Michael Gaughn Archives - Page 4 of 12

Review: Swing Time

review | Swing Time

related reviews

review | My Darling Clementine

column | What’s So Great About Color?

Kaleidescape | Casablanca

Kaleidescape | Singin’ in the Rain

see more in Reviews

The plot & characters are mainly just annoying distractions but with Fred & Ginger dancing at the peak of their form, does that really matter?

by Michael Gaughn
December 5, 2022

It might sound like a contradiction to say that the best Astaire/Rogers film is filled with scenes so contrived and hokey you’ll find yourself averting your eyes half the time. It’s hard to believe this movie was made by the same guy who did A Place in the Sun. But it’s a symptom of the evolution of film grammar I talked about in my Darling Clementine review that, up until 1939, movies tended to sputter because the fundamentals hadn’t yet clicked into place.

But then there’s the dancing—which of course you expect in an Astaire/Rogers movie, but for some reason the routines in Swing Time are at a whole other level from their other films, maybe because the numbers don’t just act in parallel with the plot but almost supplant it completely. That’s not to say there’s nothing to keep your attention during the dialogue scenes—Astaire does an unusually good job of holding his own and Helen Broderick is masterful at doing her bits while winking at the camera at the same time—the trick Groucho Marx did so well, and that a handful of performers used to lean on in the early days of sound in order to keep their creative dignity until the movies caught up with the sophistication of their delivery and gave them better material to work with.

And you can always admire the production design while you wait for the next dance number to kick in. RKO had the streamlined look of late Art Deco down so cold it felt like they’d actually come up with the style and were just exporting it to the rest of the world. That pared-down take on Deco was so stylized and so much of the moment it was destined to have a relatively brief lifespan but was both elegant and brash at its peak, which coincided with the creation of this film.

Somewhat in line with the above, Swing Time features the smaller-group, tighter, more rhythmically-driven, more infectious jazz style of the late ‘20s and 1930s, which would soon be drowned out by the lusher, brassier, swinging-for-the-fences sound of the MGM musicals. The leaner, more energetic approach here fits well with the relatively constrained sets and bits of business and creates an appropriate intimacy that enhances the dance routines. Yes, the more modest orchestrations, sets, and scope of action were partly a necessary reflection of budget, like the not-an-inch-bigger-than-they-need-to-be sets of Casablanca, but in both films doing more with less keeps you appropriately closer to the characters and their interactions.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve got anything to add to the vast existing commentary on Astaire and Rogers. But it is worth pointing out how extraordinary their numbers are here for anyone who’s never seen them dance or hasn’t come across Swing Time before. There’s something about this movie’s pervasive creakiness that makes the dancing seem even more exhilarating than usual. Anyone who can watch them break into “Pick Yourself Up” and not feel an unbidden thrill should just go back to watching the deadening sadism of contemporary action films.

That number, shot within the simple confines of a dance-school studio, begins with a deceptively casual stroll that quickly becomes both exuberantly kinetic and epic, making two people dancing far more compelling than any melodramatic scenery-chewing or special-effects set piece could ever be. Similarly the “Never Gonna Dance” number near the end, performed in the justly famous Silver Sandal nightclub set, takes the dross of the plot and transmutes into something sublime. Astaire and Rogers somehow create a whole other realm of existence where they express their emotions not just through dance but also through a kind of mime that for some reason doesn’t feel contrived but instead a natural extension of both their dance and what they’d more lamely been trying to convey through dialogue. By so intensely focusing their emotions, the result makes their limited characters infinitely deeper, more moving and human and real.

And now, unfortunately, I need to talk for a moment about blackface—not that I really want to but the current cultural myopia with its mania to slap labels on virtually everything while showing zero tolerance for context makes it a necessity. That any intelligent human would ever take a pass on this movie because of a warning like that is unfathomable and makes me wonder how much lower we can go with smugly sneering at the past.

Yes, Astaire uses black makeup as part of his tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, but you need to put the first part of that sentence into context, because this is very much a heartfelt tribute on Astaire’s part and Robinson very much deserved to be honored—not just for his dancing but his efforts, as the most prominent black performer of the first half of the 20th century, to counter racial stereotypes. Anybody who, having bought into the whole “blackface bad—censorship good” mindset, misses the chance to experience this number also misses the chance to experience an important piece of history, reinforcing our vast and deepening cultural ignorance instead. And they’d of course be missing out on a virtuoso dance by Astaire with its groundbreaking cinematic framing—and there’s really no excuse for that. It’s more than worth it to claw back all the cultural howling and experience this movie and that number on their own terms, free of the fetid reek of political reeducation.

The HD transfer is good enough for something from 1936 and not likely to seriously get in the way of your experience of the film. There’s a grittiness to the presentation that could be removed with some judicious cleanup—the key word being “judicious.” It would take someone with a keen eye, a deft touch, a dedication to staying true to what was originally shot, and a respect for the inherent look of film to avoid turning Swing Time into a visual travesty. Here’s hoping somebody sensitive and astute enough decides to take that on sometime soon.

There’s not much to be said about the sound of a movie this old but I was surprised by how well the orchestra was recorded, by how there was decent separation between the instruments and how accurate a sense it conveys of the size of the ensemble, with its chamber-size string section. Avoiding the temptation to make the orchestra sound bigger than it was went a long way toward maintaining the film’s sense of intimacy.

I apologize if my comments made it sound like I’m only half-heartedly recommending this film. The distorting pressure of marketing hype aside, there really are only a handful of movies that rise above the vast and rapidly expanding slough that is American film. Swing Time is far from perfect—but perfection is a fool’s goal and what it gets right it gets right in a way that all but erases its flaws and leaves most other movies in its dust.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The HD transfer on Prime is good enough for something from 1936 and not likely to seriously get in the way of enjoying the film, but it exhibits a grittiness could be removed with some judicious cleanup

SOUND | The sound is well recorded for a movie this old, with decent separation between the instruments in the orchestra and accurately conveying the size of the ensemble

Spanish Treasure

theater designer

Lisa Slayman ASID, IIDA

Slayman Cinema
Slayman Design Associates Inc.

spanish treasure

An intense collaboration between the homeowners and their designer resulted in a cutting-edge Old World private cinema

by Michael Gaughn photos | Eric Figge Photography

November 30, 2022

This is the story of a unique theater and of a unique collaboration—about how an all-star team had to muster all its expertise to get the square peg of a room to fit into the round hole of the area they had to work with without having any of the seams show. And about how they were able to turn a daunting number of liabilities into virtues, letting those challenges serve as inspiration to whip up a private cinema that dovetails neatly with the look of the rest of the home while exhibiting an appropriately theatrical flair that makes it a singular and dashing design statement of its own.

