Today’s puritan liberalism would probably say, “Don’t make a movie about a black policeman who is a corrupt brute,” but that is what Antoine Fuqua‘s Training Day, from 2001 (a different time), is. And that it is detached from such philistine orthodoxy makes the film that much more respectable. Denzel Washington is electric and never false as the rule-breaking Officer Alonzo, who treats the rookie cop he is “training” (Ethan Hawke) like excrement. Puritan liberalism would also say, “Don’t require Eva Mendes to purvey, however briefly, full-frontal nakedness (especially since she’s a woman of color),” but TD does require it.

It’s too bad the film is a far less realistic police thriller than something like The French Connection. For example, after Alonzo beats Hawke’s rookie to a pulp because Hawke tries to arrest him, the rookie has enough remaining strength to throw himself on the hood of Alonzo’s moving car. Ludicrous. Still, wildly improbable as the movie is, one can have a raw good time with it. It’s a harshly masculine eye-opener, urban with an appealing Los Angeles setting. (Appealing to me, anyway.) Needing, yes, a more mature script, Training Day is nevertheless pretty thrilling.

The cynosure of temporary insanity as a legal defense captured the American imagination in years past, and not surprisingly it showed up in 1959’s Anatomy of a Murder, the Otto Preminger film starring James Stewart.  Nowadays it would be more compelling without this cynosure, but as it is, the picture is still gripping and intelligent.  Or, to be honest, it becomes gripping once the technical awkwardness, evinced by Duke Ellington’s flashy and incongruous music, eases up.

Adapted from a novel, the film revolves around an attorney’s defense of an army officer (Ben Gazzara) charged with the murder of a bartender.  The bartender allegedly raped the officer’s wife (Lee Remick), an unhappily married party girl.  A trial proceeds apace and allows George C. Scott to give a smart, riveting performance as a prosecutor.  Fans of courtroom drama will love Anatomy of a Murder, an imperfect movie, sure, but one at least (from the Fifties!) that was made for adults.

Cover of Anatomy of a Murder

1) L’Enfer (1994) is a sizzler, a vivid artistic thriller from Claude Chabrol derived from a script written years ago by French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot.  How nimble the directing and editing are!  Note the sequence in which Francois Cluzot shadows Emmanuelle Beart on a trip to town one day—among the crowds, the shops,etc.—to see whether she meets a lover.  Note the sweet and attractive husband-and-wife reconciliation scenes.

2) Leave it to Chabrol, so fond of women, to present us with a female character both beautiful and an ideal wife.  Beart plays her with perfect spunk and pathos.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of L’Enfer

Why were four men (two of them uncredited) necessary for creating the script for The African Queen (1951)—an adaptation of a novel yet? I don’t know, but no wonder the script is so palatable. One of the writers, John Huston, did some soundly inspired directing of the film, and of the actors. Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, both sublime, play good people—one a riverboat operator, the other a missionary—in Africa as WWI commences.

The force and threat of a big river is a nifty subject in this entertaining adventure. What’s more, the movie is a terrific travelogue of nature as filmed in such places as Lake Albert and Murchison Falls in Uganda. Pleasingly, the shots of animals—lions, hippos, crocodiles—for which yesterday’s Hollywood didn’t have much patience are offered respectfully in Queen.

The demolition in Jamie Quatro‘s story, “Demolition,” is that of a church.

After Corbett Earnshaw, a deaf eccentric, visits the church one Sunday morning, the stained glass windows start breaking up of their own accord. Through a helpful boy’s sign language, Earnshaw declares to the congregation that he does not believe in Christianity. He has other beliefs. By and by, church members sympathetic to Earnshaw allow a wrecking crew to come and raze the church. What it all symbolizes is the superseding of Christianity in American history by strange, heretical religion. Earnshaw becomes a cult leader.

In light of this, it is no surprise when Quatro makes mention of Victorian Spiritualists in 1885. It is thought-provoking that Earnshaw rejects the concept of sin and has apparently led his cult followers to value “authenticity” (so beloved in the modern world). This, says the narrator, is “Our unnamed longing, revealed.” Of course sex is a big part of the picture. In fact, the cultists regard sex and stillness as sacrosanct, even as their growing children begin to quietly rebel against the cultists’ primitive living.

Quatro is a true artist, the penetratingly written “Demolition” possibly the most artistic fiction about heretical religion ever produced.