In Niagara (1953), Marilyn Monroe plays a tramp of a wife and Joseph Cotton her neurotic, harried husband.  Sojourning in Niagara Falls, Ontario, the two wish to murder each other, the husband for revenge. . . Naturally, Marilyn’s beauty (in Technicolor) is luminous, but her mechanical acting mars the movie.  By and by, however, it primarily becomes Jean Peters’s film, at least in the female department:  She enacts a honeymooner who is the one person aware that the Joseph Cotton character is still alive after everyone else believes he is dead.

Savory touches abound in Niagara, directed by Henry Hathaway, who wanted a bit of artistic exploration.  Hence there is a gripping pursuit on a staircase and a poignant discovery of a lipstick holder.  There is the hazy nudity of femme fatale Rose (Monroe) behind a shower door contrasted with the wet but clothed body of innocent Polly (Peters) awaiting rescue from the river.  There are even some shots anticipatory of something like L’Avventura (1960).

True, Hathaway seems pretty distant from his material, but it doesn’t matter.  Its virtues keep Niagara from falling.

Niagara (1953 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sergeant York (1941) is a coming-of-age and coming-to-faith story.  There is much that is wrong with it, but Alvin York’s biography is interesting, even with the limited treatment it receives here.  A hellion as a young man, he became a Christian and resisted fighting—resisted killing—in World War I until he discovered such Bible verses as “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s . . .”  It is well known that during an offensive in France York killed and captured a large number of German soldiers.

Religion is handled in a rather callow way in the film, but at least it’s treated seriously.  Howard Hawks’s direction succeeds splendidly in what is a not-bad flick.

Cover via Amazon

In my view, the facial play of Rowan Atkinson, who enacts Mr. Bean in Mr. Bean’s Holiday (2007), is more over-the-top than funny, but he grows on you.  And this movie grows on you.  It grew on me, anyway.  It turns out to be an appealing slapstick farce, its titular character bungling his way across France.

Sometimes nicely helpful, Mr. Bean is also intermittently unscrupulous when he gets in a jam—and so deserves every problem he incurs.  In short, he’s recognizably human.  And despite the facial play Atkinson’s portrayal of him is wonderfully droll and vigorous.  The leading lady, Emma de Caunes, is charming.

Although funny, much of what happens at the Cannes Film Festival in Holiday is pretty hokey, but the picture serves up some unusual comic invention in a scene such as the one where Mr. Bean as busker lip-synchs to Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro.”  Even better, more hilarious, is the Harold Lloyd stuff with the bicycle pursuit and the startling making of a yoghurt commercial.  Here the movie really makes antic hay—just what we want from a visual comedy.  It instantly becomes less important that Mr. Bean is recognizably human than that he is pratfall-funny.

Cover of Mr. Bean’s Holiday (Widescreen Edition)

Liberty Island is a website that publishes stories whose meaning is essentially conservative.  So far I have read several of them, one of which, Jamie Wilson’s “Murder at CPAC” (2014), is a tasty spoof and then some.  More than a spoof.  In the noir thriller mode, it’s nicely unpredictable (for all the clichés) and engaging.  Its ending resembles that of Kiss Me Deadly, and the message is about progressives not being able to face the TRUTH.

Few liberals will like “Murder at CPAC”, if any of them read it.  (CPAC, of course, stands for Conservative Political Action Conference.)  But I suspect that conservatives, libertarians and some apolitical people will like it.

Another story is “Beautification Claws” (2014), a clever fantasy by Karina Fabian.  Here, a jejune girl confronts the talking dragon that protects a crime-ridden neighborhood.  The theme is the need of certain vicinities not for Great Society luxuries like beautification but for constant, big-guns security.  First things first.

There is admirable wit in these tales, and they are not just meant to entertain.  No, sir.

The website’s address is libertyislandmag.com

Style and theme are everything in the exquisitely made Italian film Eclipse, or L’Eclisse (1962), one of the four or five major pictures of Michelangelo Antonioni.

This is the one about Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and Piero (Alain Delon) in the modern age.  Here, reinforced by the visual black-white contrasts, indifference and insensitivity eclipse love, worry eclipses passion, aimlessness eclipses belief.  For all this, however, Antonioni makes clear that ours is a fascinating world, not only because of nature but also because of what human beings have wrought.  Airplanes, light poles along a street, the stock exchange, a rural café—all are presented as having the power to captivate.

Eclipse is less sad than L’Avventura and La Notte, even though, granted, the world of the film is menacing.  The closing sequence is famous, and according to Stanley Kauffmann, it has been seen as Antonioni’s “statement that man must come to terms with his new environment before he can love.”  This is probably as good an interpretation as any, if interpretation is needed.  Whether or not such a sentiment about love is true, though, we are led to observe that, at the film’s end, main character Vittoria certainly seems accepting of her life—obviously a good thing.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Cover of L’Eclisse – Criterion Collection