This story is also unusual because the client, a Los Angeles attorney with extensive real-estate experience, was not only willing but eager to share his experiences. He and his wife, a well-known Broadway producer, brought an exceptionally broad knowledge of design, movies, theater, and technology to the endeavor, and were happy to roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the project’s three-year duration.

The client—let’s call him “Tony R.”—wasn’t new to private cinemas, having had a succession of them in his Mandeville Canyon home. His most recent one had been a smallish room off the pool house, meant mainly for use by his children. But as they grew up and moved out, Tony and his wife decided to do a far more ambitious theater that was not only spacious—able to accommodate 16—but a true digital cinema that could show first-run movies via the Bel-Air Circuit.

One of Tony’s main requirements was that he didn’t want the usual home theater shoebox. But once the area of the existing theater was excavated to make room for the larger space, it turned out a traditional rectangle probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. After digging down 35 feet, they arrived at an area that was, to put it kindly, not only unusually shaped but literally etched in stone since excavating further would have compromised the foundation of the home. The result mandated a hexagonal, somewhat wedge-shaped room that had to fight to achieve any kind of symmetry.

This theater room carries over the Moorish design style of the rest of the home while adding an abundance of appropriately theatrical touches

cineluxe showcase

Secret Cinema

Achieving Serenity

Inside the Ultimate
Home Entertainment Space

Excavating as far as possible beneath the three-story home resulted in what the owner describes as “a really weird-shaped room” that created significant design and acoustical challenges

click on the image to enlarge

the ceiling of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes, Toldeo Spain

Mudéjar, Briefly

Cribbing from Wikipedia and elsewhere, I can tell you that “Mudéjar” refers to a Late Medieval style of art produced by Muslims who stayed after the Iberian kingdoms had been reclaimed by the Christians but who didn’t convert to Christianity. The term is somewhat derogatory, derived from an Arabic word for “tamed” and was meant to refer to the Christians allowing the Muslims to remain in their lands.

The Mudéjar style is mainly defined by the incorporation of Islamic elements into Christian architecture and art. The style can also involve using building materials like wood not only structurally but decoratively.

Mudéjar was brought to Spanish regions in the Americas during the 16th century by Christian craftsmen and can be found throughout the former Spanish empire

—M.G.

“If you can start from scratch, you can really pin down what you want the room to be, both design-wise and with the technology for the sound and video,” Tony said. “This room was totally the opposite. There are no parallel walls. The ceiling and floor height needed attention, for lack of a better word. It was just a really weird-shaped room.”

Confronted with this jigsaw-puzzle space, he retained designer Lisa Slayman (ASID, IIDA) who has a storied reputation for creating sumptuous but not garish private cinemas. The room presented Lisa with some formidable challenges, but the biggest, literally, was a 30-foot-long 18-inch-wide I-beam that, supporting a wall above the space, ran right through the middle of the proposed area. Rather than try to minimize the beam’s presence, she decided to embrace it and make it the inspiration for her design.

The “A-ha!” moment was when Lisa realized that, by referencing Mudéjar art—an ornate style that emerged in the late Middle Ages in Spain as Islamic influences began to permeate Christian culture—she could both integrate the beam and stay true to the Moorish look of the rest of the home. Creating the kind of intricate decorative ceiling Mudéjar is known for would allow for the introduction of a series of faux beams spoking away from the boxed-in I-beam. And it would allow her to apply crest-like graphics that would not only tie the room in with the style of the home but allow her to personalize the design.

Lisa then sought out Ojai-based artist Robert Walker to paint all the various symbols, which were chosen in collaboration with the clients, who used them as an opportunity to express their heritage. “He actually hand-painted every panel,” Lisa said. “When you look up at the ceiling, they’re all a tiny bit different. So they really do look authentic.” Everyone was impressed with the result—even the artist. “I said to the gentleman, ‘You have to sign this,’” remembered Tony. “And he said, ‘What are you nuts? Of course I’m going to sign it. I’m not going to let someone else steal my work.’”

The ceiling design also served to conceal the height speakers for the Dolby Atmos surround system. The usual solution would have been to place the speakers in can-type fixtures or hide them behind neutral pieces of cloth, but Lisa took it in a more innovative direction, silk-screening some of the symbols onto fabric that was then integrated into the ceiling in a kind of trompe l’oeil effect. Tony said, “I tell guests, ‘Yeah, there’s speakers in the ceiling. Show me where they are.’ Nine out of 10 can’t find them.”

It’s easy to become fixated on the ceiling—which guests to the theater inevitably do—but the room is brimming with other design elements that exhibit just as much inventiveness and discreet panache—like the arched alcoves on the side and back walls that conceal the surround speakers. Rather than go with the usual acoustically transparent fabric, Lisa proposed woven horsehair, a much more expensive solution but one that melded better with the color and texture of the room. And then there are the wrought-iron grilles—another design element carried over from elsewhere in the home, but something you rarely—or never—come across in a private theater.

Making a dynamic statement out of a necessity, the theater’s ceiling uses sleight of hand to obscure the presence of a 30-foot structural steel beam, with the ceiling area between the various beams, faux and real, filled with custom, hand-painted emblems inspired by Late Medieval Mudéjar art

Introducing as much texture as possible was key to creating the desired Old World feel, and you can also see it in things like the ledged brick beneath the alcoves; the distressed thick-plank theater doors with their flat-iron straps; the scalloped Austrian-shade-style silk curtain for the 16-foot projection screen; and the hand-troweled acoustical plaster. “I didn’t want to do a covering all over the walls or a stretching fabric system, like most theaters,” Lisa said. “I wanted the Spanish look of the hard-surface stucco material. The troweled-on plaster gave us that look.”

Because she was proposing so many unusual design solutions, Lisa did mockups so the clients wouldn’t be surprised once everything was in place. “I had them made for everything I picked for that room. But they weren’t tiny little samples—you know, 6 inches big. We would do a wall section or whatever it was, so they could get a feel of seeing it in the space and on the area.”

Having appropriate lighting was also key to maintaining that “maybe we’re in a castle in Spain” effect. “It was really important for me not to have harsh, cold LED lighting because it wouldn’t give it that feeling like you’re in an old space,” Lisa said. “The lighting dials down to 1,200 Kelvin, which is candlelight.” She wanted to keep the fixtures not just unobtrusive but all but invisible. ”If you look in that room, you really don’t see lights because there’s a lot of indirect lighting hidden behind the arches or behind different places. I didn’t want to walk in and see sconces on the wall or downlights—things like that.” The one truly distinctive, but still restrained, lighting touch is the ceiling fixture at the intersection of the beams, with its wrought-iron grille over backlit leaded glass.

