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The Warren Beatty movie, Reds (1981), is a grabber about the American pro-Communist journalist John Reed (Beatty) and his wife Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton).  Often fascinating, it is also, alas, extremely faulty, and its biggest problem is the use of real-life elderly “witnesses” who yak about the John Reed they saw and knew about.  Rebecca West, George Jessel and Will Durant among them, these people make observations that add nothing to the on-screen story, not least because they utter things the rest of us already know.

Beatty’s acting, though not memorable, is palatable.  Keaton does her best to create a character, but some of what she has to do is plainly beyond her.  Director Beatty—co-scenarist too—mostly wastes Jack Nicholson in the Eugene O’Neill role, and Paul Sorvino is sadly almost laughable.

Reds is sufficiently honest to affirm that the Russian Revolution did not liberate people; it oppressed them.  It says, in addition, that political movements are (constantly) hindered or damaged by natural complexity and human variety, even, in fact, by going against nature (as Alfred Jay Nock knew).  As it happens, Bolshevism, in its cruel determination, went not only against nature but also against people.

Charley Chase was an acclaimed movie comedian of decades past.  The star of numerous two-reelers, in the silent 22-minute Be Your Age (1926), he plays a bashful nobody (or “nobody”) who, darn it, just has to resign himself to his boss’s, an attorney’s, objectionable plan.  He pays for his passivity, and it’s all richly amusing, a modest winner with an agreeable cast (especially Chase), with Oliver Hardy, not yet great, in a supporting role.

Even better is Chase’s sound film, the 18-minute The Grand Hooter (1937), wherein the amiable gent is, alas, a ninny of a husband.  His wife’s complaint that he spends too much time at the Hoot Owl Lodge and not enough with her prompts the two to go off together to a hotel, but Charley’s ninnyism won’t quit.  The piece is uproariously funny, suitably paced by director Del Lord, giving genuine proof that Chase was able to make a smooth transition from silent film to talkies.  And it was chivalrous to keep Charley’s wife (Peggy Stratford) from being mistakenly kicked in the rear end by a hotel detective.

Both movies are available on YouTube.

Cropped screenshot of Ida Lupino from the trailer for the film The Hard Way Further cropped from Image:Ida Lupino in The Hard Way trailer.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The print I saw (on DVD) of Ida Lupino‘s The Young Lovers (1949) is so technically deficient it seems ready to come apart at the seams.  The audio, for example, is often lousy.  As for the movie, it is a nicely serious love story in which the girl (Sally Forrest), a dancer, contracts polio.  The guy (Keefe Brasselle), also a dancer, doesn’t—but he truly loves the girl.  He has to eat, though, so he leaves for Las Vegas.

Herself afflicted with polio as a child, Lupino was a genuine creative force.  Not only did she direct The Young Lovers, she also produced and, with Collier Young, wrote it.  Likewise with other films.  The movie in question, however, is pretty pedestrian and sometimes overwrought.  But, again, it is nicely serious and thus manages to be watchable.

Also called Never Fear (a crummy title).

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Luis Bunuel‘s Belle de Jour (1967) is so bad it’s riveting.

A French woman (Catherine Deneuve) happily married but sexually unresponsive to her husband gradually becomes, of all things, a daytime prostitute at a brothel.  Repelling kinkiness is shown, but there is also Bunuel’s usual surrealism which, at the end, causes the film to scurry away from, well, real life.  From human catastrophe.

In Belle, at bottom, Senor B. likes neither people nor traditional Western morality (it’s so bourgeois).  Practically the only good thing about the film is Catherine Deneuve’s marvelous beauty.  I’m glad her character is a daytime beauty, a belle de jour, since she’s so easy to see that way.

(In French with English subtitles)

Preston Sturges based his script for The Lady Eve (1941) on a story by one Monckton Hoffe and then directed what was one of the best screwball comedies ever made.  In it, a father-and-daughter con artist team attempts to bamboozle a wealthy young snake expert (Henry Fonda) but, as it happens, a cynic, the daughter (Barbara Stanwyck), falls for a non-cynic, the young man.  She never misses a beat.  Imperturbably she aimed to cheat him at cards, now she imperturbably likes the fellow and says no to cheating him—except that he soon breaks up with her.

The old charmer, Sturges, is at it again—teasing us with hard reality before proving once more that he’s in a romantic mood.  The hard reality is Stanwyck’s elaborate plot to—get even?—with Fonda, who does need to learn a little lesson.

Even more fun than The Great McGinty, Eve is a farce of manners, an unfrothy romp.  Stanwyck is fine in her juicy role, but I like Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story a bit more because Claudette Colbert looks more feminine than Stanwyck.

The Lady Eve (Photo credit: Wikipedia)