For the first hour and 15 minutes, Forbidden Planet (1956) holds up well as science fiction, then falls apart with its Id-as-monster plot device.  Oh well.  It is still a curious entertainment proffering a familiar-looking robot and those electronic tonalities on the soundtrack.  Sets are still often impressive when they are not, like the idyllic backyard woods, strikingly quaint.  Plus FP has Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis.  Oddly, it respects religion and it respects leggy females (that is, Miss Francis).  More ambitious than Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it is nonetheless a lesser film, although . . . I wish I had seen it when in opened in Cinemascope.

Screenshot of Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis from the trailer for the film Forbidden Planet. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Again there is an absurd plot, but at least it’s fairly interesting.  However, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) succeeds on the strength of its utterly captivating adventure set pieces.  A terrorist mastermind’s silly overkill in an opera-house assassination scheme creates some mesmerizing human doings.  A motorcycle chase is long-and-winding exhilaration.

Participating here, and elsewhere, is of course Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, but also newcomer Rebecca Ferguson, a Swedish actress using an imperfect British accent, who is practically the star of the movie.  (But not quite, Tom.)  A real action heroine she is, and she somehow looks like a secret agent.  She has a noirish look.  The acting in Rogue Nation, such as that of Simon Pegg,is winningly successful.

Christopher McQuarrie’s film knows how to cast a spell.

Have fun.

Without harshness This Is Spinal Tap (1984) satirizes hard rock musicians: the few who make up the British band Spinal Tap are blokes with very little going for them.  Rob Reiner’s modest film is a mockumentary, still as funny as ever, with dandy cameos by Fran Drescher, Patrick Macnee and Fred Willard.

Principal cast members, Christopher Guest among them, wrote the script, which outdoes later mockumentaries which Guest himself directed.

Note: The sight of a long-haired, shirtless Harry Shearer is not one I care to see again.

Cover of This is Spinal Tap (Special Edition)

It’s a pity that American movies declined in quality in 1975 and did not recover at all until the Nineties.  Granted, they were not much better during the Sixties, but the years ’70 to ’74, for all the consistently adult material, told a somewhat different story.  To be sure, I hate M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the Robert Altman offspring, but Badlands, Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, Slaughterhouse-Five and three or four others are solid artistic successes.  The Godfather might be, too, but I need to see it again to be sure.  Even such films as The Conversation and Save the Tiger, though failures, are at least interesting and non-homogenized.  A late ’70s film like Breaking Away, on the other hand, is interesting and homogenized.

A problem arose in that most of the artistic stuff failed to make money.  Chinatown did okay, but the weird Slaughterhouse-Five?  Forget it.  The 1975 Michael Ritchie picture, Smile, didn’t make the commercial grade either, by which time Hollywood had had enough.  It very much wanted stuff that was tamer and less ambitious.  The truth is that to an extent moviegoers had let down the artists.

Cover of Carnal Knowledge

Save the Tiger (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is post-World War II, in 1948, and New York City marches on, busy and packed with the citizens.  Jules Dassin’s Naked City is the most urban movie I’ve ever seen, giving Serpico and An Unmarried Woman (you’re so Manhattan, girlfriend!) a run for their money partly because of the black and white cinematography.

How productive the Big Apple is!  Ah, but as the police know, the jewel thieves are out there, and so are the murderers.  There are no dirty cops in this film, fortunately.  They’re very amiable, whereas the felons, especially the killer of one Joan Dexter, are not whitewashed.  Sinners are true sinners in Naked City.

The screenplay by Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz is generally credible, and Dassin has so directed as to almost produce pictorial art.  It’s the biggest canvas you’ll find in film noir.

The movie stars Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff and Don Taylor.

The Naked City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)