I was deprived of the fifth season of the FX series, The Americans, for a long time until I found it on Amazon Prime. I have now watched the first four episodes of this the story of a Russian married couple living as spies, for the Kremlin, in America. The couple’s teenaged daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), is shaken and confused now that she knows what her parents do for a living, with Mom and Dad doing what they can to hide their occupational violence from the girl.

However dubious, here, some of the conduct and strategies of American and Russian operatives may be, Joe Weisberg‘s show is penetrating and compelling. A theme of the fifth season is the reality that powerful states such as the U.S. must struggle (or war) against failed or pathetic states. Think of Israel and Iran, or Israel and Saddam’s Iraq in 1981.

I like it that Weisberg has supplied The Americans with a fairly large number of characters. The focus is not too narrow. . . Most of these characters, incidentally, know how high the stakes are. Alarmingly high.

Cover of Tamara Drewe

I never saw the 2010 British film, Tamara Drewe, in the theatre, only on DVD.  That was sufficient, however, for letting me know that the problem with the film is that it reveals too little about its title character, Tamara Drewe.  Still, based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, the film is robust and sophisticated, and actress Gemma Arterton does all she can with Tamara.

Miss Drewe is a formerly unattractive gal who, after getting a nose job, returns to her rural town a real beauty, and then gets into some vexing scrapes with lovers and foes alike.  It’s probably one of Stephen Frears’s best.

Only 65% of critics recommend this film (source: Rotten Tomatoes on the Internet), but that scarcely matters.  Why?  Because most movie critics write claptrap.  In fact, usually they’re not even critics, they’re reviewers.  As John Simon indicated long ago, true criticism is written in such a way that it invites the reader to think, whereas the reviewer does the reader’s thinking for him or her.  That’s what they’ve done with Tamara Drewe, which in any case deserves better than a response of claptrap.

A film about the post-collegiate lives of eight female students in the Thirties, Sidney Lumet‘s The Group (1966) makes me curious about the Mary McCarthy novel on which it is based (and which I haven’t read). The film itself, after all, is pretty incurious about such matters as the interior lives of these women. All we see is their constant interaction with each other and with the men in their lives (group interaction), which is one reason I don’t find the movie engaging.

Brought into focus here are educated women who are in truth intellectual nonentities, enticed by gossip, sexual liberty of sorts, and surface politics. They’re mostly underachievers too. To this I have no objection, but, scripted by Sidney Buchman, The Group is overwrought and too episodic—as well as marred by some lousy acting. Elizabeth Hartman, for example, simply lacks appeal in a puny role: that of Priss, whose flat chest is a subject of discussion for the women when Priss begins to breastfeed her child. Certainly Joanna Pettet is not uninteresting but she overplays a woman called Kay. Jessica Walter does likewise for Libby, while Candice Bergen and Kathleen Widdoes are hopelessly bland. Hal Holbrook is somehow off. Shirley Knight, on the other hand, is winsome and never false; and James Broderick is commendable also.

Sadly, it can be said that the movie contains meaning but matters very little.

A film about the post-collegiate lives of eight female students in the Thirties, Sidney Lumet‘s The Group (1966) makes me curious about the Mary McCarthy novel on which it is based (and which I haven’t read). The film itself, after all, is pretty incurious about such matters as the interior lives of these women. All we see is their constant interaction with each other and with the men in their lives (group interaction), which is one reason I don’t find the movie engaging.

Brought into focus here are educated women who are in truth intellectual nonentities, enticed by gossip, sexual liberty of sorts, and surface politics. They’re mostly underachievers too. To this I have no objection, but, scripted by Sidney Buchman, The Group is overwrought and too episodic—as well as marred by some lousy acting. Elizabeth Hartman, for example, simply lacks appeal in a puny role: that of Priss, whose flat chest is a subject of discussion for the women when Priss begins to breastfeed her child. Certainly Joanna Pettet is not uninteresting but she overplays a woman called Kay. Jessica Walter does likewise for Libby, while Candice Bergen and Kathleen Widdoes are hopelessly bland. Hal Holbrook is somehow off. Shirley Knight, on the other hand, is winsome and never false; and James Broderick is commendable also.

Sadly, it can be said that the movie contains meaning but matters very little.

Directed by Edgar Ulmer and written by Martin Goldsmith, Detour (1946) runs for only a hour and eight minutes. There isn’t much to it; it’s like a pulp-fiction short story (not a novel).

A musician (Tom Neal), hitchhiking, is picked up by a man who soon dies of an illness. Al Roberts—Neal’s character—is afraid the police will accuse him of having killed the man, hence he decides to assume the deceased gent’s identity. However, Vera (Ann Savage), a cynical ne’er-do-well, knows the dead man, and knows that Al is driving his car, and begins to blackmail the scheming musician. From the film’s beginning, Al has retained an acceptable goal for his life but circumstance, and his own choices, pull him further and further away from the goal.

One senses that Goldsmith wanted Detour to be even darker than it is. His plotting is not fully credible, but it is very involving. Neal is serviceable as an ordinary man who will tolerate being a milquetoast for only so long. Savage never lets up on her wounded, hard-bitten attitude, and it’s something to behold.