Life is hard enough without subjecting yourself to your own stupidity.  The store owner played by the peerless W.C. Fields in It’s A Gift (1934) could attest to this if he wasn’t wearing blinders.  Comic misery grows as Fields allows himself to be flatly cheated at the same time he is victimized by a shrewish wife and a contrary daughter.  The movie exists for its extended sight-gag situations, well enough directed by Norman McLeod, notwithstanding it all starts weakening in the last 15 minutes.  One remembers the down-to-earth farce, though.

It’s a Gift (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Miranda Otto, as 20-year-old misfit Dimity in Love Serenade (1996), gets it right:  Dimity’s loneliness, shyness, quirkiness, and naive impulsiveness.  And, like her fellow players Rebecca Firth and George Shevtsov, she succeeds as a comic actor, indispensable for shaping Shirley Barrett‘s Australian film into a funny curio.  But a curio, according to dictionary.com, is “valued as a curiosity.”  Love Serenade ought to be valued as that and more—as a startling look at isolation, at the abovementioned loneliness.  This isn’t done, however, without the film getting (amusingly) weirder as it goes along.

Barrett—director and sole writer here—is good at seeing scenes and makes competent use of space.  The dialogue she has written for her characters is wildly clever.  She is patently talented, and LS should be seen several times.

Centered on the characters of Krystyna, Stefan, Bruno and Rachel, the novel Polonaise, by Piers Paul Read, concerns Polish people from decades past who join, and eventually depart from, the Communist movement.  One of the book’s themes is nihilism.  Another is the way Life overwhelms Ideology, or at least forces it to take a back seat.  It is a compelling read which nevertheless mildly disappointed me with its final standard anti-nihilistic philosophy—a not very fresh summation.

All the same, the book is wonderfully intelligent.  It is interesting to see it go from being a depiction of political sweat and commitment to being a chaste drawing room drama before it gets its hands dirty again.  And, ineluctably, Read is disinclined to ignore sex—significant but no source of salvation—but is never sensationalistic.

Centered on the characters of Krystyna, Stefan, Bruno and Rachel, the novel Polonaise, by Piers Paul Read, concerns Polish people from decades past who join, and eventually depart from, the Communist movement.  One of the book’s themes is nihilism.  Another is the way Life overwhelms Ideology, or at least forces it to take a back seat.  It is a compelling read which nevertheless mildly disappointed me with its final standard anti-nihilistic philosophy—a not very fresh summation.

All the same, the book is wonderfully intelligent.  It is interesting to see it go from being a depiction of political sweat and commitment to being a chaste drawing room drama before it gets its hands dirty again.  And, ineluctably, Read is disinclined to ignore sex—significant but no source of salvation—but is never sensationalistic.

In Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film, the mean streets of Little Italy remain mean because they are far removed from such spiritual values as repentance and stillness—and, in the case of Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy, from honor.  Charlie (Harvey Keitel), the levelheaded lost soul raised a Catholic, knows all this.

It’s all too bad, however, that Mean Streets is an arty dud.  Constantly it is unbelievable as it moves desultorily to some loud, inept drama in its last 15 minutes.  I admit that the film captures the free-floating absurdity and madness in the urban characters’ lives, but that’s its only contribution to cinematic art.  It doesn’t help that De Niro looks like a homely beatnik.

Cover of Mean Streets