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?

Dunkirk (2017), written and directed by Christopher Nolan, presents war in Europe within the broadness, or openness, of time—and even within a relatively brief duration of time.  Three time periods meet, in all of which men are warring and struggling to survive; all demand endurance.

How credible some of the details in the film are I don’t know, but an enthralling and exciting enterprise this is.  Although it contains more heroism than (British) patriotism, patriotism is there.  So are great surprises and little mysteries, as when a charitable old man compliments the British soldiers but never makes eye contact with them.  And when two of the soldiers quickly haul a wounded grunt on a stretcher a strikingly long way to a seabound ship, where, as it turns out, the grunt is in greater danger than he was before.

Unlike other war movies today, Dunkirk never becomes even slightly boring until, I’d say, the last 15 minutes.  But, as well, it is gratifying to see that it bounces back a bit before those minutes are over.

Dillinger (1945 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a useless prelude here in which a movie audience watches newsreel about John Dillinger the gangster before Dillinger’s father shuffles out on the stage to deliver his own information about the man.  It actually promises to be boring.

The prelude belongs to the 1945 Dillinger, which isn’t boring, starring a very limited Lawrence Tierney as the ever-active bank robber and murderer.  The screenplay by Philip Yordan is intermittently dopey—the movie, in point of fact, is near-trash—but not without heat and punch.  Max Nosseck (who?) directed with only modest ability, notwithstanding he gives us a nifty scene where Dillinger, after having a tooth pulled, wakes up from the anesthesia only to be nabbed by waiting police officers.

I’m glad I saw Dillinger, but I can’t value it much. . .  Speaking of very limited acting, Anne Jeffreys plays Dillinger’s love interest, and is one of the most beautiful blondes in American cinema.

Cover of The Good Girl

The Good Girl, from 2002, is a flop.

Jennifer Aniston plays Justine Last, a retail store assistant who attempts to escape her hated husband and her hated life by having a no-account affair with a young neurotic (Jake Gyllenhaal).  Intelligent people are well aware that the film is dreadfully condescending to small-town Texans, but it is also true that after the condescension finally eases up, scriptwriter Mike White proffers a phony happy ending.  We are prompted to ask a few questions:  Why, really, does Justine hate her husband (John C. Reilly)?  Because he frequently smokes pot?  Did she not know what he was like before they got married?  Did he have her fooled?  No answers are supplied.

White substitutes serious intent for credibility.  Eventually Justine’s hubby learns of her unfaithfulness, but, well, he accepts it.  He stays married to her.  Convincing?  No.

Directed by Miguel Arteta, The Good Girl is an unprofound nonentity, the very thing the filmmakers don’t believe it to be.  Its cheapness is enough to make it a nonentity.  Mike White himself, an actor as well as a screenwriter, plays Corny, a security guard and a Christian, one who turns out to be, in Justine’s words, a “Bible-thumping pervert.”  At length he gets beaten up for something he never did, which is, to White, no big deal.

Straw Dogs (1971 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m tired of contemporary Hollywood films that appear to have been scripted by young, liberal know-it-alls (example: Spider-Man: Homecoming).  By no means is this the case with a Hollywood item from the past like Sam Peckinpah‘s Straw Dogs (1971), which I reviewed on this site once before.  I said the film was not quite a success, but I demur from that now.  It is an imperfect but serious and riveting thriller.

A “straw dog” is something that is made only to be destroyed.  David (Dustin Hoffman) and Amy (Susan George) are trying to make a life for themselves in Amy’s Cornish village, but shiftless, lascivious rustics soon intend to destroy it.  They clearly diss David the intellectual and envy his union with pretty Amy, who is sexually victimized by two of them.  Although this has nothing to do with Amy’s not being a strong woman, it is indeed true that she is not strong (a notion the know-it-alls would refuse to brook) , but neither is David.  They’re both very human.  David is not manly enough until the last act, and he is imperceptive.

Straw Dogs is hard on the human race, which is, as critic John Simon has put it, “eager for compromise, wallowing in reciprocal abasement, and balking at accommodation only when denied even its widow’s mite.”  A measure of sympathy, though, goes to the primary characters, to David and Amy, and it is also certain that screenwriters Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman—the film is based on a novel by Gordon Williams—never pretend to have their understanding of these two persons all wrapped up.  As the film runs its course, they constantly probe David and Amy for who they are, what they think, what they want.  None of this has anything to do with ideology or intellectual stasis.  It has to do with artistic acumen.  Although it’s a shame that Dogs may have been Peckinpah’s last good film, at least genuinely young, Millennial-like minds were not behind it.