Executing a theater this elaborate and intricate inevitably led to tradeoffs between the room’s design and the performance of its audio video system. “Compromises between design and technology almost always favor design,” Tony said, “because to make even an incremental leap in the performance of something like the sound is so expensive. No one other than a seasoned professional is going to notice that tiny improvement. So we always opted in favor of the design as long as the sound achieved an acceptable level, because if we had opted for the sound instead, the design would have taken a major hit, and we weren’t willing to do that.” But he and his wife have no regrets. “Is it the perfect room in terms of design? Yes. Is it perfect in terms of everything? No. But we’re OK with that.”

With a private cinema like this one at his disposal, Tony doesn’t see any reason to patronize commercial theaters. “Certainly the sound is not going to be any better. The comfort is not going to be any better. And the bar’s not going to be any closer.” But he does make one exception. “I’d carve out IMAX because that’s a unique experience.”

Many people would consider having a certified digital cinema with its entrée to the Bel-Air Circuit the ultimate way to watch movies at home, so it was surprising to hear that Tony has become disenchanted with what the Circuit has to offer. “I thought that would be of huge importance to us but in the end it wasn’t. We just don’t need that anymore.” His next big project is to optimize the theater for playback from sources like streaming and Kaleidescape.

Other than that, Tony and his wife couldn’t be happier with what Lisa created for them. “The conclusion of your article should say, under no circumstances should you hire any designer other than Lisa Slayman to do your project.”

theater designer

Lisa Slayman ASID, IIDA

Slayman Cinema
Slayman Design Associates Inc.

Hidden Treasure

Reviews: Seconds

review | Seconds

related reviews

Amazon Prime | Carnival of Souls

Amazon Prime |
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)

Kaleidescape | Rosemary’s Baby

Kaleidescape | Blue Velvet

see more in Reviews

A arch portrait in alienation, this 1966 John Frankenheimer shocker might be more important for who it influenced than for what it is

by Michael Gaughn
November 20, 2022

It’s not really a horror movie but it’s got some pretty good jolts along the way. Not really science fiction, it would be meaningless without its sci-fi trappings. A portrait of suburban disenchantment and angst à la Updike and Heller, it doesn’t go far enough down that road to fully qualify. “Psychological thriller” probably comes closest but calling it that shortchanges everything else. John Frankenheimer’s Seconds is undeniably something but it’s virtually impossible to put your finger on exactly what. Probably the most appropriate description would be “mid-‘60s Gothic,” but what does that mean?

What’s undeniable—although Frankenheimer might not have been aware of it and likely never saw the film—is that it’s the spiritual twin of Carnival of Souls, one of those detached portraits of utter alienation that started popping up beginning in the mid 1950s. Souls’ Mary Henry and Seconds’ Arthur Hamilton/Tony Wilson indisputably share the face of the same troubled coin—and that also makes it a descendant of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the film that first raised the cry that there was something deeply rotten at the heart of Mid Century culture.

It’s also undeniable—although again likely a more unconscious than conscious influence—that Seconds springs directly from Hawthorne, not just because of its rarified/stylized world and use of typification that borders on allegory but also because it adopts the kind of sci-fi framework Hawthorne developed in stories like “The Birth-mark,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and, most pertinent here, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.”

And that kinship also points toward the fundamental problem with Seconds—while it does feel very much like a Hawthorne short story, it needed to be at least a novella to work. The neat pattern of introducing a character into an artificial microcosm, giving them a too easily achieved path to bliss only to have them realize to their horror that they’ve actually been led down to Hell, and then wrapping it up with a twist, is just too linear and one-note to sustain a feature film.

The film—I really can’t attribute this directly to Frankenheimer because there’s no way to know if he was aware of it—compensates for all that by becoming an exercise in style, one that leans heavily on European art movies, introducing Antonioni-like longueurs to at least put up the front of a serious film, and to pad out its run time. And in all that—and many other ways—it’s a progenitor of Lynch. It’s impossible to watch the Saul Bass credit sequence (one of his best—which is saying a lot) and not think of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, or Blue Velvet. And everything from the stylized compositions, lighting, and camera moves to the callow ambiguity, meaningless pauses and elisions, and overall archness of the exercise, feels very much like Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr, or Fire Walk With Me.

It also feels very much like Rosemary’s Baby, with the scene where the Reborns subdue Rock Hudson’s Wilson when he gets out of line very much like the seniors subduing Mia Farrow for her Satan rape. And it’s also very much like Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, with the central figure robbed of his identity by a bureaucratic/technocratic corporate society that promises paradise but only delivers the carrot of endless tantalizing diversion while perpetually poised to bring down the stick.

And that goes to the heart of why I’m bothering to write up a film that’s got so many flaws—because it represents a point of intersection for far too many important things in the culture to ignore. No, it doesn’t get many of the fundamentals right but it’s such a tantalizing slice of the zeitgeist, channeling so many powerful currents, anticipating what was about to boil over and what wouldn’t come to the surface for at least another 20 years, that it’s impossible to look away. On a more base level, it is creepy as all get-out, and it’s well worth taking the ride at least once. Just don’t expect it to do much for you the second time around.

Frankenheimer tried his damnedest to be a first-rank director but his stuff just won’t stick. The Manchurian Candidate is the closest he got to making a great film but it wears too much of its anxiety on its sleeve and is too unnuanced, too dead-certain in its paranoia to have the requisite resonance and heft. Everything that feeds Seconds is valid and needs to be expressed but Frankenheimer just wasn’t deft or deep enough to translate it.

The biggest problem is that he doesn’t really care two craps about his main character or his dilemma and seems to treat him with a kind of contempt. The result is that it feels like Frankenheimer is just as cold-blooded as the entrepreneurs and minions who engineer Hamilton’s rebirth and demise, so it’s all kind of like watching a jaded medical-school professor do a lecture-hall dissection of a cadaver.

But it’s not like master cinematographer James Wong Howe (Sweet Smell of Success) wasn’t eager to try to deliver on anything Frankenheimer might have asked from him. Howe, through the framing and camera moves and documentary-ish, high-contrast, sometimes blownout look, all of which was about four decades ahead of its time, sets a tone and a mood that would have been mesmerizing for the duration if Frankenheimer had had a better grasp of his material.

The same goes for composer Jerry Goldsmith, who delivers a truly accomplished and innovative score (up there with the one he turned around on a dime for Chinatown) that at times references ‘20s and ‘30s horror while somehow avoiding slipping into kitsch, and evokes fin de siècle Viennese chamber music without slipping into pretension, lending the film a lot of depth it would have otherwise lacked.

And I’m actually going to say some nice things about Rock Hudson, whose career, very much like Marilyn’s, stemmed from being game to be whatever the public wanted to project onto him without pushing back by trying to express anything authentically intrinsic to him. In other words, he was fine with—or at least reconciled to—being nothing but a big, empty hunk. The result was that he never looked entirely comfortable on camera and never felt entirely right in any of his roles. He had to have been aware of all that because he seems to channel it here to portray someone who not only just doesn’t belong but, like Mary Henry, just doesn’t exist.

