NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL
#429
every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with anti-alphabetical cheats)
It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
It Rains on Our Love (1946)
It Should Happen to You (1954)
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
Ulysses (1967)
It Happened Tomorrow (1944)
Sylvia can predict the future, or pretends to, as a circus sideshow performer. Larry sees the future too, and he’s not pretending; he’s a reporter who somehow has access to tomorrow’s newspaper today. This leads to wackiness & trouble, but not to an enjoyable movie — and this is that movie. Dick Powell (sigh, in a bad way) and Linda Darnell (sigh, in a good way) star.
I am a fan of time travel novels and movies, and this is genre-adjacent, but Powell is smugly insufferable, and everything is as slight as a whisper in the wind.
Verdict: NO.
♦ ♦ ♦
It Rains on Our Love (1946)
This is early Ingmar Bergman, only his second feature, and I’d never heard of it so perhaps it’s considered “minor,” but I liked it oodles.
Two lonely strangers, each with a secret past and empty pockets, meet by chance at a train station, and boink the night away. It’s a casual encounter, but David & Maggi are still awkwardly together the next morning, the next week, the next month.
They’re poor, so their travels show Sweden from the underside, and we tag along, meeting a scamming landlord, and observing the self-fulfilling prejudice aimed at them for being “lower class,” and the horrid but ordinary cruelty of police, other authorities, and of course, the Catholic Church.
Amusingly, the story is introduced and occasionally narrated by a completely ordinary white guy wearing a suit and carrying an umbrella. He knows all about the main characters, but interacts with them only very briefly, late in the story. Perhaps he’s God, or just an inside joke from the writer-director.
The story is bleak but with whimsical touches, and even a “minor Bergman” is better than an average movie. I watched it twice.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
It Should Happen to You (1954)
Gladys Glover (Judy Holliday) is a model in New York City, who’s been fired for gaining an inch in the wrong place. With no prospects for a new job, her bright idea is to rent a billboard downtown, with just her name on it: Gladys Glover.
“The whole reason I came to New York in the first place was to make a name for myself.”
Gladys is not, however, a singer, a dancer, an actress. She has no product she’s selling, and nothing going on that could plausibly make her famous, except that billboard. And it works. The sign makes the whole city curious, then the whole country, and soon Gladys has all the fame she wanted and more, but her intermittent boyfriend (Jack Lemmon) doesn’t approve.
This was Lemmon’s first film role, after years of television work, and he’s already the everyman with an bottomless well of common sense. Nobody could outshine Ms Holliday, though. She makes Gladys ditzy and dizzy, but every time you wonder whether she’s mentally challenged, Holliday makes it clear she’s sharp as a spork.
All this makes for a fun, featherweight movie with laughs. Director George Cukor wants it to be a morality play, and it is — tsk tsk, you shouldn’t want to be famous, just for fame’s sake, which is good advice, but c’mon, damned near everyone In America wants to be famous. It’s like trying to talk Americans out of being American.
Gladys wanted fame, and found a way to become famous, but for all her success the movie should give her a little credit instead of a lecture.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
It’s 1880, and Sir Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) is a Scottish scientist who stumbles upon a hundred-year old clue from a long-dead explorer of caves and tunnels leading down, down, and further down. Following these clues, he embarks on a journey to the center of the earth!
When I was 8, and 10, and 12, I watched this whenever it was on TV, and it fascinated me every time. There’s a navigable ocean, and edible mushrooms taller than a man’s head, and there’s bright, vivid color even miles underground, because there’s a form of algae with properties of luminescence.
On an adult rewatch, the movie is hokey, cheesy, and only tangentially related to Jules Verne’s book, but I’ll admit, my inner 8-year-old still enjoyed it.
Virtually all of its visual grandeur is sets and matte paintings, which aren’t very convincing. The supersized reptiles are laughable. And Pat Boone co-stars, sings, and wears green plaid slacks on the expedition. But the cave sets are constructed well enough to impart a sense of claustrophobia, and Bernard Herrmann’s score brings its own sense of wonder, and Mason, usually a supporting actor, makes his stuffed-shirt character likable. As for the Boone songs, well, that’s why there’s a fast-forward button.
Co-stars Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker, Alan Napier, and Gertrude the Duck.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Ulysses (1967)
“And the head coach wants no sissies, so he reads to us from something called Ulysses.” That’s a line from Alan Sherman’s big hit, “Camp Granada,” and it’s almost everything I know about James Joyce and Ulysses.
The novel Ulysses is universally hailed as the ultimate achievement of English Lit, riffing lightly on Homer’s Odyssey but set in modern times. But it’s a stream of consciousness with no bridge, and I had no waders when I tried to read it in my 20s. Of its 700+ pages, I may have read a hundred, but then and now I couldn’t tell you what it’s about, so the notion of filming it seems impossible. Yet somehow, Joseph Strick and some other blokes did it, in the 1960s.
True to the book, the film has no story. It’s an avalanche of vignettes involving about a dozen Irish folks who have lots and lots of conversations. Some of their yakking is insipid, some hilarious, some profound, and none of it’s about the weather or local sports.
Mostly, the camera follows three Dubliners: a teacher and aspiring writer named Dedalus, a Jewish businessman named Leopold Bloom, and Molly, Bloom’s rarely-touched but always horny wife. These three are all lonely and frustrated, and have long inner dialogues presented as voiceovers, while they go about their day.
The novel wandered all over tarnation, but the film knows where it’s going. Even though nothing really happens, it’s always interesting, often thoughtful, and when it’s over you’ll still be thinking about it. Or at least, I am.
If you’re afraid (as I was) that something called Ulysses will be too highbrow, relax. The movie is smart, but it’s IQ 125, not 200, and there’s a palpable sense of humor built into all of it.
Verdict: YES.
11/23/2025
If you can’t find a movie I’ve mentioned, or you have a recommendation, please drop me a note.
Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.
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