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I appreciate Agnes Varda's Documenteur more in theory than in practice.

Are you holding up?
No.

A serious film about a divorced mother teetering on the edge of poverty and emotional collapse while she works to find housing and take care of her young son sounds right up my alley. The problem is that it never coheres into anything more than gestures toward depth and importance, as if (as with Mur Murs) Varda expects the viewer to fill in the gaps, and transform the film into the profound experience we're told it must be.

The images, often, are striking, particularly the rabbit-warren streets of the neighborhood in which Emilie (Sabine Mamou) and her son (Varda's son Mathieu Demy as Martin) temporarily make a home, the beachfront house in which she works, and the diner in which mother and son alight one exhausted evening.* But it all feels a bit lazy and un-assembled, tossed together during the editing process on the assumption that the audience will find the contrast between the grimy streets of Venice and the beach profound, and that the silent scenes of sex and nudity will be taken as meaningful simply because they're there.

All of my frustration, however, briefly vanished when the tall blonde guy (credited only as "Homme au lit d'eau") showed up with his white wine. He looked massively familiar and, when I finally looked him up, my brain exploded in the best way possible: it's Charles Southwood! He of a handful of spaghetti westerns, in which he is uniformly wonderful and cheerfully weird! He who spent about five years in Europe having fun making movies, and then came back to the states and chilled in private (and made cigarettes)! Somehow, Varda found him and, eight years after his last film, stuck him in this. So random! So wonderful! I want to know everything.

*The desk with a view of the beach reminded me a ton of Tales of Ordinary Madness, another LA film by a foreigner (in this case Marco Ferreri) made in 1981. That movie is a huge mess but, for me, it uses the proximity of the beach and the contrast it provides far more effectively than Documenteur does.

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

As far as Esther Williams vehicles go, Thrill of a Romance is a bit of a damp squib. She hardly swims at all (GASP), and an enormous percentage of the film is dedicated not to Williams, the pool, and/or her character's romance, but rather to Lauritz Melchior, a Danish opera singer making his film debut. Playing a sort of singing, less bumbling S. Z. Sakall character, Melchior belts out more than half a dozen songs, and dispenses romantic advice in his spare time.

Melchior is charming and unexpectedly comfortable on screen, rendering his opera singer character Nils Knudsen far more appealing than he at first appears. Knudsen is a fairy godfather for the film's star-crossed pair (Williams as the newly married Cynthia Glenn, and Van Johnson as modest war hero Major Thomas Milvaine), bringing them together every time they threaten to fall apart and urging them both to seize the proverbial day — something which conflicts rather enormously with the fact that Glenn has a husband, and this is the Code era. Knudsen's reminiscing about his youth, in which, he says, he fell in love many times, is surprising and moving. There's nothing leering about his story, just joy at having had the privilege of having felt wonderful emotions so many times.

But, regardless of how delightful Melchior and his character become, everyone spends so much time waiting for him to finish singing — and, as also happens regularly in the film, waiting for Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra to finish their numbers — that Williams and Johnson often feels as if they're inconveniences for director Richard Thorpe, given how much of his film he's been told to devote to song.

When Milvaine and Cynthia are around, they're about what you'd expect, with Milvaine ponderously wholesome and sincere, and Cynthia doing her best not to fall in love, despite the fact that her creepozoid husband (played by Carleton G. Young, whose short film career is a mercy to us all) abandoned her for a business trip just hours after their wedding.

So, there's not much to the movie apart from the songs. But, even when her character is bland and/or sidelined, I will always love watching Esther Williams and the physical confidence that she was simply unable to hide.* The way she moves and carries herself is quietly thrilling, and her casual, unflagging ease in her own skin is nearly irresistible.** And such is the case here — though she's given precious little to do, Williams still shines in the simple act of walking through a room, or depicting the easy way, unselfconscious way Cynthia settles into a warm friendship with a man she likes.

*I know I'm kinda on an island with my Esther fascination, but I'm ok with that. Y'all are missing out, though.

**I tend to assume Williams is so striking because she was an athlete, and thus both intensely conscious of and reliant upon her body, but the only other other actor I can think of who is in her league is in of presence is Claudette Colbert who, as far as I know, was never into sports.

Starring a radiant, twenty-one-year-old Silvia Pinal in drag, Yo Soy Muy Macho is terribly lightweight and immensely charming. Everything about it is completely predictable, but Pinal's energy and the ferocity of her character's moments of competitive masculinity* are so irresistible that nothing else matters.

Pinal plays María Aguirre, a responsible, wealthy young woman who constantly covers for her party boy/military pilot brother, Mario — including when he's, oops, been arrested again, just when he's called to fly supplies to a jungle camp. Luckily, María is just as good a pilot as her brother, so she throws on his jaunty cap and leather jacket and does the job, expecting to turn around and fly right home. The problem, however, is that, wouldn't you know it, Mario is supposed to stay at the camp and become their regular pilot, at least for the foreseeable future. As a result, María finds herself (and her boobs) forced to navigate an all male world, complete with hurdles like sleeping arrangements and romance and whatnot.

As with nearly any film in the "woman-plays-man" genre, Yo Soy Muy Macho requires a considerable suspension of disbelief, given that María's chest isn't ever bound, and the coat she insists upon wearing despite the sweltering heat does little to obscure the presence of breasts. But whatever, man — Pinal makes a gorgeous soft butch lesbian/femme boy, and the way she dives into every aspect of the role immediately makes us María's allies.

Another commonality among films in this genre is their unavoidable queerness, something this one engages with enthusiastically through the romance between Mario and Mercedes (Gina Romand), the camp engineer's sexy daughter. We're presumably supposed to believe (María as) Mario's flirtation with Mercedes occurs only to irritate the camp's uptight, macho capitán (Miguel Torruco, with his shirt almost never buttoned, as Pablo Rivera), but the delight with which (María as) Mario plays the role of almost-leering, suave suitor is such that it is easy to embrace the lesbian overtones of the relationship.

Really, though the endgame all along is obviously María and Capitán Rivera (for whom she falls the moment he mentions his willingness to kill for love), the most fun is to be had from watching Mario and Mercedes. The former's modern, sensitive brand of machismo is gleefully ridiculous, and the enthusiasm with which Mercedes responds is just as delightful as (María as) Mario's peacocking. And, to the credit of Torruco, the third leg of the love triangle does his part as well, sulking magnificently as he watches the tiny, younger man he had previously dismissed as weak and probably gay sweep the woman Mario thought was his off her feet.

That presumption that Mario is probably gay — based on his stature, voice, and mannerisms — is undeniably homophobic, but the way that homophobia affects Capitán Rivera is unexpected and kind of charming, if only through the lens of 1953. The younger man's own masculinity looks nothing like Rivera's sternly traditional one — but, based on Mercedes' reaction to it, it is not only welcomed but embraced by women of Mario's own generation. The result is that Rivera's masculinity is constantly threatened by Mario's presence and way of moving through the world, creating insecurity with which the capitán is entirely unfamiliar.

Later, after (María as) Mario kisses Rivera on the assumption he has ed out (Mario and the capitán have been drunkenly, adorably bonding) and Rivera goes into full gay panic, he is the only one who responds with the horror one would expect from such a homophobic environment. In fact, when Rivera tells the camp doctor what has happened, his response is not to recoil in shock, but simply to ask what Rivera did when Mario kissed him, leaving the door open to whatever Rivera chose to do.

When (María as) Mario flees the camp for good and Rivera is left alone, he slips into a deep depression, wrestling with the fact that he genuinely liked being kissed by a man, and assuming it means he will need to get gender confirmation surgery. It's a conclusion that is both comical and terribly sad, accidentally revealing the incredibly limited option before a man attracted to other men in 1950s Mexico — or, at least, a man whose sense of himself is so tightly bound to conventional masculinity that he cannot conceive of an M/M relationship.

Of course, none of this is supposed to matter because Mario was a girl all along. Indeed, the movie's unspoken conclusion is that Rivera's attraction to Mario is a confirmation of the strength of his masculinity — his man's body knew Mario was a woman even before his mind did. But getting to that point treads a whole lot of gloriously queer ground, and the fact that Rivera is calling desperately for Mario when he forces his way into the Aguirre home to find his beloved is just icing on the queer cake.

Thanks to Citog, whose review encouraged me to get to this!

Watched on YT with great autogenerated subs — if the dialogue is so simple and clear that even I can understand most of it without the subs, YT's AI isn't going to have any problem with it at all.

*I am very curious about whether or not Rita Pavone was familiar with this film, because her impish masculinity in the title role of Gian Burrasca's Diary feels a lot like Pinal's presence here. I'd argue that Pavone actually outdoes Pinal in the completeness of her commitment to her male character, but that makes sense given that Pinal's character here is a woman, not a fierce little boy.

Casually treated as a joke by friends who consider themselves more talented and relevant than he, drummer Johnny Cousin (aka Iago, played by Patrick McGoohan) is determined to create his own big break by shattering a marriage. In his mind, after Rex (aka Othello, played by Paul Harris) and his wife Delia (Marti Stevens playing Desdemona), a former jazz singer who retired when she married, break up, Delia will be free to Johnny's new band and carry him to the success he's always deserved.

The slight outsider status Johnny feels in his very soul makes him prickly and resentful, and his ferocious venality is so naked and remorseless that it make All Night Long hard to watch. And Johnny is such a complete villain — such a despicable character — that it is impossible to have any sympathy for him as he manipulates and lies and turns people he calls his friends into so much fuel for the fire of his dream. The last tenuous connection between Johnny and the audience is snapped when we see him with his wife: the dismissive way he treats her; the emotional violence with which he meets her every, hesitant gesture of .

Johnny is an unrepentant monster, abusive as a matter of course because he can be — and because some small part of him wants to be hated; wants to be despised. Transparently desperate for love and affection, he lives in an isolation of his own creation, and it is an isolation which is destroying him (just as he hopes that it will). He is the kind of man who will go to his grave miserable and alone, thinking, "I showed them!" as he wraps his pain around him like a luxurious shroud.

Johnny's final confession is uncomfortably, gracelessly on the nose ("I don't wanna be loved. ... Everybody loves everybody. Well, I don't, see? I don't even love Johnny.") and, when combined with his morbidly triumphant command that his wife "Walk out on me, like all the others did," confirms his fundamental inability to either see or live in the world. Like an emotionally stunted teenager, he wants everyone to do as he commands, but also delights in alienating people because the turning of their backs only confirms that no one ever liked him in the first place, thus allowing him to wallow in the self-pity that feeds him.

Or: in which a miserable, resentful man feels compelled to destroy all of the happiness he cannot have.

I sought this out because, when I was reading up on The Vampire Moth after watching it, a piece mentioned Ghost Man as a good double bill. Made two years earlier, it does indeed share DNA with The Vampire Moth: based on a novel in the same detective series (here, the detective is played by Seizaburō Kawazu), Ghost Man is also set a world of comodified beautiful women being menaced by a sinister figure who haunts and kills them. And, like the later film, Ghost Man, too, has a murky narrative, with twists that come out of nowhere and misdirections about just who the villain might be.

I would argue, however, that despite having a smaller body count, this earlier film is far, far darker than The Vampire Moth. Whereas in that film, the endangered women work as models in high fashion, here they are artist's models for hire who sit around a small, seedy office room in various stages of undress, waiting for clients to come buy them for a few hours. And here, where the line between sex work and modeling appears to be paper thin, the women are sold to virtually anyone who walks in the door. Though referrals are necessary, no checks are carried out and potential clients are allowed to manhandle the girls of their choice without comment or interference. Even when the women know men are dangerous, as the only source of income to families or even just themselves, they sometimes have no choice but to walk alone into the lion's den.

The Vampire Moth takes place among the elites, people with time and money to spare to attend high fashion shows; the models work for pay, but they are protected from the seedy world outside of their little haven. In Ghost Man, on the other hand, the threat of poverty is a constant presence, and one near-victim of the killer turns to exotic dancing, forced to exploit her own suffering in a stage show dramatizing her kidnapping in order to make ends meet. Trying to explain her life to a naïve reporter, she tells him that "the world is a cruel place" in which "what a single woman has to do to make a living is both thrilling and terrifying." (In the film, we see none of the former, and a whole lot of the latter.)

Surrounding these desperate women is a menacing, self-satisifed group of elite men who refer to themselves as the "Bizarro Enthusiasts Club." What, exactly, that means is never explained, but the stink of exploitation hangs over their constant, languid presence in the office from which the women are sold. These men are tourists, visiting the seedy, desperate underworld for entertainment and then returning to the safety and comfort of their money and status at the end of each night; their belief that this world cannot (should not) touch them is confirmed by their fury when a newspaper mentions their club in the context of the death of the models they have forced to become their companions.

Though the rest of Ghost Man cannot live up to the potential of its opening segments, it is nevertheless genuinely disturbing at times, and is highlighted by the great, alarming dance sequence that dramatizes the kidnapping and near-murder of the model-turned-exotic dancer mentioned above. For me, even with a villain who is constantly dressed like The Invisible Man, it's better than The Vampire Moth in its frank depiction of the lives of women and almost accidental seriousness.

As someone who is completely unfamiliar with slashers, I'm probably not the ideal audience for a movie like The Slumber Party Massacre, which plays with and/or undermines the conventions of that genre. That said, however, there were certainly things about it that I liked, which I suspect are not typically found in this sort of horror film. To wit:

1️⃣ As one might expect from screenwriter and Noted Lesbian Icon Rita Mae Brown, the film is blithely, winkingly queer, particularly with regard to Coach Jana and Pam, her lady handyman, and the killer's first victim, who we meet on a ladder, working at the school (and who easily shrugs off the attention of a cocky male student). In addition, the long look between Trish and Val* in the showers is comically overt — it's just a pity that particular potential storyline was so quickly dumped.

1️⃣🅱️ Also, the relationship between Val and Courtney is weirdly flirtatious?

2️⃣ Within this movie's world of high school girls, it's the norm for them to call their gym coach at home in order to ask questions about baseball statistics, and their coach is so close to them that she not only calls them, but also ventures out in the night to make sure they're ok.

3️⃣ Men are almost entirely irrelevant to the story, appearing as victims, predators, and/or clueless engers. (Jeff and Neil embrace the demands of their gender by first delighting in treating the bodies of unknowing women as objects and then attempting to save those women, but in the end, they fail, where the girls succeed.)

4️⃣ The unmissable, symbolic castration of the killer by Val is both hilarious and an appropriate conclusion to a movie in which men have been repeatedly proven hopelessly impotent.

5️⃣ It's both sobering and reassuring that the film's final scene is of the remaining girls expressing their trauma. There's no heroism here, just desperate survival — but it is a survival that enables them not to return to their lives as they were, but to begin the process of constructing new lives amidst the pain and terror of the night they have just endured. I assume this kind of engagement with the consequences of trauma is not typical of the genre, but I'd love to have that either confirmed or denied by those of you well versed in the slasher-verse.

(One thing I decidedly did not like: how unbelievably bad every single girl was at basketball. Jesus Christ! I am sorry, I cannot suspend disbelief enough to accept that this is a high school varsity team.)

*Robin Stille is so stinkin' cute! She could easily have been an exploitation (adjacent?) actress in the Candice Rialson mold. Her wikipedia page makes me so sad.

Thanks to Casey, whose casual mention of Brown's authorship of the screenplay in his review sent me running to watch.

