In Hold Your Man (1933), Clark Gable plays a con artist who begins a relationship with the unscrupulous Ruby (Jean Harlow), only to meet abject failure.

For a long time the film is an abrasive farce with dandy, mostly Harlow-delivered wisecracks.  Indeed, if there was any personal vision here, the movie would be misanthropic.  Eventually, though, it all becomes more solemn, but in Anita Loos‘s screenplay there is no proper blending of comedy and drama.  Scenes in a women’s reformatory take over and, for my part, I was soon ready for the film to end.  The good cast and Sam Wood‘s direction were not about to save it.

The Hero (2017) is a sensitive human-condition film for potheads.  The principal characters enacted by Sam Elliott, Laura Prepon and Nick Offerman regularly and casually get high, without the film making any kind of point about drug use.  It’s just there—an uninteresting motif.  Almost nothing in director Brett Haley‘s script is novel or fresh, and it even turns fraudulent with its portrayal of a sad, 71-year-old man (Elliott) made happy by a much younger, attractive woman.  Miss Prepon pursues him, doing so not because Eliott has a measure of fame but simply because she has “a thing for old guys.”

A terrible romantic comedy, this, but a nifty musical.  Elvis Presley is a great singer in 1964’s Viva Las Vegas, but Ann-Margret outshines him because her voice is more than serviceable and her dancing charming and heartfelt.  Re the dancing, the movie wisely takes its cue from West Side Story: it’s vigorous.  So is some of the cutting from scene to scene (buckle up!)

As for the songs, they have hooks.

Cover of Viva Las Vegas [Blu-ray]

Mauriac’s brilliant 1927 novel, Therese Desqueyroux, was filmed in recent years by French director Claude Miller, the result of which is, I think, a respectable but forgettable period piece.  It is called Therese (2013), and its title character (Audrey Tautou), like Therese in the novel, tries to poison to death her husband Bernard (Gilles Lellouch).

There is some astute footage in the film (an emaciated, declining Therese making an appearance for her in-laws, Therese starting a fire with a cigarette), but Therese is less interesting than the novel because of how the novel is structured.  Plus, Tautou goes around with such a saturnine face that she makes the movie a bit stifling.  No high spirits ever spring up, as they usually do in Antonioni and Bergman, and the acting is not as varied as that in the finest art films.  Such cold art this is!

(In French with English subtitles)

Mauriac’s brilliant 1927 novel, Therese Desqueyroux, was filmed in recent years by French director Claude Miller, the result of which is, I think, a respectable but forgettable period piece.  It is called Therese (2013), and its title character (Audrey Tautou), like Therese in the novel, tries to poison to death her husband Bernard (Gilles Lellouch).

There is some astute footage in the film (an emaciated, declining Therese making an appearance for her in-laws, Therese starting a fire with a cigarette), but Therese is less interesting than the novel because of how the novel is structured.  Plus, Tautou goes around with such a saturnine face that she makes the movie a bit stifling.  No high spirits ever spring up, as they usually do in Antonioni and Bergman, and the acting is not as varied as that in the finest art films.  Such cold art this is!

(In French with English subtitles)