It’s a simple story, this clash between a small rural community living close to nature and a corporation that wants to construct a site for tourist “glamping,” but it’s symbolic of something larger, and beautifully told. The cinematography is gorgeous from the very beginning, with those shots upwards into the trees, and Hamaguchi takes his time to let us feel the quiet rhythms of this place before getting to the conflict.

What becomes apparent during a public meeting the company…

It’s ironic that this film was made in 1939, because it occurred to me that it is to Native Americans as Gone with the Wind is to African-Americans; both were made in that year by talented filmmakers; both told dramatic stories with high production value; both were racist and amplified the whitewashing of the original sins of America, genocide in the former case, slavery in the latter. The parallels run deeper in the gentlemen/scoundrels (John Wayne and Clark Gable) and…

“Man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurting everybody in the world, ‘cause then he’s not just breaking one law but all laws. Law’s a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity.”

It’s pretty special that in a…

“The camaraderie we five shared was, I don’t know…it was like the smell of bread.”
“I’m your cake. It’s better!”

They Were Five, or in the French title, The Beautiful Team, has a group of five down-on-their luck friends win a share of the lottery, enabling them to open up a guinguette, which is a riverside open-air restaurant. The five have an easy camaraderie with one another, though they were also a little annoying early on, expecting their landlord to…

There are some truly compelling behind the scenes aspects to this crime drama, which was made by people who had already been blacklisted, and ended up being John Garfield’s final film. On top of that, you have James Wong Howe and Shelley Winters on the project, both of them always plusses, and in the same year Winters was nominated for an Oscar for A Place in the Sun. It’s a tight story told in just 78 minutes, one that’s especially…

What a wild ride Frank Borzage takes us on with this film! It’s got something for everyone and a fantastic cast as well, but it’s best you go into it completely cold, so I’d advise against reading this review if you haven’t seen it but plan to.

On the romance front, we get an incredibly sweet meet-cute between Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer. Arthur is wonderful here, so radiant in her happiness with Boyer, and so tortured when her creepy…