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

In the second half of the 1940s, the number of articles in Soviet journals [about] issues of pedagogy and education increased, devoted to the education of will, courage and endurance in a child (regardless of gender): "The main goal of such work is proclaimed to be the ability of children - especially those of school age - to educate themselves independently, but in accordance with the instructions received from adults." [x]

Based on a Russian fairy tale first published in 1951, Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors tells the story of a little girl's experiences in a cartoonish, violent, fascistic mirror kingdom. In the kingdom, the girl (Olya) meets her twin (Aylo) — the characters are played by real-life twins Olga and Tayana Yukina — and, together, they save a righteous boy from the oppressive forces of the state and crush the oppressors and would-be oppressors with the power of their independence — and their Young Pioneers song.

Though, ultimately, the film is very much a lesson about self-discovery, reflection, and the greatness of the Soviet Union,* it is also a lot of fun, featuring magnificent, meticulously crafted and incorporated matte painting and sketches, and shot through with the reliably deranged energy that is present in nearly every fairy tale film made in the USSR during this era. In addition, the Yukina sisters are fantastically human, and the dirtiness and defiance of their characters are so convincing that it's impossible not to root for them.

Apart from the girls, the characters are all gleefully ridiculous and their costumes are over the top, featuring many men with false noses, women with metric tons of eye shadow, a king with a grand cape that is at least twenty feet long and, oh yeah, a Toad man. He is the only person in the kingdom who isn't human, and he leans hard into his persona, complete with green skin and a house and carriage shaped like toads. (The Toad man's name is the Russian equivalent of Daot, a naming technique that applies to every character in the movie — in the mirror world, everyone has a name which, when spelled backward, reveals their nature.)

Olya and Aylo navigate this topsy-turvy, evil world with grit and resourcefulness, just as Olya's government would have wanted. In that way, they remind one a lot of the boys in another Soviet Bloc film from this era: Karel Zeman's glorious Journey to the Beginning of Time. All of the children struggle with the enormity of navigating a foreign environment on their own, but they have all been well-taught and, using not only the tools with which their education has equipped them, but also the confidence it has granted them, the both entertain us and survive together, coming back to their home worlds wiser and stronger than they were when they life.

Thanks to mrbalihai for the recommendation!

*The Wikipedia article linked above offers really interesting insights into the way in which the original text undermines its own ideology, perhaps in part because of the contradictory nature of the dictates of the Soviet government in the late 1950s.

Major ending spoilers in the last paragraph.

Back Street is so inescapably Sirkian in its feel that one wonders just how Sirkian the director himself would have been, had he never run into producer Ross Hunter, who helped turn his melodrama up to eleven and encouraged and embraced the most absurd of narrative twists. And, if one is able to view the characters in Back Street as nothing more than threads, woven together to create a melodramatic tapestry, the result is exquisite, with breathtakingly high emotional peaks, devastating valleys, shocking events, and unflinching, noble martyrdom from our heroes.

If, however, one makes the mistake of viewing those characters as human beings, the film becomes a catastrophic depiction of womanhood, rooted in the madonna/whore complex, but with the twist that the one labeled "whore" from the outside is the saint, while her counterpart, beneath a paper-thin veneer of respectability, is the most monstrous of female figures: a terrible mother (as is so often the case with the women who play Sirk's and Hunter's villainesses, Vera Miles is glorious in the role).

But having her being a terrible mother would not be enough to raise the woman's cheating husband (played by a dreadfully wooden John Gavin, who is dressed like Rock Hudson but entirely without his charisma or presence) to the status of wronged martyr — no, she must also be a manipulative, philandering, abusive alcoholic, someone our hero tries selflessly to rescue despite her constant spitting of venom and his unflagging love for a Good Woman (Susan Hayward, supremely in her element).

Though the film takes the unusual step of allowing its Good Woman to have a thriving career, the work happens almost entirely off-screen — when we see her, she is either joyously with her beloved, leaving work to be with him, or sitting in a lonely space (home, workroom, office) without him, waiting for his call and then, when it comes, assuring him that his love is all she needs, and that she will happily wait forever for just a moment together.

Within the world of Back Street, the happiest of possible events for the Good Woman is for her married lover to buy her a cottage in the French countryside, leaving decorating up to her — apart from a framed drawing of himself, one she made the first day together. This, we're to understand, is the height of sensitivity, not the act of a deranged narcissist who expects a single, successful woman to build her life around him and be available whenever he calls, to travel wherever he desires. And, within the world of Back Street the single, successful woman wants nothing more than to do exactly that, falling into a kind of mechanical stasis in between the phone calls, trip, and moments of romance that make her life worth living.

(With in the world of Back Street, the good woman is redeemed and has her life restored by assuming the role of mother to her dead lovers children, reclaiming the title of martyr in the discovery of a new generation to which to devote her life; a new generation for whom she can elide her own identity.)

Also: justice for Curt.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ for the spectacle, and Vera Miles. 
⭐ for the human beings, and for John Gavin.

NB: Using this to review La Planque, one of Benazéraf's hardcore films that for some reason isn't allowed on LB, though a bunch of the others are. Also adding it to my ratings as a placeholder for that film, which I hope the folks will eventually add.

ing mention of sexual assault ahead.

One of José Benazéraf's early hardcore films, six of which have been restored and collected in Pulse Video's new Blu-ray set, La Planque (The Hideout, in English) retains the director's inclination for dark crime pictures, but interrupts it with arbitrarily inserted sex scenes, and infuses the oddly dour images with a witty meta-sensibility that would (from what I can tell) come to head the following year in the experimental J.B. 1, a movie about a porn shoot.

The narrative of La Planque is about a pair of thieves who, after pulling a heist they consider to be "like Verdun, Tobruk, and El-Alamein, all at once" arrive at a brothel where they plan to hideout, a girl they have raped in tow. That story, however, is largely irrelevant to the rest of the film, the point of which is a series of joyless sex scenes, nearly all of them overlaid with emotionless, generic porn dialogue.

There is a strong sense in the film that Benazéraf's objective is less titillation than it is ironic exploration of the genre — or, at least, that his desire to titillate is accompanied by a powerful self-awareness and sense of humor about his still-new transition into hardcore work. For example, watching an expressionless man with an enormous erection being repeatedly serviced by pairs of women as his monotone voice speaks various degrading obscenities becomes increasingly absurd as the director stops bothering to make it look as if the man is speaking at all, let alone giving voice to the words we're hearing.

Similarly, the world of La Planque is twice shattered by comments that remind us the people we're watching are doing jobs, not obeying their own desires, or experiencing the film's dark atmosphere. On the first of these occasions, the film has just begun, and we've been dropped into the middle of what appears to be a grim, fancy dress sex party, full of jaded watchers whose interest is finally aroused by the news that a new initiate will, that evening, "take the veil," a reference which suggests the exact opposite of what we're watching. When one of the attendees responds with "You're kidding me!", the answer is a deadpan "No, you know Benazéraf never jokes."

Later, as the film is drawing to a close, two women who have once recently arrived in the story (such as it is) are setting up a comically conventional lesbian sex scene by discussing the relative quality of their breasts when one of them interrupts the setup by asking "Is there no orgy in this movie?" The response she gets, as they move toward the bed and their scene, is a no, because "Don't forget, this is a softcore movie!"

Given the degree to which Benazéraf intentionally confronted both censors and the very idea of censorship itself with his work, it is difficult not to see these lines as being directly address to those who would compelled edits of his work, or ban it entirely. By draining the picture almost entirely of conventional eroticism and pleasure,* and winkingly breaking the fourth wall, the director seems to be wrestling with the definition of pornography, both for audiences and for those who desire to regular or stop it.

As a result, there little pleasure to be had from (or seen it) La Planque, but in the context of Benazéraf's career, it is compelling nonetheless. (I'm definitely watching J.B. 1 next.)

*The only character in the film who has ionate emotions is the rape victim, both in her response to her assault and the pleasure she finds in subsequent sex scenes, largely initiated by women. Putting aside the lazy trope of a woman needing to be raped to discover her latent sexuality, this, too, feels like a comment on pornography, with brothel and the jaded people in it standing in for the industry and the soulless mechanics to which their engagement with sex and the body have been reduced.

⏩ The Godard of porn: José Bénazéraf, ranked.

Just Burt Kennedy's third film and one of three he had released in 1956, Man in the Vault is a scuzzy little crime film about warring criminals and the locksmith caught in their feud.

As the locksmith with an A+ name, Tommy Dancer, William Campbell gives one of his best lead performances. Far from an innocent drawn into a spiderweb of crime, Dancer is ambitious and styles himself a cynical tough guy. In their early interactions in particular, he meets mobster Willis Trent (Barry Kroger, as slimy and great as ever) where is, backing down only when his girlfriend is threatened and, even then, not very far or for very long.

The world of Man in the Vault is a dark, unpleasant one, full of schemers, grifters, and killers — one in which anyone who isn't out for himself is a mark, and even the nice kids are fearless and tough. Dancer's girlfriend, Betty (Karen Sharpe, bright and charismatic), is very much in the latter category, vulnerable with Tommy once she takes her shields down, but also willing to go nose-to-nose with Trent and showing not the slightest concern when he tries to physically intimidate her.

The relationship between Betty and Tommy is vanishingly rare in its sincerity (though Tommy briefly believes she, too, is playing him) — much more common are romances of convenience, like the one between rich scumbag Paul de Camp (James Seay) and his girlfriend, Flo (Anita Ekberg, whose prominence in the credits isn't reflected in her screen time). Just like de Camp's last girlfriend, Flo is with him only because he's rich, and is always looking for a chance for advancement — another transactional relationship, in other words, but one that offers slightly more than tolerating de Camp does.

The plot that surrounds this stew of scumbags and cynical climbers is sweaty and dangerous, full of desperate betrayals and entirely unearned confidence for nearly all concerned. And, despite the lack of experience behind the scenes — not only is it one of Kennedy's first films, but it is also the directorial debut of Andrew V. McLaglen* — the storytelling is tight and effective. Plus, experience cinematographer William H. Clothier (like Kennedy, a western specialist) shows the skill that would earn him a pair of Oscar nominations a few years down the road, particularly in a bravura sequence at a bowling alley.

A very rewarding seventy-three minutes!

*McLaglen's Gun the Man Down was released earlier, but it seems to have been made after Man in the Vault.

Released in the middle of 1954, Vampire Moth has remarkable aesthetic similarities to the supernaturally rooted, Mexican horror movement that would begin just a few years later, arguably with Fernando Méndez's The Vampire.

The most striking of the connections is how flat the films look — clearly made in studios, they all feature gothic exteriors, crafted with little concern for reality, and shot in heavy shadow to emphasize their sinister natures. In addition, many of the films have a certain pulpy flair — like 1957's The Body Snatcher and 1959's The Black Pit of Dr. M — delighting in their own brands of violence and transgression. While Vampire Moth moves much closer to giallo territory than the Mexican films (at least the ones I've seen), it nevertheless checks boxes next to Gothic settings, supernatural threats, and women in (sexy) peril.

The women in question all work in the fashion industry, either as designers or models, and as the story progresses, they find themselves increasingly menaced by a snaggle-toothed stranger they refer to as "The Wolf Man." Trying to explain the plot of this movie is completely pointless, because it is incredibly confusing, but its broad outlines are as follows.

Superstar designer Asaji Fumiyo (Asami Kuji) is being blackmailed by someone who seems to be the Wolf Man; the Wolf Man might be an entomologist who lives in a creepy castle/house full of moths (played by Eijirô Tôno). When everyone starts being slaughtered — models, designers, and functionaries alike — adorable model Yumiko (Kyôko Anzai, who I now want to marry) and an earnest reporter named Kawase (Minoru Chiaki) get their gumshoes on but, unable to solve the many mysteries, they call in detective Kosuke Kindaichi (the hero of the series of books from which the film's source material comes, and played by the extremely handsome Ryo Ikebe), who eventually unmasks the killer and saves the day.

Honestly, the whole thing is a huge mess even before the last twenty minutes go deliriously off the rails, with bodies hitting the floor left and right and entire days vanishing from the timeline, all leading to a hilariously Scooby-Do conclusion. But it's loads of fun to watch, with its enthusiastic running up to the line of propriety before backing away — there are burlesque dancers, severed limbs, and many nude bodies covered at the last minute, not to mention the billion murders — and the charmingly wholesome amateur detective duo. Plus, the final chase through an abandon building seems to be intentionally referencing The Third Man, which is pretty fun.

In addition, the similarities in cheap horror sensibilities between Mexico and Japan in this very specific era are unexpected and compelling, as is the fact that director Nobuo Nakagawa would, within a few years, go on to direct much better known, much shinier horror ts like Jigoku and The Ghost of Yotsuya.

Thanks to threepenny, whose review made it impossible for me not to watch this immediately.

NB: Watched the director's cut.

When I saw Revenge in 1990, the violence of the beating scene was too much for me; upon rewatch, thirty-plus years later, I understand why. The film glories in pain and suffering: so that Jay (Kevin Costner) can rise above what has been done to him, and so that Mireya (Madeleine Stowe) can suffer further, waiting to be rescued and fulfill her purpose (declaring her love), finding relief in death.

And there's something oddly freeing in the film's absolute commitment to its superficiality — we know next to nothing about any of these people; they exist only for the few moments they are on screen, there to play their parts in a grand romance, a chase, and a two-pronged pursuit of revenge. Though Jay denies being a cowboy, the film is very much a western woven of tropes: the violated woman, the shattered friendship, the good man seeking redemption. In fact, with its brutality and focus on sexual violence and betrayal, Revenge leans more than a little into spaghetti territory, dripping red sauce as freely as Jay does blood. (Sorry.)

While we watch the familiar story play out against stunning Mexican settings (somehow the film's adoration of broad vistas and breathtaking natural locations screams "Tony Scott" as much as its propulsive, kinetic style does), we get to know no one — but we do see the easy way Jay slips into every community into which he enters, smoothly adapting himself to people and places without a hint of ego or expectation. It's an aspect of the character that at once begs further exploration and is better without it, because any attempt at explanation would no doubt dampen the pleasure of watching the way he just fits with people; the way he enjoys being around them, particularly men.

The scenes with Amador (Miguel Ferrer, having a wonderful time) and Ignacio (tiny baby John Leguizamo in his second film, looking eighteen despite being thirty years old) are easily the best in the film, dropped in from an entirely different, much older movie about how an accidental meeting under pressure leads to a lifetime of friendship.

The way Jay accepts Amador is remarkable, particularly given the barely contained fury that is driving Jay's pursuit of Mireya. Though Amador is almost a stranger, Jay not only listens to him, but also allows the other man to impose himself upon both his narrative and his body, as if there was never any doubt Amador would be an equal part of the story. (Even more remarkably, Amador understands all of this almost immediately.)

Though they are less prolonged and less complex, Jay has similar relationship with both Mauro (Joaquín Martínez) and the Texan (James Gammon), accepting them into his life and adapting himself to theirs without either hesitation or expectation; through witnessing these relationships, we understand the way Jay and Tibey (Anthony Quinn) are (were) together, even without ever learning a thing about their shared past.

The characterization — using that term loosely, given that she's little more than a body to fuck and/or abuse — of Mireya (and exploitation of Stowe) alone really should render Revenge irredeemable. But the wide open, near-innocence of the way Jay accepts people makes a worthy distraction from the film's forgettable plot and virgin/whore fixation, and the third act story of Jay, Amador, and Ignacio makes one temporarily forget how awful everything about Mireya has been (and will continue to be).

