The Man I Love (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In large measure Raoul Walsh‘s The Man I Love (1947) is about nightclub life, with a chunk of real shadiness tossed in.  Ida Lupino stars as a tough-minded but amiable club singer, who doesn’t care much about her job since her boss (Robert Alda) is a cocky heel who makes advances to her.  Alda ain’t the man she loves; really, the man she loves seems like a bore and is badly acted by Bruce Bennett.  Lupino’s scenes with him are the weakest in the movie.

Other scenes, however, such as those with Petey Brown (Lupino) and her family, are spunky and agreeable.  The movie in toto is agreeable, if without the greatest plot in the world.

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—albeit Andersson has assets other than those under her blouse.  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)

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—albeit Andersson has assets other than those under her blouse.  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)

The novel The Dark Angels (1936), by Francois Mauriac, presents us with the complicated Gradere, a man who allows himself to sink into utterly foul illegality.  A particular woman, Aline, is a threat to him because of Gradere’s dirty business practices, and an elderly man named Desbats uses her to deepen the threat.  Gradere determines to do something about it.

The novel’s prologue consists of a letter Gradere has written to the village priest, Alain, a good man.  The priest recoils passionately from some information in the letter:  Gradere was once told by another priest that “there are human souls that have been given to [the Devil].”  The reader is left to ask whether this is so.  Mauriac seems to see a half-truth in it, but also expresses, of course, his Christian optimism about God, He Who is “greater than the strength of our mad desire to achieve damnation.”  Withal, he brings Gradere to faith and repentance.

Frankly, this might be deemed implausible and even forced—it is not like the conclusion of, say, Read’s A Married Man—and yet it takes place at the same time that the priest is afflicted with a troubled, self-doubting mind.  This seems to make Gradere’s conversion artistically acceptable. . . The Dark Angels is a wise and poetically written book.  As for the title, well, if certain souls (or all souls?) are given to the Devil, maybe it is the “dark” angels, as it were, who effect it.

It looks like director Claude Barras was able to borrow a good story for his stop-motion animated film, My Life as a Zucchini (2017), based on a novel called Autobiography of a Zucchini.

Engaging and sad, it has to do with children in an orphanage, and their big-eyed, almost blasted faces bespeak uncommon hardship.  There is no despair here, though, and nothing cheap or uninspired about the exquisite visuals.  The movie is not really for kids, but they should probably see it anyway.  A dubbed version of this French-Swiss production offers the voices of Nick Offerman and Will Forte.