For a long time the noir item, Scarlet Street (1945), is to me interestingly artificial and almost quaint as it focuses on an innocent played by Edward G. Robinson who falls in love with an alluring slugabed (Joan Bennett).  Er, well, she’s not just an alluring slugabed:  she’s doing the will of a reprehensible con artist (Dan Duryea).  By and by the flick, directed by Fritz Lang, grows much less artificial (or stylized) and its almost-quaintness disappears.

SS is based on Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, itself based on a novel, and it is as sexy, nice-looking and perceptively cast as it is unoriginal.  Robinson knew how to enact an innocent—one who is foolish and finally miserable.  Duryea is never false with his two-faced character, not even when he abuses his glamorous girlfriend, Bennett.  The powerfully feminine Joan, with fine range, is the best thing about the film.

Directed by Josh Schwartz, Fun Size (2012) is a sex comedy for teenagers.  Not a good idea.

It’s “envelope-pushing” crud, and I put envelope-pushing in quotes because that’s merely what the moviemakers believe it to be.  In truth it’s just a naughty nonentity.  A teens-in-trouble romp, it’s incompetently written and not much better directed:  I wasn’t always sure where the camera was taking me.

Yes, there are laughs in Fun Size, but a giant plastic chicken on top of a restaurant falling on a car and appearing to copulate with it is smutty silliness.  Just as offputting is a toad of a young boy, Albert, with his immature scatology.  The movie stars Victoria Justice, who is lovely but bland, and several others who are better.

Those primarily responsible for this thing may be accurately described as big boobs.

(The photo is of Victoria Justice.)

Victoria Justice Image (Photo credit: jake.auzzie)

Dick Heldar in The Light That Failed, William Wellman‘s film of 1939, is a London painter who eventually goes blind long after receiving a head-slashing wound on the battlefield.  A message is conveyed:  There is a great deal that will not break a man, but war will.

Heldar is not broken, for example, by his sweetheart Maisie’s leaving him, or by Cockney girl Bessie’s wronging him, but war is another matter.  Wellman’s direction of this adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s first novel is expert, although most of the cast is just okay.  Ronald Colman decorates the film without solidifying it, as Wellman does.  His opening war sequence is engrossing.  For good measure, there is also Ida Lupino—true and energetic as the pathetic Bessie.

The recent picture Juliet, Naked (2018)—in which no one gets naked—is amusing and poignant and pleasantly, vividly acted by Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke.  However, the story it tells is not as rich, or as interesting, as that in the Nick Hornby novel it derives from.  In fact it becomes contrived and forced.

Scripted by two women and one man, it is skeptical of the male sex and, up to a point, traditional living.  It ends with a dose of boring contemporary feminism:  You can have it all, Annie (Byrne’s character)!  Whether she can have it all or not, it’s hackneyed.

I’m sorry Nick Hornby was involved in the making of this film.  His novel is a success.  The film is not.  It was directed by Jesse Peretz and produced by Judd Apatow, still a mediocrity.

Michel Garfinkiel used the phrase “classic French society” in the May 2007 issue of Commentary magazine.  The sentence he wrote was:  “Classic French society—the one that lasted from the revolution to the end of the 20th century, that is on display in the pages of the great French novelists, and that features in the work of the great film-makers from Renoir to Truffaut, from Chabrol to Sautet—was based first and foremost on strong nuclear families.”

Some years after the 20th century’s end, Avenue Montaigne (2006), by Daniele Thompson, appears and classic French society is all over it.  What we see is as classic as anything in Renoir or Truffaut, and (alas) it’s a society that no longer exists.  I deplore having to add, however, that strong nuclear families are not behind it.  People both married and raising children do not show up in the film.

That isn’t why Montaigne makes me nervous, though.  Its final moments seem to impart that neurosis trumps all, that no matter how neurotic your desire for something is, and no matter how neurotic your behavior, the something you desire can and should be yours.  Thus the silly, fretful concert pianist gets what he wants, and so does the self-absorbed, hysterical actress hankering to play Simone de Beauvoir in a movie.  Is this really the happy denouement Thompson wants?

But don’t get me wrong.  For all this, Montaigne is enjoyable.  It has no plot and yet it’s interesting.  It is airy and sweet and enticingly acted.  It’s arrantly, lovingly Parisian too.  Just don’t expect the great French novelists with their classic French society.

(In French with English subtitles.)

Cover of Avenue Montaigne