(Also, holy shit the wardrobe in this movie! I hope costume designer Aude Bronson-Howard got about a billion dollars for her incredible work. The stuff Costner wears is glorious but, god, it's all so good — The Texan's hat! Amador's stupid leather jacket! Chef's kiss to every bit of it.)

Watched as a mini-collab with Stephen! His review is here. 

I still cannot get over the fact that Constance aux enfers is not a Robert Hossein film. It frustrates in the same way his films often do, with its male lead being inexplicably irresistible to women, and strongly recalls Hossein's Blonde in a White Car in the way that man's belief in his own control is so spectacularly wrong.

In addition — and more importantly — Constance aux enfers suffers terribly from not having Hossein, or someone with his charisma and presence, in its lead role. Simón Andreu, who plays the part, is simply not up to the task before him, and his blank, Hossein-lite presence (Andreu looks very much like Hossein, particularly in profile) makes the central relationship, already unconvincing on the page, impossible to accept. The result of this is that nothing in the movie is convincing, rendering it simply an exercise in a writer and director endeavoring to show how clever they are.

Hossein also comes to mind while watching this film because its star, Michèle Morgan, starred in Hossein's Marked Eyes in 1964, the same year Constance aux enfers was released. And Morgan's roles in the two films are similar: in both, she is an aging woman (Morgan was forty-five when the films were made), being blackmailed in connection to a man to whom she is or was attached. It is there, however, that the similarities end.

In Hossein's film, Morgan's character is single, self-posessed, and canny, comfortable in her femininity and gender without needing a man to define her. In Constance aux enfers, she is the title character, a (not new) widow who only pretends she is happy and complete without a man. When she is alone, Constance spends her time wearing a severe, conservative dress and engaging in deep sighs as she watches young people — and one young man in particular — flirt and enjoy life.

While the broad depiction of Constance is valid and, perhaps, recognizable to some women who have found themselves in a similar position, the characterization of her through those deep sighs — at one point, in less than a minute she lets out five of them, looking increasingly distressed — is so lazy and disrespectful as to nearly put one off of the film completely.

And, if that scene doesn't do it, Constance's sudden, absolute commitment to her bluntly handsome, murderous young neighbor Hugo (Andreu) just might. We're given the impression that Constance becomes attached to Hugo both because she feels he needs her, and because his desire rejuvenates her — as if no one has looked at her since her husband died, and she needed to be wanted by a man to rediscover herself.

Again, broadly, this makes sense. When one considers at the case of Constance specifically, however, the idea that someone who looks like Michèle Morgan would be wasting away because men don't want her beggars belief. But the film requires us to accept this reality because it is the only explanation for the way Constance becomes obsessed with Hugo, reshaping her life around him, and stalking him when she suspects he is lying to her.

While the movie's third act allows Constance to regain some agency, the fact that every bit of it is motivated by her being hurt by Hugo undermines the significance of Constance's seizing of control. In addition, her decision to make a woman rather than Hugo the focus of her rage and need for revenge further diminishes Constance's recovery and rediscovery of herself as a person who can stand alone without being defined by the presence of a man in her life.

Constance aux enfers looks great and Morgan, despite being given little to do that is interesting, does her best to elevate things, but the movie around her just isn't very good, and her costars — including Dany Saval, who had a wonderful, meaty role a year earlier in Marcel Carné's gloriously loony Chicken Feed for Little Birds, in yet another pretty, bitchy girlfriend role — aren't either.

If Richard Denning had written an autobiography, he would have — or, at least, should have — called it I Understood the Assignment. Because, more than almost anyone else I can think of, he genially, unambitiously showed up in an endless array of cheap b-pictures and was reliably Richard Denning: dimply, manly in a nonthreatening way, effortlessly serious and sincere when necessary, and always willing to take his shirt off.* It's all simple and modest and delightfully self-aware — and, since he worked for about a billion studios, must have made him immensely reliable.**

ANYWAY. Harbor of Missing Men is a perfect example of one of Denning's functional, supremely forgettable postwar films. Playing a fishing boat skipper in the Florida Keys named Brooklyn Gannon, the screenplay requires Denning to be a canny bad guy, a cheerfully optimistic bad guy, a sweet, idealistic boyfriend, and a macho, righteous citizen. And, for each one, Denning's like: "I got this!"

He's an enormously limited actor, but he had such confidence in what he could do that it's all just ... breezy and effortless, somehow, whether he's being: goobery with a kind, welcoming family of Greek Orthodox sponge divers, threatening with some baddies, or shmoopy with a perfect, Greek Orthodox girl. (There are about fifteen minutes of this movie that are VERY Jesus-y.) Given that the film runs only an hour, the wild swings in characterization are more than a whiplash-inducing but, whatever — what do you want from a b-picture that cost like $14?

To be clear: this is not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, but Denning just makes me really happy, wandering around being so uncomplicatedly and reliably himself. ☀️☀️☀️

*He changes things up here with a tank top in one scene, which an A+ Denning Wardrobe Development.

**I feel like Chester Morris was in kind of a similar position a decade earlier, but Morris was always mad about where his career ended up, whereas Denning seems to have been entirely content with his life and steady paychecks (as, presumably, was his b-movie queen wife of fourty-plus years, Evelyn Ankers).

After his film was brutally cut to a mere thirty-five minutes by producer Carlo Ponti and inserted as one part of an anthology film called Oggi, domani, dopodomani, Marco Ferreri defiantly proceeded with the movie he had intended to make, creating what we would now call a director's cut, for which he managed to secure limited distribution.

The resulting film, The Man with the Balloons, is ninety minutes of Marcello Mastroianni (as Mario Fuggetta) becoming increasingly obsessed with the amount of air that can fit into a specific type of balloon. Such is his obsession that he pushes aside the advances of both his much younger fiancée (a wonderfully natural Catherine Spaak as Giovanna) and a group of hot-to-trod ladies he meets at a club.

All of this is, transparently, a statement about the emptiness and selfishness of the Italian upper classes, as well as the fragility of those who believe themselves — and in whom we're trained to believe — important. Mario is intentionally, overtly a fool, rarely going five minutes without whining about something (always someone else's fault), obsessing over something that does not matter at all, and eventually binding his self-worth to his ability to answer the question by which he has become consumed.

And Mario is pathetic as he melts down — demanding that Giovanna tell him she'll "stand with me" despite "my defects"; begging her to tell him that she loves him — to such a degree that it is difficult to tell whether or not Ferreri wants the audience to sympathize with his character. If we are to watch Mario from a distance, achieving the kind of emotional superiority with which Mario would no doubt view another man behaving the way he does, the film is a successful black comedy, if one that is far less clever than it considers itself. If, on the other hand, we are meant to have even a modicum of sympathy for Mario, it has failed, because his wallowing in impotent selfishness drives everyone away, the audience included.

You know what is great about The Man with the Balloons, though? Catherine Spaak. Warm and human, she brings the film to life with her naturalism and easy confidence, the latter of which she es on to her character with great effect. Part of the problem with Mario, really, is that Giovanna is so wonderful — as Mario spirals, all we want is for her to leave him, and find someone worthy of her with whom to spend her time.

(Also great: William Berger in his glorious beardy era — that, apparently, was the way Ferreri liked him — as Mario's philosopher neighbor, who woke up after a night of debauchery to find four women in his apartment, something he handles with enough aplomb that it seems a regular occurrence.)

Anyway, this did very, very little for me, but Mastroianni throws himself into yet another pathetic character with deranged glee, the color sequences are fabulous, and Spaak is magnificent. Oh, and also: there's a perfectly placed Ugo Tognazzi cameo — which, like the rest of the movie, is nowhere near as funny as Ferreri thinks it is.

NB: So far, I don't connect with Ferreri at all, but there's a wonderful interview about him with Michel Piccoli on Criterion Channel, in which Piccoli literally talks about falling in love (platonically, of course) with the director. It's lovely.

There's an undeniably amateurish quality to Sarasota Half in Dream, a sense that its directors are determined to make Important Points and tell Great Truths through their exploration of their city's liminal spaces. But the film soars for those very reasons: its idealism, and the shameless, unselfconscious way it wears its aspirations on its sleeve.

Made on a micro budget — and completed thanks to $2644 raised via Kickstarter — Sarasota Half in Dream is a warm, loving portrait of a city's ever-shifting edges, as it decays from the outside in. As once-destination tennis clubs fall into ruins, boxcars are left to rust on isolated tracks, and parking garages stand empty, the folly and inevitable collapse of capitalism are casually exposed — alongside the unstoppable, inevitable power of nature to restore itself once men move on.

One of just two interview subjects in the film, Saratoga's only urban explorer (or, at least, the only one with an online presence in 2016) marvels at the degree to which nature reclaims spaces within just a few years of human departure. Meanwhile, the other interview subject lays bare the city's eager catering to wealthy white people and reveals the secret ways teenagers found to carve out unsupervised space of their own. For the subject and their classmates, that privacy was secured by cooperation with the rampaging nature around them — by creating a maze of paths and hideouts in the dense woods behind their school. For others, it was gathering after dark at a storage space, ungoverned by Saratoga's draconian noise laws, and open to anyone who wanted to offer their music to the universe. And, for still others, it was soccer games in abandoned spaces, spaces like the roofs of forgotten, unused parking garages.

Sarasota Half in Dream falters only when it tries too hard: when, without commentary, it dives into the microscopic life found in a drop of water; when, unnecessarily, it endeavors to put a button on a movie that doesn't need one. One suspects those points of slippage occurred when director Derek Murphy and his high school classmate, editor, co-producer, and cinematographer Mitchell Zemil allowed the outside world to push its way into their minds. Because, when they're focused purely on what they see, care about, and , Sarasota Half in Dream has moments that approach transcendence.

The film is currently streaming for on Ovid and MeansTV.

Soviet studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s were uncommonly good at both putting fairy tales on film and infusing more traditional fare with a serum of whimsy and cockeyed perspective. A Very Old Story is an example of the former, based on a quartet of stories by Hans Christian Andersen, and crammed with eye-popping color, glorious patterns, and the kind of flawless absurdism for which nearly every generation of Soviet actors seem effortlessly equipped.

In the cobbled together story, a young puppeteer (Oleg Dahl) waits the night in a country inn ahead of the arrival of his girlfriend, who will arrive at daylight to run away with him. As he waits, he asks his marionettes — who, oh yeah, are sentient, and also turn into actual people when they feel like it — to make up a fairy tale to distract him until morning.

In that story, which makes up the bulk of the film, Dahl reappears as a genially cocky, newly decommissioned soldier who, by defeating the cheerful, grandmotherly witch who tried to rip him off, restores her cat to its original wizard shape (shades of Salem, except this one only wants to sleep, not take over the world). As a reward, the wizard offers the soldier seemingly unlimited wishes, which the soldier eventually uses to contrive a marriage with a princess.

Whereas the puppeteer is so quiet and serious as to appear haunted, the soldier is all sunny optimism — not because he expects the world to be sunshine and rainbows, but rather because he's serenely confident he will be able to handle anything that comes his way. Similarly, while the puppeteer's girlfriend (the delightful, twenty-one-year-old Marina Neyolova making her film debut) is innocent, adoring, and uncomplicated, the princess, also played by Neyolova, is opinionated, mouthy, and self-reliant.

The contrast between the characters must have been a pleasure for the actors to play, and the princess, whose confidence easily matches that of the solider, is particularly wonderful in her total lack of shame and absolute certainty that she deserves to have power over her own life. (Also fantastic: Vladimir Etush, who plays the father of both the girls.)

Though the love story/ies are, of course, the movie's narrative hook, the fun comes from the cleverness of the screenplay, the perfection of essentially every performance, and the magic of Marina Azizyan's and Igor Vuskovich's set design. Nothing that occurs is safe from the temptation to be silly, but the silliness is often enormously smart, as with the (kindly) autocratic king who, conveniently, is prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge in his country's court. Or when that king, who has decided to punish his daughter by refusing to talk to anyone, tries ineptly to mime to his attendants that his room is on fire, causing the attendants to assume that any future urgent gestures must also be about fire.

Anyway, it's adorable and charmingly familiar: ninety minutes of sparking, song-filled fun, followed by a few moments of inescapable, very Soviet melancholy, reminding us that fairy tales are not, in fact, real life.

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

There is a kitchen sink worth of ideas packed into the seventy-five minutes that Fort Worth runs, starting with a blink-and-you'd-miss-it mention of the "truth" of the Lost Cause narrative of the Confederacy, moving into a woman mocking a man for growing up and choosing to use words rather than guns to make his point, and ending with that man winning the woman by a)strapping guns on over his printer's apron, and b)shooting a whole bunch of dudes. Oh, and also, there's a shockingly frank discussion of pregnancy for 1951.

For about the whole first half of this mess, I thought it was terrible, particularly John Twist's spectacularly hokey but weirdly idiosyncratic screenplay, which is crammed with men and one woman saying ridiculous things with great seriousness. In addition, that one woman — Phyllis Thaxter* as Flora Talbot — is initially lazily constructed, a one-dimensional fearless western girl with confidence that would be wonderful, if anyone bothered to give her a personality beyond it.

Eventually, though, the film narrows its focus and becomes far more effective, casting aside the conflict between word — as represented by the newspaper run by Ben Garvin (Emerson Treacy) and former all-action gun guy Ned Britt (Randolph Scott) — and deed, turning instead to what really matters: the friendship/rivalry between Britt and his former bestie, Blair Lunsford (David Brian).

In the years since Britt left Fort Worth, Blair has become the city's big man, buying land and presenting himself as the one who will bring the railroad to town, thus securing its new status as a beef-shipping hub. This goal, however, means he's run afoul of the local bad guys who, because of their cattle-running business, would very much like to keep the railroad away. But Garvin has suspicions about Blair, who can buy land at such low prices only because of the threat posed by the baddies he allegedly hates — could Britt's old pal be less of an upright citizen than he seems???

The entire second half of the movie is filtered through the Blair/Britt lens, with every event and confrontation pushing Britt further and further from the trust Blair craves. But Blair, apart from the odd blip of anger, remains adorably chipper, fiercely committed to his old friend, and certain that, eventually, he'll prove himself worthy of Britt's . And, when the two get to reprise a clever gun trick from their youth in order to drive off the baddies, Blair almost grins himself to death, certain he's gotten his pal back. But he doesn't (yet).

Britt's continued reticence frustrates Blair enormously since he has become used to being trusted based on his money, big smile, and what Britt calls his "snake's charm" — but Blair cannot drag himself away, concerned far less about the possibility of bad press than he is the catastrophe of itting defeat, in this situation more than any other.

Usually, this kind of relationship in a western explodes into flirtation and homoerocticism because the actors have such good chemistry that it's impossible to ignore. Here, though, the opposite is true: Bitt and Blair have great chemistry, but Scott and Brian tragically don't, a weakness that means it takes far longer for that central relationship to come alive than it should.

That said, there's a fantastic moment when Britt knows he's being used by Flora to get back at Blair, who has pissed her off, and just leans into it like a pig collapsing into some nice warm shit. His languid posture and amused expression when Blair approaches him after the scene with Flora is glorious, a knowing, teasing moment between friends — bros bein' bros, you know — of which the movie needs a whole lot more.

