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.

It’s 2009 (that’s the year I wrote this) and Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco is finally on DVD.  I popped it in my player the other night and, in 1998, saw it at the theatre.

Young professionals make up the dramatis personae and, although Stillman sympathizes with them, they are no more adults yet than the fun pop music—disco—-they frequently listen to is adult.  Then disco dies during the early ’80s and the desire for personal change occasionally springs up.  Maybe it’s time to fall in love, even start a family.  (Thus Stillman justifies his comic optimism at the movie’s end.)  Or maybe, just maybe, it’s time to spurn society’s deep secularism.  Why, the singing of “Amazing Grace”, done by the irreligious Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), could actually mean something.

John Simon criticized Stillman’s failure to explore his characters in the film Barcelona (1994), and the same failure exists in Disco.  Alice Kinnon (Chloe Sevigny) comes close to being explored, but not quite.  For this reason The Last Days of Disco is by no means a great film.  But it is shrewd and witty and as dramatically imaginative as it is clumsy.  Also, Stillman’s chief character is what Troy Patterson of Slate.com identifies as the movie’s subject:  “society—small s and small scale,” and it IS explored.  To me, the exploration is fascinating.

The Long Riders, directed by Walter Hill, is a 1980 Western more entertaining (“wipes” and all) than truly good. It deals with Jesse James, played by James Keach, and his bank robbing outfit, toward whom the film is a tad too cordial. There are some fine details, however, such as an argument between two buckboard passengers about service in the Civil War while the passengers are being robbed.

The material involving the female characters (Amy Stryker‘s Beth, Pamela Reed‘s Belle) is paltry and unconvincing. But the movie’s action, though not without cliches, is exciting. I also give it a cheer for offering an original screenplay and for what is nowadays politically incorrect content. Remember I mentioned the Civil War?

Anthony Hopkins, who is extraordinary in Richard Lester‘s film Juggernaut (1974), once said this obscure picture is “highly underrated.” It was released in the Seventies when it was understood that British films were saying very little, if anything, of importance. Hence what difference would it make for Lester to direct a thriller about a vicious criminal who has planted seven bombs on a transatlantic liner?

But Juggernaut, though quite imperfect, is pretty shrewd and engrossing. Lester does well with the early crowd scene—all those ocean liner passengers before the voyage begins—and maintains the directorial competence to the end. One of the best segments covers the bomb squad technicians as they parachute into the ocean and go through hell to get on the ship. (It’s up to them to dismantle the bombs.) Then there are the actors. Although Omar Sharif, as the liner’s captain, is uninteresting, Richard Harris and David Hemmings are pleasingly believable. Ian Holm and Roy Kinnear are reliable, but Shirley Knight does not show the unerring authenticity that Caroline Mortimer, enacting Anthony Hopkins’s wife, shows.

I should also indicate that there is scant directorial daring from Lester in the film. It isn’t Petulia. It is underrated, even so, and credit should be given where it is due.