With appealing authenticity Chiwetel Ejiofer enacts a courageous man in the 2018 film, Come Sunday (on Netflix). He is Carlton Pearson, the Tulsa pastor willing to declare to his congregation that he now believes in the ultimate salvation of all people, that God Himself led him to this fond conviction. Most of his fellow Christians are scandalized, ergo leaving his church. The church can’t afford to stay open. Pearson finds himself on a unique and troubling path.

I am glad Pearson is a universalist—like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa before him—although his theology seems very incomplete here. (Where is the ideation?) The film is respectable but also more interesting than dramatic, and then it runs out of steam. The sop it throws to homosexuals isn’t interesting at all. . . Even so, such actors as Martin Sheen (as Oral Roberts), Condola Rashad (as Pearson’s wife), and Jason Segel deserve plaudits.

I have generally respected, but not liked, the art of playwright Arthur Miller, but the John Huston film The Misfits (1961), for which Miller wrote the script, I neither respect nor like.

Misfitism and disillusionment, femininity in the face of masculinity, amatory competition—these are a few of the themes in this movie which gradually turns into a particularly stupid milksop concoction. And by calling it milksop I am saying it is basically anti-masculine. Miller achieves this through his depiction of the very vulnerable Roslyn, played by his wife, Marilyn Monroe.

Clark Gable is in the film but his performance, for a long time, is mannered, his smiles usually phony. Eli Wallach, however, is incisive. Monroe—gorgeous, of course—goes nowhere fast, and Montgomery Clift is not much better. Not all the peekaboo shots of Monroe’s body are gratuitous, but most of them are. For some reason Monroe thought Miller turned director Huston against her. Maybe he did.

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“Honyocker” is a contemptuous word applied to the Hunyaks, the people of Slavic descent who (after leaving other states such as Missouri) try to make it as homesteaders in Montana.  The Montana cattlemen in Giles Lutz’s interesting and exciting Western, The Honyocker, from 1961, resent and oppose the homesteaders, among whom is virile Ashel Backus.  A struggling farmer, Ashel is forced by the deeds of his no-good brothers to start working off a debt to a cattleman named Milo Vaughn.  Later, fortunately, Ashel is actually hired by Vaughn, but has a monstrous enemy in Dandy Cabe.

The intense difficulties of keeping poverty at bay is a theme here.  We see a lot of human depravity too–the depravity of violence done to other men.  The Honyocker is plainly written and, within the limitations of Old West mythology, honest.  A Western with a good plot can be a delight.  This one is, and it’s not very long either.   

I was able to rent on Amazon Prime the magnificent 1947 French film, Devil in the Flesh, from a novel by Raymond Radignet. Claude Autant-Lara directed it superbly, with a strong concern for composition, without strict conventionality. Starring Micheline Presle and Gerard Philipe, both outstanding, it presents the disturbing affair, during World War I, of a French boy, Francois, and Marthe, a woman married to a soldier.

The shots of wounded French servicemen confirm that behind every war there is a devil in the world. What Francois and Marthe manifest is le diable au corps: the devil in the flesh. In fact, to the sometimes impudent Francois the world war doesn’t matter, and it begins not to matter to Marthe. Both are self-seeking. But “devil in the flesh” may also refer to the fatal sickness Marthe contracts—contracted in the early 20th century when death patently abounded. War may not kill you, but something else will; will kill even the self-seeking.

The screenplay by Jean Auvenche and Pierre Bost is smartly written, and Autant-Lara seems to have insisted on pictorial vividness, with much help from film editor Madeleine Gug. There is, indeed, often a rough visual poetry in this absorbing film which leaves the impression that it needed to be made.

(In French with English subtitles)

Susanne Bier did an imaginative job of directing the first episode of the HBO series, The Undoing (2020), which might prove to be a laudable show. Nicole Kidman plays a therapist who is beginning to encounter a bit of breathtaking trouble. There is a notable cliffhanger ending and a palatable cast, even if Hugh Grant‘s cynical wisecracks eventually irritate me.