Anyway, it's probably too weird to be recommended, and the first half really is terrible. But I love me some western!David Brian, and fifty-three-year-old Randolph Scott, in addition to having some genuinely impressive acting moments during that good second half, looks ludicrously perfect in his suits. Also, Phyllis Thaxter's comfort on a horse, while nothing compared to Scott's, is phenomenal. I cannot find anything about her being a horsegirl, but if she wasn't she picked it up incredibly quickly, to such a degree that she is rarely doubled, if she is at all.

*Thaxter plays the woman whose place Barbara Stanwyck takes in No Man of Her Own, and damn does she look like Stanwyck in this sometimes? I think it's the spacing of her eyes, or her forehead or something?

Thanks to Gentry, who sold me on this with the promise of very real, entirely intentional polyamory.

No one comes to the Emanuelle movies for the scripts, but holy cow is the one for Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade exceptionally poor. I first assumed the issue was just the catastrophically bad English dub, but then I went to check the Italian language version, and it turns out the English dub is spot on, if the English subtitles on the Severin release are to be trusted.

My point here is that, as much as I love Emanuelle the character, it was hard for me to enjoy this installment in the series as much as many other folks do, purely because the screenplay was so insipid. But Laura Gemser is, as ever, magnificent in her role, floating effortlessly through the world and, as Emanuelle, approaching each new sexual encounter with the distant, kind indulgence of a goddess bringing pleasure to previously ignorant fools.

Whether the sex is for pleasure or for the purposes of achieving a goal, Emanuelle has the same attitude, as if it is all very nice but nothing earth-shaking or remotely new, a marco version of her unmoved response to the allegedly life-changing sex with George Eastman's Very Tall Sex Guru in Emanuelle Around the World.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the best, most engaged (and engaging) moments for both Emanuelle and Gemser here are out of bed: the character's flirtatious negotiations with Francis Harley, the polished sex-peddler played by Gemser's husband and regular Emanuelle costar, Gabriele Tinti. In those scenes, Emanuelle is bright and sharp, playing the role of a penniless, fiercely ambitious woman, but also almost daring Harley to call her out on her obvious lie, as if she is enjoying the game so much she cannot help but add to it layers of both temptation and danger. Gemser and Tinti are always wonderful together, at least in this series, but it's particularly true here, perhaps because the relationship between their characters is professional and transactional, made up of conversations and the exchange of looks and cash, rather than physical touches and pleasure.

It continues to be troubling that, in the series, the gang rapes Emanuelle suffers with troubling regularity are brushed off like they didn't happen at all (I get the narrative idea that sex is just not a big deal to her, but even if being forcibly violated matters little to her emotionally, you'd think the physical impact would last beyond the event itself), but the character is so great that I can never stay mad at the movies, even when they're as horribly written as this one. Also, her clothes are phenomenal — I want Emanuelle's wardrobe to have babies with the pants Katherine Ross wears in The Stepford Wives and, I don't know, take over the world, or something.

One of just three features in which Dorothy Dell appeared prior to her death at nineteen in a car accident, Wharf Angel tells a familiar story about a fallen girl (the eighteen-year-old Dell as a sex worker named Toy) saved by her love for a wayward but good man (Preston Foster as Como, an instinctive organizer of the working class).* Further complicating matters is the close friendship between that man and the person he doesn't know is his rival for the girl's affection (Victor McLaglen as the rough, would-be-possessive Turk) — a wrinkle which is almost as familiar as the central story itself.

This telling of the story works for several reasons, primary among them the quality of the central performances. Dell, who reminds me a lot of Jean Muir when she turns pure and adoring, is very good in Toy's rougher, more canny moments, and the wholesomeness of the relationship between Turk and Como is wonderfully played by both Foster and McLaglen. The simplicity of the way the two men commit to one another is arguably more moving than the love between Como and Toy, because the men truly know and accept one another, whereas what Como and Toy have is rooted in desperation: her craving for kindness, and his need to believe in his own love story.

The unreality upon which both men have based their love for Toy is made comically, miserably clear when they wistfully discuss her for the first time, having no idea that they are talking about the same girl. Their ignorance is understandable when we hear the way each talks about the girl he loves: to Como, Toy is " helpless" with "the saddest face [he's] ever seen," whereas to Turk, she is "a great kidder" who "can look after herself," and of whom he proudly says, "you can't put anything over on."

Their shared, contrasting fantasies reveal the degree to which both the idealistic Como and the simple, threatening Turk have made up the woman they hold in their minds — Como wants to rescue her, whereas Turk loves the idea of taming and being accepted by a woman who doesn't need anyone. The real Toy is, of course, a combination of all of the qualities the men have assigned her (and many more besides), and it is heartbreaking to realize that her happy ending with Como means she will be casting aside the toughness and resourcefulness that is so central to who she is. Within the world of Wharf Angel, those qualities are expected in a sex worker, but must be abandoned when that girl is rescued by love.

(Between Turk and Como, however, there are no lies or illusions. Turk is exactly who Como has always known him to be, and his own happy ending is nothing more than the embrace of the goodness and generosity only Como has been able to see.)

*In its inciting event, during which a wanted man is protected from the cops by a young, pretty stranger, the film calls very specifically to mind Raid in St. Pauli, made two years earlier in , but the broad outlines of the story are far from unusual.

Based on a beloved radio show, Ahí viene Martín Corona is terribly, sweetly charming, a throwback to a more innocent, simpler time in film when the poor had protectors and women were always saved from those who would subjugate them. The film is made even more charming by how little has been done to leave behind its radio roots — if you close your eyes, it is still a radio show, complete with with humorous sidekick commentary, handy descriptions of events, and simply sketched characters and relationships.

The movie stars the leads from the radio show, established movie star Pedro Infante as the heroic title character, and future icon Lalo González in his first major film role, as Piporro, Martín's sixty-something guardian and sidekick, a character so important to González's career that he was often credited simply as "Piporro" on movie posters.

As Martín rides around Mexico, being beloved by the peasants, singing songs, and righting wrongs (while the slightly more impulsive Piporro enthusiastically advocates for murder or, when stymied, ties people to trees), Piporro is by his side, offering , commentary, and unwanted-but-necessary advice about Martín's love life.

It's remarkable how much of González's future screen persona is already present in Piporro, particularly given the uncharted territory into which he was diving, giving corporal form to a character who had previously been only a voice. Because it's all there: the impish expressions and reactions, the exaggerated, sometimes just slightly feminine mannerism, and the ferocious sincerity of action and word. Partly because he's stuck behind a white wig and halfhearted old age makeup and partly because it's all still very new, González doesn't quite have everything worked out yet, but it's nevertheless a delight to get this early glimpse into the genial, irresistible persona that would define his career.

Oh and also: Sara Montiel is there as Martín's feisty, pint-sized love interest.

The Whole Truth is theoretically fun, a sparkling, Riviera-set mystery about an unfaithful man whose lover is murdered needing the wife he betrayed to save him from the gallows. In application, however, the more we learn about our protagonist, powerful film producer Max Poulton (Stewart Granger), the less appealing he and his story become.

Initially appearing to be fully reformed and in adoring love with his wife, Poulton is increasingly shown to be at best stupid, and at worst smarmy and selfish. As in most fictional stories about such things, his decision not to tell his wife about the affair is inexplicable, as is the way he clings to the lie, even as it unravels and leaves him in ever-hotter water. And, when Poulton's arrogance toward everyone (not to mention the odd comfort he shows with the man who has framed him) is piled on top of the affair-related idiocy, it becomes difficult to understand why, exactly, we're supposed to root for this guy. It's a rare occasion of an innocent character becoming less sympathetic as the pressure on him mounts.

Part of the problem, surely, is that Poulton's wife, Carol (Donna Reed), is so appealing. Fresh-faced, straightforward, and honest, Carol is a delight, someone with whom we would all want to be friends, and who we would love to have on our side in a pinch. The fact that, as written, she is never for a moment truly upset about her husband's betrayal (or his self-destructive lying, arguably even more important to their relationship) is maddening. Poulton could not be less worthy of her, and the fact that the movie wants us to find him clever and appealing, and to delight in their happy ending feels like the screenplay (by pulp novelist Jonathan Latimer, whose work I often love) thinks we're as dumb as Poulton is.

Starting life as a play, one suspects The Whole Truth was created primarily for audiences to sit and watch people walk in and out of rooms and be eloquent and clever for two hours. Little thought, however, seems to have been given to things like likability and humanity; the result is that the story, at least in this telling of it, feels superficial, far more concerned with sparkle than with the people behind the shine. (To be clear, I don't require likability from my protagonists, but when the movie wants us to root for and find them charming, well, it seems like it's kind of important.)

In better news, George Sanders in great in a role, managing to wring pathos and that crucial humanity from a character that potentially could have been just as superficial as Poulton.

Less a tragedy than a thoughtful embrace of the age of time, Suzaku is delicate and lovely, a sensitive look at a family and place that are somehow simultaneously in flux and at stasis.

A weary man who has lost hope, spending his last day surrounded by sunshine and smiles; laughter and warmth. A wife and mother who quietly, tentatively pushes the edges of her life outward, beyond the home. An elder who has seen everything, weeping sudden tears as the weight of loss lands upon her.

A tunnel into the future that leads nowhere. A lost young man, choosing to go on.

Thanks to jrhovind, whose beautiful recent review prompted me to move this up my watchlist. 

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

The Man Who Knew Too Much offers a pantomime of domesticity, western family life as written by an alien.

The son is witty and poised, youthful but clever, and a pal to his parents. The wife/mother is impeccably dressed, extravagantly emotional about motherhood (she wants her son back, and she wants a new baby), and communicating in either breathless pleas with those in authority or impotent anger (her act of heroism is a perfectly feminine one: a scream). The husband/father is the brave chooser of paths; the resilient figure who rises again after being struck from behind by the cowardly villains; the one whose determination finds and saves his son, and whose toughness ends the life of the boy's captor.

Tendrils of reality, however, occasionally worm their way through the warm, white picket fenced façade.

(The way the husband refuses to listen to the wife's concerns about his interrogation by a stranger; the way he fails to notice the stranger's determination not to answer questions. The way the husband insists upon introducing himself and his wife under his name, every time she is recognized and named as the stage star she is. And the way the husband refuses to tell his wife their son has been kidnapped unless she takes the sedatives (taken from a travel pouch crammed with pills of different colors, something which puts her mention of once being told she was taking too many pills in a very different light) he is forcing on her; the way he makes key decisions about their future and their son when she is under the influence of the drug she did not want to take.)

⏩ Alfred Hitchcock, ranked.

The Bloody Lady is strange and wonderful, an animated, dialogue-free telling of Countess Elizabeth Báthory's story in a whimsical, intentionally primitive style. With backgrounds of nothing more than pencil lines and watercolors, and its animated subjects made of simple shapes and bright colors, there's an innocence to the film's look that belies its sinister tale, that of a royal who believes bathing in the blood of young women will preserve her own youth.

In the hands of Slovak cartoonist Viktor Kubal, who also adapted the story, the countess begins life as a sweet young woman, mirroring Disney's version of Snow White in her close relationship with animals and nature, and moving through the world sweetness itself when it comes to dealing with her fellow man, servants and suitors alike. Things change only when, after being saved from death by a kind woodsman, she literally gives him her heart. Immediately, the once angelic Báthory turns brutal and violent, attacking the animals and plants she once adored, and cruelly treating the men who compete for her affection. (In a wonderful detail, the transition in the countess' persona is symbolized by her decision to ride astride her horse rather than sidesaddle.)

The contrast between the tones of the film before and after Báthory's removal of her heart is fantastic, with the music undergoing a sudden change, the woodland creatures (flowers included) fleeing for their lives, and the coutess' very obedient world metaphorically shaking before her new, unstoppable presence.

While it's frustrating that, in Kubal's telling of the story, Báthory cannot simply be an awful person, but has to have literally lost her heart to a man in order to become nasty and cruel, the depiction of the character post-transition remains delicious. Her absolute command over everyone and everything is breathtaking, even as she visually remains the same gently curved pile of blue and white paint, and the fact that her typically unseen commands are obeyed instantly and without question is unmissable. This new Elizabeth Báthory is doomed and a monster, but she relishes her power, and the brief moments during which she is allowed to frankly and unashamedly command her environment are glorious.

(Perhaps not surprisingly, the man's story threatens to take over the film's third act, as he dons the countess' saintly persona and devotes himself to healing his beloved. And, inevitably, though her crimes cannot be undone and she must be punished, Báthory's soul is reclaimed by love. Yawn.)

Thanks to Ryan, whose review made me aware this movie existed!

⏩ Female Rejuvenation: Youth and Beauty Through Blood, Goo, and Magic(al Science)

Insurance Investigator is unusually lighthearted for a movie about what is essentially insurance fraud via serial killing. Considering that a woman falls down an elevator shaft, a man dies on screen after having been clobbered by the fraudsters, and there is an extended shootout between cops and baddies — the former of whom have a civilian just SITTING IN THE BACKSEAT — its lack of seriousness is defiant and charming, a bit like the tone of the Boston Blackie series.

Though crime and violence are narratively front and center, the movie works because of the breezy chemistry between its leads: Richard Denning as crack insurance investigator Tom Davison, and Audrey Long as Nancy Sullivan, the decidedly not-in-mourning daughter of the most recent victim of an "accidental" death. Nancy and Davison are delightful together, falling almost immediately into a comfortable, teasing friendship, as Nancy jumps with both feet into helping Davison set up a fake identity and job at the firm where Nancy's dad worked, in order to get closer to the possible crime. (The amount of joy that both Denning and his character take from getting to pretend to be from Atlanta — with an accent to match, naturally — is frankly obscene.)

Their relationship is robustly adult, full of romantic — or, at last, sexual — tension but without a hint of urgency. For example, when Davison dives hopefully into a relationship with his new secretary (played by Hillary Brooke, being, as usual, very hot and very evil), he cheerfully reports its progress to Nancy, who responds with exactly the same lighthearted, joking tone. It's clear both parties get great pleasure from their simple, shared flirtation and plotting, and are in no hurry to get to the turning point they both know is somewhere ahead.

Also unusual is the fact that, in the third act, when Davison is incapacitated and spends a lot of time in a laundry hamper, it is Nancy who takes decisive action, guiding the cops to the bad guys and helping them track down her missing homie. Their shared kiss as the film comes to a close is cheesy but well earned, a contented settling into place more than a swooning confession of secret love.

Anyway, it's light as air and runs just sixty minutes — you could do a whole lot worse to get your b-movie fix.

I am fond of a frankly ridiculous number of vague, pretentious films, particularly of the French variety. Guy Gilles' The Garden That Tilts, however, with its story of a dumb, pouty, selfish young hitman (Patrick Jouané as Karl) and his affair with an older target (Delphine Seyrig, who is lovely and does her best with a badly underwritten role, as Kate), left me entirely cold.*

The film's failure to emotionally engage on any level meant that the viewer has no reason to invest in or care about its empty conversations about love and time and meaning. Further, Karl is an absurd sketch of a character, totally unappealing in his studied blankness (here intended, I suspect, to indicate depth, pain, or both), and we are given no indication of why Kate would find him appealing enough to devote several weeks to not only having sex with him, but also talking to him.

