lathbury Reviews

Satan Met a Lady (1936)

A Disaster

[27 June 2018]

Seeing "Satan Met a Lady" as a spoof of "The Maltese Falcon" is a desperate but futile effort to redeem it. It is a dreadful movie, full of unfunny, heavy handed jokes, with a garbled plot, and thin-to-the-point-of-vanishing dramatizations.

The film appeared in 1936, two years after the sprightly blend of mystery and comedy of "The Thin Man." Probably the creators were trying for another singular conflation. In this film, however, the mixture fails.

One reason is that the focus is blurred-at first the center of interest is the detective's affectless love life seen with elephantine facetiousness; then it switches to intent chasing after a valued object.

The characters are both earnest and self-parodic. You can't have it both ways. Nick Charles (William Powell) is never earnest; he is always aware of himself as an absurd figure.

Names are changed for no reason whatever: Shane is Spade; Purvis is Brigid O'Shaughnessy; Murgatroyd Effie; Madame Barabbas (a religious reference?) and Arthur Treacher split the role of Gutman; Kenneth is WIlmer; Farrell Thursby. The viewer keeps thinking how enjoyable the originals were as opposed to these inane cartoons. One has to feel sympathy for Treacher, forced to utter with a straight face cliché after cliché of British speech.

The fabulous falcon becomes Roland's fabled horn from the French epic "La Chanson de Roland." The writers of "Satan Met a Lady" don't seem to know much about the epic, where the horn is a means to an end. In Hammett's story the falcon is appropriately an end in itself. It was plausible that the statuette be encrusted with gems in a wealth-oriented world. True, Roland's olifant was-as a sign of spiritual preciousness. Stupidly, here, the gems are supposed to be stuffed inside-a ridiculous notion in practical or historical terms. Finally, as any reader of this much-read work knows, Roland damages the object at the conclusion by attacking a Saracen soldier with it.

The movie goes through the motions. Mercifully, after one hour and fifteen minutes it expires.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

A Precursor to the Precursor

[8/10 · 3 July 2016]

A little drawn out and predictable but still riveting and highly charged with tension, the plot lines are neatly—if somewhat over-literally—tied up. The final scene in which Kidman (Alice Hartford) suggests behavior to resolve the sexual mistrust between her and her husband seems to me reductive and not to answer the exciting questions about the place of the libido in married life, i. e., the discussion that precipitated the action.

Everything implied or said in the movie is in a 5200 word short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown" (1835). The sex (more implied than explicit), the uncertainty, and the guilt are all there; Hawthorne's story is told with more tact, with a clearer philosophical framework and less self-consciousness than in Kubrik's film, which I still liked, though.

A Most Wanted Man (2014)

Enveloping but Perhaps Flawed

[9/10 · 1 September 2014]

I found the film steadily absorbing and well acted, especially by Hoffman. It is beautifully photographed. The plot, which turns on a betrayal by American intelligence interests (see below), is followable. It has formal similarities to _The Spy Who Came in from the Cold._ Allowing for usual Hollywood glam nonsense, i. e., lawyer-do-gooder Annabel Richter (McAdams) is put through hell yet always looks fresh-as-a-daisy beautiful, the film has some of the gritty bitterness of LeCarré.

SPOILER COMING It needs to be more explicitly stated why the Americans decided to foil the German spy scheme at the last moment; there is no evidence that they were on to what happened when Abdullah decided to make the tell-tale substitution of charities. If the Americans generally suspected Abdullah, there is no reason for them to wait until the last minute when the plan almost went according to script except that it makes a more dramatic finish.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Glass Eye (1957) Season 3, Episode 1

A lonely spinster falls in love with a ventriloquist

[9/10 · 21 September 2008]

I think this is the best episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." It shows Hitchcock's mastery with lighting and staging. Unlike the previous reviewer, I did not find Jessica Tandy too attractive for the part of a lonely spinster. The ventriloquist, Tom Conway, is managed so that he becomes a plausible object onto which a lonely woman might project her romantic illusions. As the narrative builds, the point of view is quietly shifted to conceal the reversal on which the climax depends. The framed tale-within-a-tale tacitly contrasts to the bizarre love story in the main plot and unobtrusively negotiates the distance between the viewer and the upsetting revelation that effects the turn. My one quarrel is the facile attempt by voice over at pathos in the last scene, but this brief coda does not detract from the power of the main sequence.

Secretary (2002)

A job seeker falls in love with her sadomasochistic lawyer/boss.

[7/10 · 19 April 2008]

The first two thirds of this film are wonderful with its cynical view of empty suburban existence and courtship/seduction rituals, plus its satire on job hunting and male dominance in the workplace. Maggie Gyllenhaal as the secretary, Lee Holloway, has the right dippy admixture of canniness and insouciance to bring off her role. James Spader, the attorney, E. Edward Grey, is less commanding as the bizarre, tortured attorney; but his is an imperfectly written part: Grey doesn't seem really to do any of the activities a lawyer would have to in order to keep in business. However, satire notwithstanding, one willingly forgoes demands for realism because the quirky, sadistic alliance makes a more fulfilling and resoundingly interesting life the empty marriages and households secretary Holloway dispiritedly rejects. The problem comes when the film attempts to transform this alliance into a permanent one. The conclusion suggests that a marriage based on a common interest in S & M is just like a regular old sentimental marriage, only the couple has kinky sex. This conclusion betrays the premise that made the first two thirds of _Secretary_ satisfying and renders the film shallower and less convincing than it promised to be.

Babel (I) (2006)

Four apparently separate stories are interlocked by a shooting.

[8/10 · 19 August 2007]

The four at first distinct narrative lines in _Babel_ veer toward tragedy: the Morroccan family that acquires a rifle, whose children start it all; the traveling American couple (well played by Pitt and Blanchett) with a troubled marriage accidentally caught up in it; the nanny back in San Diego guarding the couple's two children; and the Asian (Korean?) daughter and father whose link to the first three plots is the most tangential. Only the first of the four strains delivers on the film's tragic, ironic sensibility and delivers the end toward which events have been building. The second dilemma is rather improbably saved at the last moment and off camera; in fact, the moving first story shows how effective a non-Hollywood resolution might have been. The third offers a more plausible and qualified resolution; the last feels incompletely worked through. All these stories, running simultaneously and deftly cut off at points of high dramatic tension, are in their own ways affecting, but the film is uneven and too long by about twenty minutes. Its modernist manner seems not wholly germane to the conception but still entertains.

The Brasher Doubloon (1947)

Marlowe (George Montgomery) is hired to recover a rare coin. His investigations reveal several murders and unearth secrets of a wealthy Pasadena household.

[6/10 · 17 July 2007]

_The Brasher Doubloon_ is clearly second tier, with at least one scene in Marlowe's office copied directly (and painfully directly) from _The Maltese Falcon._ If the characters are stereotypes and Montgomery's voice over shy-making in its adolescent appreciation of Merle Davis's beauty, the pacing and plot movement are still satisfactorily brisk. Florence Bates is perfect as the crusty, port-sodden Elizabeth Bright Murdock, and the night club goons look just right. It's not a masterpiece but is a diverting hour and a half. The final revelation is ingeniously presented as it involves a film-within-the-film and the way in which this key piece of evidence for the story came into being is more concretely explained in the movie than in Chandler's original, the one way in which the motion picture is superior to the published novel.