Cover of The Lemon Drop Kid

A talented Bob Hope stars in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), and although much of it is funny, I don’t consider it a successful movie.

Hope’s character is a chiseling skunk who is only a little less than a chiseling skunk at the flick’s end.  Naturally he has a girlfriend but the actress who plays her, Marilyn Maxwell, is charmless. . . The movie lacks what marked a lot of American screen farces of the Thirties and early Forties: likable characters and, whether the narratives were any good or not, likable scripts.  The script for It’s a Gift is indifferently plotted but still likable, still palatable.  Those words don’t describe the script for The Lemon Drop Kid.

A Coast Guard boat attempts to rescue the men on a ruined oil tanker in Craig Gillespie‘s based-on-fact Disney film, The Finest Hours (2015), and when nature isn’t unpleasant in one way (a sea storm) it’s unpleasant in another (a blizzard).

Re the blizzard, it’s no holiday for Holliday—Holliday Grainger—when she’s out driving in it, worrying about her man, Joe Coast Guard (Chris Pine), out on the waves.  Here, the movie owes a trifle too much to The Perfect Storm (remember Diane Lane and Mark Wahlberg?), a lesser work, but at any rate there is a dab of visual poetry when the small boat shining a searchlight on the dark tanker is followed by a shot of Grainger’s car as the snowflakes fall.  Mostly, though, there is entertainment to be had.

George Templeton‘s The Sundowners (1950) leaves the sense that there are blanks in the film needing to be filled, but it is also very involving.  Written by Alan Le May, the flick is a Western in which a man accepts the help of his criminal brother (Robert Preston) to fight the cattle rustling of a rival rancher.   Alas, the brother is a murderer; he represents an immorality greater than what is evident elsewhere.

Filmed in color in Texas, the movie is unremittingly outdoorsy, a properly Big Country Western, as they should all be.  Too, it avoids the soft artificiality of so many Hollywood Westerns before it (e.g. Dodge City), but is not as good as multiple oaters, such as Shane, that followed it into the Fifties and Sixties.  It’s a rather unambitious affair, but no matter.

Cover via Amazon

In the 1977 Luis Bunuel picture, That Obscure Object of Desire, fifty-something Mathieu (Fernando Rey) is crazy about, and forever frustrated by, a much younger woman, Conchita (alternately played by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina).

It has been declared, and might be widely believed, that this film concerns the uselessness of logic in our lives.  I rather doubt it, for if that is the meaning, Object is a poor film for demonstrating such a thing.  Consider the scene where Mathieu sees a woman holding in a baby’s blanket not an infant but a piglet!  To my mind, what Bunuel is giving us is faulty absurdism and no-account surrealism.

The film’s action is punctuated by deadly terrorist acts, and here there could be a grave “message” about how people inescapably want sex and get death, especially in our absurd and agitated times.  It is less digestible, though, that women in That Obscure Object of Desire are flat-out weird—Conchita is, and so is her mother—even psychotically so.

Refusing to sleep with Mathieu, Conchita nevertheless strips for him, the result being that both Bouquet and Molina expose their beautiful breasts.  They do so rather excessively, but then Bunuel is a creep in this film.

(In French with English subtitles)

The letters in the subdued religious film, The Letters (2015), by William Rieard, are those of Mother Teresa, and they incite a discussion between Teresa’s spiritual director and a priest from the Vatican.  Coinciding with this is a dramatization of the nun’s work with the impoverished of Calcutta and her efforts to establish a new Catholic congregation, the Missionaries of Charity.

Mother Teresa eventually believed that God was not “in” her, that He had in fact abandoned her.  Judging from what’s in this film—how accurate is it?—it is impossible to maintain that she did not know, and experience, God.  And yet . . . what is the truth?  Celeste van Exem, the spiritual director (played by Max von Sydow), suggests that the distress Teresa felt was an essential element in her ministry, but is this really true? . . . In any case, it must be admitted that van Exem’s words are an example of the movie’s unexceptional dialogue.  It is pleasant, though, to watch the acting of von Sydow and Juliet Stevenson (Teresa)—among others, for sure—but aesthetically unworthy that, as one Serena Donadoni put it, “What’s missing is [Teresa’s] own anguished voice from the letters.”