For her part, Kate is similarly opaque, mildly cheerful and flirtatious in a way that doesn't stick, but without any clear motives for anything she does. In the end, when she sends Karl away and he collapses into depression and harassment, I think we are meant to be in sympathy with him, and to agree that he was treated unfairly. Similarly, there's a suggestion we should see Kate as tragic because of what Karl calls her fear of love, rather than ire her for being a woman who isn't interested in commitment and has recognized and embraced that fact.

All of it is fundamentally ridiculous, a bunch of one-note idiots swanning around, spouting false profundities and staring into the middle distance.

(Meanwhile, out on the fringes of the story, Karl's beautiful, temporary work partner — Philippe Chemin** as Roland — is begging the story to focus on him and his fierce commitment to crime in order to buy a house for his exploited working class parents, and his only briefly seen connection with one of the film's pair of presumably gay men.)

*The other LB reviews indicate that a lot of folks find it quite affecting, so please don't let me put you off.

**After staring at Chemin's perfect hair and face for an extended period of time, I realized he looks like a mash-up of all three of The Police as they would appear a few years later: Stewart Copeland's luxurious tresses, Sting's cheekbones, and Andy Summers' emotional distance. You're welcome.

Spoiler and mention of suicide ahead.

There's something unexpectedly modern about the expressions of emotion in Man with the Gun, a western that acknowledges the oft-ignored reality that the people we called good in the old west were complex and, often, broken, just like our villains.

As "town tamer" Clint Tollinger, Robert Mitchum is laconic but cavalier, treating Tollinger's life as little more than a matter of dangerous routine — a routine which, any day now, will be shattered by his inevitable death. Having chosen a job that requires facing multiple enemies alone, over and over again, Tollinger's death wish is front and center, as are the decades of simmering rage that have guided him through it. Telling himself he's getting revenge for the unarmed father who was murdered by remorseless, powerful men, all Tollinger is really doing is killing, and hoping the blood of bad men eases his pain (even as he well knows it will not).

When Tollinger arrives in Sheridan City, his initial goal is not professional but rather personal: he's there to see Nelly Bain (Jan Sterling), the mother of his child* who took the girl and left years ago, certain that a life of waiting for the return of a man engaged in a slow suicide is not one she is willing to accept. What he finds, however, is a town under the thumb of an elusive overlord (Joe Barry as the hardly seen Dade Holman) who, through his gunmen, keeps the land for himself and his cows, and reaps profits through the town's main saloon, where Nelly runs sex workers.

Tollinger eagerly throws himself into the fray, accepting a star from the cowardly sheriff and antagonizing Holman with new rules and dead bodies. He also wins the affection of a starry-eyed, very engaged young woman (Karen Sharpe as Stella Atkins), whose desire for him is more visible to everyone else than it is to her. When the two dance, Stella's previously jovial fiancé immediately realizes sending them off together was a mistake, and the taciturn Tollinger responds to Stella's breathless narrative about his emotionlessness with a pointed "I'm human" as he holds her close. To modern eyes, it's only the most explicit example of the frank sexuality bubbling through the story, one which is prickly with often unexpressed ion, and unusual in its acknowledgement not only of sex outside of marriage for our hero and his former partner, but also the fact that such encounters can lead to children.

When Tollinger finds out that his daughter is not back east with Nelly's family, as Nelly had told him she was, but had in fact died three years earlier due to disease (a genuinely shocking moment in the film, wisely underplayed), he casts aside his limited control and wrecks havoc on the town. There is sadism in his behavior, particularly toward the arrogant Holman agent (a delightfully smarmy Ted de Corsia as "Frenchy" Lescaux) who runs the saloon where Nelly and her girls work, and the fire Tollinger creates in the bar is allowed to burn without the slightest concern for anyone else: any wind would spread the flames and take down all of Sheridan City, but Tollinger can see only his own sorrow and anger, and genuinely doesn't care whether anyone (himself included) lives or dies.

Though the film ends with the requisite happy reconciliation, and the reclaiming of Tollinger through sacrifice and generosity, the rest of Man with the Gun is difficult to shake, particularly the raggedness of Tollinger's emotional state, and the way suicidiality so easily became a profession in the cinematic (and no doubt actual) west.

(Also: uncredited Claude Akins and Angie Dickinson, and ing work from good guy Emile Meyer, and Leo Gordon — in the tightest tros in a western this side of John Ireland — as a baddie known for shooting dogs.)

*The wikipedia entry for the film describes Nelly as Tollinger's wife, but that is never stated and, indeed, not even suggested, beyond the fact that they share a child.

Excruciatingly funny when it's not just plain excruciating, The Barnabás Kos Case is a satire with Kafkaesque moments that savages pretension, flattery, and the bureaucracy of communist Czechoslovakia.

Built around the title character's (played to earnest perfection by Josef Kemr) sudden ascent from triangle player to orchestra director — a position to which he is appointed entirely because, despite being frankly unsuited for the position, he is so "modest" that no one is able to muster an objection to him — the film wallows in second-hand embarrassment as the power goes to Barnabáš' head, and he reshapes the orchestra (and, by extension, his world) around himself and the triangle.

When the film begins, Barnabáš is so quiet and obedient that he is taken advantage of by everyone: appointed to every committee, and given the worst jobs on each of them. It is nearly as hard to watch his resigned ivity as it is to see him blunder about as director, a position he quickly forgets demands obedience, and happily assumes that the blanket agreement with all of his terrible, childish ideas is confirmation of his brilliance.

Thus, Barnabáš is certain he has wrought a musical revolution by moving the triangle to the front and the string instruments to the back, commissioning a triangle-focused symphony, and reducing every instrument in the orchestra to a fraction of its capability, bringing the piano closer to the triangle, for example, by covering all but a handful of its keys, and reducing clarinetists to playing only on their mouthpieces. It's catastrophically awful, but everyone goes along with it because the system says they must — and, as those who dare complain are told, if Barnabáš is unsuited to his position, what does that say about the all-powerful, all-knowing men who appointed him? They are always right, ipso facto, Barnabáš is well-suited.

In addition to the comedy that comes from the cringeworthiness of Barnabáš' every waking hour, the presentation of the film's bureaucrats is gloriously unserious, depicting them communicating in gibberish symbols and placing them behind literal plexiglass to protect them from the commoners (the result is that complainants often have to shout to be heard), thus making it clear to even the most credulous souls in the audience just how disconnected from reality their masters are. (It was at first very surprising but then not surprising at all how often this film reminded me of 1971's Hydro-Puzzle, a tiny budgeted, gleefully strange satire — one with a superhero in it! — from Poland.)

It is also instructive to watch how different people react to Barnabáš and his behavior. Those who stand against him are inevitably removed, and banished even more completely if they dare to complain. Thus, all that remains is accommodation, but that accommodation can be grudging and silent, ive and resigned, or vocal and enthusiastic; ultimately, the different flavors of agreement are set apart primarily by the degree to which the individuals have humiliated themselves, not by any lasting or profound change in status.

Given how cutting The Barnabás Kos Case manages to be about essentially every aspect of life under a fiercely bureaucratic (communist) government, it comes as no surprise that it was completed seven years after it began, finished and deemed acceptable for released only when a more permissive government took power in Czechoslovakia.

Many thanks to Ryan for the fantastic recommendation!

Spoilers for the end in the last paragraph and footnote.

Apart from the fact that he was bullied as a child and discovered his 'mesmeric power' over animals at a young age, we know nothing about Stephen Torg's (Herbert Lom in his first major role) life before he attached himself like a tick to an unlucky traveling circus, over which he quickly takes control.

Has he been doing this for years, targeting and shattering small communities for his own pleasure and then leaving the broken pieces in his wake? Or is it the first time he's attempted such a thing — the first time he's used his power exactly the way he wanted, regardless of the possible consequences? Or, perhaps more accurately, assumed (knowing) there could be no consequences?

Whatever the answer, Torg's studied deference — behavior that matches his tramp trappings — disappears the moment he's hired; from that moment on, Torg is supremely confident, bringing the show and everyone in it under his thumb. Within days, he's made himself a part owner, achieved easy control over the woman he desires (Mary, played by Anne Crawford), and made himself untouchable, more through will and shamelessness than the use of his powers. From what we repeatedly see, Torg is involved in exactly one moment of one act, something which nonetheless makes him the show's meal ticket and, soon, has his name above the proverbial title. With Torg as its headliner, the circus moves from small towns to urban theaters, and its audience is transformed from bored working people and families to evening wear-clad swells.

And, unlike other small, angry men who use their hypnotic powers to control people (to control women), Torg makes no effort to be likable or to hide his true motives. No, Torg is rude and brusque and obnoxious, rubbing his authority and untouchability in the faces of those around him and making it clear with his every word and move that he is infinitely more important than they. Torg doesn't need to be liked or valued by his alleged social betters; Torg just wants money and power, and he could care less who hates him.

Though everyone around him — except Mary, whose mind he controls — does hate Torg, there is only one person who suspects there is more to him than obnoxiousness and classlessness: Dora (Josephine Wilson), the circus' sharpshooter (who we never seen perform). The fact that the person who sees through him is a woman who repeatedly cites her gender as the reason she knows something insidious is going on is, on one hand, a possible indication of frustratingly lazy writing. On the other hand, however, perhaps it is simply accurate, a woman recognizing a predator and his hold over her friend while the men around them are busy disapproving of her and writing her off for choosing the wrong man.

Not surprisingly, however, Dora is largely powerless to make any difference, impotently venting her anger, and being forced to rely upon mealy-mouthed men to do something about what she suspects — what she knows — is going on. In the end, having been shown those men will do nothing about the situation,* the film's cartoonish climax sees Dora literally taking matters into her own hands and disposing of the force that has taken control of her friend. Because this is a movie from the 1940s, there has to be a tacked on heterosexual romantic motivation for her action, but the reality is that she has planned and executed the murder of a predator in order to save Mary, a stark illustration of the way women, sometimes, have only themselves to rely upon. 

The fact that the movie's only other woman is a shrewish nag who exists only as comic relief is striking — none of them are relevant as human beings until they either become victims, or cast aside social norms and do what they must.

*Though a man, too, eventually takes action to destroy Torg, his action is opportunistic and spontaneous, whereas that of his female counterpart is calculated and considered.

Happyend is set in a pre-apocalyptic, near-future Tokyo, but neither the location nor the time really matter to the story. What matters is how it feels to grow up: to make new friends, keep others, and leave some behind; to realize what you will fight for; to dare to look beyond the edges of your own life. To consider the future as a real, concrete thing for the first time.

Hurtling toward a looming future as they prepare to graduate from high school, and coping with the newly arrived surveillance state at school and in the streets, the film's collection of friends seek joy through (the) music and(/of) defiance, increasingly aware that the joy is the equivalent of putting one's fingers in one's ears, or burying one's head in the sand: it is the noise that fails to drown out the droning of fear, responsibility, and unexamined truths.

Even Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), the one who lives most insistently, fiercely (desperately) in the moment, is forced through the bravery and sorrow of his friends to see the truths he works so hard to avoid. While some fight and rage at the oppression and cruelty gathering around them, and others watch its approach with sorrow as they try to wring every moment of happiness from their present, their new realities drag Yuta (headphones firmly in place, eyes tightly closed) forward, into a new phase of life.

Whether the motivation is one's response to oppression, the pursuit of a dream, or something that feels like a betrayal, Happyend's characters are forced to realize there is violence to life's transitions and the way they so often expression themselves through shifting (shattering, emerging, strengthening) relationships.

The certainty of childhood is gone. What remains are decades [if they (we) are lucky] of the unknown, lit up [if they (we) are lucky] by new friends and [if they (we) are lucky] old ones in new shapes. And, if they (we) are lucky, a self-reliant resilience that grants them (us) ease as they (we) move inexorably into yet another future.

Many thanks to Ayush, whose wonderful review let me know this movie existed!

Given that it was made with the cooperation of the US Navy and is set during WWII, The Frogmen is surprisingly inoffensive, leavening the machismo of its heroes with a shocking amount of emotion and fallibility. In addition, the title characters — of one of the Navy's Underwater Demolition Team, which were eventually replaced by SEALs— are almost to a person at least bi-curious, waxing rhapsodic about the kind blue eyes, strong jaw, and manliness of their deceased former commander, and sometimes pairing off into extremely devoted duos.

Saddled with the unenviable task of replacing the perfect dead man, the Second Mrs. de Winter, I mean Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence (Richard Widmark), is seen as uptight and cowardly simply because he, you know, does his job properly and isn't a showboating turd. The leader of the grumbling is a whiny little baby named Jake Flannigan (Dana Andrews), who has an elevated position within the team and is for some reason adored by his peers. (To their credit, he is also the least heterosexual of the bunch, more than a little obsessed with the prettiest boy on the team, "Pappy" Creighton — played by Jeffrey Hunter — who returns his affection in a more chill way.) Because Flannigan's behavior sends the message that all the cool kids are doing it, everyone falls in line against their new boss, mocking and criticizing Lawrence until, eventually, they all apply for a transfer.

It should come as no surprise that the movie ends with Flannigan accepting Lawrence and the rest of the team happily following suit, but it is a surprise that Lawrence nearly weeps with relief when this moment finally occurs. Equally surprising was Lawrence's earlier, miserable confession to the ship's captain and his accidental temporary mentor (the deeply reassuring Gary Merrill as Lt. Cmdr. Pete Vincent) that he believed himself responsible for the discontent in his new team. Unable to fight off his very human doubts, Lawrence has assumed all of the men cannot be wrong so the problem must be with him, revealing the kind of shameful insecurity that Widmark is sneakily great at playing.

Look, don't me wrong: there's nothing deep (LOL EXCEPT THE WATER!) about this movie. But its characters are far more complex than one would expect from such a film (the bar is low, but still), and the procedural elements of the underwater work are both suspenseful and fascinating. Plus: bonus Warren Stevens AND William Bishop! Running around with their shirts off all the time! (Robert Wagner is also allegedly there, but I swear he's in one shot and nothing more.)

The debut feature by Josefina Molina — the first ever female graduate from la Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía de Madrid (she was a classmate of Cecilia Bartolomé's) — Vera, a Cruel Tale turns out to be a reworking of an hour-long adaption of the same story made for TV a few years earlier. Both versions were co-written by Molina and Salvador Maldonado (the frequently used pseudonym of Lola Salvador Maldonado), and both build considerably upon Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's original story, introducing a second female character and intensifying and expanding the relationship between the film's two men.

Vera is supremely gothic, with its dark castle and tone, qualities which are highlighted by the brightness and joy of the film's opening, during which the title character (Mel Humphreys) and her beloved Alfredo (Victor Valverde as Count Alfredo Quiroga) fall in love and marry. The pair are inseparable, profoundly bound together emotionally, and enjoying an enthusiastic, ionate sex life.

When Vera dies in the act of sex, however, everything goes dark, both literally and figuratively. Unable to cope with the loss, Alfredo closes himself into the grand family home, devoting his life first to the memory of Vera, and then to the delusion that she is still alive, there with him just as she was in the weeks and months before.

Whereas in the original story, Alfredo's butler (Fernando Fernán Gómez as Roger) recognizing the count's madness and, out of pity and affection indulges and s him, in both of the versions written by Molina and Maldonado, the butler comes to share Alfredo's delusion, eventually suring him in the intensity of his fixation upon the departed Vera, who he served from the time she was a child.

