He looks too old for the part, but John Cassavetes is vividly first-rate as an 18-year-old gang leader in Don Siegel’s Crime in the Streets (1956).

Here, a trio of punks plan to murder a working-class gent who caused a fellow street tough to be arrested.  Frankie (Cassavetes), the only punk who is never reluctant about the plan, is utterly hardhearted and seemingly unreachable.  Siegel’s direction is characteristically good, though screenwriter Reginald Rose creates a liberal-psychotherapeutic vision which is never distracting but a little less than realistic.  Dirty Harry, another Siegel picture, this ain’t.  Harry, however, is asinine.  Crime in the Streets is a decent work, grounded and working on the emotions. . . Siegel’s late 40s and 50s films are often naturalistically finer and more appealing than his later, post-censorship items.

1. Okay, so we see the ultimate that a movie can do with cars—in Furious 7 (2015), the seventh The Fast and the Furious pic—when five sleek autos drive out of a plane and drop by parachute to the mountain road below.  Subsequently, of course, the drivers zoom them away.  Talk about durability.

Don’t think the parachute drop is the stupidest thing in the movie.  It’s just the most visually fun, in a concoction with a lot of amusement-park visuals.

2. Furious 7 brought me back to my natural appreciation for dark-skinned young women in the form of Ramsey, the computer hacker played by black-and-British Nathalie Emmanuel.  Nice to see you nudged out of the way, Michelle Rodriguez (Letty).  Emmanuel is before us, good looks, sensitive face and all.  And, yes, after all the life-threatening peril, her character is pleased to slip into a bikini for a while.  What’s more, she’s too good for that boring imbecile enacted by Tyrese Gibson.

3. Cold reality, man:  Paul Walker (Brian) died in a horrifying car wreck.  The movie is dedicated to him.  Paul, you will be missed.

Hilary Mantel’s two novels about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII have been transferred to television with the title of Wolf Hall, and the first episode (on PBS) was—is—tastefully and intelligently presented.  At present Cromwell (Mark Rylance) is secretary to Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce, and great) and although the corrupt clergyman likes him, hardly anyone else does.  A stand-offish Protestant, smart and willful, he will, I assume from what history exposes, turn ruthless.

Mantel’s books are not for me, but I’m looking forward to seeing further episodes of Wolf Hall.  Probably it will be just as, or more, enjoyable than the Showtime series, The Tudors, and less sensationalistic.  The first episode, in fact, has the touch of art.

Directed and co-written by John Slattery, who plays Roger on Mad Men, God’s Pocket (2014) is about city crime, violence and despair in a past decade.  Some of what happens is so crazily grotesque that it has elements of comedy, and yet the film ends up being a mite too dark and gloomy.  It is also less honest than it thinks it is, being short here and there on necessary verisimilitude.  (Why does Jeanie tolerate the smitten newspaper columnist?  Why does the truck driver run a red light merely because a frantic schlub is running down the street toward him?)

Slattery does imbue the film with personal vision, though, and such actors as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Richard Jenkins are superb.

The 1959 Douglas Sirk film, Imitation of Life, is being shown for a while in New York City and was called by Charles Taylor in The Village Voice an “American masterpiece.”

To me, not quite.  The movie’s flaws, such as Annie’s overwrought death scene, are glaring.  But it is an absorbing and still provocative work about skin color and aspiration:  it’s the one where the light-skinned girl who considers herself white (Susan Kohner’s Sarah Jane) is ashamed of Annie, her black mother.  Indeed, it focuses on a black woman’s having to live a mere “imitation of life,”  i.e. a life in which she constantly feels unloved.  In this she resembles the Sandra Dee character, Susie.  For Annie, though, the burden is greater.

Imitation is a remake of a 1934 film, but was directed by a man who truly cares about the material.  The two actors complimented by Taylor—Kohner and Juanita Moore (Annie) —are the best, but Sandra Dee is typically endearing.  That she died in 2005 at age 62 brings a painful sigh.

Cover of Imitation of Life