A Francois Truffaut film, Small Change (1976) is small potatoes.

Full of vignettes, most of them mediocre, about young boys (and one girl), the flick is vapid, intermittently sentimental, even stupid.  The old Truffaut charm registers much weaker than it does in The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Two English Girls, etc.

(In French with English subtitles)

Small Change (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Weddings and Babies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Weddings and Babies (1958) is, like Little Fugitive, an American independent film by Morris Engle; and, again, the setting is New York City.  A Swedish-born young woman, Bea (Viveca Lindfors), desires to be married to her photographer boyfriend, Al (John Myhers); but Al lacks the confidence that marriage is for him and even that he loves Bea.  He goes through a quite miserable day on which he in fact announces upcoming nuptials with Bea and later sees her pulling away.  Plus his new camera gets broken.

Only now and then does the film limp along; the rest of the time it is pretty agreeable.  Resembling a short novel, it is properly a short movie, not lacking in interesting characters.  Except for the coda, its conclusion focuses exclusively on Al, who is asked by a priest to photograph a concurrent wedding (Al wants a future in which he does not take pictures of weddings and babies), and he agrees.  The flashbulb on the broken camera fails to work, though, and this is apparently a sign to Al that he must move on in life and both marry and love the woman who has pulled away from him.  Engle, who wrote the script originally for the screen, did not mean for the ending to be moving, but only authentic.  Which it is.  In fact it’s a more artistic ending than the one supplied for Little Fugitive.  Bravo!

The 1951 Billy Wilder film, Ace in the Hole, is one of those wherein Wilder expresses his anger over deception and skulduggery, the bilking of the innocent or vulnerable for the sake of money or prestige or sex.  A newspaper reporter (Kirk Douglas) “befriends” a man trapped under rocks during a mountain cave-in, but cruelly arranges for a third-rate rescue operation in order to prolong the man’s predicament.  This, the reporter believes, will make for a more important scoop, one that will possibly guarantee for the gent a New York City position.

That the lousy rescue plan is devised is not quite credible, and, unlike other Wilder films, Ace is disturbingly gray, chilly.  Even so, it is one of his best.  The whole of Wilder’s personality is evident in it; it’s intelligently cynical and morally meaningful.  Neither Wilder nor Douglas makes the reporter a caricature; the former aims for too much unHollywood-like honesty to commit such an error.

Cover of Ace in the Hole – Criterion Collection

1. 

   Movie poster of The Ten Commandments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

   The acting in Cecil DeMille‘s The Ten Commandments is not always good, so it’s a wonder the thespians manage to exude as much true spirituality as they do.  Not that it is never artificial—of course it is—but the artificiality of the entire picture fails to upend the spiritual feeling DeMille was after.

2. Since the ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods, cats included, surely it is unsurprising to find an Egyptian woman, Anne Baxter‘s Nefretiri, worshipping a handsome non-god, Moses (Charleton Heston).  Baxter is beautiful, her acting nicely precise in its dreaminess.  Debra Paget and Yvonne De Carlo are beautiful too, but do not have much impact here.
3. It was inspired of the screenwriters to have Joshua (John Derek) paint lamb’s blood on the doorposts and lintel of the house where Lilia (Paget) is being kept by middle-aged Dathan (that pig!)  It means firstborn Lilia doesn’t have to die.  Ah, Moses, however, tells the stricken Nefretiri—nothing really goes right for her—that he is unable to save the life of her small son, and yet this is not true.  He simply needs to urge her to arrange the painting of lamb’s blood on her doorposts and lintel.
   

   Cropped screenshot of Anne Baxter with Yul Brynner from the trailer for the film The Ten Commandments. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    

Cover of White Dog – Criterion Collection

I wonder whether they’ll ever make a movie about today’s black-on-white violent crime, of which there is a lot.  What was made instead, though it was decades ago, was Sam Fuller‘s White Dog (1982), about a dog trained by a sick racist to attack black people.

TV actress Kristy McNichol plays an aspiring thespian who finds the dog, initially lost, and then discovers what he was intended to be.  A white dog.  Like other Fuller films, this one is moderately unusual but, in addition, it shows that Fuller soundly possessed a mind.

At a training spot for animals used in movies, a black man acted by Paul Winfield painstakingly tries to cure the dog of its ugly instinct.  Progress is so frustratingly slow that the dog has time to escape and, yes, actually kills a man.  The film shows us the ease with which evil becomes real, becomes evident, and how lost we often are when trying to eliminate it.  Fuller’s directing is far from ideal with its camera zooms and clunkiness, but the story’s power to disturb remains.  McNichol and Winfield turn out decent, if unspectacular, performances.  As always, Burl Ives is agreeably authoritative.