Pickup on South Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Sam Fuller  film, Pickup on South Street (1953), is probably the only movie ever made in which a prostitute, or former prostitute, is accused of being a subversive Communist.  But the woman in question, Candy (Jean Peters), simply doesn’t know the company she keeps, and is, it turns out, badly roughed up by a Communist.  Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), a cynical thief, gets rough with her too—welcome to New York City—but later the two become, er, committed lovers.

Fashioned under the studio system, Pickup is better directed, more polished, than Fuller’s White Dog, and just as absorbing.  This despite a couple of defects in Fuller’s screenplay:  e.g. Thelma Ritter‘s character never would have stayed alive as long as she does.  I like most of the acting, except that Murvyn Vye, as a police captain, never changes his scowling expression.

Film poster for True Crime – Copyright 1999 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Clint Eastwood miscast himself as a newspaper reporter in the 1999 True Crime, but a bigger problem is the weak plot.  Based on an Andrew Klavan novel, the film’s serious subject is the death-row conviction of an innocent man (Isaiah Washington).  Steve, the reporter, interviews people for his paper but he also likes to play Dick Tracy, and he doesn’t understand how a male witness, after a homicide, could have seen the innocent convict’s gun through a rack of potato chips.  Nice try, but this won’t fly as a plot device.

On the positive side, the anguish of the convict and his family is handled movingly, and there is a powerful scene of marital breakup featuring Eastwood and an extraordinary Diane Venora.  Both these scenes belong in a better movie—one, in fact, that doesn’t rely on constant profanity and obscenity to hold a viewer’s attention.  (Thanks, Clint, for your use of James Woods in this regard.)  True Crime is somewhat of an offense.

True to Hollywood’s mixed genre tendency, Game Night (2018) is an arrant comedy-adventure starring Jason Bateman and Rachel MacAdams.  Although the action of the adventure is stronger than the zippy comedy, some of the jokes are quite amusing.  Others, though, are desperate or boringly vulgar (stuff about penis size) or not as witty or intelligent as the filmmakers think, as when Bateman wants his unborn child to eventually learn Mandarin because “China is the future.”  This last one, in fact, isn’t even funny.

Game Night is solidly, sometimes scintillatingly (Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons) acted.  I consider it a bit too playful and cheeky for its own good, but it is a fun piece of harmlessness.  And how can the directorial work miss?  The flick has two of them—directors, that is.

True to Hollywood’s mixed genre tendency, Game Night (2018) is an arrant comedy-adventure starring Jason Bateman and Rachel MacAdams.  Although the action of the adventure is stronger than the zippy comedy, some of the jokes are quite amusing.  Others, though, are desperate or boringly vulgar (stuff about penis size) or not as witty or intelligent as the filmmakers think, as when Bateman wants his unborn child to eventually learn Mandarin because “China is the future.”  This last one, in fact, isn’t even funny.

Game Night is solidly, sometimes scintillatingly (Kyle Chandler, Jesse Plemons) acted.  I consider it a bit too playful and cheeky for its own good, but it is a fun piece of harmlessness.  And how can the directorial work miss?  The flick has two of them—directors, that is.

Though overlong, the French film Populaire (2013) is an entertaining homage to American movie comedies of the Fifties, taking place in 1959.  Deborah Francois plays an appallingly incompetent secretary who nevertheless has an amazing knack for typing, while Romain Duris enacts her boss, an insurance man, intent on coaching her in ten-finger (instead of two-finger) typing for several lauded speed-typing contests.  Eventually romance blooms, for, after all, the boss is a young man essentially deprived of love and the secretary is a small-town girl in Lisieux who has no beau and is probably a virgin.

Populaire is a seriocomic Doris & Rock-like movie with brief mild nudity thrown in.  It understands that an item like Pillow Talk contains strong hints of sexual desire while it readily respects the mores of the time.  The same respect exists in this current film directed by Regis Roinsard even as sexual desire is realistically more than hinted at.  Really, the movie is in love with pop culture, nostalgically so.  Even the pink typewriter necessarily becomes a pop culture element.  The film is not as funny as the Fifties’ American comedies (even Hawks’s Monkey Business) but it is rich and buoyant.  It has a fine cast too, although Duris does not even come close to declaring his love for the typist convincingly.

No bete noire is Populaire.

English: Screenshot from Linux software KTouch. An image of the Home Row keys for touch typing. Suomi: Kymmensormijärjestelmän sormien paikat. ???????: ??????????????? ?????? ????? ?????? ????????????? ????????? KTouch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)