I rather enjoyed the 1954 A Kiss Before Dying, by Gerd Oswald, except that much of the acting needs to be more grounded and the plot is mediocre. Re the former, for example, Robert Wagner seems to care little about his part. Re the latter, for example, apparently no one saw Wagner (as Bud) and Joanne Woodward (as Dorothy) together as they ambled up to the roof of a tall building where Bud murders Dorothy. Everybody but everybody thinks she committed suicide.

There is sapid suspense, though.

The main character in Bernard Malamud‘s short story “The Jewbird,” a bird that calls himself a Jewbird flies through the open window of a Jewish family’s apartment and never willingly leaves there. He is fleeing certain culprits, enemies, especially anti-Semites. The bird represents the Jewish race.

He cannot pay back the Cohen family for his food and shelter, but can only do them the favor of necessarily helping son Maurie with his schoolwork. The father is suspicious of and then hostile to the bird (“whoever heard of a Jewbird?”) Yes, he is a surreal creature, but the bird brings into relief the family’s failure to really understand the threat of anti-Jewish hate, and of human brutality in general. It is the bird who understands as he begins to live as though he were in a chamber or a prison camp of terror. This is before the story’s horrific ending when it becomes clear how indistinguishable violent anti-Semites are from predatory animals.

Revolving around life in the notorious Hoa Le Prison in 1960s Vietnam, Lionel Chetwynd‘s The Hanoi Hilton (1987) launches a strong assault on Communists and the New Left’s anti-anti-Communism of yesteryear. It pays homage to American POWs, tortured until they “broke,” in the prison.

The film’s characters are not fully convincing and sometimes they are viewed sentimentally, but there is never a dull moment and THH can be moving. It is slightly puzzling when Lt. Cmdr. Williamson (Michael Moriarty) asserts to the prison major (Aki Aleong) that the POWs not only survived the prison, admirably, but also “won” against their captors. Weren’t the POWs forced to provide the North Vietnamese with useful information every time they broke under torture? Is this really winning? In any case, I like Chetwynd’s film. Though flawed, it is inspired and conservative.

Walkabout (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In Nicolas Roeg‘s Walkabout (1971), an English teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her younger brother (Lucien John) must make their way out of the Australian outback, and are helped by a virile, humane Aboriginal boy (David Gumpilil).  Here, civilization and primitive culture have so much in common they are nearly one and the same, except, as it happens, primitive culture has a moral nobility that civilization will simply never manifest.  Screenwriter Edward Bond does the film no favors by arguing such a theme and by making the theme damnably obvious.  In other words, there’s no subtlety.

Although the film is remarkable-looking—and not always pleasant-looking—Roeg is a would-be artist ignorant of how to avoid pretentiousness.  Hence we see everything from pointless freeze frames to white tree branches which resemble sexy human legs, and we hear ill-fitting choral music.  Walkabout, not surprisingly, is sometimes uncomfortably weird.

Jenny Agutter’s acting is fairly successful, but rather too cold.  Gumpilil, on the other hand, is lively.  Kids are the major characters in Walkabout but, believe me, it’s an  adults-only picture—except, well, I can’t imagine anyone but a callow adolescent REALLY enjoying it.  Roeg has seen the enemy and it is us Civilizers.

Yew Kwang Han of Singapore is, to me, one heck of a writer—and director—of farce, farce being what the film 18 Grams of Love (2007) is. Herein: “Two men [Ah Hui and Zihua] write anonymous love letters to test if their wives are faithful. When their wives actually respond, the two men are left in a fix of what to do” (imdb.com). The marriages are hardly satisfying. The wives, Michelle and Xiao Tong, are insensitive and tired. The men, even so, are not the same as they were during the couples’ courtships, and Zihua, in fact, is a hothead. The attempt at self-justification naturally comes about, but so does soul-searching. “When we have problems,” says Zihua, “why don’t we think back to when we fell in love?”

Problems there are, explored with playful, eccentric direction by Yew, whose plot never gets inert or too thin. And there is good farceur acting from everyone: Adam Chen (Ah Hui), for example—spot-on as a handsome but ordinary and confused hubby. Magdalene See, as Xiao Tong, performs as though she’s been doing farce for two decades. For good measure, the pic features the longest scene of literal finger pointing I will probably ever see.

(Available on Tubi)