I wasn’t sure Tom Perrotta‘s Mrs. Fletcher was a novel that would speak to me and so I discontinued reading it.  I may also discontinue watching the HBO TV series, Mrs. Fletcher—Perrotta-created—if I find it a letdown.  Judging from the first, late-October episode, it might not be.

Director Nicole Holofcener and scenarist Perrotta do crisp, bright work here, and the 30-minute episode is very effective at depicting something in particular:  a teen boy (Jackson White) who, because he is callow, fails to appreciate the mother (Kathryn Hahn) who helps him move into his college dorm room.  Hahn, as Mrs. Fletcher, knows how to do uneasiness and discomfort, and is never unsubtle.  I want to see more of her.  I hope Perrotta maintains his smarts.

From outer space has come a disease, a germ attached to a satellite, which has killed nearly every person in a tiny American town.  The satellite is removed to a laboratory where the brainy scientists in The Andromeda Strain (1971) speedily learn about it and naturally hope to neutralize it.  The film, by Robert Wise, suggests that without scientific development we go nowhere but, as well, we don’t always need it for the survival of humanity.  (It can ensure something altogether different.)

Based on a Michael Crichton novel, Andromeda is obsessed with laboratory technology and carries dramatic punch.  Thus, to me, it is engrossing.  The trauma and contingency that James Wood says exist in Ian McEwan’s fiction are here in full force.  I disagree with Pauline Kael that the chief characters are “dull” but, like her, I frown on the fact that the melodramatic climax has nothing to do with the central dilemma.  Also, the government germ warfare stuff is a fatuous bore.  Still, the film can be recommended.

Are merry-go-rounds capable of speeding up the way the one in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) does?  Were they in the 1950s?  I don’t know, but I suspect Hitchcock thought he had a better story than he did in this fascinating thriller.  However spotty the plot, though, Strangers is a terrific directorial achievement with some great things done with eyeglasses and Robert Walker’s pathology.  Laura Elliott is vividly good as naughty Miriam.

English: Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) boating into the Tunnel of Love in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 Strangers on a Train (trailer) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The movie version of the 1940 musical, Pal Joey (1957), is sorely damaged by Kim Novak‘s poor performance.  Probably Frank Sinatra saves the enterprise (it is worth watching) as he sings well the first-rate Rodgers and Hart songs, including a couple from other shows.  It’s Tin Pan Alley heaven, even if the problem with the rendition of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” is that Rita Hayworth‘s singing is partially dubbed.  (Likewise with “Zip.”)  The dubbing is obvious.

The movie is stupid enough to make Novak a little less alluring than she really is, or was, in order to play up the superior beauty of Hayworth.  It doesn’t work:  by 1957 Hayworth, though still attractive, was slowly losing her physical appeal and greatness.  The flick is in color, of course, and there are a few lovely outdoor scenic bits.  I’m sometimes bewitched by Pal Joey, sometimes bothered, but at least not bewildered.

Directed by George Sidney.

With Desperate Characters, adapted from a novel by Paula Fox, we get a man (Kenneth Mars) and a woman (Shirley MacLaine) in a practically loveless marriage.

Taking place circa 1971, it is a 1971 film.  Adeptly Frank Gilroy wrote and directed it, and it shows us when personal discontent mirrors, as it were, social discontent.  MacLaine tells Mars, after she is bitten by a cat, that if she becomes rabid it will be “equal to what’s outside.”  The film is about cognitive dissonance and confusion, even frenzy, in human relations both intimate and casual.  It is about ennui and the possible decline of society through personal desperation.  An astute picture, it was undervalued by critics who were tired of films akin to profound, plotless Eclipse and A Passion.

Like Mars, Sada Thompson and Gerald O’Loughlin, the clearly attractive MacLaine is knowing and committed.

In his review of DC, Stanley Kauffmann called the two main characters “well-disposed people of the now-despised liberal persuasion.”  Yes; it was despised then and still is.  You’ll understand why from watching this film.