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)

A Francois Truffaut film, Small Change (1976) is small potatoes.

Full of vignettes, most of them mediocre, about young boys (and one girl), the flick is vapid, intermittently sentimental, even stupid.  The old Truffaut charm registers much weaker than it does in The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, Two English Girls, etc.

(In French with English subtitles)

Small Change (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Weddings and Babies (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Weddings and Babies (1958) is, like Little Fugitive, an American independent film by Morris Engle; and, again, the setting is New York City.  A Swedish-born young woman, Bea (Viveca Lindfors), desires to be married to her photographer boyfriend, Al (John Myhers); but Al lacks the confidence that marriage is for him and even that he loves Bea.  He goes through a quite miserable day on which he in fact announces upcoming nuptials with Bea and later sees her pulling away.  Plus his new camera gets broken.

Only now and then does the film limp along; the rest of the time it is pretty agreeable.  Resembling a short novel, it is properly a short movie, not lacking in interesting characters.  Except for the coda, its conclusion focuses exclusively on Al, who is asked by a priest to photograph a concurrent wedding (Al wants a future in which he does not take pictures of weddings and babies), and he agrees.  The flashbulb on the broken camera fails to work, though, and this is apparently a sign to Al that he must move on in life and both marry and love the woman who has pulled away from him.  Engle, who wrote the script originally for the screen, did not mean for the ending to be moving, but only authentic.  Which it is.  In fact it’s a more artistic ending than the one supplied for Little Fugitive.  Bravo!