Summer with Monika (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A Summer with Monika (1953) is a Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman from a novel by Per Anders Fogelstrom.

Monika (Harriet Andersson), for a long time a believable character, and Harry (Lars Ekberg), not much explored, are two adolescent lovers.  Both are inexperienced and foolish but also harassed and even mistreated.  Eventually they marry, but in the film’s final third, unfortunately, Bergman allows Monika to become a surprising tramp.  This is, nonetheless, one of the Swede’s few successful movies, remarkably made with its wonderful exterior shots, long takes and (of course) mise en scene.

In addition, it is a famously erotic film—and not just for 1953—with Andersson exposing her very pretty buttocks.  She is an actress so “natural” it is uncanny, as true in her hysteria as in everything else.  She creates a good blending of sophistication and innocence, and is enticingly kinetic.  It is a great performance in a more-than-okay movie.

(In Swedish with English subtitles)

What does a man in Edwardian England do when his marriage is hopeless?  Well, he should not fall in love with another woman.  This is what Philip Marshall in The Suspect (1944) does, and his outraged wife, Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West, refuses to give him a divorce.  The presence of young Mary, Philip’s love interest, keeps him in town and makes him desperate.  Ergo he kills his wife, in a murder  plot not exactly believable.  Very easily he becomes The Suspect.

This Robert Siodmak film is an Old Hollywood crime story set in Old London.  In polished black and white, it isn’t anything important but it is entertaining enough, what with, for one thing, Charles Laughton in the leading part.  Rosalind Ivan is good and true as the shrewish wife, and although I regard Ella Raines as perfectly passable as Mary, I wish Universal had hired a Brit, not an American, for the role.  Not bloody likely:  other women in the film are American too.

(Seen on YouTube)

Jake, a black pastor in The Second Chance (2006), is abrasive and insulting, although at other times he is too good to be true.  Not a well-drawn character.

Ethan, a white associate pastor, is poorly acted by Michael W. Smith.  Steve Taylor’s Christian movie doesn’t work.  It has a good feel for inner city life, but is sometimes less than credible: e.g. Ethan doesn’t seem to be secretly hoping other people are watching him give alms in the ‘hood, and yet this is what mean Jake repeatedly accuses him of.

Cover of The Second Chance

Cover of Duel (Collector’s Edition)

Man-made cars and the interstate highway system are not the modern wonders to make us forget, and not be shocked by, the strange brutality in human behavior.  Indeed, it is on the interstate that businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver)—in Steven Spielberg‘s Duel (1971)—encounters a stranger who tries to off him with a tanker truck, the reason for which is never revealed.  It is activity as absurd as it is horrible.

Spielberg’s first notable success, Duel is a made-for-TV action thriller which has been called “Jaws on wheels” except that it’s a better flick than Master Steven’s Jaws.  It has a shaky climax, but is consistently fun and nicely economical.  The smart script is by Richard Matheson, and Weaver is constantly on screen but never abandoned by skill.  As well, Duel is one of those many 1970s films enamored of rural American settings, as though it is only in these pristine outdoor places that insights about life may be had.