I have not been watching very many 2018, ’19 and ’20 movies because current flicks are so blasted familiar and dull and, of course, woke (and thus play it safe). (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an exception.) I’m mostly sticking with films from the past. The 1974 California Split, by Robert Altman, is not a good movie—the situations it presents are absurd—but it isn’t uncomfortably familiar or dull or woke either. Revolving around two shallow gamblers, it doesn’t play it safe. The film is a mess, however.

It rambles on preposterously, with no character development. George Segal is in a dopey, underwritten role but his acting succeeds except in the drunk scenes. Elliott Gould is a grabber, appropriately zestful. Ann Prentiss is unreal and miscast, but such supporting players as Joseph Walsh (Sparkie) are fine. Gwen Welles, who died of cancer at 42, is pleasant. Occasionally California Split is vulgar. In a good scene in Altman’s Nashville, Miss Welles reveals her attractive buttocks. Here, Gould reveals (discreetly) his unattractive penis. Spare me.

George Stevens‘s self-produced Penny Serenade (1941) is a film about a happy marriage. A terrible contingency causes the marriage to nosedive, but maybe, just maybe, all will be well again. PS is lovely but, alas, sentimental. It ends up being a heart-warmer and nothing more. All the same, one admires Irene Dunne and Cary Grant for their likability and Stevens for his directorial control.

George Stevens‘s self-produced Penny Serenade (1941) is a film about a happy marriage. A terrible contingency causes the marriage to nosedive, but maybe, just maybe, all will be well again. PS is lovely but, alas, sentimental. It ends up being a heart-warmer and nothing more. All the same, one admires Irene Dunne and Cary Grant for their likability and Stevens for his directorial control.

The 1946 The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers is melodrama—tragic melodrama. Lewis Milestone did efficient work in directing it, and such actors as Van Heflin and Kirk Douglas are solid. Barbara Stanwyck is a bit less interesting and persuasive than they are, but the fetching feminine presence here subsists in Lizabeth Scott.

‘Tis Stanwyck who is the lead, even so, in this tale of a rebellious girl who gets away with murder before growing up to live the high life. Unfortunately, she is married to a childhood friend (Douglas) who drinks and whom she does not love. The man she does love, another childhood friend (Heflin), shows up for some legal assistance from the sottish husband (a lawyer), but is shortly roughed up by the man’s hired goons. Douglas wants Heflin’s eyes off his wife—Stanwyck’s Martha Ivers—but all Heflin wants is to be in the driver’s seat in the present circumstances.

This is another nasty-but-nice Old Hollywood flick which is heavily dependent on both violence and a positive ending. In a screenplay by Robert Rossen, it has intelligent dialogue and no humor (it’s grave). Incidents in the film don’t exactly leave a character smiling. I’d say, though, that Ivers in toto left me smiling.

Directed and co-scripted by Jean-Jacques Annaud, Enemy at the Gates (2001) contains the spot-on visuals that a movie about the Battle of Stalingrad ought to have. All the same, the film has been accused of desecrating the memory of those who fought and died in Stalingrad during the Forties. I agree with this, except that the history of this battle will be known (in Russia and elsewhere) long after Annaud’s movie is justly forgotten.

Enemy is well-made but unsophisticated. That’s the problem. Even an entertainment film needs more than two Russian men in the midst of war getting jubilant because, owing to the sharpshooting skill of one of them, both men will be “famous.” It needs more than a Russian mother seeming to readily accept that her very young son, Sacha, has forsaken the Soviet Union and gone to the other side. Too, there is a deplorable love story. Jude Law‘s Vassili and Rachel Weisz‘s Tania engage in odd, laughable sex, and it’s a real pity they don’t—can’t—use protection.

I like much of the cast, though, notwithstanding Bob Hoskins rants embarrassingly as military officer Nikita Khrushchev. I don’t know; maybe the Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov could have done something with Khrushchev. But Enemy at the Gates is not Bodrov, who directed Prisoner of the Mountains and Mongol. Those are the pictures to see.