It is a change that makes the story both more interesting and more frightening, transforming it from the one-note horror fantasy of a man who might or might not be interacting with the ghost of his beloved wife, to a complex tale about shared madness and how that madness behaves when it's forced into with the world. (For the count, sunlight and reality are healing; for his butler, they drive him to defend his delusion, with catastrophic results.)

Described by academics as the only horror film directed by a woman during the Franco era, Vera is languid in its darkness, allowing its title character to dominate the lives of two men from beyond the grave. (In this article, which is fantastic even Google traslated, references are made to vampirism, as suggested by the blood at the corner of Vera's mouth as she dies, and the way she saps the men (who were) in her life of their strength and vitality.) The movie's focus on the ways in which they cope with their grief is unusual and compelling, allowing the men to suffer, be emotional, and show weakness at the center of the story.

Despite its weaknesses (the third act strikes a very different tone from the other two, and it takes a long time for us to care about the characters), Vera, a Cruel Tale is worth watching for its storytelling and because of simple rarity of its existence. Plus, it's the screen debut of eighteen-year-old Miguel Bosé, who appears alongside his little sister Lucia (she never made another movie)!

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

The cruel joke that is capitalism: advancement not through quality or ability, but through obsequiousness, spinelessness, and the dissolution of self. Financial rewards for the loss of humanity; for the transformation into a thing that serves its master.

They tell you that happiness comes from a windowed office, a bigger bank , and your name on a door. They tell you that service and obedience are indicators of worth and success. What they don't want you to know is that fulfillment can only be found by setting it all ablaze: by saying "no" and "I don't need you" and "I don't care." By reclaiming the self and leaping into the void.

Some spoilers ahead.

Hidden beneath — or, perhaps, lurking alongside — the sex and kink and transgression of Odd Obsession is a story about the profound indignity of aging.

Everything in the film occurs because of Kenji Kenmochi's (Nakamura Ganjirō II) shame at the physical reality of his advancing age. Kenji feels his body slowly betraying him, but his primary concern isn't his health — instead, it is the appearance of youth. He wants his wife (and his daughter) to believe he has the vitality of a much younger man, something he seeks through hormone injections and by ignoring the dire warnings of the doctors he sees.

To make matters worse, Kenji's mind is breaking down as well, leaving him with vast holes in his memory; periods during which he re nothing. These moments must be terrifying, but he speaks to no one about them — no one except a group of old (male) friends. Perhaps Kenji shared the truth of his spells with his friends because he expected them to respond with their usual irreverent joviality; their shock and concern must have devastated Kenji further, by rendering it impossible for him to continue to ignore his reality.

Though Kenji's wife Ikuko (Machiko Kyō) explicitly hopes for his death through arousal-triggered overexertion, there is something almost kind about her willingness to allow herself to be used in his fantasies. When Kenji is photographing her ed out body, or scheming to throw Ikuko and Kimura (his daughter's boyfriend, played by Tatsuya Nakadai) together, he feels young again, because he feels powerful. No longer is he the impotent, weak man whose eyes see double and whose mind betrays him — in those moments, he is the man he wishes himself to be: proud and strong and sharp.

The scene in which Kenji demands that his daughter Koike (Junko Kanō), Ikuko, and Kimura him in his bedroom as he is being bent and broken by a quack chiropractor is devastating, because it is a complete capitulation to age — Kenji can no longer even pretend he is well. Yes, his decline and death are linked to sexual arousal, but once Kenji so nakedly exposed himself, it was only a matter of time before he body gave out, just as his will already had.

(And Hana confesses to murder, only to be treated as an old nuisance by the police, who threaten to arrest her if she refuses to leave them alone. An old woman like her, they assume, could not possibly feel the kind of anger required to murder three people, nor could she ever be smart enough to pull off such a thing. For them — as for Kenji, Koike, Ikuko, and Kimura —she is nothing but her age: infirm, irrelevant, and desperate for attention.)

Things I liked about The Farmer's Daughter:

1. Richard Denning entering dimple first, and spending roughly 93% of the rest of the movie just standing around looking pretty.

2. The farm family being presented as a genuine collective: the father denies being the owner, saying he holds only a share, and every decision is made by a vote of the four of the family who still live at home. Sadly, this concept pretty much vanished after their first five minutes on screen.

Some spoilers ahead.

A fairly early effort from José Ramón Larraz — one followed immediately by two of his bigger successes, Symptoms and Vampyrs — Emma, Dark Doors is more muddled than his later films, but also contains traces of the earlier Whirlpool, and seeds of Symptoms, with its troubled young woman, isolated haven (or, more accurately, "haven"), and the transformation of the familiar into anything but.

When Emma (Susanna East, seemingly cast only because of her enormous eyes) is hit by a car in London, her injuries require both physical and psychological care; eventually, she is adopted by the woman who hit her, someone who also happens to have been Emma's most trusted caregiver (Perla Cristal as Sylvia Keane) when she was receiving treatment. Dr. Keane's ostensible objective is to give Emma the close attention and care she was unable to receive in the hospital, but there's something both possessive and dangerous about her desire to control the girl, as well as strong hints of an uneasy, mutual desire between the doctor and her patient-daughter.

We don't know how long Emma is with Dr. Keane and her husband (Ángel Menéndez as Steve), but it is long enough that the couple's friends know Emma's name and her situation without having to be reminded. Steve is exhausted by the constant presence of both an unpredictable, sometimes violent stranger in his home and his wife's obsessive attention to her, so they send Emma away to the country to stay with friends while they prepare for a vacation alone. Emma, whose obsession with the volatile Dr. Keane is just as intense as the doctor's with her, ends these plans by sneaking back into the house, destroying the plane tickets, and murdering Steve. (The fact that Dr. Keane is her accomplice in hiding the body speaks volumes about the relationship between the two women.)

From that point on, the movie turns into a combination of slasher and old dark house, with the blood flowing freely as the threats to Emma, both real and imagined, loom ever larger. The moment Emma is on her own, everything suddenly possesses an air of danger, whether or not she is on screen. It is as if we've been absorbed into Emma's view of the world, thrust into her paranoia in a way that makes us uneasily sympathetic to her violent impulses as she struggles to protect herself.

It is here, I think, that the film is most successful, something Larraz would do with much greater grace in Symptoms (helped there by the presence of Angela Pleasence, a more compelling actress than East). His ability to trap us in the worlds of his troubled women is impressive and eerie, effectively forcing us to fear the woman in question — someone we know is dangerous — but also the world that she sees as a constant threat. In this way (much like Jess Franco at his best), he makes us sympathetic to the women at the center of his films, even as he watches them through an exploitation lens.

⏩ José Ramón Larraz, ranked.

The Miami of Semi-Tough is the mirror of Inherent Vice's Los Angeles: oozing corruption and exploitation; teeming with cults and lies. Within this world, even love and sex are tarnished by the muck in which people spend their days, and built upon deception of either the self or the other.

Given director Michael Ritchie's abiding interest in the lies of American institutions and cultural norms, and their effects on society, it is no surprise that, here, the challenge is what it has always been: being true to oneself. Imperfection is honest; mistakes are honest. Being lost is honest. It is those who have answers who deceive; the ones who sell truths (ain't always what's so) for ducats and pain, forcing supplicants to prove their devotion before graciously assuming responsibility in exchange for coin.

Unexpectedly, the only thing within the world of Semi-Tough that is clean and real and honest is football. On the very first play we see, Billy Clyde (Burt Reynolds) takes a handoff and throws rather than runs the ball: he made a choice that affected an enormous number of people without a second thought, assuming responsibility the moment he let go of the ball. And the entire team, with the exception of Shake (Kris Kristofferson) is similarly honest and their own small ways, revealing flaws that are nevertheless their own.

Billy Clyde's life is awash in terrible choices, but he never once fails to take responsibility for them; the same is true of Puddin (Roger E. Mosley), and Vlada (Ron Silver), and TJ (Brian Dennehy), and many more besides. Even they fall into the habit of lies and half truths when it comes to women, but on the field and when it comes to who they are, everything is settled: unlike Shake and Dreamer (Carl Weathers), the rest have found a way to believe in themselves.

(Being human is hard; making decisions is scary. It can feel like salvation to let someone else take control — to blithely tread the path laid out by another and thus avoid the agony of choice.)

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

You want to make a movie? Without film?

Yes — let's pretend.

All of the optimism, hope, and sentimentality for which there was no room in Hugo Haas' previous American films was poured into his final one, Paradise Alley. With a cast full of refugees from the silent era — including Chester Conklin and Corinne Griffith — and made, as usual, partially on Haas' own dime, the director's swan song is a love letter to both the movies and humanity.

The film is a shameless fairy tale, about a once-renowed European director (former European director Haas, as Mr. Rudolph Agus) whose life of acting in bit parts to survive is interrupted when he moves into the titular condemned neighborhood and discovers that his neighbor (played by Conklin) was once a cameraman for D. W. Griffith. An inveterate optimist, Mr. Agus comes up with an off-the-wall idea: bringing harmony to the angry, unpleasant neighborhood by pretending to make a movie about it.

Using an empty camera and a microphone carved out of a cucumber, Mr. Agus and his gleeful co-conspirators (his neighbor's former camera-loader also eagerly s the wholesome grift) not only give the neighborhood's poverty-stricken, frustrated residents a focus, but also bring them together, simply by giving people opportunities to matter, and putting kind and thoughtful words into their mouths.

Because it was written by Haas, there is not an ounce of condescension in Paradise Alley: he cares about these people (and humanity as a whole) as much as his character does, and they both take great pleasure in allowing the alley's residents to either discover or become their best selves. And, through the charade, connections are made, hatchets are buried, and confidence is rediscovered.

Just as the lie is exposed and the house of idealistic cards begins to tremble, salvation arrives in the form of a thoughtful, generous studio head who transforms all of Mr. Agus' tall tales into truths, embracing both his ideas and the people around whom he has built his pretend picture (and his real life).

Regardless of the context in which it was made, this would be a charming movie: its budget is small and its story is simple, but the joy on screen is palpable, particularly when Mr. Agus and his friends giggle at their secret, the star-crossed young couple finally gets together, and middle-aged people are allowed to live out their long-buried screen dreams. But for Haas, who lost his beloved brother, Pavel, in a concentration camp (discussed in detail here), to depart the world of film with such an explosion of love and optimism for humanity makes Paradise Alley especially poignant, particularly in light of the darkness and selfishness that dominated his previous American works.

You have no one? Anywhere?

Well, it depends how you feel about these things — maybe I have everybody everywhere.

Unlike the later cycle of film set in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, which often veer close to exploitation in their eager engagement with the area's reputation for violence and selling sin, writer-director Werner Hochbaum's Raid in St. Pauli instead presents the neighborhood as a haven from the brutal, exploitative world of labor and capital.

Set largely in a seedy bar populated by sex workers, criminals, and sailors on leave, the film uses the relationship between a thief (Friedrich Gnaß as Sailor Karl) and a sex worker (Gina Falckenberg as Else) to illuminate the world in which they live. Agreeing that they would both rather live outside the mainstream/law than conform to social and economic expectations by going to work in a factory, the duo's shared desire to leave the city creates an instant bond between them — and a misguided belief that they alone can escape the grip St. Pauli has on them and their fellow marginalized rebels.

Over and over again, the world of the bar proves itself to be a unified one. Far from the St. Pauli of the 1960s and 1970s films, in which criminal forces are constantly in violent conflict, here those forces make common cause against external threats. Refusing to be persuaded by the powers that be that they are enemies, this collection of outsiders instead recognize that they have more in common with one another than they do anyone out in the rigorously capitalist world, and do everything they can to keep one another safe.

Even Leo (Wolfgang Zilzer), the kind, simple musician Else is leaving for Karl, finds a way to get along with his rough, brusque rival. Though their situation is an extreme one, it is representative of the choices made by those in their world: to move together rather than against one another. And, when the inevitable happens and Karl is captured by the agents of the state for the crime of refusing to conform (and, also being a thief), Leo and Else find one another again, slipping back into their little, familiar place on the margins.

Hochbaum's filmmaking here is a charming mix of very loose in of its narrative, and rigorous in of its style, with its rhythmic editing bringing the bustle of the city dynamically to life, and his use of diegetic sound often providing a clever, striking bridge between scenes and locations. In addition, though the interiors in the film were shot on soundstages, the exteriors are often St. Pauli itself, and Hochbaum keeps the film local by featuring Charly Wittong, a folk singer who became famous performing in the area, and using the Hamburg police to play themselves.

Presumably because of its mature content, upon its original release, Raid in St. Pauli was off limits for children and young people (for readers of German, the censorship report is here); at the end of 1933, the Nazis banned it outright because, among other things, its depiction of :

... is incompatible with today's understanding of morality and decency and runs counter to the aspirations of the new state, which combats prostitution as a source of physical and moral danger. These aspirations are directly contradicted by the depiction of an unbroken chain of breeding grounds for vice and debauchery, giving the viewer the impression that such conditions are still conceivable or even possible in today's state.[x]

Thanks to Zynab for the recommendation, and for the irresistible introduction to Hochbaum.

I spent an unable percentage of the early and mid 1990s watching and rewatching Peter's Friends. At that time, I so persistently revisited it because I loved getting to watch all those Cambridge Footlights friends just be together, and to imagine we were getting glimpses of their off-screen relationships, at least sometimes. And, also, the soundtrack is great, and the screenplay is incredibly funny. (Plus, I adored Tony Slattery — where my Whose Line people at? — and, I mean, early 1990s Emma Thompson is pretty much the hottest woman ever, y/y?)

Rewatching it now, after more than two decades, I realize my affection for the movie might also have been about its tone, and the way in which it so brazenly embraces unhappiness, self-loathing, and the sorrow of missed opportunities. While in my twenties I didn't realize how much comfort I got from films about sad people groping their ways through a life of compromise and frustration, I'm fully aware of it now, and am frankly astonished as to how well Peter's Friends fits into that very specific framework.

Because this is a staggeringly dark, sad movie, masquerading as a comedic story about the reunion of college friends. Everyone is miserable when they arrive, and only one couple leaves in better shape than they were when they came — and that pair (played by Hugh Laurie in glasses and the always perfect Imelda Staunton) is still laboring under the weight of the loss of an infant son less than a year earlier. It's a wonderful, ballsy film that refuses to allow anyone to maintain the lies they tell themselves: Peter (Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry-ing his face off) is absolutely not ok, Andrew's (thirty-three-year-old Kenneth Branaugh, possibly also at his prettiness peak) marriage is in shambles, Sarah (Alphonsia Emmanuel) uses sex and romance to avoid facing her life, and Maggie (Emma Thompson with perfect hair, pretending she's dowdy) uses books to do the same.

They're all disasters, and they all treat one another terribly in spite of themselves, slicing, bleeding, and then forgiving, just as they always did, and always will do. When they're not being selfish, the group all have impressive emotional intelligence, a fact which makes their emotional violence to one another all the more affecting, and all the more realistic. They lash out because they know one another's weak spots, but also because they know they can — because they know that these are people who will always have their backs, even when their is messy and wrong and cruel. These are the people around whom they can expose their darkness, and know nothing will change.

Anyway, I fucking love every miserable inch of it. Holds up spectacularly well.

One of Robert Rossellini's final films, Dark Soul reaches desperately for the depth and ennui of La Dolce Vita. Unfortunately, all it achieves is the creation of an egotistical, unpleasant, compulsively lying lead character who abuses (emotionally) and exploits (financially and emotionally) everyone around him, but for whom we are expected to have sympathy.