The HD transfer available through Amazon Prime is good—remarkably good. While the print isn’t pristine—there are some damaged frames and occasional circles for reel changes—there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it. It’s crisp, tonally consistent, and faithful enough to the original film.

Noble failure? Flat-out failure? For some reason, going there just doesn’t fit. Seconds is undeniably an experience, an experiment that clearly didn’t succeed but also didn’t utterly fail. Crucial to blazing a fruitful and prodigious trail, it isn’t just some bizarro curiosity. The problem—and I wish there was some way I could be a little more precise about this—is that there just doesn’t seem to be enough there there.

PICTURE | The print used for the HD transfer on Prime isn’t pristine but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it, being crisp, tonally consistent, and faithful enough to the original film.

Review: Play It Again, Sam

review | Play It Again, Sam

related reviews

Kaleidescape | Annie Hall

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

Kaleidescape | Casablanca

Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

see more in Reviews

This film version of Woody Allen’s Broadway play showed he had a range behind his cartoony early films, laying the groundwork for his more sophisticated later work

by Michael Gaughn
November 16, 2022

This is a decidedly minor movie made in the somewhat frivolous style director Herbert Ross (The Goodbye Girl, Footloose) was known for, and all involved had to have known they were devoting their energies to what was basically a throwaway. But Play It Again, Sam is still well worth watching 50 years on, partly because the lines still deliver but mainly because it was the incubator or springboard (pick your metaphor) for everything that would be great about Woody Allen’s later work.

In 1972, Allen was in the middle of making the “early, funny” films that would build his initial movie audience. Take the Money and Run and Bananas preceded Sam; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, Sleeper, and Love and Death would follow. The problem is, those first directorial efforts are almost unwatchable today—for a couple of reasons. Allen was still an apprentice, a little obviously learning on the job and with no real ability with actors. Also, conceptually, the films tended to be extensions of his S.J. Perelman-inspired essays for The New Yorker, and—especially when looked back on now—was the kind of material that played better on the page than on the screen. But if he hadn’t paid his dues, he would have never matured into a master filmmaker.

Allen originally wrote Play It Again, Sam as a play, which he performed on Broadway for more than a year with Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts. In it lie the seeds for everything that would blossom in mid-period masterworks like Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Stardust Memories, and would define the best of his later films. He already had vast experience as a TV sketch writer but Sam forced him to focus on creating believable characters who could sustain scenes and ultimately a play. Probably more importantly, it showed he had an uncanny ear for dialogue that feels convincingly natural yet is full of an appropriately theatrical energy, verve, and wit. Allen tends to downplay his abilities, but this alone shows his genius—a talent that’s never been adequately acknowledged because he makes it look so effortless and is done so well that the technique itself is almost invisible.

I suspect Allen could have never arrived at the breakthrough of Annie Hall if he’d only made movies and never done a play. The need to make sure Sam would land with a live audience—a live Broadway audience—meant everything had to be perfectly honed by opening night since he wouldn’t have the luxury of fixing anything in post. (Most of his early films essentially had to be saved in the editing.) Nothing could be too glib or jokey, and the whole couldn’t play as a disjointed series of big laughs. Just as he learned how to be a filmmaker on the job and in public, the same with his education as playwright and stage actor. The theater forced him to finetune his writing and performance to a degree he’d never had to do with film.

More importantly, it showed him he didn’t need to rely on silly non sequiturs to entertain an audience, that there were people eager to watch other people sit around a New York apartment hashing out their neuroses—as long as there were a few fantasy sequences tossed in. Which is the formula for the best Allen films in a nutshell. No other filmmaker has ever made it more inherently interesting to just listen to people talk to each other for 90 minutes at a pop.

It’s hard not to watch Play It Again, Sam and wish the Allen of five years later had directed it instead of Ross—but that would have been pointless because in Annie Hall, Allen took what was best about Sam to a far higher level. Fearing the movie version would feel stagebound, Ross made the mistake many directors do of building out the action way too much. And why the hell did they set it in San Francisco when everything about the characters and dialogue screams New York—especially the NYC references that are oddly retained from the play? The ‘70s were the absolute nadir of the film score, and here you have to suffer through an execrable effort by Billy Goldenberg.

But it’s not too hard to look around all that while watching the film and imagine it as it must have played on the stage and how it would have gone if Allen had made the movie instead of Ross. The scenes from the play, when they’re not arbitrarily chopped up for the film, still work beautifully, and this is the first movie where Allen isn’t just trying to be a funny character but a credible urbanite who’s both a victim of and wry commentator on his circumstances.

The HD presentation on Amazon Prime is pretty faithful to the film’s look, which Owen Roizman (The French Connection, The Exorcist, Network) shot in that archetypal early-‘70s style he pretty much defined. But it seems flatter than it should—even for a style that was defined by its limited color palette. As A Clockwork Orange showed, it’s especially important to keep transfers of ’70s movies faithful to what was originally filmed so they don’t look drearier than they already are.

One of the pleasures of the movie over the stage version of Play It Again, Sam is its famous—and, for some people, notorious—opening with footage from the final scene of Casablanca. The footage they cut into Sam wasn’t in great shape but it feels a lot more like watching that movie than the recent digitized-to-death 4K HDR release.

PICTURE | The HD presentation on Prime is pretty faithful to the film’s look but seems flatter than it should—even for an early ’70s movie with a limited color palette

Review: My Darling Clementine

review | My Darling Clementine

also on Cineluxe

Amazon Prime |
Hail the Conquering Hero

Kaleidescape |
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Kaleidescape | Casablanca

Kaleidescape | The Godfather

see more in Reviews

Often eclipsed by the more iconic Stagecoach and The Searchers, this lower-key approach to the western proves to be John Ford’s most satisfying take on the genre

by Michael Gaughn
November 14, 2022

I’m always wary of “best of” lists because they’re near always just a way to coerce a consensus, usually for institutional or marketing purposes, and rarely have much to do with the actual quality of whatever’s listed. But it’s hard to understand the importance of My Darling Clementine without going there, even if just a little. My favorite John Ford film, I would place Clementine just slightly above Young Mr. Lincoln and Fort Apache, partly because of its deceptively loose, almost documentary style and episodic structure, which have helped keep it limber and relevant. While I admire Stagecoach and The Searchers, I just don’t have the unalloyed affection for them that I have for those other three.

I would also humbly suggest that Clementine is the best western ever made—exactly because it isn’t epic and mythic but intimate and, that dread word, poetic. Anything shot in Monument Valley is inevitably going to have an epic feel, and there are moments when Ford gives the Academy-ratio frame the grandeur of widescreen. But he never lingers there for the sake of effect, instead devoting almost all his attention to developing his core group of characters, making sure they’re never eclipsed by the setting and that nothing allegorical or mythic distorts their human scale.

