The John Sayles-written The Lady in Red (1979) is a tawdry historical fiction about the eventual girlfriend (Pamela Sue Martin) of John Dillinger (Robert Conrad) and how she witnesses his getting shot to death outside a movie theatre and then becomes a one-time bank robber herself. The plot is pathetically bad and no character development for Polly Franklin, the girlfriend, ever obtains. She comes from the sticks but seems utterly suited to the big city. Why?

Sayles inserts a justified, old-style liberalism, or liberal sentiments, into the film, which targets in a big way the aggression of men toward women. Martin is fairly good as Polly but that’s all. (Conrad sleepwalks.) With nice red hair and pretty breasts, she is physically enticing. But, truth to tell, there is too much female nudity in this “feminist” picture. Sayles has nothing to be proud of. The director, Lewis Teague, did better.

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a brilliant novel, even though I have never much explored its meaning, which I perhaps wouldn’t like. The 1970 British cinematic version of it, directed by Robert Fuest, is not very faithful to the book and thus doesn’t yield any real meaning. It’s just a romantic period piece whose Heathcliff (Timothy Dalton) is not the vengeful moral monster of the novel but a pretty enigmatic outsider. However, to be sure, he is not a good man and yet at the end the film glorifies him. A mistake.

Still, I don’t regret seeing Heights. It has some lovely actresses and is attractive-looking. Anna Calder-Marshall, a frequent TV actress, is wholly admirable as Cathy Earnshaw. Judy Cornwell is beautifully persuasive as a maid named Nellie. Certain elements in the film make it plainly more interesting than successful.

Diana Watts is A Teacher (high school; Austin, Texas), with a nice body and a nice high-school boyfriend, Eric, selected from her class. They sleep together, and Diana is fearful that she will be caught and lose her job. But she doesn’t want to lose Eric either.

A question springs up: Is Diana a monster of irresponsibility? Her brother apparently thinks she is neglecting their mother, who seems to have some form of dementia. And eventually she is consumed with emotional need, turning into a basket case.

This 2013 indie film was written and directed by Hannah Fidell. As Diana, Lindsay Burdge shows a perfect understanding of her character’s personality. She is never overwrought and Fidell, for her part, shoots her, including her nudity, with wise discretion. It’s a quite effective item, with too many scenes, perhaps, with short-running dialogue. But I don’t mind that A Teacher is a short-running film, at an hour and 15 minutes long.

(Available on Freevee and Tubi)

A prominent critic opined that in writing Lord of the Flies, William Golding created merely a situation, not a novel. Well, to be sure, Peter Brook‘s film adaptation of the Golding book (from 1963) is not a very novelistic movie and doesn’t have to be. Rather it’s an opus of visual potency. The problem, however, is that it isn’t very well directed. Brook under-emphasizes important points and fails to create a good narrative flow. The young male actors in Flies play schoolboys marooned on an island who become foolish and vengeful brutes, but the performers seem lost, their acting unfocused. The killing of a boy named Simon (Tom Gaman) is ugly but clumsy. The blame falls on Brook. Would that the Francois Truffaut who directed The 400 Blows had made this film.

Yoon Ga-eun‘s Korean film The World of Us (2016) is a masterly work about childhood bullying and discontent. Sun (Choi Soo-in) is a lonely young girl non-physically bullied by her schoolmates. A new girl, Ji-ah (Hye-in Seol), enrolls in the school and Sun is clearly motivated to make friends with her, which she does. Things go swimmingly between them until Ji-ah gets chummy with a girl more esteemed than Sun and “learns” to dismiss Sun. But this precedes Ji-ah herself becoming unpopular, and yet the lass persists in taking jabs at Sun—with no glee whatsoever.

Yoon is a truly fine writer and director. The children are drawn knowingly, truthfully, memorably, fleshed out by a palatable cast. The World of Us—of Sun and Ji-ah—turns out to be the WORLD, with its bullying, harshness and sadness, as well as pleasure. The film hopes for at least some of the pleasure to be consistent.

(In Korean with English subtitles. Available on Tubi and Prime Video)