Greystoke, and a few more films

NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#235  [archive]
DEC. 12, 2023

Crack-Up (1946)
Streaming free

Pat O'Brien is an art expert, lecturing at a museum, who thinks art is art if you like it, and if you don't that's OK too. Then he shows the crowd a Piccaso-esque painting, for laughs, and everyone laughs. "I'm not condemning modern painting. I just think this is nonsense. If you like it, fine. I don't."

But we only see the lecture in a flashback. Later or earlier, he's arrested for making a ruckus at the museum, after a train wreck, which he vividly remembers but which didn't happen.

It's an intriguing mystery that pulled me along for about an hour. I wanted to like it, especially since it's based on a short story by Fredric Brown, and I love me some Freddy Brown, but… 

Eventually it gets so convoluted, with cross and double-cross, noises in the dark, art forgeries and forgeries of forgeries, and outsmarting the cops at every turn, that I just couldn't keep my disbelief in suspense any longer.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940)
Streaming free

Paul Ehrlich was a smart guy, who figured out staining techniques for microscopic slides, that made it possible to identify different kinds of cells and diseases. He led the team that effectively cured syphilis, and won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research into immunology. He also won perhaps the highest honor, a Hollywood biopic.

I came in knowing next to nothing of Doc Ehrlich or his research, and the movie's version is probably polished up as the movies tend to do. In our new dark ages, though, we need some hero-worship for scientists, and Ehrlich's eureka moments of discovery here gave me goose bumps.

Edward G. Robinson plays the doctor, unrecognizable behind a fake beard, and using none of the familiar mannerisms or even the voice you know from his gangster and cop roles. Ruth Gordon plays his wife, and plays a piano in several scenes, which reminds me I need to see Harold and Maude again.

Overall, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet is quite well-written and made, and definitely recommended by me.

It was a delicate project for the studio — Ehrlich was German and Jewish, and the movie was made as the world worried about early reports of Hitler's murderous ways. Ehrlich's Jewishness is never mentioned, and Warner Bros needed special permission from the Hays Office to have the word 'syphilis' in the script.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Greystoke:
The Legend of Tarzan,
Lord of the Apes (1984)

You can tell this flick is classy right from the start, cuz it opens with an overture. Can't remember a movie doing that since Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Then comes half an hour of wordless simian grunts. This is not your granddaddy's Tarzan movie, and that's a good thing.

It's a serious character study of this fictional man, Tarzan (Christopher Lambert) — lost in the jungles of Africa as a baby, adopted by apes, becoming one of them and eventually their leader. As an adult he's found and 'rescued' by an explorer named D'Arnot (Ian Holm), who pieces together the evidence to conclude that this savage white apeman is actually heir to a famed Scottish estate. D'Arnot teaches Tarzan to speak English, and brings him to Scotland, but he remains a primate at heart, even among the tuxedo crowd.

Having never read Edgar Rice Burroughs, I can't say whether this is more true to his books or less than other adaptations, but it sure feels smarter, and it dispenses with the Johnny Weismuller movies' overt racism.

It was filmed on location in Africa and Scotland, and you will believe a man swings from vines and laughs with apes. Lambert is remarkable, Ralph Richardson sparkles, and the apes (by Rick Baker) are more realistic than in Planet of the Apes.

The movie makes some strange mistakes, though.

Why are we given a five-minute scene with D'Arnot teaching Tarzan to shave, when the full-grown Tarzan was already clean-shaven?

Also, no-one ever calls him Tarzan — those two syllables are not uttered at any point here.

In her first film role, Andie MacDowell plays Jane, and in a bizarre indignity, the moviemakers decided that her slight Southern accent was a distraction, so they had every line of her dialogue dubbed. It's simply strange to see MacDowell but hear Glenn Close's voice.

They dubbed Lambert, too, but only by adding animal roars when he's angry. The actor's French accent is left intact, which makes lots less sense than MacDowell's drawling lilt.

And jeez, I yearned to see Tarzan kick the hell out of at least a few people at the Scottish mansion — there are two characters who certainly deserve violence, but Tarzan was in his trying-to-be-civilized phase, so all he really does is glower and growl.

It's a damned good movie, though. Greystoke is thoroughly engrossing, and somehow never seems ridiculous even when Tarzan is bonding with his simian adoptive parents, or leaping like Baryshnikov from trees and roofs.

Verdict: YES.

12/12/2023   

• • • Coming attractions • • •

Hugo (2011)
The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)
The Lawyer (1970)
Not of This Earth (1957)
The Saint in New York (1938)
Same Kind of Different as Me (2017)
The Shooting (1966)
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)
The Train (1964)
Welcome to New Orleans (2006)
Winter Soldier (1972)

... plus occasional 
schlock and surprises 

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you're missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:

Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Films for Action • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • WatchDocumentaries • or your local library. 

Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.

— — —

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Reviews are spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-warned. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

 

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