Riding the Rails with “Train Dreams”

Among the ten movies nominated by the Academy for Best Picture, there were a few that were unfamiliar to me. To be honest, I hadn’t kept up with some of the year’s best foreign-language films, like Brazil’s The Secret Agent. Nor did I feel much inclination to check out the Oscar-nominated racing flick known as F1. Though it didn’t, of course, get named Best Picture, it did take home a statuette for its true-to-life sound design. As I write this in my home office, I’m hearing plenty of souped-up cars racing past my window. Why on earth would I want to go to a movie and listen to more of that screeching and rumbling?

 On the Best Picture top-ten list, there was one small American art film that I did feel obliged to view. A popular Oscar preview broadcast is hosted each year by my favorite L.A. public radio station, LAist. Shortly before the Oscar ceremony, the station’s critics annually gather to weigh in on the candidates in all the top categories, after which the audience applauds for its favorites. To my surprise, a little movie called Train Dreams got a big reaction from the crowd, as well as from the critics. Some of the latter actually called it the most memorable movie of 2025. So I absolutely needed to see what the excitement was about.

 Train Dreams started out as a 2011 novella by the acclaimed Denis Johnson. Though Johnson, the son of a U.S. State Department operative, grew up all over the globe, this book represents a rich slice of Americana. It focuses on the quiet but eventful life of Robert Grainier, an orphan who first rides a train in 1893 when (at age 7) he’s sent to meet his adoptive family in Fry, Idaho, As he grows up in these rustic surroundings, he remains directionless until he meets a young woman named Gladys. They marry, build a log cabin by the side of a river, and welcome a young daughter they name Kate.

 Though Grainier yearns to live at home with his growing family, his best source of income is  helping to build the Spokane International Railway. Camping out with his co-workers, he meets kind and gentle men, but also bigots who torture their Chinese immigrant co-workers and inflict vengeance on outsiders. Grainier also takes in the natural beauty of the forest, as well as the danger always lurking in the background as men fell giant trees and handle explosives. When he decides to return home for good, he learns that disaster has stricken his loved ones in his absence. That’s pretty much the whole story, which follows Grainier up until his death in 1968, Toward the end of his life, he watches on television John Glenn’s foray into outer space, and sees the earth spread out below him from his seat in a biplane. A narrator solemnly tells us that during this ride into the heavens, "as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."

 It’s a beautifully shot movie that certainly earns its four Oscar nominations, especially the one for cinematography. It’s also slow and solemn, and definitely an acquired taste. For me the biggest surprise is that three of the four main actors—Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones as his wife, and Kerry Condon as a forestry service worker with her own sorrows—turn out to be born and raised overseas. Only William H. Macy, playing a wise old coot, is  actually American-born. Surely there’s a good reason why Americans aren’t playing Americans. Any thoughts?

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The Angst and the Ecstasy of Catherine O’Hara

Life, as we know, is not always fair. Right now, when the world seems to be becoming a more and more daunting place, it doesn’t seem fair that we’ve just lost a lady so funny that she helps us forget our angst. In a way, angst is one of Catherine O’Hara’s personal specialties. She agonizes so hilariously over life’s vicissitudes that—momentarily, at least—we forget our own. It doesn’t seem right, frankly, that we had to lose her this past January, at age 71.

 O’Hara, Canada-born, was among the zanies at SCTV from 1976 to 1984. In Hollywood she played a number of memorable though subordinate film roles. I remember her fondly in After Hours, Beetlejuice, and as Kevin’s thoroughly rattled mother in Home Alone. Her longest lasting project was surely Schitt’s Creek,  an outrageous TV comedy (2015-2020) about an L.A. show-biz family forced to relocate, because of financial reverses, to a  Canadian town full of heart and not much else. O’Hara played opposite her good friend (and series co-creator) Eugene Levy, as Moira Rose, the snooty, multi-wigged mom who was once a soap opera star, and now can’t easily accept her much-diminished smalltown life. She seemed destined for an equally long run on Seth Rogen’s hit show, set behind the scenes in Hollywood, when death overtook her. Rogen's sweet tribute to her at the recent SAG awards ceremony is worth savoring.  