When we meet Adriano (Vittorio Gassman) and Marcella (Annette Stroyberg), they are driving through Pisa on their honeymoon. Marcella just wants to go back to Rome, sick of a seemingly obligatory tourist trip around the country in which they live, while the agreeable Adriano answers her every comment with a kiss. It quickly becomes clear that Adriano's main interest in his much younger wife (Gassman was forty-four while Stroyberg, whose character is twenty, was twenty-six) is sexual: when he's not reminiscing about his ladykilling past, he is trying to cajole her into bed. Marcella is sanguine about her husband's bragging, but there's a strong suggestion they haven't known one another for very long, and that she's not yet had to really confront who Adriano is — or, at least, who he was.

The very day the couple arrives back in Rome, things begin to crumble. Adriano's long, long term sugar mama (the always fabulous Yvonne Sanson as Olga, who is referred to as an old crone by everyone, despite the fact that Sanson was three years younger than Gassman), with whom he has not broken things off, wants him to repay some of what he owes her, his business partner is calling him out on the swindling by which he runs their car dealership —bankrolled by Olga — namely selling cars that don't exist, and a woman arrives from the north (Eleonora Rossi Drago as a countess called Alessandra) exposing to Marcella just one of the many hidden rooms of Adriano's past.

Furious with Adriano, Marcella leaves, and within what appear to be minutes, Adriano storms into a restaurant and bodily drags a woman (Nadja Tiller as Mimosa, his twice-over ex who is now doing sex work) out of it, driving her to a deserted beach, and demanding she return to his side and his bed. Mixing seduction with rage against Marcella and new "truths", Adriano wins Mimosa over yet again, taking her home and even gaining her crucial help with Alessandra.

It is here, I think, that we're supposed to develop sympathy for Adriano, as he talks to Mimosa about a traumatic experience during WWII, and comes clean about the family that he's always claimed died under a bomb during the war. But we have absolutely zero reason to believe that he's telling the truth, something which Mimosa reinforces by spending the entirety of his WWII story fixing her hair in the mirror. Indeed, the fact that he claims that, now, everything is true makes us even more certain that Adriano is, yet again, working an angle.

In reality, every word he says further exposes his selfishness and remorselessness, repeatedly returning to how much he hates Marcella and stating his desire to "walk all over her" for daring to leave him. Warming to his subject, Adriano announces to Mimosa that "The more you spit on people, the more they love you. They adore you even." (Mimosa who, to her credit, has her eyes wide open about the terrible judgment that has landed her back at Adriano's side, replies with "Tell me about it.")

Having Marcella suddenly proclaim that she once thought "given the horrors of war, life was worth nothing," before deciding that "It's only worth the little pleasure it can give us," is also presumably meant to make us see Adriano in a new light — to transform him into a victim of trauma who acts out as a result of that suffering. But, no matter how hard the screenplay tries convince us to share Marcella's sympathy for him, the Adriano we see is not lost, he's just an entitled, raging asshole, someone who wants his (hated?) wife back purely to show his power, and who immediately loses interest the moment he again secures her loyalty.

The whole thing is frustratingly empty, offering none of the cultural critique it presumably intends to present, and, to a person, the women are treated terribly by the screenplay. Marcella's youth arguably explains a lot of her behavior, but the film refuses to take her seriously, and the reason for Mimosa's ongoing attachment is anyone's guess. For her part, Olga is treated with as little respect as Marcella, by both the film and Adriano, and her loyalty to him is just as mysterious as that of Mimosa — yes, he looks like Vittorio Gassman, but surely there are other men (younger ones!) she can buy who are less odious to be around.

(FWIW, Gassman hated this movie and, according to this review, Rosellini did, too. You'd have thought one of them might have been able to do SOMETHING about it.)

Starring western icon Bill Elliott in one of his final appearances in the genre, Bitter Creek is a fairly by-the-numbers revenge picture, in which the person seeking vengeance for the death of a friend/relation is convinced that violence isn't the way — only to be forced to kill their quarry in self defense, thus ensuring both their heroism and their goodness.

Elliott, needless to say, is the righteous man (his name is Clay Tyndall), here seeking revenge for the death of his brother, shot in the back just outside a town called Bitter Creek. Clay arrives there to find that his brother's ranch has been taken over by the neighboring Lazy Q, owned by the all-powerful, morally questionable Quentin Allen (Carleton Young, who was clearly cast because Stephen McNally was too expensive), who Tyndall suspects of being involved in the killing From there, things proceed almost entirely as you'd expect, up to and including Quentin's girl (Beverly Garland as Gail Bonner) falling for Tyndall, and Tyndall achieving his righteous goal.

Within the very forgettable movie, though, is one wonderful nugget: Tyndall's brother, we're told, had just two friends (it is dangerous, you see, to visibly stand against Allen and his boys), both of whom immediately move with Tyndall into his brother's old house. The three of them find easy comfort together, with the two friends of the dead man (Jim Hayward as Dr. Prentiss and John Harmon as A.Z. Platte) practically vibrating with joy at meeting someone new they can actually trust, and with whom they can let down their guards. When the two of them prepare dinner together for Tyndall, Gail, and Gail's little brother, the domesticity is achingly sweet, as is the way Gail so comfortably fills a space in the little found family.

(While nothing else is as good as that pre-dinner scene, baby Claude Akins, playing Allen's right hand baddie, is already an absolutely delight in just his second film as a wee lad of twenty-seven.)

An absolutely exhausting comedy about the massive Marzooq family — led by Zeinab (Taheya Cariocca) and Hussein (Imad Hamdi) — and the stress caused by the engagement of its oldest daughter, up to and including greedy in-laws and the odd spot of embezzlement.

With seven kids in their small home (including an infant and two others under six), the life of Zeinab and her husband is one of constant chaos, full of shouting, violin playing, and the endless refrain of the monstrous youngest boy demanding to be paid by everyone, all the time. In a vacuum, the family is endearing — they plainly adore one another despite the short tempers to which their living situation and financial instability give birth — but the "hilarious" noise and fighting and stress wear on the viewer nearly as much as they do Zeinab and Hussein and, eventually, all we want is a break,

Complaints asides, however, the relationship between Zeinab and Hussein is quite lovely — the screenplay takes pains to show the strength of their affection and reliance on one another, and the performances by Cariocca and Hamdi are human and winning. And, as the central couple, Samira Ahmed (as Ahlam) and Youssef Shabaan, who has considerable Piporro energy (as Galal), are charming and convincingly sweet and in love.

In addition, the film offers a compelling look at Nasser's Egypt, both physically and socially (including the maddening — seemingly inevitable in way too many places — reality that a girl can either live her dream of going to college and becoming a doctor or fall in love and get married), as well as a glimpse into the life of the professional classes and the modernized (and very much not) traditions of courtship and marriage.

Some spoilers ahead.

A rape-revenge story in which the (barely metaphorical) rape gives its victim superpowers that she chooses to nourish only with the blood of men who want her body.* Men she effortlessly seduces with transparent lies and come-ons, which they all swallow because they want them to be true — and because they've been taught that girls who show off their bodies are sluts, and can be had by any man who wants them.

A classic superhero tale in which the hero and her nemesis are lifelong, soul-bonded friends; in which the hero can sense her nemesis, not only when she's near but, often, when she experiences sexual arousal. In which the hero is granted powers through her duty-bound killing of the villain she loves — a powerful force, undone by the loss of the hero's friendship. And in which the hero, shorn of her goodness by the brutality of life (of violence against women and its results), uses her borrowed superpowers to destroy those who victimized her friend.

(A modern film in which a gothic novel breaks out: a woman in white, walking across a field in the foggy, frightening night, in pursuit of the man who(se blood) will restore her; the woman and the man she sought climbing a hill toward a crumbling, deserted ruin, where truths will be revealed and everything will finally come to a head.)

Smart writing and editing, flawless casting, and inch-perfect performances. Thrilling and hilarious and horrifying every. single. time.

*With the exception of Ahmet, who was less a choice than the result of desperation — at that point, all she was capable of choosing was not to kill Needy.

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

As if the films of Marguerite Duras and those of Catherine Breillat had a cinematic baby — a baby then raised by the movies Nelly Kaplan and Rainer Werner Fassbinder made. Gloriously, unapologetically obtuse, fiercely serious, and unbounded by the laws of time; built upon female sexuality, blazing confidence, and the magnificent face of uncontainable 12-year-old girl.

I loved it. Thanks to Zynab, for both the wonderful review and the recommendation.

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

There is a lot that is familiar about Nightmare, with its tale of female madness, violence, and gaslighting, and its twist-upon-twist ending that looks ahead to the last ten minutes of many a giallo. While that familiarity does it a bit of a disservice, its austere atmosphere and uncompromisingly dark vision of humanity are striking and effective, and allow the film to separate itself a bit from its many cinematic cousins.

Within the insular world of the stately family home at the film's center, the only redeemable figures are the violent ones — and the only violent ones are women. Women pushed into explosive, desperate violence by psychological pressure that nudges them intentionally past the edge of sanity and turns them into weapons to do the bidding of others. This world is a brutally cruel place for women, who can only abuse or be abused themselves — the lone protection they have against victimization is to participate in the destruction of the mind of another woman.

As far as we know, the only innocents with their roots in this hereditary estate are those who have been condemned as mad from the start, mother and daughter murderesses. The psychologically fragile Janet (Jennie Linden) is ruthlessly, meticulously abused by her adored guardian (the far-too-bland David Knight as Henry Baxter) and his paramour, Grace (Moira Redmond), transforming her from an adolescent struggling to find herself into a walking weapon, purely for their convenience. And, when the deed is done and the girl is locked up for the murder they created, the pair are without remorse, forgetting Janet instantly and simply glorying in the wealth and togetherness her violence has secured for them. Until, that is, two other women train their newly malicious sights on Grace.

This cyclical progression of emotional and physical violence takes us back to what occurred before the film began, specifically the murder of Janet's father by her mother, the inciting event for Janet's own (very useful) mental fragility. No one in the film — no one in its dark, emotionally haunted house — suffers a break without being pushed, so we have to ask: To whose advantage was her mental decline? Who was served by his death?

Though the film's ending leaves us with enormous questions, particularly about Janet's dreams and their creation, it is Nightmare's nastiness that lingers in the mind — its nastiness and its uneasy, unresolved attitude toward its women, who exist on a knife's edge between sane saintliness and catastrophic violence, helpless before the will of others.

"Margarita y el lobo is one of Cecilia Bartolomé's most surprising works," says historian Luis Parés. "Making a film like this in the 1960s seems almost like a terrorist act to me. It criticizes everything: the church, piety, the family, sexuality in couples, etc." [x]

Cecilia Bartolomé's final student film at la Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía de Madrid (from which only three women, total, graduated in the the nearly twenty-five years of its existence), Margarita y el lobo runs only forty-four minutes and is a magnificently assured, spontaneous, fiercely pointed dismantling of gender and the institution of marriage in Franco's Spain. Starting with the separation of Margarita (Julia Peña) from her upper class, traditional husband (José Antonio Amor as Lorenzo), the film uses humor, song (the songs are AMAZING), and direct address to camera to layout the unequal reality in which the clever, ionate Margarita lives.

Having met at a one of 1968's many student protests, the couple moved quickly from dating to marriage, at which point Lorenzo's criticism began: accusing his wife of trying to "repress" her femininity through working and thinking, dismissing her way of speaking for not being refined enough, and taking it upon himself to dismantle her ion for everything she loved by "proving" to her that she lacked talent.

When Margarita has enough and tells Lorenzo it is over, his family is full of judgment, labeling her "Terribly vulgar. As always.", and, wondering why their dear, perfect boy ever married a woman like that. To Lorenzo's credit, he denies that Margarita trapped him into marriage, but his defense of her is token rather than imioned. And she is officially declared the "guilty" party by the court that approves the separation, losing all right to shared property.

And yet, because of Bartolomé's light touch and Margarita's resilience and lust for life, none of this is ever depressing. Instead, there is humor throughout, with those who oppose and belittle Maragarita (oppose and belittle women) the buffoons and fools, while she moves through the world with her head held high, often narrating the way through cutting, clever duets with the men around her.

As the film ends, Margarita collapses onto the tiny mattress in the sparsely furnished new apartment into which she has moved, and, kicking her legs with joy, proclaims "Finally alone!" (Ultimately, perhaps it was this joy as much as the film's criticisms of marriage and gender norms that led to its banning by the Francoist regime, and Bartolomé's lengthy blacklisting.)

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

Spoilers ahead.

If Dorothy Dandridge had a daughter and her daughter was Pam Grier, what would her granddaughter be? [x]

Despite the fact that there is sometimes superficiality to its peripheral dialogue and the pop psychology with which it engages, Naked Acts is successful where it matters, around the struggles of its main character (Jake-Ann Jones as Cicely) with her body and self-image.

As she grapples with the challenges of a newly slim body in both her personal and professional (she is an actress, or at least aspires to be one) lives, Cicely also faces for the first time the long-term sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother's (a former blaxplotiation star brilliantly named Lydia Love, and played by Patricia DeArcy) boyfriend. Her journey is a harrowing one, but she comes out the other side with not only a new belief in herself, but also the ability to be sympathetic to her mother, despite the woman's flaws as a caregiver.

The film's final scene, in which Cicely slowly strips before the camera in an empty studio, and photographs herself nude is enormously powerful, rising above its possible cliches because of the journey we've made with Cicely, and the profound vulnerability in her manner as she exposes herself with absolute control for what is surely the first time.

Given the role of the camera in the movie's climax, it is fitting that its other best scene is between Cicely and her photographer friend Diana (played by renowned photographer Renee Cox, who seems to just be playing herself). While Cicely is constantly bombarded by the ideas of men who are unable to think or talk about her body without sexualization and objectification (the latter of which is presented as a positive by an actress/nude model, who finds it reassuring in her work), Diana and her art offer the possibility that nudity can be frank and empowering: that the female body is neither shameful nor inherently sexual.

This ongoing conversation between the two continues as they share a sauna, but it is as much Diana's physical presence as her words that seems to work upon Cicely. Her friend is entirely without self-consciousness, sitting how she is comfortable, not how she looks best, and worrying not at all about what her posture does to her breasts, or her stomach, or her shape. Diana is so confident — so effortlessly herself — that she seems a person out of time, having successfully moved beyond the prison of shame to become untouchable by society and its rules. The fact that Diana is both firmly a woman and vaguely androgynous in her presentation further intensifies her remarkable ease with herself and her body: she lives and moves to please herself, not for anyone else, a shining, frank example to Cicely of a possibility she'd never even imagined.

While Cicely might never achieve Diana's level of self-possession, by the time the film ends she has forgiven herself for her victimization, and begun to love the woman she has always been. And that, as a first (or last) step, is more than enough.

⏩ 52 Films by ♀: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | watchlist

I plan to draw largely from this list, which I'm trying to keep at least somewhat diverse in of genre, nationality and language, and race and ethnicity; all are first-time watches. Please drop any must-sees in the comments!

• Je Tu Il Elle
• Cléo from 5 to 7
• The Creatures
• News from Home
• The Meetings of Anna
• Le Bonheur
• On the Barricade
• Double Agent 73
• Bury Me an Angel
• Humanoids from the Deep

...plus 494 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Watchlist for all years of this challenge is here.

