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

The best thing about the late Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was his perennial interest in the human condition.  His first feature film, 1950’s Story of a Love Affair, offers an original screenplay wherein a husband investigates his young wife’s obscure past and a vexing affair between said wife and a car dealer gets rekindled.  Ironically, however unsavory the (rich) husband is, the two lovers enable him to morally one-up them.  At long last, an event that would seem to “free” the lovers merely leaves them at a painful impasse.

Although some of what is here cannot be taken seriously, alas, Affair is a personal and impressively directed enterprise.  As was expected, stylistically it anticipates L’Avventura, Eclipse, etc., and it is near-profound—unlike L’Avventura, Eclipse, etc., which are profound.  The progress was beginning.

The film stars Massimo Girotti and Lucia Bose.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Wanda (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wanda (1971)—written, directed and acted in by Barbara Loden—is one of the truly good American films of the Seventies.

The newly unemployed, soon-to-be-divorced Wanda (Loden) ignorantly takes up with a robber (Michael Higgins) who is unstable and tyrannical.  Theirs is a pathetic (occasionally funny) relationship, but Wanda never has to assist the robber in his stealing until he finally insists on it apropos of a bank.

The cannily written film has to do with what the lives of working-class people—Wanda, not the robber—sometimes become, and with the slow, harmful creep of irresponsibility.  The movie concludes with a freeze-frame shot of Wanda sitting in a tavern and at a dead end, not enjoying the conviviality of the strangers who have invited her to drink with them.  With her deep performance, Loden proves she understands the character she is playing; likewise with Higgins.

Loden, by the way, was married to Elia Kazan.  One wishes she could have made at least one more film before she came down with a fatal cancer in 1978.