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Category: Movies Page 2 of 43

Travels On “The Wayward Bus”

I’ve never read John Steinbeck’s novel The Wayward Bus and won’t be doing so. I did wish to see the 1957 film version of it and am glad I did. It is an entertaining piece about a driver and his passengers on a problematic, life-changing bus ride. The driver, Chicoy, for example, needs a better marriage to one who eventually becomes a passenger: his perturbed wife, Alice (Joan Collins). The bus ride is one of infatuation, growing or potential love, and reconciliation. Ably screenwritten by Ivan Moffat, the film is about when relationships represent hope—and it’s about waywardness.

Beautiful Collins is not quite beautiful, for some reason, until near the end of the flick. Her acting is a trifle too much on the surface, although the scene where she is at the door of her diner after her frustrated husband zips away in the bus is a poignant one. Rick Jason is pretty effective as Chicoy, and at least passable is gorgeous Jayne Mansfield as a stripper. Dan Dailey never disappoints as a traveling salesman who gets fresh for a while with Mansfield, and elderly Will Wright is a character actor par excellence. The Wayward Bus had an un-wayward, Russian-born director in Victor Vicus, whose work I don’t know.

“Jungle Fever”: A Fever Dream?

Spike Lee‘s Jungle Fever (1991) is about an interracial illicit romance, and it’s an overwrought joke. Most, but not all, of the black characters here are estimable; including the less than believable architect, Flipper Purify (Wesley Snipes), who cheats on his wife with a white woman (Annabella Sciorra). Nearly every white character is foolish and/or mean. The best sequence in the film presents a group of black young women discussing black men and their relationships. In one of the worst sequences, several Italian-American dudes are blabbing hysterically and are like profane, monstrously racist Jersey Boys. The movie is stupid—with, however, a nifty credit sequence—and even features constantly inappropriate music.

Easy To Be A Pushover For “Pushover”

The 1954 film noir, Pushover, was adapted from two stories by different authors and so, presumably, real credit must go to Roy Huggins for the smooth script. Here, Fred MacMurray is all right but certainly not great as a police detective whom a bank robber-murderer’s girlfriend (Kim Novack) talks into running off with her. Oh, and they’ll abscond with the bank robber’s stolen money. Novack is all short-haired glamor and has an intelligent-looking beautiful face. Her acting is menacingly cool.

I detected nothing wrong with Richard Quine‘s directing. The black-and-white visuals are glossy and thus attractive. The pic is sobering and involving.

Young English Marrieds In “A Kind of Loving”

A Kind of Loving (1962) may be British director John Schlesinger‘s best film; I don’t know. Cold Comfort Farm is good too, but Darling, Marathon Man and, probably, Midnight Cowboy (which I’ve resisted watching in full) don’t cut it. Loving, based on a novel, is an exquisitely wrought production in which Alan Bates stars as a working-class man who, because of her pregnancy, marries a girl (June Ritchie) whom he inconsistently cares for. For six months the marriage is miserable, but it’s primarily due to the couple’s having to live with the girl’s unpleasant mother (Thora Hird). The acting is superb. Aspiring thespians should study Bates for his range. Ritchie and Hird make the women flibbertigibbets but not just that. The look of the movie is enticing, with Schlesinger savvy at filming space—not outer space, just space—influenced perhaps by Antonioni.

The No-Nonsense “John Wick”

John WickRussian criminals in America beat the excrement out of John Wick, a former hit man, kill his beagle puppy, and steal his car.  But Wick is formidable; he arms himself (after all these years) and goes out to settle the score.

To me, an action movie nowadays needs to be fluid, non-arty and halfway-sensible or it will be no blasted good—and this is the kind John Wick (2014) is.  Tidy, not at all sloppy are the direction of Chad Staheslki and the film editing of Elisabet Ronaldsdottier. . . As John Wick, though, Keanu Reeves moves well but is flat, while surprisingly Ian McShane seems out of kilter.  But it matters little since this commercial flick, as John Nolte says on the Big Hollywood site, “knows exactly what it is and what it promises.”

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