Watched in 2022 || watched in 2023 || watched in 2024

• Derailed
• Nude on the Moon
• Dzhamilya
• Ghost of Spring
• The Teckman Mystery
• Simon and Laura
• Ana and the Others
• The Great Deception
• Aurora Borealis: Northern Light
• My Contribution

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. St. Pauli Between Night and Morning
2. Sexus
3. Joe Caligula: Tallow for the Old Men
4. Anthologie des scènes interdites érotiques et pornographiques de José Bénazéraf
5. Night of Lust
6. Hell on the Beach
7. Frustration
8. Sin on the Beach

Also seen, but so long ago it needs rewatching before being ranked: Psycho.

1. Rebecca
2. Rope
3. Shadow of a Doubt
4. Marnie
5. Rear Window
6. Vertigo
7. The Birds
8. Torn Curtain
9. Lifeboat
10. The 39 Steps

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Very open to suggestions, as long as they're movies in which women somehow get control over their looks/youth — in other words, not Eyes without a Face, or anything else in the cycle of movies about men killing/mutilating women in order to restore the beauty of another.

• She Devil
• The Wasp Woman
• The Leech Woman
• Countess Dracula
• The Legend of Blood Castle
• Evil Spawn
• The Wasp Woman
• Death Becomes Her
• Rejuvenatrix
• Tangled

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Coming of Sin
2. Vampyres
3. Symptoms
4. Whirlpool
5. Emma, Dark Doors

1. Pickup
2. Hit and Run
3. The Girl on the Bridge
4. Strange Fascination
5. Bait
6. One Girl's Confession
7. Paradise Alley
8. The Other Woman
9. Lizzie
10. Hold Back Tomorrow

These rankings are based on some sort of incalculable combination of quality and my love for the movie. That is why Summer Night will always, always, always be number one with a bullet.

1. Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil
2. Gian Burrasca's Diary
3. Seven Beauties
4. Love and Anarchy
5. The Belle Starr Story
6. Swept Away
7. The Basilisks
8. The Seduction of Mimi
9. A Night Full of Rain
10. Rita the Mosquito

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Highway Pick-Up
2. Pépé le Moko
3. Mother Hummingbird
4. Panic
5. Deadlier Than the Male
6. Au Bonheur des Dames
7. They Were Five
8. The Impostor

1. The Affair
2. Woman of the Lake
3. Ime
4. Affair in the Snow
5. Bitter End of a Sweet Night

Having finally read and really dug some of Mickey Spillane‘s books about him, I'm suddenly really invested in (and weirdly defensive of?) the character of Mike Hammer. I think it's hard to argue that Kiss Me Deadly isn't the best movie about him, despite being an unfaithful depiction; the rest of the list is kind of a mushy mix of how much I like the movie and how faithful I feel like the character is. And, yes, I know no one loves the 1953 version of I, the Jury but me.

1. Kiss Me Deadly
2. I, the Jury
3. The Girl Hunters
4. My Gun Is Quick
5. Margin for Murder
6. Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer!
7. I, the Jury

1. All That Heaven Allows
2. There's Always Tomorrow
3. Magnificent Obsession
4. Written on the Wind
5. All I Desire
6. The Tarnished Angels
7. Lured
8. Sleep, My Love
9. Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
10. The Lady Pays Off

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Part of my Italspolitation project. Poliziotteschi are here.

1. What Have They Done to Your Daughters?
2. Footprints on the Moon
3. A White Dress for Marialé
4. Love and Death in the Garden of the Gods
5. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
6. The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh
7. Death Walks on High Heels
8. My Dear Killer
9. Blood and Black Lace
10. Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

One of the very few female directors working behind the Iron Curtain (and in Europe, full stop, during the 1960s and 1970s), Hungarian director Márta Mészáros made films about women, and their struggles to achieve independence.

1. Binding Sentiments
2. Diary for My Father and My Mother
3. Adoption
4. The Inheritance
5. The Two of Them
6. Just Like at Home
7. Riddance
8. The Girl
9. Aurora Borealis: Northern Light
10. Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls!

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

As suggested by Dennis Vehlen, a list of the many (many) films in which Aldo Ray plays a scummy and/or corrupt cop or agent of the state.

Please drop suggestions/corrections in the comments, because I've only seen a few of these yet, and have basically added anything in which his character name has a cop title before it. I can't imagine he ever played, you know, a good cop, but if any of his characters are being unfairly maligned by their presence on this list, let me know immediately!*

*For a cop, he's mostly a ~good guy~ in Riot on Sunset Strip, but since he beats the shit out of some longhairs in a proper macho rage, it's staying on the list.

• Nightmare in the Sun
• The Dynamite Brothers
• The Glove
• Flesh and Bullets
• Human Experiments
• To Kill a Stranger
• The Executioner Part II
• Riot on Sunset Strip
• The Bad Bunch
• Psychic Killer

What it says on the tin.

• Mr. Soft Touch
• The Sheepman
• Out of Sight
• Lover Come Back
• I Married a Witch
• Beauty and the Boss
• the Night
• Woman Chases Man
• It Started with Eve
• Too Many Husbands

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Wild Bunch
2. Cross of Iron
3. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
4. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
5. Junior Bonner
6. Ride the High Country
7. The Deadly Companions
8. The Ballad of Cable Hogue
9. Major Dundee
10. The Killer Elite

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Irezumi
2. Stolen Pleasure
3. Giants and Toys
4. An Ode to Yakuza
5. A Wife Confesses
6. Two Wives
7. The Great Villains
8. Love for an Idiot
9. The House of Wooden Blocks
10. Manji

Watchlist for all years of this challenge is here.

Watched in 2022 || watched in 2023.

• The ionate Stranger
• Kamilla
• Rattle of a Simple Man
• Don't Sting the Mosquito
• The Captive
• The Point Is to Change It
• A Very Curious Girl
• A Place of Rage
• The Moon Has Risen
• You Got to Move

...plus 64 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Indelicate Balance
2. Red Roses of ion
3. Confessions of a Young American Housewife
4. Abigail Leslie Is Back in Town
5. Love's Island
6. The Love Merchant
7. The Bed and How to Make It!
8. Young Playthings
9. All the Sins of Sodom
10. Sin in the Suburbs

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The king of Italian melodrama.

1. The Ship of Condemned Women
2. Torna!
3. Chains
4. Melancholy Autumn
5. Tormento
6. Nobody's Children
7. He Who Is Without Sin...
8. Rice Girl

1. Nightmares Come at Night
2. Eugenie de Sade
3. The Diabolical Dr. Z
4. A Virgin Among the Living Dead
5. The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein
6. Vampyros Lesbos
7. Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac
8. Succubus
9. Night Has a Thousand Desires
10. Lucky, the Inscrutable

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Very, very open to additions here. Please tell me there are more of them.

• Swamp Women
• Voodoo Woman

Russian king of sad whimsy.

1. Ordinary Miracle
2. Juno and Avos
3. The Very Same Munchhausen
4. To Kill a Dragon
5. Formula of Love
6. The Twelve Chairs
7. The House That Swift Built

1. Agatha and the Limitless Readings
2. La Musica
3. Baxter, Vera Baxter
4. India Song
5. Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert
6. Nathalie Granger
7. Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne)
8. Les Mains négatives
9. Woman of the Ganges
10. Le Navire Night

1. Querelle
2. The Marriage of Maria Braun
3. Nora Helmer
4. World on a Wire
5. Martha
6. Lola
7. Beware of a Holy Whore
8. Fox and His Friends
9. Despair
10. Chinese Roulette

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Please, hit me with your must-sees!

(Also seen but like 30 years ago, and therefore not raked yet: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.)

1. Lorna
2. Good Morning... and Goodbye!
3. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
4. Mudhoney
5. Vixen!
6. Motorpsycho!
7. Common Law Cabin

1. Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis
2. Woman in the Moon
3. Metropolis
4. The Tiger of Eschnapur
5. M
6. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
7. The Big Heat
8. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
9. Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild's Revenge
10. Die Nibelungen: Siegfried

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Pickup on South Street
2. The Naked Kiss
3. Forty Guns
4. Park Row
5. The Steel Helmet
6. I Shot Jesse James
7. The Baron of Arizona
8. House of Bamboo
9. The Crimson Kimono
10. Shock Corridor

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Girl from Trieste
• Tales of Ordinary Madness

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
2. Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels
3. The Meetings of Anna
4. Hotel Monterey
5. Toute une Nuit
6. News from Home
7. Je Tu Il Elle
8. The Captive
9. Golden Eighties

1. One Must Live Dangerously
2. Nea
3. Papa, the Lil' Boats
4. A Very Curious Girl
5. The Pleasure of Love
6. Charles and Lucie

He was a murderous outlaw and a Confederate hero until he wasn't. Hollywood used to love him a lot, and still doesn't seem to have quite given him up.

AFAIK, Brian Donlevy is the only man to have played Quantrill twice, in 1950's Kansas Raiders, and then in Allan Dwan's Woman They Almost Lynched in 1953, even though his character's name in that one is technically Charles Quantrill. (A ton of movies feature of Quantrill's gang, mention him, or are built around characters based on Quantrill. This list includes only movies in which he actually appears as a character.)

Let me know if I'm missing any — I've seen about half of them, but otherwise I'm relying on Wikipedia.

• Kansas Raiders
• Quantrill's Raiders
• Renegade Girl
• Red Mountain
• Kansas Pacific
• Young Jesse James
• Arizona Raiders
• The Legend of the Golden Gun
• Ride with the Devil
• Woman They Almost Lynched

This list is a)a work in progress, and b)based on an unquantifiable combination of 'favorite' and 'best'. Don't @ me about Susana.

1. Susana
2. That Obscure Object of Desire
3. Belle de Jour
4. Diary of a Chambermaid
5. Wuthering Heights
6. Viridiana
7. That Is the Dawn
8. The Young One
9. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
10. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Watchlist is here, please let me know what's missing!

1. Dead Eyes of London
2. The Terrible People
3. The Inn on the River
4. School of Fear
5. The Black Abbot
6. The Mysterious Magician
7. Fellowship of the Frog
8. The Monster of London City
9. The White Spider
10. Room 13

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Playing with Fire
2. Trans-Europ-Express
3. Eden and After
4. Successive Slidings of Pleasure
5. The Man Who Lies

Watchlist for all years of this challenge is here; 2022 watched list is here.

• Diary for My Loves
• River of Grass
• Hypocrites
• The Smiling Madame Beudet
• The Headless Woman
• Fugue on the Black Keys
• India Song
• Questions for Two Women
• Pussy
• Diary for My Father and My Mother

...plus 68 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Please drop any additional recs in the comments — I'm particularly interested in the best products of his time with Roscoe Arbuckle. Many thanks to the folks who have contributed to the list so far!

• The Rough House
• Coney Island
• The Cook
• Good Night, Nurse!
• The Bell Boy
• The Hayseed
• Back Stage
• The Garage
• The Scarecrow
• Neighbors

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Bewitched
2. Carne
3. Fuego
4. Fever
5. Ardent Summer
6. Nude in the Sand
7. La mujer de mi padre

Also seen by not recently enough to rate or include: Letter from an Unknown Woman.

• Lola Montès
• There's No Tomorrow
• The Earrings of Madame de...
• La Ronde
• Le Plaisir
• Everybody's Woman
• Liebelei
• Caught

1. The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!
2. Ballad of a Hussar
3. Beware of the Car!
4. Carnival Night
5. Office Romance
6. Unbelievable Adventures of Italians in Russia

As inspired by Enrico, Breigha, and Savage, a list of recent-ish watches (the all-time list is way too daunting to even think about making), and the actors in them whose presence and/or performance got me feeling some type of way. I limited myself to 20 based on Enrico's model, and one/actor, otherwise we'd be here all day, and the list would just be, like, Barbara Stanwyck movies. Not really ranked, except #1. Names of the offending actors in the notes.

1. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

   Literally no one has ever been hotter than Gian Maria Volonté is in this movie.

2. Bitter Rice

   Vittorio Gassman and Raf Vallone.

3. Vampyros Lesbos

   Soledad Miranda.

4. T-Men

   Charles McGraw.

5. Detective Belli

   Florinda Bolkan. (Also, it was while watching this that I discovered she was in a 20 year relationship with a woman. I have not been the same since.)

6. The Hard Way

   Dennis Morgan.

7. Nightmares Come at Night

   Diana Lorys.

8. Without Honor

   Dane Clark, god help me.

9. Susana

   Rosita Quintana and Víctor Manuel Mendoza.

10. My Reputation

    Barbara Stanwyck.

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

IDK I think I'm a budding superfan?

1. Anna
2. The Boarder
3. The She-Wolf
4. Mafioso
5. Heart of a Dog
6. The Bandit
7. Without Pity

1. Summer Light
2. Lady Killer
3. Stormy Waters
4. Little Lise
5. The Strange Madame X
6. The Woman Who Dared
7. The Love of a Woman
8. White Paws

I don't think 'Southern Gothic' is exactly the right description of this cycle — this label is the best I can do.

For now, I'm excluding pure exploitation (like Russ Meyer's southern flicks, and stuff like Gator Bait), but that could well change, as the line between that and whatever this is gets narrower.

I've kinda got a watchlist, but am always open to recs, both exploitation and not. The trashier the better, though, always.

1. God's Little Acre
2. Desire in the Dust
3. Baby Doll
4. The Fugitive Kind
5. Ruby Gentry
6. Lightning Strikes Twice
7. Reflections in a Golden Eye
8. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
9. Swamp Women
10. Suddenly, Last Summer

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Danger: Diabolik
2. The Whip and the Body
3. Black Sunday
4. Blood and Black Lace
5. Kill, Baby... Kill!
6. Rabid Dogs
7. Black Sabbath
8. Roy Colt and Winchester Jack
9. The Girl Who Knew Too Much
10. Knives of the Avenger

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Old Hollywood flicks created in the Thin Man mold, ie in which couples banter and solve crimes and strive fruitlessly to be as cool (and hot) as Nick and Nora Charles. Suggestions appreciated!

• There's Always a Woman
• A Night to
• There's That Woman Again
• Fast and Furious
• The Amazing Mr. Williams
• Dangerous Blondes
• Fast and Loose
• Fast Company
• No Hands on the Clock
• Strange Affair

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

"Ranked" here means "ordered based on some inarticulable combination of quality and the amount of joy they brought me." Don't come for me about The Country I Come From, y'all.

1. The Country I Come From
2. Hôtel du Nord
3. Port of Shadows
4. Daybreak
5. Air of Paris
6. Children of Paradise
7. Thérèse Raquin
8. Chicken Feed for Little Birds
9. Bizarre, Bizarre
10. Jenny

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Part of my Italspolitation project. Gialli are here.

1. The Police Serve the Citizens?
2. Execution Squad
3. We Still Kill the Old Way
4. The Violent Four
5. The Day of the Owl
6. Death Occurred Last Night
7. Caliber 9
8. The Boss
9. High Crime
10. Detective Belli

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is the 26th San Francisco Silent Film Festival; it's my first one. This is me, a)trying to keep track of what I’ve seen, and b)putting them in some rough order of preference.

1. The Johnstown Flood
2. A Daughter Of Destiny
3. The Organist at St. Vitus Cathedral
4. Padlocked
5. Up in Mabel's Room
6. The Love of the Little Dancer's Life
7. Pigs Will Be Pigs
8. A Midsummer Night's Dream
9. The Iron Mask
10. Kentucky Pride

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.