Arthur Bishop in the Michael Winner picture, The Mechanic (1972), is a hitman and a moral eunuch. The flick is a Charles Bronson vehicle but, regrettably, he and Jan-Michael Vincent act their parts poorly. Further, the thing makes little sense, which is a shame given how plainly enjoyable it often is, as witness a lively motorcycle chase. Or the assassination and shoot-out action in Naples, Italy. The film, to sum it up, is a tastefully made failure about hard-nosed men.

In Roman Polanski‘s 1962 Polish feature, Knife in the Water, a painful tension exists between a vain sportswriter (Leon Niemczyk) and his wife (Jolante Umecka), who nevertheless wish to entertain themselves on a sailboat outing.  To be sure, theirs can often be called an adult marriage, for they can be good to each other, whereas the unexpected game the sportswriter plays with a young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) he invites to the outing is merely childish.  The sportswriter sees the chap as a challenge to his manhood.  Out of envy, they try to outdo each other in manliness, and a secret understanding exists that if the hitchhiker ever gets the chance to make love to the sportswriter’s wife, the sportswriter will be instantly UNmanned.  The Niemczyk character has no reason to suspect the youth of wanting to do this, and yet . . . suppose it’s true.

Despite some filler, Knife in the Water is artistically solid.  Its script was written originally for the screen and its cast is soundly fine.  Both shots and editing look great in a sequence such as that in which the sportswriter punches the hitchhiker and he stumbles back onto the boat’s sail.  The Jolante Umecka character anxiously but futilely tries the save the youth from the water, for he has falsely told the married couple he cannot swim.  Into the lake he goes, with Umecka crying out to her husband and Krzysztof Komeda‘s insinuating music arising.  Here we have an example of written and directorial splendor.

(In Polish with English subtitles)

Cover of Knife in the Water: Essential Art House

Directed by Joe Wright, The Woman in the Window (2021, on Netflix) seems to have one foot in the 1950s (mainly because of decor) and one foot in the present century. Appropriate, this, because the film owes much to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, and, it could be said, it is the Hitchcockian 1950s it has its foot in.

Cards on the table: I don’t like the screenplay based on a novel by A.J. Finn, but I do relish the brute suspense and Bruno Delbonnel’s intriguing, un-showy cinematography. Amy Adams does very well—she’s relatable and pleasantly forceful—as an agoraphobic child psychologist who witnesses a murder. Gary Oldman, Brian Tyree Henry, et al. are creditable too, and Julianne Moore is a no b.s. master in a small role. The film has a muddled script, but Rear Window is imperfectly written also. Yet Hitchcock’s pic is critically acclaimed and worth seeing. The Woman in the Window, I think, is worth seeing too.

Celeste Price, the protag of Alissa Nutting‘s 2003 novel Tampa, is selfish, unloving, perverse and good-looking. She is a married middle-school teacher sexually excited by fourteen-year-old boys. The grabber is that this is all she cares about: intimate time with these boys, specifically Jack and then Boyd. Thus Nutting is right to make the book so sexually descriptive.

A first novel, Tampa is almost inconsequential but, as well, it is vigorous and certainly not boring. Best of all is that Nutting can write, the finesse here positively clear.

In the 1930s, a 68-year-old man was considered an old man.  Thus Louis, the hero of the Francois Mauriac novel Viper’s Tangle (1933), is an old man—one afflicted with angina pectoris, in addition to being obsessed with money and riled by his family.

He is not much different from a Flannery O’Connor sinner-infidel except that he is studied psychologically, by the author, to a degree unheard-of in an O’Connor fiction.  The true Catholic, the Christian, in the story is Isa, Louis’s wife, and the old man implacably scorns her religion.  Yet, after Isa dies, Louis finds himself penning the words, “Oh God, oh God—if only You existed!”

Does God exist?

After all, even Louis’s loving granddaughter, Janine, avers about herself and the other relatives that  “our principles [Catholic ones] remained separate from our lives.”  All the same, this will not remain the case with Louis, who discovers that God does exist.  The world in Viper’s Tangle finally and sadly offers nothing.  Louis finds the Deity offering redemption.

The plot in this novel is pretty unimpressive, but character and style aren’t.  Mauriac’s prose is pellucid and his attitude beautifully sympathetic.  It is Christian fiction at its finest.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis serves as mother church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (Photo credit: Wikipedia)