NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#383
I Live in Fear (1953)
I Touch a Red Button (2011)
I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
O Dreamland (1953)
Threads (1984)
every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with random anti-alphabetical cheats)
I Live in Fear (1953)
a/k/a Record of a Living Being
Akira Kurosawa made classic samurai and war movies, but this one’s something different, smaller and more enormous.
A family petitions the court to have Nakajima, their father, declared mentally incompetent, because he fears nuclear warfare. He fears it so much he’s decided to move the whole family to Brazil, after reading research that suggests wind patterns would bring a better chance for surviving WWIII there.
“Madness — inventing such a thing!”
It’s Japan, only a few years after the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so is he delusional, or simply planning ahead? The delusion, seems to me, is all of us taking the everpresent threat of annihilation for granted.
Nakajima pleads with his family to come with him to South America; they refuse. Being old and wealthy and old-school Japanese, he’s accustomed to having his orders followed, not questioned. But his children aren’t particularly worried about nuclear war, and their own lives are more important to them than their father’s wishes. Which is as it should be, but still sad.
The movie is interesting and intelligent, and I’m definitely recommending it, but there’s a big problem.
Never thought I’d say this about Toshiro frickin’ Mifune, but he’s quite bad as Nakajima, the worrier. Mifune was in his mid-30s, under old man makeup, and kudos to the make-up crew — I wasn’t even aware it was him until reading the credits afterward. But he’s constantly wearing an exaggerated ‘cranky old man’ sneer that looks like a parody of a cranky old man, and makes the character’s justifiable fears look loony.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
I Touch a Red Button (2011)
This is a music video made by David Lynch, for a listenable song by the band Interpol.
The visuals are low-tech animation, in keeping with the style of Lynch’s earliest film work, and extra movement is provided by shaky camerawork. It shows a rather deformed man in black, chasing after and repeatedly touching a red button, before being inundated with a flood of red buttons in an otherwise balck-and-white landscape.
I wasn’t able to find a thematic connection between the visuals and the song — “All that I fear / Don’t turn away / And leave me to plead in this hole of a place…” — but the animation and music are enough to hold your attention for six minutes.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
I Was a Male War Bride (1949)
Old comedies of this era are a favorite of mine when they’re done right, and this one’s done right. Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan are both reliable stars, so how have I never seen this before? Maybe the weird title put me off?
I Was a Male War Bride is a fine old-style romance, jammed with witty repartee between two characters who loathe each other but are, of course, destined to fall in love.
Grant is a tiny bit brusquer than you’d expect, Sheridan cool as ice water. They’re both military officers overseas during World War II, ordered to work together on a not-particularly important assignment, despite a shared past that’s never explained but ensures that they’re sparring from the film’s first lines of dialogue. It’s delightful dialogue, and the movie’s enjoyable all the way through.
Directed by Howard Hawks, and written by Charles Lederer (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, His Girl Friday), Leonard Spigelgass (Gypsy, Silk Stockings), and Hagar Wilde (Bringing Up Baby, Carefree with Astaire & Rogers), this would make a fine double feature with any of those classics.
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
O Dreamland (1953)
Welcome to Dreamland, an English amusement park where we gawk at people gawking at caged animals, and playing games of chance with no real chance. Step right up and see torture and executions enacted by animatronics! Hear the worst-ever rendition of “I Believe”!
This is only 13 minutes, and it’s from Lindsay Anderson (If…, This Sporting Life), but it feels almost John Waters-level grotesque, even though it’s only ordinary people being ordinary. What a ride!
Verdict: YES.
♦ ♦ ♦
Threads (1984)
In the 1980s, there was a flurry of ominous TV movies about the threat and realities of nuclear war — The Day After, Testament, Special Bulletin, etc. This might be the best, and holy cripes it’s a nightmare.
This is how it’ll go down when the world blows up — a few days of breaking news bulletins on TV, same as always happens when there’s an “international incident,” only what if the diplomats don’t save the day, the leaders don’t listen to reason?
Threads was made for television by the BBC, and much of its strength comes from being a TV show. In its first twenty minutes, it looks like any ordinary Brit drawing room drama, with TV and radio reports as familiar background noise for anyone who has a TV set. Those mundane ingredients add to an overwhelming gutpunch when things stop being mundane, and you’re given a glimpse of the future you’d never want to see.
“If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room, move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address, and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets, or blankets. If, however, you have had a body in the house for more than five days, and if it is safe to go outside, then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench or cover it with earth, and mark the spot of the burial.”
Threads is not entertainment, and it’s too much a horror to call it a horror movie. It’s a hardcore reminder that beyond our blasé day-to-day decisions — what brand of tuna to buy and who to marry — the bigger matters are beyond pretending we’re in charge. We’re at the mercy of people we’ll never meet, who believe they’re our betters when they’re actually our worsers, but they’re in charge.
Written by Barry Hines, who wrote Ken Loach’s Looks and Smiles, and the novel Kes (1969) was based on. Directed by Mick Jackson, who later went Hollywood and made The Bodyguard and Temple Grandin.
Verdict: BIG YES.
Seems I’m on an end-of-the-world kick, with The Dead Zone a few days ago and I Live in Fear and Threads today. It’s not an intentional choice, but I am worried, and we all ought to be. An abject madman is in the White House, and the odds of the end are going up.
6/2/2025
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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