The Phil Spector in the HBO film, Phil Spector (2013), written and directed by David Mamet, is probably not guilty of even second-degree murder.  Mamet, indeed, has clearly imparted that his film is NOT “based on a true story”—period.  Spector here is a rich, drugged-out freak whom people want to be undisciplined enough to have taken the life of the hapless Lana Clarkson.  Mamet produces the implication that a society in which Ted Kennedy can get away with causing the drowning death of a young woman is just as easily one in which an offensive but innocent-of-murder eccentric can get hanged.

As ever, the artist’s dialogue impresses.  It’s intelligent and so is the direction.  Phil Spector is a good movie and Al Pacino, as Spector, is a great actor.  A remarkable Helen Mirren plays the record producer’s defense attorney, giving the character saltiness and smarts.

David Mamet at the premiere of Red Belt at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are too many entertainment films these days (as, really, there were in the past) but the situation would be better if more of them resembled the 1968 thriller, Pretty Poison.  It offers the subject of mental illness without boring or confusing us, and is uncomfortably convincing about violence and characterization.  Lorenzo Semple Jr. was perspicacious in writing the book-derived script, and Noel Black directed tastefully and unpretentiously.

As a mentally disturbed young man, Tony Perkins does not provide the distinction he did as the mentally disturbed dude in Psycho; but his performance passes.  As his peculiar girlfriend, the “pretty poison,” Tuesday Weld is intriguing and subtle.  A chemistry exists between them.  The chemistry that makes up Miss Weld is very pretty.  The film can be seen temporarily rent-free on Prime Video.

River’s Edge, a 1987 film directed by Tim Hunter and scripted by Neal Jiminez, is a mankind-bashing drama which borrows its subject from an incident in Milpitas, California in 1981.  A teen boy has just strangled his girlfriend and left her naked body on a riverbank.  All but one of his teen buddies keep mum about it, and to be sure the adults in the film hardly inspire confidence regarding the disclosure of such information. . . A bitterly tragicomic concoction, this, but one whose plot is very rickety and essentially unsatisfying—and whose musical score is intrusively bad.  It’s fine that Jiminez hits the adults as hard as the kids, but this doesn’t mean the adults are represented intelligently.  They aren’t.

Pauline Kael was right that River’s Edge is “a slack mixture of ‘important’ and mediocre.”

Seal of Milpitas, California (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Siren of the Tropics (1927) is an interesting but rather silly silent film, from France, which is the first full-length picture to star an African American performer: the dancer Josephine Baker.  

Baker’s dancing is admirably confident, her body strong and agile, in what is strictly a vehicle for her.  Like the Baker talkie Princess Tam Tam, Siren depends too much on a black woman’s persistent love for a white man (Pierre Batcheff), a man she’ll never win.  This is in spite of her sexiness.  In this somewhat uncensored item, Baker bares her comely breasts, but this is in keeping with the lowbred island character she is playing.  Not that this lowbred “siren of the tropics” is unlikable, though; she isn’t.  She’s a gem, and the whole picture.

I suppose that at bottom Private Hell 36 (1954) is Ida Lupino’s film.  Don Siegel directed it, but Lupino starred in and co-wrote it—originally for the screen, hooray!—with Collier Young.  She plays a bar singer who falls for a now admirable, now dirty cop (Steve Cochran) intent on making his distressed partner (Howard Duff) dirty as well.

The movie is right up Siegel’s alley, with hard-nosed conflict, unobtrusive mystery, human interest, and a car chase.  The cast is estimable: what Lupino and Cochran do cannot be improved on.

I am inspired to add, too, that there is nothing feminist about the Collier-Lupino script.  The bar singer, Lillie, is not a “liberated woman” but simply an adult: she talks like an adult, likes to be with other adults, and is never to be patronized.  That she isn’t at the center of the cops-and-crime story here doesn’t alter the evidence that Lupino and Siegel were meant to be together.

Private Hell 36 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)