Peter Graves enacts a federal investigator, Tom Kaylor, assigned to bust the supplier of illegal amphetamines in the film, Death in Small Doses (1957). He poses as a trucker because the “bennys” are being purchased by truckers intent on receiving pep for their long drives. But deaths are the consequence and the pushers are shady.

With acceptable direction by Joseph Newman. the movie is an almost too earnest entertainment item with energetic drama. Finally, though, it goes off a cliff; the writing by John McGreevey flops. Tom’s love interest, Val, is played by Mala Powers, a woman with an exquisite face and excellent breasts. However, the Val of the film’s first half is not at all consonant with the Val of the second half, and it hardly helps that Miss Powers plays her ineffectually. As for Graves, he fills the bill, but Chuck Connors is shallow. The thrills of the first two-thirds of Death made me glad I could see the picture on Amazon Prime.

I was deprived of the fifth season of the FX series, The Americans, for a long time until I found it on Amazon Prime. I have now watched the first four episodes of this the story of a Russian married couple living as spies, for the Kremlin, in America. The couple’s teenaged daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), is shaken and confused now that she knows what her parents do for a living, with Mom and Dad doing what they can to hide their occupational violence from the girl.

However dubious, here, some of the conduct and strategies of American and Russian operatives may be, Joe Weisberg‘s show is penetrating and compelling. A theme of the fifth season is the reality that powerful states such as the U.S. must struggle (or war) against failed or pathetic states. Think of Israel and Iran, or Israel and Saddam’s Iraq in 1981.

I like it that Weisberg has supplied The Americans with a fairly large number of characters. The focus is not too narrow. . . Most of these characters, incidentally, know how high the stakes are. Alarmingly high.

Cover of Tamara Drewe

I never saw the 2010 British film, Tamara Drewe, in the theatre, only on DVD.  That was sufficient, however, for letting me know that the problem with the film is that it reveals too little about its title character, Tamara Drewe.  Still, based on a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, the film is robust and sophisticated, and actress Gemma Arterton does all she can with Tamara.

Miss Drewe is a formerly unattractive gal who, after getting a nose job, returns to her rural town a real beauty, and then gets into some vexing scrapes with lovers and foes alike.  It’s probably one of Stephen Frears’s best.

Only 65% of critics recommend this film (source: Rotten Tomatoes on the Internet), but that scarcely matters.  Why?  Because most movie critics write claptrap.  In fact, usually they’re not even critics, they’re reviewers.  As John Simon indicated long ago, true criticism is written in such a way that it invites the reader to think, whereas the reviewer does the reader’s thinking for him or her.  That’s what they’ve done with Tamara Drewe, which in any case deserves better than a response of claptrap.

A film about the post-collegiate lives of eight female students in the Thirties, Sidney Lumet‘s The Group (1966) makes me curious about the Mary McCarthy novel on which it is based (and which I haven’t read). The film itself, after all, is pretty incurious about such matters as the interior lives of these women. All we see is their constant interaction with each other and with the men in their lives (group interaction), which is one reason I don’t find the movie engaging.

Brought into focus here are educated women who are in truth intellectual nonentities, enticed by gossip, sexual liberty of sorts, and surface politics. They’re mostly underachievers too. To this I have no objection, but, scripted by Sidney Buchman, The Group is overwrought and too episodic—as well as marred by some lousy acting. Elizabeth Hartman, for example, simply lacks appeal in a puny role: that of Priss, whose flat chest is a subject of discussion for the women when Priss begins to breastfeed her child. Certainly Joanna Pettet is not uninteresting but she overplays a woman called Kay. Jessica Walter does likewise for Libby, while Candice Bergen and Kathleen Widdoes are hopelessly bland. Hal Holbrook is somehow off. Shirley Knight, on the other hand, is winsome and never false; and James Broderick is commendable also.

Sadly, it can be said that the movie contains meaning but matters very little.

A film about the post-collegiate lives of eight female students in the Thirties, Sidney Lumet‘s The Group (1966) makes me curious about the Mary McCarthy novel on which it is based (and which I haven’t read). The film itself, after all, is pretty incurious about such matters as the interior lives of these women. All we see is their constant interaction with each other and with the men in their lives (group interaction), which is one reason I don’t find the movie engaging.

Brought into focus here are educated women who are in truth intellectual nonentities, enticed by gossip, sexual liberty of sorts, and surface politics. They’re mostly underachievers too. To this I have no objection, but, scripted by Sidney Buchman, The Group is overwrought and too episodic—as well as marred by some lousy acting. Elizabeth Hartman, for example, simply lacks appeal in a puny role: that of Priss, whose flat chest is a subject of discussion for the women when Priss begins to breastfeed her child. Certainly Joanna Pettet is not uninteresting but she overplays a woman called Kay. Jessica Walter does likewise for Libby, while Candice Bergen and Kathleen Widdoes are hopelessly bland. Hal Holbrook is somehow off. Shirley Knight, on the other hand, is winsome and never false; and James Broderick is commendable also.

Sadly, it can be said that the movie contains meaning but matters very little.