He also keeps the film rooted in history, having it revolve around the actual town of Tombstone and the actual figures of the Earps, Clantons, and Doc Holliday, being careful to keep all the elements in proportion. Is it accurate? Not really—or not much at all. But rather than stay pedantically true to the facts, it stays true to the feel of the facts. This isn’t how history actually was but how we want it and need it to be.

Maybe the biggest reason for the film’s strength and durability, its glue, is its grounding in process. Ford doesn’t underline it but Clementine’s not just armature but foundation lies in its portrayal of Tombstone’s evolution from frontier outpost to something resembling a civilized town and of how Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday both effect and are affected by that maturation, which makes the film much richer than if the town had just been used as a backdrop.

The most startling thing about Clementine, though, might be its look, which is often stark and gritty with naturalistic light but filled with grace notes and, especially in nighttime shots, both exteriors and interiors, venturing into chiaroscuro. I suspect this was partly inspired by the documentaries Ford had been making for the government during the wartime years leading up to the filming, and that he deployed that style here to, again, keep things immediate, rooted in the characters, and seemingly real.

I was struck this time around by just how fluid film grammar had become by 1946 and by how the ‘40s represented its crestline. Every movie pre 1939, no matter how well done otherwise, feels a little awkward, hesitant, because the language was still forming, only to click suddenly and a little miraculously into place right at the end of that decade. The most confident expressions of American film followed, 10 years during which the core genres were forged and the execution of movies, for all its contrivance, felt effortless, with the results speaking with both power and grace, economically and, often, with surprising subtlety. Everything since has been a reaction to, a mostly futile rebellion against, what was established then.

You can even see this in the lighting—something seemingly secondary but actually core since it subliminally has a huge impact on how we experience a film as a whole. The technique had become so refined by the mid ‘40s that no moment in Clementine feels tainted by what we would usually think of us as the high-key Studio Era style. That doesn’t mean its look isn’t inherently theatrical, and there are times when Ford ventures surprisingly close to Expressionism, but it never draws attention to itself in a negative way—which makes it all the more curious that the next few decades—well into the ‘80s—would be defined by a much flatter technique often populated by numerous, blatantly artificial shadows.

Clementine adopts a variety of visual styles, but it shows the maturity of both film grammar and of Ford as a director that their use and juxtaposition are never jarring. Large sections of the film feel like he was back working with Greg Toland, with significant swaths of deep black, faces in shadow, and low muslin ceilings. But then there are those starker passages with their documentary immediacy, which Ford never tries to make feel vérité, instead carefully using composition and light—especially the consistently dramatic western skies—to style his tale.

Joe MacDonald’s mostly undistinguished résumé keeps him from being considered a top-rank cinematographer but he did have his moments, shooting Samuel Fuller’s classic noir Pickup on South Street and probably the two best color noirs, Fuller’s House of Bamboo and Henry Hathaway’s almost Sirkian Niagara. He also did outstanding work on Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life and probably the best Frank Tashlin film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? What he and Ford came up with for Clementine feels almost experimental, so fresh and responsive that you won’t encounter anything similar until more than a decade later with the emergence of the Nouvelle Vague.

Ford even extends that approach to the music. There are only a handful of cues and the ones that are there are just brief accents, not the usual wall-to-wall wash. Most effectively, there’s no score during the big dramatic scenes when almost any other filmmaker would be amassing great gobs of turgid Late Romantic noodling, relying on sheer musical tonnage to prop up their material. Fonda’s horseback pursuit of the stagecoach is just accompanied by the sound of charging hoofs, and the big shootout at the O.K. Corral is just isolated gunfire, spare dialogue, some whinnying from the corral, a passing stagecoach, and the wind.

This is probably Henry Fonda’s best performance, angular and laconic, of course, but making each line, look, movement, and gesture ring true—except in the somewhat discordant coda, which feels like a studio-mandated reshoot. It’s hard to believe a film this good could have Victor Mature near the top of the bill, and it’s a huge testament to Ford’s abilities that Mature’s presence doesn’t sink the whole thing. Linda Darnell specialized in playing what were once known as loose women, and she really works her patented trashiness here, but Ford even finds ways to draw expression from that laboriously manufactured erotic heat. (To Darnell’s credit, she pulls off Rex Harrison’s elegant, befuddled wife in Preston Sturges’ Unfaithfully Yours beautifully.) Walter Brennan, usually typecast as the cantankerous but lovable sidekick, is disturbingly strong as Clementine’s villain, his sadism all the more unsettling because Ford bases it in a believable devotion to his sons.

So, to sum up, you’ve got a western that’s likely the best in the genre primarily because it doesn’t use epic sweep, mythic iconography, or fussy pedantry to distance you from the action but instead creates a compelling you-are-there effect with disarming moments of grace. Its technique is still fresh and engaging because its nut has never been cracked. And the characters are finely and distinctly drawn while still feeling like organic members of a burgeoning community. (I just realized I could be describing a Robert Altman film, but this is 1946, not 1976, and Altman was too much of a cynic to ever lend his characters the warmth and rough charm and unexpected but apt layers Ford used to bestow on big and small alike like a benediction.)

CLEMENTINE ON PRIME
I realize that, watching Clementine in its current form, you have to take a decent amount—but hopefully not too much—of what I wrote in the main text on faith. The transfer available in HD on Amazon Prime is, like so many older films, a bit of a visual mess, with some sequences sharp and with the proper tonal gradation and others great blotchy blobs of black and white. (One brief shot of a stagecoach racing through the desert is so blurry, contrasty, and stuttering it looks like badly damaged 8mm film.) I can only make assumptions here, but it would be hard to believe most of this was present in the movie as originally released and is likely a product of having to cobble together the transfer out of disparate elements, some of dubious quality.

That said, I also have to wonder if Clementine isn’t suffering a bit of the neglect that comes with manufactured consensus. Because The Searchers is big, widescreen, and Technicolor, unabashedly mythic and not afraid to beat its chest—and conspicuously, although mostly dubiously, influential—it’s been doted on in ways My Darling Clementine never has. True, Searchers is the more recent film (though by only 10 years), but it doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to think more can be done to steer Clementine back in the direction of the movie John Ford and Joe MacDonald created. (The recent 4K HDR releases of Casablanca and The Godfather show the downside of being iconic, so thoroughly scrubbed they no longer look much like film. Clementine even in its current state is the better experience because at least it still feels, from beginning to end, like a movie.)

Lastly, there’s something strange going on with the sound, with the music and effects track often mixed way higher than the dialogue. In the quiet scene where Henry Fonda delivers a monologue at the graveside of his younger brother, he’s almost completely drowned out by some strumming on a solo acoustic guitar. I don’t remember that being a problem with previous releases.

