Written and directed by Bill Forsyth, Housekeeping brings the low-key folksy charm of Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero to an American setting, in the tiny town of Fingerbone, Idaho.

Ruth and Lucille are sisters, little kids, whose mother drops them off at their grandmother’s house, and then drives to a meadow, smokes a few cigarettes, and kills herself.

So the girls will be staying with Grandma, but while they’re excruciatingly well-behaved, they’re still too much for her to handle, so Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti) comes to tend the kiddies.

Sylvie is a touch eccentric, and doesn’t much care whether anyone approves or doesn’t. She takes a nap on a park bench, explores the site of a locally-legendary train wreck, and barely shrugs when the girls skip school. It’s the 1950s, so the townsfolk are aghast at her flighty, free-spirited ways, and wonder if she’s fit to raise children.

She’s not what you’re expecting — one of the bubbly but wise eccentrics so often seen in the movies. Sometimes dark, never quite a responsible adult, she yearns to wander, but unlike most of the yearners she’s actually done some wandering.

Housekeeping is less comedic than Forsyth’s other well-known films, but no less thoughtful. Without ever quite bringing it up, it questions the meaning of conformity, and the allure but also the dangers of thinking for yourself. Does it without being pretentious or preachy, too.

It’s been a long time (too long) since I’ve seen Local Hero, and I’ll watch it again to be sure, but today I’d say this is Forsyth’s best.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Housing Problems (1935)

In England 90 years ago, people were crammed into shoddily-built and cramped apartments, one room for each family, with running water only from a spigot outside. That’s what this 20-minute documentary is about — life in the slums in the 1930s.

It hits hard, with a British accent, and as journalism it’s better than the present-day standard.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

How a Mosquito Operates (1912)

Oh, this is unsettling — a 6-minute cartoon showing a mosquito feeding on a man who’s trying to sleep. The skeeter wears a hat, but other than that it’s drawn realistically. Stubborn and thirsty, it wants to suck blood, when all the dude wants to do is catch some ZZZs.

Early-era but excellent animation by Winsor McCay, who drew the comic strip Little Nemo, and made the animated short Gertie the Dinosaur. The copy I watched was accompanied by a perfect musical score, too.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

You’ve heard of this movie, whether you’ve seen it or not. It won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Direction for John Ford.

Dad is the foreman at a Welsh coal mine. He rules the family and the mine, but smiles huge and friendly as he takes his pittance of pay. All the town’s working men sing a hearty tune as they walk home from the sooty mines, and also sing at weddings, during and after church, and pretty much constantly through the opening scenes of hard-working hard-drinking hard-churching Welshness.

After 20 minutes or so, the quaint joviality fades, the story begins, and the movie gets better. The workers quit their dang singing (for a while) when the mine owner announces wage reductions. There’s talk of forming a union, which the father/foreman dismisses as socialism. In a few great dialogue moments, sons and strikers argue against the father/foreman, and against the church that (of course) opposes the union.

12-year-old Roddy McDowall plays a sickly boy who miraculously walks again when he’s encouraged by the pastor. My eyes rolled.

Director Ford was so impressed by McDowall’s performance (and the kid is good) that he cancelled plans to have a different actor play the character as an adult. So the boy grows up, but there’s no visible change in his appearance, which is strange and distracting (but again, the kid is good).

We get scenes of religious hypocrisy, some called out and others simply accepted. There’s a cartoonishly pricky schoolteacher who gets what he deserves. The mine owner, though, continues to be revered and respected even after the strike and follow-up layoffs.

Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, and Donald Crisp star. The film is effective, moving, and you’ll cry at the end, but it’s an antique. The family, the church, and most of the characters are so 1800s obedient it made some of this difficult to stomach.

There’s also more singing townsfolk (“Welsh Singers as themselves”) than any town should endure without violence.

Verdict: YES, but in winning Best Picture, this beat Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon, which is as nutty as Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees.

