Cover of The Women (Keepcase)

George Cukor, in filming Clare Booth Luce’s play, The Women, put out in 1939 a jangled, vivacious—almost too vivacious—domestic comedy about female dreadfulness and female resilience.  There is also an element, to be sure, of a woman-needs-a-manism (i.e. a man to love).

Norma Shearer is too weepy as Mary Haines, but provides otherwise distinguished acting.  Rosalind Russell plays bitchy Sylvia exaggeratedly and exhaustingly, though Joan Crawford does commanding work as a home wrecker.  The woman who sparkled in Modern Times, Paulette Goddard, tries too hard as a saucy divorcee.  Virginia Weidler, a child actor, however, is unself-consciously true as Shearer’s daughter.

The Women is quite a confection, smartly directed and in black and white with, nonetheless, an in-color fashion show sequence.

Cover via Amazon

Suddenly (1954) is a pulp fiction film about a trio of punks hired to murder, as he passes through the tiny town of Suddenly, the President of the United States.  It’s properly economical with some vigorous action, as in a strong scene where one of the killers uncontrollably fires his rifle, tat-tat-tat, while being electrocuted.

The movie is respectful of middle-class—and certifiably small-town—American values.  E.g., Sterling Hayden (as a sheriff) keeps inviting Nancy Gates to ride to church with him.  And, yes, the main assassin is a WWII veteran, but was enough of a cur to be discharged from the army.  Frank Sinatra is the star here.  Suddenly is such a basically conservative pic, I’m surprised Ol’ Blue Eyes was initially a Democrat.

Directed by Lewis Allen, written by Richard Sale.

Unread by me, an A.S. Byatt novel, Possession, became in 2002 a weak film directed and co-written by Neil LaBute.  Such LaBute films as Your Friends and Neighbors and Nurse Betty are dismally offputting, while this one is merely poorly written.

In it, two literary researchers in London (Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow) try to solve the mystery of whether an illustrious 19th century poet, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam), began an extramarital affair with a fellow poet, the lesbian, or bisexual, Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle).  It so happens he did, and so does Eckhart begin a licit if dullish affair with Paltrow, playing an Englishwoman.  The crosscutting between time periods yields on screen the two researchers more often than the two luminaries, which is a shame since Ash and LaMotte are the more interesting couple—and with Northam and Ehle outacting Paltrow.

The script, one of whose writers is the playwright David Henry Hwang, has its people saying things like “I have known incandescence and must decline to sample it further.”  To the scenarists’ credit, though, elsewhere the dialogue shines.  But characterization matters little here—less, in fact, than dialogue.  We wish to know more about Ash, this fictitious poet laureate to Queen Victoria, a man whom Paltrow’s character calls “a soft-core misogynist.”  Ostensibly a feminist, Paltrow’s character herself is a zero.  Then there’s Blanche (Lena Headey), Christobel LaMotte’s lesbian companion who turns out to be mostly a punching bag.

Possession was not a mature work for LaBute.  He may have avoided his usual misanthropy, or whatever it is, but why do it in an adaptation of a book by A.S. Byatt?  Generally his directing is not only good but expert, and once again he gets plenty of vitality from Aaron Eckhart.  Luciana Arrighi did the spot-on production design, Jean Yves Escoffier the cinematography.  Thanks to this pair, the look is modestly painterly—appropriate for a small but artful opus.  Alas, a small but artful failure.  LaBute is a gifted man with a baffling career.

Two-Lane Blacktop (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Footage of the rural road in America, with plenty of medium-long shots and no score, dominates the screen in the 1971 Two-Lane Blacktop, directed by Monte Hellman.  A flick about two car nuts who routinely race other street drivers for money, it is so low-key it is practically asleep at the wheel.  Neither James Taylor (the singer) nor Dennis Wilson (the Beach Boy) is a good actor as they play the Driver and the Mechanic—no names, please—respectively.  But Warren Oates is, and Rudolph Wurlitzer‘s screenplay is provocative and amusing.

Oates plays a man who, though proud of his car, is no longer young and has problems.  Reduced to mendacious talk, he is a lost soul, while the Driver and the Mechanic are empty souls.  As their girl companion (Laurie Bird) observes, their lives are no “better” than those of the noisy, mating cicadas they hear.

Apropos of Bird’s character, simply called the Girl, everything is a letdown.  The Driver tries to retain his relationship with her, such as it is, by murmuring, “Figured we’d go on up to Columbus, Ohio.  A man got some parts up there he wants to sell cheap.”  But what goes on with these car nuts is cheap, and blandly the Girl replies, “No good.”

Two-Lane Blacktop has nothing new to say, but it can be a strange treat of “white trash” naturalism.  If you haven’t been on the rural roads in a while, and you actually miss them, this is your film.

The French film The Clockmaker (1973) tells us that France in the Seventies is a country in which a loutish, abusive security officer is allowed to get away with the garbage he does.  As the picture opens, the somewhat political son of the tale’s main character, a clockmaker (Philippe Noiret), has murdered the security officer and fled.

The film was directed by Bertrand Tavernier and so is not without artistic merit.  Even so, it does not take the murder of the depraved man seriously enough, but more or less excuses it.  At heart it is a politically radical film, consistently distrustful of authority.  Based on a Georges Simenon novel, it was screenwritten by Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, who, in their seventies at the time, should have known better.  It is a relatively simple but also foolish work.

Its counterculture attitudes could be appropriated for the sake of present-day people in America who are not exactly bending to the big Ideological Will.  Two or three years ago, Wisconsin police illegally raided the homes of certain conservatives (probably Scott Walker supporters) and confiscated their computers.  In a case involving the refusal to honor a same-sex marriage, any Christian defendant who did not show up in court would have a warrant sent out for his or her arrest.  The current Attorney General wishes to expand the seizure of property, before a trial, of suspected drug traffickers.  See what I mean?