—M.G.

Review: Casablanca

review | Casablanca

Review: Hail the Conquering Hero

review | Hail the Conquering Hero

also on Cineluxe

Amazon Prime |
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

Kaleidescape | A Clockwork Orange

Amazon Prime | Double Indemnity

Amazon Prime | The Apartment

see more in Reviews

This Preston Sturges comedy would be one of the very best American films if Sturges hadn’t decided to pull his punches at the end

by Michael Gaughn
November 7, 2022

We’re back in smalltown America again with Eddie Bracken and William Demarest and the action again revolves around World War II, but beyond that Hail the Conquering Hero bears little resemblance to The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek from just earlier that same year. Preston Sturges was on a roll and Morgan’s Creek had been one of the biggest films of 1944, but he was never one for formula and Conquering Hero is dark and almost brooding in exactly all the places where Morgan’s Creek was silly and light.

Sturges pretty much broke the comedy mold here. The first almost 20 minutes are shot and for the most part performed as straight drama—so are most of the closing 15. The satire, which was so light in Morgan’s Creek that the audience wasn’t even sure it was being kidded, is here brought to the foreground and with such force that it verges on the vicious and bitter. The contrasts are so stark that, if it wasn’t for the presence in both films of Bracken and Demarest, of Sturges’ recurring themes and his vast stock company, it would be hard to believe they’re from the same director, let alone made in the same year.

This was all very much deliberate of course and not just Sturges being wildly schizo. You just need to compare Bracken’s characters, and his performances, to see what Sturges is up to. In Morgan’s Creek, Bracken is so broad you almost want to cringe. Here, his character is again a schnook but he’s also a genuinely tortured soul. The Norval of Morgan’s Creek could have never done the long monologue about the history of the Marines or the closing speech where Bracken tells the town members he’s nothing but a fraud while at the same time basically calling them a bunch of morons.

Morgan’s Creek was about how war hysteria had stirred the moral pot, breaking up the too-simple strictures of smalltown America and putting them in play. In Conquering Hero, Sturges frontally attacks the American love for appearances over substance, how we’ll believe practically anything as long as it comes from someone we want to believe in and are deaf to the people we don’t want to see. The film revolves around the premise that we already know what we want to hear and are just looking for mouthpieces that fit those preconceptions—which is why Bracken is able to get away with so visibly and audibly reacting to being forced into that role. The townspeople literally can’t see or hear him.

The scene where he tries to resist the locals’ effort to draft him into running for mayor, with them conveniently spinning his protests into affirmations, is a sitcom staple I don’t think has ever once worked on TV. But it succeeds here because Sturges has built up to it so carefully and cunningly that it becomes an ambiguous and troubling moment that almost gets the audience to look at itself.

Hail the Conquering Hero is one of the great American movies and would be one of the very best if Sturges hadn’t gotten himself all snarled in his own net. The final third begins to fall into the tradition of bold and cutting truth-telling that defines the greatest American art—the saying “No! in thunder” that Melville ascribed to Hawthorne. But right after Sturges delivers a couple of staggering blows, he fails to finish the job, instead pulling his punches, all too aware he’s making a major-studio film in the middle of a particularly brutal war and ultimately reverting to what the audience wants to hear instead of what it ought to hear. And so it almost always goes with the movies, which is why they’ll always be a second-tier artform.

You have to wonder if Sturges’ inability to reconcile his insights and ambitions with the material didn’t spill over into the production, which is, at moments, oddly uneven. About half the cast proves nimble while the other half can barely get its lines out, which can be disconcerting when four or more of them are trading quips within the same scene. Ella Raines is undeniably striking but also as wooden as they come, and you just need to compare that four-minute take in Morgan’s Creek where Bracken and Betty Hutton stroll through town to the similarly long stroll here with Raines and the tall, handsome, and dull Bill Edwards to feel how the latter scene creates a drag on Conquering Hero. If coat trees could converse with each other, this is what it would sound like.

The cinematographer, as with Morgan’s Creek, is John Seitz, the man who in Double Indemnity single-handedly defined the look of noir and thereby the look of all American movies from that moment on. Conquering Hero has a much more noirish style than Morgan’s Creek and that couldn’t feel more right—partly because what Sturges is doing here overlaps sympathetically with the true heart of noir. The distance between Fred McMurray in Indemnity and Bracken in Hero is so slight they could be doppelgängers. Both are trying to control worlds that have their own agendas—worlds that definitely don’t have either character’s best interests at heart. Both ultimately have to admit to the futility of will and don’t so much come to accept their fates as have them imposed on them.

Visually, Conquering Hero is discernibly darker than Morgan’s Creek and that comes across well in the HD presentation on Amazon Prime, which is a step up from the same service’s presentation of the latter. But the deep grays (there are no real blacks) are muddy and crushed throughout, making the transfer darker than it should be, which can make the film feel a little oppressive. The 4K HDR release of A Clockwork Orange showed how using a transfer to bring a film all the way back to its original look can have a big impact on how it’s perceived (that is, if the director and cinematographer knew what they were doing in the first place). I have to wonder if nailing the original look of Conquering Hero—getting the visual tone to match the comedic/dramatic tone—wouldn’t go a long way toward clarifying what Sturges was up to.

Many filmmakers have tried to peer into the American soul—some have even tried to lead a charge against it—but none have ever done it, as Sturges did here, in the guise of Norman Rockwell. It all comes cascading down in an avalanche—patriotism, heroism, boosterism, motherhood, smalltown democracy, civic pride, the myth of the childhood sweetheart, the basic decency of the common man. The funny thing is, in the wake of the ‘60s and ‘70s and their relentless assault on those same institutions, which triggered the relentlessly cynical reaction of the ‘80s to the present, all of that has been successfully obliterated but nothing of any substance has been put in its place. We just have endless self-obsession and self-indulgence and the need to be endlessly diverted instead. That lends a delicious and frightening irony Sturges could have never foreseen to the fact that everything in Hail the Conquering Hero is set in motion by the actions of a psychopath.

PICTURE | Conquering Hero is a dark, almost noirish film, and that comes across well in the HD presentation on Amazon Prime. But the deep grays (there are no real blacks) are muddy and crushed throughout, making the transfer a touch darker than it should be.