♦ ♦ ♦

How High is Up? (1940)

17 minutes of Larry, Curly, and Moe as odd jobs men, or odd men looking for jobs. They float down a street on a mattress, patch a tire with salami, and make hot rivets on the 97th floor. Smiles all the way plus a few laughs.

The Stooges are basic, but they do what they do better than you remember.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Haiti got flattened by an earthquake in 2010. This is a documentary about two American men who heard about it on NPR, and wanted to help. One of them, a retired construction worker, went to Haiti to build a school. The other, a documentary filmmaker, went to make a movie about the school being built.

The moviemaker thinks it’ll be a positive, uplifting story, but the locals all want a piece of the construction funding, more than any of them really want a school. The two Americans slowly learn that human nature is sucky everywhere, including Haiti.

This is not a positive, uplifting story, but it makes for a headshaking good movie. Factual, frustrating, occasionally funny, and always all fucked up, like life.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

How the West Was Won (1962)

This opens with a bombastic choral overture, signaling that the movie’s going to be BIG. It’s extremely widescreen, from the Erie Canal to the Mexican border to the Pacific Ocean. It was shot by four cinematographers, including William H Daniels and Charles Lang Jr, and three directors, John Ford, George Marshall, and Henry Hathaway.

James Stewart plays a mountain man with a cold-blooded killing streak, and Henry Fonda wears a fake mustache the size of a ball park pretzel, but they share no scenes. Instead of a story, the movie is a bunch of vignettes, some sorta interesting, while others feel like a ‘movie’ you were forced to watch in 7th grade Social Studies class.

The all-star cast includes Carroll Baker, Lee J Cobb, Carolyn Jones, Karl Malden, Gregory Peck, George Peppard, Robert Preston, Debbie Reynolds, Eli Wallach, John Wayne, and Richard Widmark, with smaller roles for Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Raymond Massey, Agnes Moorehead, Harry Morgan, Thelma Ritter, and Russ Tamblyn. The starchy, patriotic narration is read by Spencer Tracy.

There are too many characters for any of these actors to be more than stereotypes, and for such a BIG BIG movie, the greenscreen projection is flamboyantly fake in the action scenes.

I didn’t make it to the end, but 3/4 of the movie has an all-white cast, except for war-painted natives who probably weren’t natives.

Original songs by Alfred Newman, Sammy Cahn, and Johnny Mercer. Or maybe not so original. The awful dirge at intermission is a Christmas carol with patriotic non-Christmas lyrics.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

… and out of alphabetical order …

A planet much like ours and capable of supporting life has been discovered, and it’s right in the neighborhood, visible in the sky without even a telescope. How this ‘second Earth’ had never been noticed is not explained, or I missed it, but all sci-fi requires some suspension of disbelief.

Just as the planet is discovered, a smart high school kid who’s headed for MIT gets drunk, gets in a wreck that kills someone, and gets sent to prison. Four years later she’s released, but her life’s been ruined and MIT hasn’t waited. She gets a job as janitor at her old high school.

That’s enough set-up, I think.

This isn’t really sci-fi, so much as a psychological study of its principal characters, and it’s an enjoyable indy effort. The star, Brit Marling, co-wrote and produced this with the director, Mike Cahill, who also did the cinematography and editing. What they’ve made is original enough that I didn’t know where it was headed.

That said, the music is violin- and choir-laden and tedious, the cinematography is bland and shakily hand-held, and the script is too low-key about major plot elements — turn away for two seconds, you’ll be lost if it’s the wrong two seconds.

And I’ll admit, the deep emotional lives of 20-year-olds don’t fascinate me like they did when I was 20.

But never once did I consider clicking it off, and when I watched the film a second time to catch the plot points I’d missed the first time ’round, it got better.

Verdict: YES.

12/11/2024

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022)
How to Commit Marriage (1969)
How to Frame a Figg (1971)
How to Make a Monster (1958)
How to Make a Monster (2001)
… plus schlock, shorts, and
movies out of alphabetical order…

Neverending Film Festival
← PREVIOUS           NEXT →

itsdougholland.com
← PREVIOUS           NEXT →