The “girls of slender means” in Muriel Spark‘s 1963 novel of the same name live in a London hostel during the virtual end of the Second World War.  Economically poor, they are also morally unformed—wayward.  But among them the Catholic Spark has fashioned a Christian character, Joanna, and a character who will become a Christian, Nicholas Farraday, a future martyr.

The two of them are self-abnegators who remove themselves, sooner or later, from the world of sex, Joanna doing so with a mild quirkiness.  The young woman teaches elocution of poetry, and as Ruth Whittaker has pointed out, “poetry for Joanna . . . takes the place of sex.”  For his part, Nicholas becomes acquainted with the hostel and moves from intermittently sleeping with the most beautiful of the girls of slender means—Selina—to Christian service in Haiti.  Both persons end up dying: they die with sacred faith.

The girls at the hostel are superficial, except that Joanna is not a girl of slender spiritual means.  Superficiality here essentially means self-seeking, seeking to satisfy the appetites for sex (Selina) and money (Jane). . . The Girls of Slender Means is another well-written, humorous success for Spark—and another short Spark novel, which is good since most of its sentences call for careful attention to determine the overtones.  And hooray for the overtones.

Cover of The Girls of Slender Means

Montgomery Clift is painfully dull as a priest accused of murder in Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953).  It is believed he did it to protect the gaga Anne Baxter from a blackmailer, but we know who the real killer is—a ludicrous nerd. . . Come to think of it, there’s something rather nerdy about Dimitri Tiomkin’s inappropriate music for the film.

Despite some exemplary directing by Hitchcock, I Confess is a lame entertainment.  Kudos, even so, to Baxter, Karl Malden and a couple of others for their acting.

Cover of I Confess

We could use a fiction film about sharks that’s better, more consequential really, than Jaws.  Despite its preposterousness, The Shallows (2016) is it.

Following some Blue Crush pop crud, Blake Lively escapes a shark by climbing onto the back of a dead whale, but is soon perched on an islet destined to be covered by the tide.  Nancy, Blake’s character, is competent and aware she has to be brave—why, she’s even brave enough to try to eat a tiny dead crab (which she perforce spits out)—but she’s bleeding from a shark-created gash in her leg and the odious big fish is still swimming around. . . The Shallows is a good feat of directing and editing (by Jaume Collet-Serra and Joel Negron, respectively); and, granted, there is CGI but “the vistas . . . are staggering” (Glenn Kenny).  Ocean shots are even more beautiful than Lively’s smile.  As for Blake’s acting, she does a lot of yelling and, carrying the film, is spot-on.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) produces an appreciable number of laughs, especially in its big slapstick sequence, before being deprived of its comedic tone.  It’s a Preston Sturges picture, less successful than The Palm Beach Story and The Great McGinty but still engaging and unique, still the opus of a recherche artist.

Joel McCrea is not bad as a Hollywood director, but Veronica Lake, without nuance or charm, is not good as an aspiring actress.  A shame.

Sturges’s film is a comedy (for the most part) that tells us there is something to be said for comedy.  Also that there is much to be said for wealth, wherever it exists, over against poverty.  Sure ’nuff.

Cover via Amazon

The tale of an aging gunman in 1901 bound to die of cancer, Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976) is not what a Western ought to be.

John Wayne performs memorably as John Bernard Books, but far more pleasure is to be had from such energetic Wayne Westerns as Stagecoach, True Grit and even the messy Red River.  In contrast, The Shootist needs a pacemaker.  What it does not need is decent period-piece production design, for Robert Boyle has provided it.  But Siegel—he who directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Line-Up—can only disappoint us with a derivative oater like this.

Cover of The Shootist