Review: Creature from the Black Lagoon

review | Creature from the Black Lagoon

also on Cineluxe

Kaleidescape | Alien

Kaleidescape | The Birds

Amazon Prime |
Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Amazon Prime | Ed Wood

see more in Reviews

The movie that made guys running around in latex monster suits a thing would seem like a curious choice for a 4K HDR makeover

by Michael Gaughn
November 3, 2022

You can’t lump the work of an entire decade of filmmaking under one umbrella but the movies that best define the ‘50s all exhibit a kind goofy optimism—which is kind of weird given that the culture was grappling with the recent shocks of global war, economic depression, and genocide and with the new threats of nuclear annihilation and ever-lurking Communism. But I guess unbridled prosperity cures all ills. You can feel that almost reckless sanguinity almost everywhere in the era’s movies—in the musicals and comedies, of course, but also in the melodramas (something Douglas Sirk had a field day with), noir (Kiss Me Deadly), and even sci-fi and horror. That odd ebullience is still seductive—which helps explain the continuing appeal of Mid Century Modern. And of what would otherwise be tedious monster movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Universal recently brought out some of its classic horror films, like Creature, The Mummy (1932), Phantom of the Opera (1943), and Bride of Frankenstein, in 4K HDR. My first instinct was to go for Bride of Frankenstein, which remains fascinating, mainly because it shows the monster genre veering into self-parody almost from its inception, but I thought Creature, being more recent, would be a better candidate for HDR. I should have trusted my gut.

This is the kind of film that fascinated me as a kid but became harder to slog through once I developed a sense of how movies are made and what they’re capable of expressing. It’s a necessary skepticism that comes with the loss of innocence—the tradeoff of naive pleasure for insight—but some films can be really tough going once you can see their technical and aesthetic seams are showing.

Creature was a cut above the usual monster flick of the day but still far from A-list. The presence of Whit Bissell alone (who last appeared in these pages via Invasion of the Body Snatchers) tells you you’re solidly in the realm of the lucky to have an acting job. That impression is bolstered by the presence of Richard (It Came from Outer Space, Tormented) Carlson, who looked equally out of place in whatever film he was in and was probably one of the least convincing actors to ever have his name above the title. And then there’s the lone female presence, the oddly visaged Julie Adams, who obviously got the role solely on the strength of her breasts.

There’s also the defining ‘50s trope of kill what you don’t understand (actually a shade more enlightened than our current paradigm of kill anything that moves), here tempered a little by Carlson’s pleas—until the creature snatches his girl and then all bets are off. And of course the monster starts by polishing off the coolies before working his way up the ethnic pecking order.

The two things that are fair to expect from even a B-level horror movie are some kind of sustained mood and at least a yeoman-like effort to create tension within the set pieces. What Creature has instead is a bunch of alpha males swarming all over the desirable female, a boat stuck in a lagoon, and an iconic latex monster suit—and a both rote and turgid score. You come to dread hearing the monster’s theme more than seeing the monster himself.

But enough with beating up on a defenseless old movie. Let’s discuss the transfer. To sum it up before laying out my case: This is another instance of 4K HDR accentuating all the flaws of a film that wasn’t that well shot to begin with and whose elements have likely deteriorated over time. That’s not to say HDR and black & white can’t be friends—just look at Shadow of a Doubt to see a movie—and the experience of a movie—brought back with all its original impact intact.

But Creature is all over the map visually, with some shots crisp, some so soft they look like VHS (and that is not an exaggeration), some in nicely gradated black & white, some in a muddy wash vaguely resembling sepia. Everything going in and out of dissolves looks like it’s been dipped in acid, and some of the underwater photography is so vague it resembles a 16mm art film—Maya Deren Meets the Creature.

Given that, it seems almost unfair to bring the movie out this way. It’s unfortunately becoming common with UHD releases of older titles that you have to look past the compromised footage while waiting for the good shots to show up, which isn’t a very pleasant way to watch a film. Of course, as many classics as possible should be re-released in 4K—we’re all better off being able to see 2001, Singin’ in the Rain, Vertigo, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in that format. But here—and I admittedly haven’t yet seen any of the other titles Universal has released in its horror bundle—I have to wonder if this wasn’t more about “let’s get them to buy the title yet one more time” than anything else.

It was literally hard to see what the extended dynamic range brought to the presentation. The flashbulb whites made the “In The Beginning . . .” shots of primordial creation look blown out and the flames streaming off the creature look animated (they aren’t). The flame in the lamp that hangs over poor Whit Bissell right before he’s attacked was so vivid it looked matted in. And you’d at least expect the lagoon in a movie with “Black Lagoon” in the title to look blacker. It didn’t.

I’m not sure what fans of the film will make of this presentation. Maybe, having looked past its visual flaws in the earlier incarnations they’ll be willing to forgive them being heavily underscored here. My take is that drawing too much attention to the technical lapses makes you that much more aware of everything else that’s wrong. But you can’t expect a well-intended but inept ‘50s creature-on-the-loose throwaway to look like Citizen Kane.

Sorry—bad example.

PICTURE | All over the place—4K crisp and then VHS soft, with some occasional instances of blown-out HDR brightness

Against Burgers

also on cineluxe

Manos and the Myth of the Bad Movie

Survival of the Savviest

The Last Days of the Man Cave

What’s So Great About Color?

Against Burgers

A century of awards shows & marketing has created the myth of the high-quality movie but most films are on par with what you can pick up at a fast-food drive-thru

by Michael Gaughn
October 31, 2022

It’s not exactly a newsflash that a huge swath of the global populace, seduced by marketing and absurdly low prices, gorges itself on fast-food hamburgers. Or that any preferences burger eaters might have tend to be driven more by blind adherence than discernment. Most would be unable to convincingly articulate their reasons for preferring a Big Mac or Whopper or Monster Angus Burger or Big Bacon Cheddar Triple. The quality of the burger or how it’s physically presented has little impact on their opinion because quality and taste tend to run a distant whatever to almost every other consideration.

That’s not really all that different from how we consume mainstream movies. A steady diet of blockbusters is no healthier than a steady diet of super-sized hamburgers. Given that, what’s the value of reviewing movies—or of movie reviews—that are the equivalent of slinging beef?

You wouldn’t expect a website about fine dining to devote all its reviews to fast-food joints. And yet most sites that cover entertainment spaces and put any emphasis at all on gear tend to slobber over films that are the cinematic equivalent of junk food. And that’s because most of the people who write for and frequent these sites are gear enthusiasts who just want stuff that will look and sound good when it blows up on their systems. Indistinguishable from the ignorant bloviators who consume almost all the oxygen on social media, they’re not movie fans in any meaningful sense at all.

I suppose it’s conceivable that someone could come up with a blockbuster that significantly transcends its lowly origins or that a movie franchise could produce something other than empty calories—I’ll leave those arguments for another day—but I’d like to make the case for seeking out and savoring better fare. It doesn’t help that most contemporary filmmakers have become masters of conjuring up the illusion of substance or that audiences are willing to so eagerly buy into their scam. Think of it as the equivalent of going to a more upscale chain restaurant or coffeshop, businesses that thrive on the pretense that they offer something significantly better than their roadside brethren but really exist to be able to guarantee the exact same experience no matter which of their many locations you visit. Exhibiting individual flair or creativity is not only not required but is likely to get you run out of Dodge.