But I mostly think of O’Hara in conjunction with a trio of films directed and co-written by the remarkable Christopher Guest. Guest, an actual member of British nobility, had played rocker Nigel Tufnel in Rob Reiner’s deathless 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap. The experience led him (along with co-conspirator Eugene Levy and a company of gifted comic actors) to launch three largely improvised indies of his own. The first, Waiting for Guffman (1996) is an affectionate spoof of small-town amateur theatricals. It covers the torturous process of staging a pageant to honor Blaine, Missouri’s 150^th anniversary. (Any connection with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is not accidental.) O’Hara and Guest regular Fred Willard play Sheila and Ron Woodard, a perky pair of travel agents who have dreams of musical-theatre stardom. Sheila is prone to drinking a wee bit too much on occasion, which leads her to put her husband in an embarrassing situation indeed.

 By general consensus, the funniest of Guest’s mockumentaries is 2000’s Best in Show, a spoof of dog shows and of the humans who dote on their pedigreed fur babies. O’Hara and Levy are featured as Cookie and Gerry Fleck, a Florida couple who idolize their Norwich terrier and enjoy recording novelty songs in Winky’s honor. Gerry is faced with the challenge of having two left feet (literally), and Cookie—who seems to have enjoyed an exuberant sex life before her marriage—keeps running into former beaus eager to resume the relationship.

 Less well known is A Mighty Wind (2003), which mocks the era when folk music ruled the airwaves. Various Guest regulars (including Parker Posey, Michael McKean, Jane Lynch, and a host of other wacky singing actors) play musicians who amusingly resemble once-legendary groups likes The New Christy Minstrels and The Kingston Trio. The premise is that these groups reunite, decades after their celebrity has faded, for a reunion concert. The stand-outs (as always) are Levy and O’Hara. They play former sweethearts Mitch and Mickey, he now something of a nut case and she a sweet soul with an autoharp and a memory of the kiss at the end of the rainbow. Hilarity of course ensues. 

                    

Hollywood History the Orton Way

I know a very nice man of my generation named Richard Orton. He lives not far from me in Santa Monica, and local history is his passion. He’s also a serious movie buff, the kind of guy who can tell you how many times the so-called Auntie Mame staircase has been repurposed for other Hollywood films. Since 2017 Dick has been emailing free newsletters that contain his research into what he calls “Ocean Park, Santa Monica, and Other Magic Places.” Now, as a service to a community he loves, he’s compiled his beautifully illustrated newsletters into a two-volume set that fans can purchase. Since the complete box-set is expensive, he has made copies available at a number of local libraries. This is highly fitting, because the project was partially financed through a 150^th anniversary micro-grant through the  City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs department.

 In reading through Dick’s volumes, I was struck by how much the history of our region owes to the rise of the motion picture industry. Within Santa Monica’s borders there still stand many structures that have a movie association. A small neighborhood movie house called the Aero Theater was built by aerospace icon Donald Douglas to entertain aircraft workers around the clock during the hectic days of World War II. An Ocean Avenue watering-hole called Chez Jay has been described by one wag as “where the stars go to slum.” It has hosted such celebrities as Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor, and most recently was used in a key flashback for George Clooney’s 2025 film, Jay Kelly. Unfortunately, the classroom building at Santa Monica High School that had a cameo in the James Dean classic, Rebel Without a Cause, was recently replaced by a more up-to-date structure.

 According to Dick Orton, the Jewish movie moguls of old (as well as those stars in unconventional living arrangements) were once not considered welcome in Beverly Hills. That’s why many built palatial homes on Santa Monica’s “gold coast,” close to the Pacific Ocean. Most are gone now, but Santa Monica still treasures the elaborate 1929 beach house once used for entertaining by actress Marion Davies and her beau, William Randolph Hearst. Given to the city by philanthropist Wallis Annenberg in 2005, it is now a treasured public playground on the sand.

