Cover of Counsellor-at-Law

I don’t quite understand what the film Counsellor at Law (1933), derived from a play by Elmer Rice, is about, but it certainly holds the viewer.  This is thanks mostly to director William Wyler and his actors.

John Barrymore carries the film beautifully, with force and despair, and the women here are nigh enthralling.  A successful New York lawyer (Barrymore) becomes imperiled in more ways than one as Wyler’s camera captures the unceasing contacts and interaction in this particular law firm.  Regarding his direction, Wyler said, “No critic ever wrote that [the movie] was just a photographed stage play.”  No, indeed.  The play has been thoroughly cinematized.  Indeed, Wyler’s directing is so astute and sensitive we can forgive the film’s irritatingly pat conclusion.

I consider Iris (2001), about the British novelist Iris Murdoch and Alzheimer’s disease, a lousy film.

Not only does smug Murdoch wear her intellect on her sleeve, which is bad enough, but nothing justifies such a thing since the talk here is constantly intellectually shallow.  Acted as a young woman by Kate Winslet (and here the smugness comes in) and as an elderly woman by Judi Dench, the revered Iris has a penchant for skinny dipping as well as adultery, even lesbian adultery.  She is, then, a run-of-the-mill female rake, which is not very interesting.  And then there’s Murdoch’s husband John Bayley (he’s always fun),  who is such a silly and awkward man it is damned difficult to think of him as a professor of literature.  The blame for the jejune acting of the two men who portray him belongs, I think, to the director, Richard Eyre.  This is Eyre’s John Bayley before it is the actors.’

Iris (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A ’52 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s story, “The Secret Sharer,” offers James Mason as the newly commanding sea captain.  He and director John Brahm do estimable work on the 48-minute effort, even if Mason may be too old for the role.

Going against social morality, Conrad’s, and Mason’s, captain protects a sailor, Leggatt (Michael Pate), who has committed murder.  He did so, indeed, out of the same sense of duty that the captain possesses, but he will never be understood by the navy (or society?).  Likewise the captain is not yet understood by his crew.  He so resembles Leggatt that the latter amounts to being the captain’s “other self,” and it was exactly right for the production company to cast an actor who looks a lot like Mason.  And The Secret Sharer (in black and white, naturally) looks a lot like Conrad.

Needless to say, the computer-animated The Peanuts Movie (2015) contains a lot of humor.  What it lacks is the excellent wit of Charles Schulz‘s A Charlie Brown Christmas and, of course, the comic strip, although this is not to say it completely lacks wit.  No, sir.

Scriptwriters Craig Schulz (Charles’s son) and Bryan Schulz (grandson) purvey a Charlie Brown who causes problems for others as much as for himself, albeit one who is assuredly spared is the sad sack’s love interest.  The movie’s central element is C.B.’s hope of impressing The Little Red-Haired Girl, a newcomer to the neighborhood and, here, a lass whose face is very slowly revealed in full.  Amid all the slapstick, Chuck keeps his distance from her—but, withal, he does make progress and so a certain sunny vision arises in the flick.

No, it isn’t quite what Charles Schulz gave us, but I agree with the critic who said the movie feels like “the return of an old friend.”

Frank Capra didn’t always have good ideas for his films, but doubtless he did when he chose to direct a movie version of a Damon Runyon story, the title of which movie is Lady for a Day (1933), with a screenplay by Robert Riskin.

There are no idealists or innocents in this Capra film.  Instead we see the interesting phenomenon of small-time mobsters and a pool shark trying to help a financially poor woman—the apple-selling Apple Annie (May Robson)—fool the woman’s daughter into thinking her mother is a society lady.  This is the fiction Apple Annie has maintained for years.  At first the lowlifes treat their service to the old gal as something extraneous, beside the point, but later it doesn’t quite seem that way to them. Basically they are harmless lowlifes, never even roughing anyone up.

Yes, Lady for a Day has a couple of flaws, but it’s a work of a certain purity for which both Capra and Riskin are responsible.  It’s one of Capra’s feel-gooders, energetic and droll but without moralism.  The director worked well with his actors, the result being that May Robson is exemplary, Warren William amusingly assertive, and Guy Kibbee charming and commanding.

Lady for a Day (Photo credit: Wikipedia)