The pervasive ability of filmmakers to mimic “significant” gestures, to take something shallow and sophomoric and dab on enough touches that reek of art to make the gullible believe there’s more depth to their—in reality and very much deliberately—superficial work is a deeply troubling trend, partly because it makes it seem as if we have a substantial mainstream cinema. Sorry, but any industry whose first priority is to establish and sustain patronage levels that exceed McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Hardee’s combined can only create anything of real value purely by fluke—for the same reasons none of those chains will ever be able to produce subtly nuanced, flavorful dishes for the masses. These filmmakers are indistinguishable from con men, doing the equivalent of putting chopped chicken liver on a triple-patty faux-cheese white-bread abomination so the easily duped will believe they’re eating foie gras.

And then there’s the lingering influence of the moribund man cave. Spending tens of thousands of dollars—and often significantly more—to do nothing but create a kind of drive-up window in your home seems the height of absurdity—or maybe the most alarming sign of cultural decay. I’m not saying this is what always happens—and I know from experience that it’s not—but the possibility that we will come to inextricably conflate high resolution and massive screens and increasingly more elaborate surround with more and more mindless content—that we’ll substitute art (or, more accurately, the possibility of art) for all-consuming and ultimately numbing sensation generators ought to induce a pang if not a shudder. It’s the cultural equivalent of being super-sized, what ought to be the most sensitive and responsive part of your being become so calloused that what was once the pursuit of rich and diverse entertainment becomes nothing but a perfervid quest for an ever bigger thrill.

And what does this elaborately ground beef have to do with reviewing movies? Pretty much everything. “Garbage in / garbage out” pertains here just as much as it does in every other facet of life, and there’s something both farcical and tragic about the prospect of people creating six- and seven-figure garbage disposals and calling them theaters. The same discernment ought to pertain to movie night as it does to dining out but rarely does. When it comes to helping to expose people to movies, there ought to be a kind of responsibility to avoid the consensus-driven pile-ons that define most reviewing—Rotten Tomatoes has that kind of groupthink more than covered. The best thing we can all do for each other is to stop shouting out our preferences just to show what club we belong to—believe me, nobody cares whether you prefer Sonic to Jack in the Box or even Five Napkin—and instead share, rather than impose, our passions and our enthusiasms, and hope that our fervor, sincerely expressed, can open some eyes beyond the trivial and expand some palates beyond the bovine, and help lead to a cinema that’s both flavorful and satisfying and doesn’t taste like something that was shoved across the counter in a paper wrapper.

“Sorry, but any industry whose first priority is to establish and sustain patronage levels that exceed McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Hardee’s combined can only create anything of real value purely by fluke.”

“And what does this elaborately ground beef have to do with reviewing movies? Pretty much everything.”

Review: Mighty Aphrodite

review | Mighty Aphrodite

related reviews

Amazon Prime | Bullets Over Broadway

Amazon Prime | Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Kaleidescape | Blue Jasmine

Kaleidescape | Manhattan

see more in Reviews

Woody Allen’s last completely solid film until Vicky Cristina Barcelona looks surprisingly good on Amazon Prime

by Michael Gaughn
October 23, 2022

I don’t have a tremendous lot to say about Mighty Aphrodite because, although it’s a solid enough film with some genuinely funny moments and clever enough twists and decent enough acting, especially from Mira Sorvino, it feels lighter than it should be. That seems to have been deliberate on Woody Allen’s part, and I think he went there partly because he didn’t want the bluer material to hit too hard and partly because he didn’t want the Greek tragedy conventions to get too ponderous, but it just seems like the movie should have a little more meat on its bones.

The big irony is that, coming from any other filmmaker, Aphrodite would have been something of a miracle, since it’s virtually impossible to find movies that rely on wit instead of flat-out jokes and on subtle character interaction instead of a gratuitous succession of puerile clichés. But from Allen, you wish—as with films like Sweet and Lowdown and Melinda and Melinda—that he’d tried a little harder. You can’t really fault the execution, but the base material would have been well served by a little more rumination and revision.

There’s something genuinely sad about Sorvino’s character, and even though Sorvino is terrific at playing her both hardened and naive would-be porn star for laughs, she manages to work in some wistful and defiant notes that cry out for more support from the script. I’m not saying that sensed absence really hurts the film—it holds up well and is enjoyable enough—but it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

The one false note is Helena Bonham Carter as Allen’s wife. She brings her trademark high-strung brooding mannerisms to the role, and little else. You easily believe that she’d aspire to open a gallery in Tribeca, but it’s just not believable that she’d be married to Allen. That’s partly his fault—his persona has rarely been convincing when his character is in something other than show business, and while you can imagine him having a brief relationship with someone like Carter, it’s impossible to buy into the idea they’d have a long, let alone happy, marriage.

The presentation of Mighty Aphrodite on Amazon Prime is surprisingly good—especially given how compromised Bullets Over Broadway, from the previous year, looks on the same service. Given that both films apparently came from the same distribution chain, you have to wonder what’s up. Carlo DiPalma’s cinematography is subtle, especially for a comedy, but always appropriate and effective, and sometimes striking. Skin tones look natural and interiors look realistic, if a tad muted, and the whole of it is a crisp and clean and accurate enough transfer.

If you feel a movie review isn’t an appropriate place to comment on the attempts to savage Allen and obliterate his works, stop reading here. But it’s impossible to watch Aphrodite now and not be reminded that Sorvino was one of the people who turned on Allen based on hearsay and a kind of herd instinct. This film was both the beginning and pinnacle of her career—she won an Oscar for her role, then disappeared into the usual show-biz netherworld of endless dead-ends. I realize this is considered passé at a time when people don and shed professions on a dime (something I’ll refrain from commenting on for now), but there is something—a lot, actually—to be said for dedication to your craft, a focus that ought to preclude indulging in public denunciations based on thin innuendo. But if it wasn’t for that kind of shameless blaming—and the public’s endless hunger for more—there wouldn’t be any social media.

PICTURE | The presentation on Amazon Prime is surprisingly good, especially given how compromised Bullets Over Broadway looks on the same service. Skin tones look natural and interiors realistic, if a tad muted, and the whole of it is a crisp and clean and accurate enough transfer.

Michael Gaughn

Review: Swing Time

Spanish Treasure

Reviews: Seconds

Review: Play It Again, Sam

Review: My Darling Clementine

Review: Casablanca

Review: Hail the Conquering Hero

Review: Creature from the Black Lagoon

Against Burgers

Review: Mighty Aphrodite

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

sign up for our newsletter

Type:

Genre:

Duration:

Average Rating:

Michael Gaughn

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

sign up for our newsletter