Cover of Out of the Past

There is something delicious about a black-and-white film noir that begins (and even ends) in a small town, as the 1941 Out of the Past does.  It is further enriched by footage in the great outdoors.

But film noir it is, and all the elements of crime are here.  Robert Mitchum plays a once dirty detective, and—well—women are sinners too.  Understandably, I’m sure, Jane Greer‘s Kathie Moffat hates her gangster boyfriend (Kirk Douglas); not so understandably, she is a real reprobate.

Mitchum is not all that good here.  He doesn’t represent his character as well as the other actors represent theirs.  A not-bad Rhonda Fleming needs more screen time.  But Geoffrey Holmes shows expertise in his based-on-a-novel screenplay, and Jacques Tourneur directed with rich, savvy elan.

Near the end of a moderately good episode of the TV series, Chicago P.D. (Wed., 4/6/2022), a female opioid junkie gets over some injuries in a hospital bed and says to Officer Adam Ruzek (Patrick John Flueger), “They’re stingy with their painkillers here.” (She actually says it lightheartedly!) This is another reason never to become a drug abuser. If you get hurt and end up in a hospital, the medical folks will be stingy with the painkillers.

The 4/6/2022 episode (“Keep You Safe”) of Chicago Fire, though rather sentimental, was eminently watchable. The two women of color, Stella Kidd and Violet, are . . . eminently pretty. As a white man I appreciate their saying yes to close relationships with white Severide and white Hawkins. Stella, by the way, is the new firefighters’ lieutenant. Handsome Dude is no longer there, for some reason I didn’t catch.

There is some fun available in the cast and the spy action in The Wrecking Crew (1969), a “Matt Helm” adventure, but not without the movie being sabotaged by the atrocious acting of Dean Martin (Helm) and the oddball role created for Sharon Tate, who is meant to have sidekick chemistry with Martin.  Almost everyone in Crew deserves better, even—no, especially—Elke Sommer.

The Wrecking Crew (1969 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Art lies like truth. Life, then, never quite imitates art. Still, a French baker (Fabrice Luchini) watches to see whether the life of a married English woman named Gemma Bovery, whom the baker loves and lusts after, imitates that of the fictional Emma in the novel Madame Bovary. It does not, for all the strangeness, in Anne Fontaine‘s Gemma Bovery (2014), of human experience. In fact, the strangeness is a “mundane” surrealism.

Gemma Bovery has been correctly deemed thin, but it is also flavorous. Gemma, I will point out, cheats on her husband with a fellow called Herve. It is a stunningly sensual scene when she appears in Herve’s house in a bikini and, as the two lie down and kiss, her large breast slips out. Gemma Arterton, in the title role, is likably nuanced. Fontaine, adapting here a graphic novel, is an able filmmaker.

(In French, and sometimes English, with English subtitles)

Cover of Love and Death

In Love and Death (1974), an early zany Woody Allen comedy set in 19th century Russia, the wit and humor are cold.  Allen, through his character Boris, cares about no one but himself and, I suppose, the Diane Keaton character he claims to love.  Everyone else is objectified:  it’s in keeping with this kind of megalomaniacal slapstick.  (Er, when you come down to it, Keaton’s Sonja is pretty much objectified too.  Unlikely as it is, she becomes outrageously whorish.)  Allen’s later films were actually more respectable, if less funny.

Many of the gags here, even so, are slowly getting dated, not as funny as they once were.  Because of how flat and desperate they are, others weren’t funny in the first place.  What makes it worse is all those ugly and ludicrous facial expressions Allen puts on, meant to produce a laugh but . . .  Me, they only make glum.