The forgotten The Grissom Gang (1971) was directed by Robert Aldrich, maker of Kiss Me Deadly and The Dirty Dozen.  What could have been a decent crime flick-cum-1920s period piece lacks the finesse of the morally offensive Bonnie and Clyde, even if it has its stirring dramatic moments and a gripping denouement.  Based on a novel by James Hadley Chase, the film stars Kim Darby as a society girl kidnapped and held for ransom by a Barker-family simulacrum headed by Ma Grissom (Irene Dailey), mother of the likes of Slim Grissom (Scott Wilson), who begins to love the society girl.  Besides being clumsily directed and edited, the film is uneven in tone:  Levity arises only to be cast down by ugly bloodshed.  Grissom is would-be Peckinpah—and an odd duck to boot.

I’ll say this:  it isn’t at all boring.  Get a load of the actors.  Scott Wilson plays a repulsive character repulsively.  Miss Dailey is over-the-top and just plain odious.  Miss Darby, however, is excellent.  Often called upon to be emotional, she never simply huffs and puffs, never exaggerates.  She can be frantic but also moving, and is believable as an heiress.  Fine, too, are down-to-earth Robert Lansing and handsome, intimidating Tony Musante.  Why, though, did all the actors have to be coated with perspiration under the klieg lights?  Every time there is a closeup we see this perspiration.  It is yet another thing that demonstrates the film’s slipshod execution.  I’m glad The Grissom Gang is on DVD but only because of Miss Darby’s performance.

Cover via Amazon

An often disappointing artist, David Mamet is also a talented one.  As well, he is now a conservative—and was probably leaning toward conservatism as long ago as 1999, the year he released his dandy film adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play, The Winslow Boy.  The hero here is Sir Robert Morton, a respectable conservative barrister who has proven to be solidly anti-feminist and anti-trade union.  Jeremy Northam plays him with graceful intensity, enviable poise, even a spark of eccentricity.

It is he, Sir Robert, who must clear the name of  the young brother of a dignified suffragette (Rebecca Pidgeon).  Ironically, this conservative barrister begins to condemn “the great” as they side against “the powerless,” as though he were a liberal—the great being the Crown and, probably, the English press.  (The Winslow Boy is set in early 20th century England.)

Mamet’s film is knowingly directed, finely photographed, and well acted.  This movie and his follow-up picture, the rather vulgar State and Main (2000), evince what an interesting man Mamet is.  I look forward to seeing his HBO film about Phil Spector.

Cover of The Winslow Boy

The 1994 Queen Margot, adapted from an Alexandre Dumas novel, is about Margaret of Valois (Isabelle Adjani), who during the 1500s was forced to marry Henri the King of Navarre (later the King of France) in the midst of post-Reformation violence and conflict.  The marriage is essentially no good; as in life, Margaret—Margot—has her lovers, and so does Henri.  Yet the Catholic Margot feels compelled to save the Protestant Henri’s life after Margot’s evil mother (Virna Lisi) engineers the massacre of the Huguenots on the eve of St. Bartholomew’s Day.  It’s a famous horror in French history.  Even after this, Henri remains a marked man since he desires the French throne, while Margot gets together with another man she must try to protect: La Mole (Vincent Perez), her newest lover.  He too is a Protestant.

The film is a vivid and bloody historical drama with a dark screenplay by Daniele Thompson, et al.  The direction by Patrice Chereau is generally sensible and brave.  In the world of Queen Margot, some needed relief emanates through loyalty and through love affairs, but largely there is the chaos of perilous times.  What is practiced is the politics of death.  We might as well be in Ukraine during the Stalin era.  People are fearful, moving with a liveliness that demonstrates the need to escape. . . The movie ends with nasty Anjou, one of Margot’s brothers, poised to take the throne after the death of Charles IX and commenting to his mother that now, in the kingdom, hatred shall come to an end.  Empty optimism, I’d say.

(In French with English subtitles.)

Cover of Queen Margot (La Reine Margot)

The old movie The Girl Can’t Help It played in the Big Apple in 2006 and was intelligently reviewed in the Village Voice.  So I saw it on DVD, impossible though that makes it to judge the cinematography.

Frank Tashlin’s film is brazen with color, with “laminated sheen” (J. Hoberman), and is a 1956 guilty pleasure.  It’s a rock ‘n’ roll quasi-musical starring Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell and Edmond O’Brien, and featuring Little Richard, Eddie Cochran and even Julie London.  Most of the songs are trash; they’re “classic rock.”  Thankfully, some ballads are there.  Unthankfully, so is Tashlin’s script.

Enjoy yourself.  Mansfield is staggeringly beautiful, and although J. Hoberman is right that her “desire for domesticity” is “unconvincing,” at least it’s there.  The girl can’t help it?  Right, and she can’t help being highly sensual once Tashlin gets hold of her.  Not that The Girl is very hip, though.  The presence of the principals, e.g. Ewell, makes the film seem basically divorced from rock music’s feisty world.  Jayne ain’t cool . . . I take that back:  In a way she is.  Whatever the case, the flick is pure Hollywood commercialism.  Again, a guilty pleasure.

The Girl Can’t Help It film poster (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Because she is poor and pregnant and refuses to marry her irresponsible boyfriend, Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno, in a so-so performance)—the protag of Maria Full of Grace (2004)—agrees to become a criminally active “mule” who smuggles drugs from Colombia to exotic New York.  She swallows the pellets whole and carries them in her gut before excreting them in the NYC apartment of drug-dealing thugs.  The plot advances with the death of Maria’s fellow mule, Lucy, who gets fatally sick and is horribly manhandled by the thugs.  The conclusion of this film by Joshua Marston accepts what is indisputably the politically liberal view on illegal immigration (economically Colombia bad, America good, you see) and I have a problem with that.

Doesn’t mean it’s a bad picture, though.  Maria is absorbing, non-melodramatic and almost always convincing.  I do wonder, however, why Maria fails to perceive the moral seriousness of what she’s doing.  Oh well.

(In Spanish with English subtitles.)

Maria Full of Grace (Photo credit: Wikipedia)