NEVERENDING FILM FESTIVAL #390

every movie ever made, in alphabetical order
(we’re in the I’s, with random anti-alphabetical cheats)

if…. (1968)

In a British boarding school the size of a castle, hundreds of boys buzz about, endlessly inspected and corrected by elder students called ‘whips’, and taking orders from teachers and administrators who’ve mastered life’s emptiest platitudes.

This is a Christian academy, full of prayers and hymns and sermons, and also a military school, with simulated war games involving even the youngest of the boys, but the school’s main curriculum is conformity. The slightest whisper of individuality is grounds for punishment, students are allowed no privacy, and a few of the teachers are pervs.

As the new school year begins, here comes Mick (introducing Malcolm McDowell), who brings tenuous rebellion into this swirl of cruelty and anxiety. “When do we live?” he asks. “That’s what I want to know.”

This is a fine entry in the coming-of-age-in-a-boarding-house genre, but also something different. Director Lindsay Anderson filmed it at his alma mater, presumably intended as a hate letter to the place, and also an unkind allegory for all of Western Civilization.

The film switches repeatedly from color to black-and-white and back to color. At first I thought the switches signified flashbacks in time, or possibly flashforwards of imagination, but it’s random. The real reason for the switch, I think, is to keep you uncertain about what you’re seeing. The movie ended an hour ago, and I’m still unsure, but it’s sure something special.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

If I Had a Million (1932)

A rich old bastard is close to death, his doctors tell him, but he’s healthy enough to be up and about and shouting at people like rich bastards do. He won’t let himself die because there’s nobody he’d want to leave his fortune to, so he decides to give it away, a million bucks at a time, to people selected at random from the phone book.

We see these giveaways in a series of vignettes, with benefactors including a worker who quits his job in a joyous rampage, a forger who finds it difficult to cash an honest check, a soldier who simply doesn’t believe the windfall is for real and endorses his check away for ten bucks credit at a diner, etc.

None of the segments are bad, most are quite good, and a few are spectacular: a hooker-turned-millionaire rents a swanky hotel room, stashes the bed’s second pillow in a closet, and sleeps alone. A lady finds her way out of a nearly unlivable but probably accurate pre-Social Security home for the elderly.

The all-star cast includes Mary Boland, Gary Cooper, WC Fields, Charles Laughton, George Raft, May Robson, Charlie Ruggles, and Alison Skipworth. 17 writers are credited, including Ernst Lubitsch and Joseph L Mankiewitz. Seven directors each turned in a segment or two.

Fields & Skipworth’s episode is jammed with comic but very real auto wrecks, amusing as heck but out of place in what’s otherwise a mostly serious movie.

Sudden riches are a fantasy as old as money, with almost universal appeal if the story’s told well. This one tells it quite well.

Verdict: YES, and it would be a BIG YES without WC Fields and all the car wrecks.

♦ ♦ ♦

If I Had My Way (1940)

Bing Crosby and a young girl with no last name, just Gloria Jean, star in this nonsensical fluff. Bing is a master bridge-builder, responsible for San Francisco’s Bay and Golden Gate Bridges, and he’s also a song-and-dance man. And the kid sings, too, with a voice that’s painfully opera-esque.

Gloria Jean’s father promptly falls off a bridge and splatters, so Uncle Bing delivers her to be raised by relatives in New York, which leads to drama with a scoundrelly uncle and more opportunities to burst into so-so song.

There’s blackface, and never another word about building bridges. The kid’s cute, and went on to a featured role in Jerry Lewis’s Ladies Man, but…

No, why don’t you don’t.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦

Dear Albania (2015)

Eliza Dushku is an American actress you might remember from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Arnie Schwarzenegger’s True Lies. She’s of Albanian heritage on her father’s side, so she takes a vacation to Albania and brings a camera crew, for this hour-long documentary.

All across Albania, there are castles and kindly shopkeepers and Albanian politicians and opera singers and distant Dushku relatives for Eliza to hobnob with. Here’s the Albanian Riviera, but we can’t stay more than a minute, sorry, because there are ruins to rush through, before Eliza meets a stray dog, and a guy strumming a guitar, and Eliza goes to a cafe, and a nightclub, and here’s an extended look at Eliza’s family tree.

The film detours to Kosovo and Macedonia and Montenegro, and you’ll never guess what’s in all these places — Albanian celebrities and/or shopkeepers and/or Dushkus who want to chat with Eliza.

Her brother Nate directs, and ensures that no shot in the film lasts more than four seconds. You’ll be fascinated, if you’re obsessively Albanian or part of the Dushku family tree.

Verdict: NO.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Nutty Professor (1963)

Here’s Jerry Lewis in his two most unlikable roles — first his famous spazzy guy shtick, and then an arrogant man who believes he’s brilliant.

Professor Spazzy Guy is bullied by a college student in his class, but instead of having the student expelled he decides to remake himself as more of a manly man. The gym is too much work (agreed!) so his self-recreation is via chemistry, making this a Jekyll & Hyde without the murders.

Lewis’s out-of-control alter ego is rude to everyone and loves only himself. It’s gutsy of Lewis to play a character so thoroughly insufferable — essentially himself, one suspects — but it’s not particularly funny, and often the opposite of that. The film offers half a dozen chuckles, but far more cringes.

Verdict: NO.

6/20/2025

Logo illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

Neverending Film Festival

itsdougholland.com
← PREVIOUS           NEXT →