen] seemed renewable, like the very spirit of America itself.”  That Smith respects the spirit of America is one reason this is one of the most mature novels I’ve read.

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

With a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky, The Hospital (1972) is a black comedy which is almost fundamentally tragic.  There is much human folly and maddening complexity at the New York hospital where Dr. Herb Bock (George C. Scott) is chief of the medical staff.  With a failed marriage and “useless” offspring, the once luminous Bock has lost the desire to work and is a constant down-and-outer.  Although he falls in love with Diana Rigg‘s Barbara, a hippie type, and she with him, clinical madness has emerged in the hospital and is claiming innocent lives, forcing Bock to somehow deal with it.

The film exposes breakdown that takes too much of a human toll.  It especially does so when there is the madness of a madman, notwithstanding there perdures in this world another kind of “madness” to boot.  We hear about it in an emergency-room litany—the madness of physical blows, wounds and ailments.  Again, the human toll.

The Hospital has a rather weak ending but, not quite an unhappy one, it is in keeping with fundamental tragedy.  Many a fine actor is here, even if Richard Dysart overdoes it.  Miss Rigg is lovably pretty, but that’s the most I can say about her, whereas Scott is a great Dr. Bock—as tormented as he ought to be.  What an honest actor in an essentially honest picture!

Directed by Arthur Hiller.