The protagonist in the film Corpus Christi (2019), Daniel, released from a reformatory, is a serious sinner who would like to become a Catholic priest, and to find redemption, but must naughtily settle for operating as a fake priest instead. Curiously, he becomes a better man. In the parish there are unforgiving people and Daniel declares that forgiveness is necessary since to forgive is to love. Just so!

Still, this fake priest is a fake “priest of God.” He is hurt by the world and by himself. In fact there is a particular level on which the one thing missing from Daniel’s evolving spiritual life is suffering, but it doesn’t stay missing. This is just one level, though.

Corpus Christi is a powerful movie (directed by Jan Komasa) with an incisive screenplay (by Mateusz Pacewicz). Bartosz Bielenia is compelling as Daniel, and such actors as Aleksandra Konieczna (Lidia) and Leszek Lichota (the mayor) are superb in their depth. This Polish work may be a masterpiece.

(In Polish with English subtitles)

Bruce Willis stars in The Whole Nine Yards, from 2000, as a hit man who moves next door to a law-abiding dentist (Matthew Perry) with marriage and money troubles. The dentist’s contemptuous wife (Rosanna Arquette) urges him to rat out the hit man, for a price, to an enemy gangster, but the dentist intends no harm. And Arquette secretly wants him to die. Boy, does the threat of violence pervade.

Director Jonathan Lynn‘s and scriptwriter Mitchell Kapner‘s film is an effective comedy of killing and treachery, and it beats the blazes out of woke comedies. It has nothing to say but is not a thumbsucker. The plot Kapner offers is flawed but engaging. The flick is all commercial rawness. Perry is fun and supple; Arquette is raffishly dandy. Amanda Peet is committed and sapid and pretty nude. Wait, I mean she is a pretty nude.

Not enough good one-liners crop up, but there are amusingly mad sight gags, to be sure, in Stanley Kramer‘s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). And I respect that it’s full of plot and detail—far from indifferent to these elements—and that its cast is, well, largely appealing.

Spencer Tracy is creditable but Sid Caesar is a farce artist not at all uncommanding or charmless, which is practically the case with Terry-Thomas too. Ethel Merman is funny and means comic business while Edie Adams—inadequate in her acting—is at least fetching. And she has more life in her than Dorothy Provine does.

The screenplay is by William and Tania Rose. Theirs is not a great comedy, but they’ve given Mad what most great comedies possess: a certain sadness behind the hilarious occurrences.

The film 1900 (1976), by Bernardo Bertolucci, is a long and high-budget Italian period piece. Its cynical vulgarity and ugly inanity drove me to stop watching it after two hours and nine minutes.

It’s the kind of film a sexual liberal of the Seventies would put out. Two boys talk about their exposed penises. As men they are in bed together with one (prostituting) woman. An aging landowner instructively exhibits to a girl of about fourteen a member that will ever be non-erect. Had enough sex stuff yet? In themselves only one of these scenes is artistically bad (the two boys), but all are part of an offputting two-hour whole. The nine minutes beyond the two hours I saw were stupid (why is Robert De Niro so passive before Dominique Sanda?) I don’t regret not finishing 1900.

Stalin does not respect you, Joe Poet. He is willing to torture and kill you. You’re Jewish.

Another piece from The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, Nathan Englander‘s “The Twenty-Seventh Man” (1998) owes its existence to Stalin’s anti-Semitic oppression in the Soviet Union. Four Russian literary artists, among twenty-three others, are arrested and destined to die, because they are Jews. “We’ve lost our universe, this is true,” one of them says. A young man named Pinchas represents the artist who is snuffed out by a sinister world before he is known and loved.

A terrific story, this. Englander writes wryly and knowingly. His dialogue is delicious. John Freeman opines that this is a tale about the madness of “a state at war with truth.”