Because he badly needed money, Orson Welles churned out The Lady from Shanghai (1947), an unusual pulp movie with some tragic elements. The seaside party in Citizen Kane re-emerges in this flick and receives expansive treatment with a number of dandy shots. The script, however, is ineptly written, and Welles miscast himself as an Irish-American toughie who, by and by, gets pretty quiet and confused. (Not believable.) Rita Hayworth needs more magnetism in the titular role and, thanks to Welles, is insufficiently glamorous with her cut and bleached-blond hair. A flop, even at the box office.

An intense, fast-moving film was made from journalist Mariane Pearl’s book about the kidnapping and murder of her husband Daniel, also a journalist, by Islamicist fanatics in Pakistan. The movie, bearing the same title as the book, is A Mighty Heart (2007) and is patently built around the theme of anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment in Muslim jihadism.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, Heart is a detailed piece of journalistic cinema like All the President’s Men, than which it is a better film. The stakes here are higher and the film knows it. Angelina Jolie is thoughtfully remarkable as Mariane Pearl, a stoic (and pregnant) woman who loves her husband. Denis O’Hare does some marvelously grounded acting as a Wall Street Journal publisher. Irrfan Khan is very good as a Pakistani police captain, and Will Patton (as Randall) is satisfyingly earthy. A Mighty Heart is earthy. And, in its own way, brutal.

Reviews by Dean

An intense, fast-moving film was made from journalist Mariane Pearl’s book about the kidnapping and murder of her husband Daniel, also a journalist, by Islamicist fanatics in Pakistan. The movie, bearing the same title as the book, is A Mighty Heart (2007) and is patently built around the theme of anti-American and anti-Jewish sentiment in Muslim jihadism.

Directed by Michael Winterbottom, Heart is a detailed piece of journalistic cinema like All the President’s Men, than which it is a better film. The stakes here are higher and the film knows it. Angelina Jolie is thoughtfully remarkable as Mariane Pearl, a stoic (and pregnant) woman who loves her husband. Denis O’Hare does some marvelously grounded acting as a Wall Street Journal publisher. Irrfan Khan is very good as a Pakistani police captain, and Will Patton (as Randall) is satisfyingly earthy. A Mighty Heart is earthy. And, in its own way, brutal.

Reviews by Dean

I generally dislike the films of Ingmar Bergman, and Cries and Whispers (1972) is no exception.  It’s a lousy period piece set in the early 20th century and, even though it does a fine job of concentrating on human suffering as a reality of both the past and the present, it offers one specious or absurd moment after another.  Harriet Andersson is magnificent as an ailing and agonized woman; Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin are strong actresses too, but what Bergman does with them is merely embarrassing.

A Bergman film and so not a happy one, Cries and Whispers reminds us there is such a thing as human comfort–comfort from other human beings (sinful creatures though we are)— but little or no divine comfort.  Indeed, a clergyman (!) speaks of people living “under a grim and empty sky” in what is a particularly ridiculous eulogy.

Spare me this film as I would have liked Andersson’s Agnes to be spared her pain.

Cover of Cries & Whispers – Criterion Collection

In colonized South Africa, Sonia lives with her husband Jannie on a farm until Jannie is packed off to prison. The man shot to death a 12-year-old black boy for watching Sonia, through a half-open curtain, suckle the couple’s baby. Narrated by an unnamed nurse who befriends Sonia, the Muriel Spark short story, “The Curtain Blown by the Breeze,” then informs us of the inheritance money that renders Sonia rich and of the guidance she receives from the nurse and others. Guidance, that is, for living up to certain social standards. A changed woman now, Sonia, though still married to Jannie, is en route to taking a lover named Frank.

There is in this tale social climbing and relationship folly on the one hand, and brutal behavior on the other. Sonia never grasps the seriousness of Jannie’s murder of a child; what matters is advancement for the nouveau riche. The narrating nurse, however, is convinced there is in the colony a “savage territory beyond the absurd drawing-room.” A critic of the territory and of the times with their “encroaching slackness”—partly because she has been wronged by boyfriend Frank—the nurse finally longs to leave the place “for dear life.” The curtain blown by the breeze symbolizes sudden changes both agreeable and awful.

Spark’s story is moral but un-moralistic as well as piercing and droll. Typical Muriel Spark, which is good.