If you have Netflix, you might want to check out episodes of the old Twilight Zone series, by Rod Serling, from the first four seasons.  Many disappointments crop up, yes, but many virtues are there too.

Among the disappointments, in the Serling-written “Nightmare as a Child,” for a woman (Janice Rule) to conjure herself as a little girl, the child she used to be, in order to revive unsettling memories is too blatant an invention.  Serling does better in “The Hitch-Hiker,” in which Nan (Inger Stevens), driving cross-country, espies the same male hitchhiker everywhere she goes, and is terrified.  The story quickly suggests the subject of the violence of strangers against women (is there foul play in the offing?), but this is not what occurs.  Rather it is something more metaphysical.  The episode is neatly, grippingly directed by Alvin Ganzer.

As lovely as Rule and Stevens, Ann Francis stars in ‘The After Hours.”  Here, she is Marsha, a woman who seems normal but assuredly is not.  She buys at a department store a golden thimble she finds she must return, only to be told that the floor she bought it on does not exist.  Ah, but it does exist.  It could well represent the Other, the Incomprehensible, in cosmic and human experience.  Somehow Marsha herself represents this too.  The episode (like the other two, featured in the first season) is more sapidly weird than arch, with grounded acting by Francis and mildly chilling acting by a couple of others.

To be continued

There are no moral—or therapeutic—messages in the 25-minute silent flick, Coney Island (1917).  Just hilarity.

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, starring here, also directed and did so with a proper sense of scope and an appreciation of space.  “Fatty,” on the beach, slips away from the wife who treats him like a child and begins to enjoy the delights of Coney Island.  The main delight he enjoys is the company of the pretty girl (Alice Mann) courted by Buster Keaton and later by goofy-looking Jimmy Bryant.  Keaton has two rivals now, and unyielding anger flows nearly to the flick’s finish.  One likable sight gag follows another.  There is a perfect economy to the whole thing, and the performers, positively including the women, are superb.

Asghar Farhadi has made another film outside Iran, this time in Spain—Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben, 2018)—and it concerns a kidnapped girl.  Its themes include the pervasiveness of that which is secret in families, when obligation leads to rupture, and belief in God.

I esteem Farhadi for giving us another tragic drama, but this is not as good as A Separation or The Salesman.  Though skillfully directed and persuasively acted by Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and many others, the film has a weak script with unlikely plot devices.  Farhadi is a better writer than this, and probably it is time for him to use this particular talent in the traveling of a different but still serious path.

(In Spanish with English subtitles)

The title of Kenneth Lonergan’s film, Margaret (2012), is taken from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “Spring and Fall.”  Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) has an innocent involvement in the accidental death of a stranger killed by a careless bus driver.  Her subsequent pain and guilt and anger effect in Lisa the kind of mourning for herself that arises in the Margaret of Hopkins’s poem (“It is Margaret you mourn for”), or so it seems to Lonergan, who both wrote and directed the film.  A mere teenager, Lisa sees her life as though it were an “opera”, as one of her acquaintances puts it, and is actually turning people around her into “supporting players”–for her.  Thus she becomes all but indifferent to her mother (J. Smith-Cameron).  Thus she brazenly asks a boy at school with whom she has no relationship to take away her virginity, which he does.  All this, I suppose, is integral to her self-mourning.

There are many things wrong with Margaret, mostly because of production problems which undermined the film when it was made a few years ago  (but not released until 2012).  Watching it, a spectator will say, “Boy, a lot of this must have been left on the cutting room floor!”  Even so, the film is worth checking out:  it is rich and intermittently fascinating.  Intelligent too; patently it ain’t just the sex and nudity in the picture that Lonergan is interested in.  Plus there is a moving epiphany at the end.

The best thing about the movie as it now exists is the acting.  Paquin and Smith-Cameron give penetrating and energetic performances.  Although I recoil at the character she plays–but then I recoil at Lisa too–Jeannie Berlin acts Lisa’s acquaintance Emily with gutsy prowess.

It’s quite a concept:  the Margaret in Hopkins’s short poem becomes the Lisa in Lonergan’s long film.

Margaret (2011 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Adapted from a novel by Vitaliano Brancati which I did not much care for, the 1960 Italian film, Il Bell Antonio, is a work for which I care a lot.

It deals with an undeniably handsome man, Antonio (Marcello Mastroianni), reputed to be a stud but who is in reality, in the pre-Viagra days of the Sixties, impotent strictly with the women he loves.  The Woman he loves is virginal Barbara Puglisi (Claudia Cardinale), picked by his parents because they need money and the Puglisis are rich.  However, Barbara’s father needs an heir and Barbara, after she and Antonio marry, remains untouched.  This agonizes Antonio’s parents—while the Puglisis gradually see an avenue for getting even richer, and it excludes Antonio.

Here, to be impotent in sex is to be impotent in status.  The body cannot be too chaste or a family’s fortunes are affected.  In truth, they are not affected without certain moral outrages springing up.  The accusation made by a dying Puglisi elder against Antonio’s father, Don Alfio (Pierre Brasseur), is more serious and bothersome than Antonio’s impotence.  A lack of wealth is allied with a lack of integrity.  That Antonio profoundly loves Barbara matters not in the least. . .  This deeply sad film was intelligently directed by Mauro Bolognini.  Vernon Young correctly noted that his “shot selection is sensitive to mood,” and, indeed, the film is a jewel of such sensitivity.  It is, moreover, a fine contribution to the body of classic foreign pictures of the late Fifties-early Sixties.

(In Italian with English subtitles)