A Henry King film, The Snows of Kilimanjiro (1952) serves up biographical content about Ernest Hemingway, here in the guise of a writer named Harry Street, and it’s pretty strong on the subject of loss. To be specific, there is the loss of an unborn baby and later of the woman (Ava Gardner) who carries the baby. Gardner’s Cynthia Green is Harry’s true love (their scenes together are usually pleasurable).

By and by, however, the film becomes perturbingly bad—tedious, in fact. To me, as played by Gregory Peck, Harry is not very interesting (just like Ava Gardner’s acting) or appealing. Kilimanjiro is serious, to be sure, but so is the Henry King-Gregory Peck production The Gunfighter, and it’s a gem.

It is silly to show a young, surly, anti-Semitic Adolf Hitler, who is an aspiring painter, getting practically chummy with a Jewish art dealer called Max Rothman. This is what the 2002 film Max does, which is partly why it is pronouncedly un-brilliant—an intellectual lightweight. Partly, I say. The high school smarts of the film’s details and dialogue account for the rest of its unfortunate failure. For example, when Hitler tells Max he suffers “terrible doubts” about himself as an artist, Max replies, “Paint them. Paint your doubts.” Whatever.

The movie was written and directed by Menno Meyjes. John Cusack has poise and perfect timing as Max, and is winning. Noah Taylor (Hitler) knows how to portray a repulsive fool, but he belongs in a film we can regard as an intellectual asset (and an artistic success).

For once in a movie, a free-spirited girl is presented credibly and even as largely likable (and not just as a concept). This is 20-something Venus (Veroushka Knoge), a French-speaking Russian who pals around with French lass Fleur (Isabelle Pires), a rather shy and reserved person. Emmanuel Mouret‘s Venus et Fleur (2004) is a breezy, sexy romance in which the two friends search for a boyfriend and are none too fastidious. What also makes the film commendable is its subtle unpredictability.

For the most part, life is good in Venus et Fleur—the ending is slightly rueful, though—in the sphere of French Prosperity. Mouret has learned from Rohmer and Truffaut, his movie having a look both unadorned and beautiful. It lasts only an hour and 15 minutes. And I will say again that it’s sexy, casually so. Knoge is as cute as a button.

(In French with English subtitles)

The very fine An Unmarried Woman (1978), by Paul Mazursky, has aged quite well and makes a 21st century film about marriage such as Blue Valentine look lousy by comparison.

This is the one about Erica (Jill Clayburgh), a smart New Yorker who becomes “unmarried” via her husband leaving her for a younger woman.  It hits Erica hard, but the film slowly underscores there is still living—and changing—to be done.  And, frankly, it suggests there is much to be said for bourgeois living even when marital betrayal has occurred.  Still, I agree with John Simon that the second-hour chunk of the movie that features the Alan Bates character is “too precipitately idyllic by half.”

Jill Clayburgh is all T-shirt, legs and breasts in Woman.  (Well, not all the time.)  Moreover she understands Erica, and her acting is deep and exploratory.  Mazursky understands her too:  He wrote as well as filmed the mildly ambitious screenplay.

The movie co-stars not only Bates but also Michael Murphy and Lisa Lucas—all good.

An Unmarried Woman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thornton Wilder, along with Frank Craven and Harry Chandlee, worked on the script for Our Town (1940), deriving from Wilder’s classic play, and made sure it did not get sentimental. It concerns, of course, the inhabitants of a small New Hampshire town in the early 1910s and receives savvy direction by Sam Wood. But this film which is convinced of the cosmic significance of everyday acts and experiences has none of the richness, the sensuousness, we expect from fictional movies. This is because it is talky and solemn and of limited scope. The characters are enjoyable, though, so the film is watchable.

Not one of my favorites from Forties Hollywood.