Cover via Amazon

I’ve never read any of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” as opposed to his serious novels, but the 1942 This Gun for Hire smacks of a good adaptation.

Alan Ladd is in it, and he ain’t no Shane:  he’s an icy killer (suitably acted), while Veronica Lake rightly holds down the iciness she displayed in Sullivan’s Travels.  This is her vehicle; with groundedness and class she enacts a singing magician (!) recruited for a righteous cause.  I liked her chemistry with Robert Preston. . . Director Frank Tuttle is uneasy with action scenes, but not, apparently, with actors.  All the same, the movie is entertaining.

A German film from 1988, The Actress (Die Schauspielerin), directed by Siegfried Kuhn, is about an emotionally vulnerable but also strong-minded theatre actress (Corinna Harfouche) who discards her career in Nazi Germany in order to be with her relocated Jewish beau (Andre Hennicke).  Strange times, with their ludicrous (anti-Jewish) propaganda, drive the actress to do some strange things.  A major theme in the film is that political injustice, political evil, works on the mind.  Indeed, a person may even embrace what is fatal.

An East German production, Kuhn’s opus is subtle, unpretentious and lovely-looking.  Harfouche is extraordinary: talk about power, incisiveness and personality!

(In German with English subtitles)

State and Main (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

David Mamet‘s film, State and Main (2000), concerns contretemps and obstacles between a moviemaking team and the citizens of a town called Waterford, Vermont, where the team is fashioning a film.  The characters captivate: William H. Macy‘s agitated director, Alec Baldwin‘s hugely popular actor and nymphet-loving pervert, Rebecca Pidgeon’s bright, affable bookstore owner, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s diffident scenarist, and many others.

Like the witty dialogue, the plot is fun except that a glaring defect springs up when Clark Gregg‘s pushy prosecutor tries to build a statutory-rape case against Baldwin when he certifiably has no case at all.  Gregg—his character—wouldn’t be that stupid.  But something else bothers me more:  Mamet, in truth, has nothing new to tell us about corruption or Hollywood folly, and that is entirely what his film is about.  All State and Main can do is dispense airy cynicism—well, that in addition to showing us that somewhere deep inside Mamet he is a glorifier of the past.  Not merely deep inside, of course, he is a conservative.

Mamet’s 1999 The Winslow Boy worked (as did his Phil Spector).  The present film almost works, but not quite.  Even so, it’s one of the most enjoyable failures I’ve seen, and if you can put up with airy cynicism you might enjoy it too.