The Nick Searcy (director)-Andrew Klavan (screenwriter) effort, Gosnell—about the infanticide in Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia abortion clinic—has its flaws.  For one thing, Klavan’s dialogue is not masterly (sarcastically:  “You’re a ray of sunshine”).  But the film is intelligent middlebrow drama all the same, technically conventional but also brave and gripping.  More gripping, I would say, in all its ugly clinic scenes than in the courtroom parts which supply the movie’s subtitle:  The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer.  This is especially true when police officers and an assistant D.A. investigate, hardly believing what they see, said clinic.  Dean Cain enacts one of the cops and is commandingly true.  Sarah Jane Morris as the D.A. and Earl Billings as Gosnell are faultless.

Cover of Nothing Sacred

Was there ever a time when American cities gave great adulation to young women dying of something like radium poisoning?  I don’t know, but in the comic (and funny) Nothing Sacred (1937), the Big Apple does so for Vermont girl Hazel—without knowing that Hazel is shamelessly faking.  It is not even known by the newspaper reporter (Frederic March) who wants the scoop and all the crazy hoopla it leads to.

Pauline Kael wrote that “What are generally sentimentalized as ‘the little people’ are the targets” of this film.  So is Hazel, played by a grounded and never-strident Carole Lombard.  Nothing Sacred is short but filler-free, and peppery.  It’s the Billy Wilder pic that Wilder never made; William Wellman—and writer Ben Hecht—did.

Cover of Arguing the World

Joseph Dorman‘s Arguing the World (1998) is a dandy documentary about those who constitute what we universally call the New York Intellectuals, who reached adulthood during the early years of the 20th century.  The men featured are Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol.

Because their families were poor, these four gents could and did receive a free education at New York’s City College, albeit they primarily educated themselves there since so many of the profs were mediocre.  A politically radical quartet they became: they were Jews at a time when, the film explains, young Jews were frequently attracted to socialism.  But, except for Howe, they didn’t stay radical.  Their fondness for socialism could not translate into the pro-Communism and even pro-Stalinism that other lefty intellectuals were espousing.  Dorman traces the responses and attitudes of the men to such successive events as the McCarthy hearings, the rise of the New Left, and the Vietnam War protests.

The Partisan Review crowd—this is what they were; they wrote articles for that particular liberal publication.  Diana Trilling appears in the film and says the members of this crowd didn’t know how to behave—“they knew how to think, not how to behave”—but to their credit Bell, et al. found they could not wholly disdain the thinking of the “vulgar” Joe McCarthy.

For his part, Irving Howe calls McCarthy a thug.  A socialist to the end, Howe was also an excellent literary critic, a fact which doesn’t interest Dorman.  What does interest him is that in the Fifties Howe criticized the other Intellectuals for making peace with the status quo, for “conformity,” for renouncing social radicalism.  Irving Kristol wants to know whether Howe was accusing him of “conforming” to the commonly held view that America is a good country, for, after all, Kristol had always had that opinion.

A few years ago I discovered that Kristol commented in a mid-1970s essay of his on how liberalism inevitably makes “a mess of things” before the people vote it out.  Clearly the former radical became anti-Left, and, in point of fact, a conservative.  All four of the men, however, had to encounter the anti-anti-Communism of student rebels of the 1960s, since all four were professors.  Nathan Glazer thought the students were “wrecking the university,” and Bell saw Tom Hayden as “the Richard Nixon of the Left.”  They deplored the New Left’s intellectual superficiality, although in fairness they were offended by the thinking of inexperienced young people, folks no blinder, perhaps, than the Intellectuals themselves when they were young.  Even so, something necessary goes on here.  Dorman interviews the radical Hayden and Todd Gitlin, now middle-aged, and as James Bowman has written, “[Both] those gentlemen together with others of their persuasion are brought before the camera to display for us those endearing qualities which have done so much to create the present state of intellectual totalitarianism that prevails in American academic and intellectual life” (JamesBowman.net).  Yep, that’s today’s academic life for you.  Not nearly as worthy as this documentary.

Cover of Angel and the Badman

John Wayne resists being entirely convincing as a badman (a compound word?) in the 1947 Western, Angel and the Badman.  This is the first movie Wayne produced, and he wanted it to have capital acting, but he himself does not really fill the bill.  Gail Russell does, however, as the “angel,” the naive Quaker girl who, like the other devout Friends, approves of generosity and disapproves of violence.  Russell is capable of innocence—and quiet appeal.

Wayne plays Quirt, a man not of the quirt but of the gun, for his outlaw ways.  Harry Carey shows strength and depth as the middle-aged marshal who wants to hang Quirt, and who bluntly tells Russell’s Penelope not to gaze “bug-eyed” at the varmint.  “There’s no future in it,” he murmurs, but Penelope loveth Quirt. . . The beliefs of the Quakers slowly induce Quirt to change for the better, even if he retains a take-charge, aggressive mind.  Except at the very end, this change is presented subtlely, wisely, in director James Edward Grant‘s script.

Besides Russell and Carey, other actors shine here as well.  Probably the only dreadful performance is by Lee Dixon as Randy McCall, Quirt’s former partner in crime.  Enacting a slimy nerd, he’s facetious.

Cover of Man on the Train (L’Homme du Train)

In 2004’s Man on the Train, Jean Rochefort plays Manesquier, a bachelor who offers lodging to, and befriends, a middle-aged bank robber named Milan (Johnny Hallyday).  Friendless and lonely, Manesquier finds himself secretly longing for the kind of gutsiness and abandon he sees in Milan, who, for his part, warms to the quiet conventionality that the old bachelor is beginning to hate.  Each man nigh unconsciously slips into behaving a bit as the other man does.  A kind of desperate role-playing, this, while the routine danger of death abides (Manesquier has health problems).  However, both men go to their individual fates—in screenwriter Claude Klotz’s almost nihilistic vision of the world.

Ingenious for its characterization, dialogue, direction (by Patrice Leconte) and cinematography, Man on the Train is nonetheless, sadly, a failure.  James Bowman has rightly commented on the film’s “willingness to romanticize criminals,” i.e. Milan.  Watch the film from beginning to end and you’ll see what Bowman means.  That’s bad enough, but another thought provoked is that of whether an aging intellectual would ever really envy an outlaw’s life.  Yet whether he would or wouldn’t, the matter ought to be examined with a more acceptable climax and denouement than  Klotz has purveyed in this movie.  That denouement is all that keeps Train from out-and-out nihilism, and it’s lousy.  Over and above, the film is thin and rather talky, not unlike Ingmar Bergman at his worse.

Leconte’s direction is tasteful and painstaking.  Klotz’s screenplay leaves much to be desired, but at any rate his dialogue is terrific.  No admirer of the music of Schumann, Manesquier nevertheless says he likes Schumann because he “appeals to my love of failure.”  In another sequence Milan, substituting for Manesquier in the tutelage of a boy, praises a fictional character, Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, because she waits and waits for her fiance’s return.  Says the bank robber, “I think she’s magnificent.  People nowadays don’t have that kind of patience.”

(In French with English subtitles)