 Old-timers will remember the Santa Monica Pier as the home of a post-Disneyland amusement park, Pacific Ocean Park. But even before that era, celebrities came to the pier for innocent merriment. One of Dick’s newsletters highlights a once-upon-a-time photo studio where celebs mixed with nobodies to have comic pictures taken. That particular newsletter is enlivened with  some of those photos: of Lucy and Desi, of the so-called Citizen Kane and Gilda (Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth), of Judy Garland and David Rose, of Alice Faye and Phil Harris.

 And then there are entries about the long-ago Santa Monica Canyon ranches where movies were once filmed. Like Hartville, founded in 1912, which boasted its own Indian settlement, and is considered the first modern movie studio. And the Clarence Brown ranch, which eventually ended up housing the standing set from TV’s M*A*S*H.

 Now that his book is done, has Dick Orton exhausted his subject? Not even close. I’m hoping he’ll look into the history of McCabe’s Guitar Shop, a Pico Boulevard performance venue that has launched the career of many a famous musical talent. It’s now owned by the son of screenwriter Robert Riskin and actress Fay Wray, and live albums recorded at McCabe’s are prized by collectors. So, Dick, what are you waiting for?   

 

Jessie Buckley and the Luck of the Irish

Well, it’s all over now but the shouting. The 98^th annual Academy Awards ceremony is in the books, and most viewers (me included) are rather happy about the outcome. Timothée Chalamet was gracious in defeat as Michael B. Jordan was hailed for his lead performance(s) in Sinners. (Trivia time: the only other actor who won the Oscar for playing twins was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou.) Some of the actresses on display looked suitably gorgeous while others (I’m looking at YOU, Renate Reinsve) just seemed, well, a bit weird. Host Conan O’Brien was a hoot wearing Amy Madigan’s red fright wig from Weapons, being chased up the aisle of the Dolby Theatre by a pack of very excited kids. The glamorous and uninhibited Teyana Taylor seemed to have surgically attached herself to the leg of Paul Thomas Anderson as he strode to the stage to receive one of three long-overdue statuettes. There was real heartfelt emotion in the In Memorian segment, particularly in Billy Crystal’s tribute to Rob and Michele Reiner.

 But I want to focus on one of the evening’s least suspenseful awards: that for Best Actress. Everyone seemed to agree from the get-go that Jessie Buckley was a lock for  playing Shakespeare’s grieving wife in Hamnet. I too loved her performance, but it made me more curious than ever about how her career evolved. I first spotted Buckley in a small 2018 film called Wild Rose. It focuses on a young Scottish single mother who loves American country music and dreams of traveling to Nashville. Buckley impressed me in that role, and I figured she was a talented young Scot with a bright career ahead of her. Wrong! Buckley is Irish, and apparently the first Irish actress ever to win a major acting Oscar. So her win was well-timed, just ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

 As to the question of how Buckley’s career got started, I’ve discovered something quite charming. Back in 2008, at the ripe old age of 18, she was a contestant on a BBC competition show called I’d Do Anything. The show’s title came from a perky song in the musical, Oliver! (based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist) which was a massive hit in London and New York before being transformed into an Oscar-winning film. The gimmick of the TV show was that various aspiring young singing actresses were competing to win the star role of Nancy in an upcoming West End revival of Oliver!, with votes from the public making all the difference. You can find the show’s finale on YouTube, with Buckley and another singer-actress, costumed identically, each singing Nancy’s big torch number, “As Long as He Needs Me.” 

Guess what! Buckley came in second, though guest panelist Andrew Lloyd Webber passionately campaigned on her behalf. For me, looking back on the competition after several decades, Buckley was a star in the making. I am not expert enough at singing to comment on the technical prowess of the two contestants, but there’s no question that Buckley was better at pouring into this song a deep well of emotions. Clearly, she understood the lyrics. 

 The Jessie Buckley of 2008 was not exactly the woman we saw on stage at the Dolby. At 18 she was very slim with a mop of curly hair and a fair amount of makeup, not the more austere look she seems to favor these days, as a wife, a new mother, and a recognized dramatic actress. She was adorable back then, but I wouldn’t have guessed what she’d go on to do. Now, though, the sky’s the limit. Brava! 

 

 

Murmurs from the Heart: Agnès Varda in California

I fell hard for the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda when I saw her onscreen in her Oscar-nominated Faces Places (originally Visages Villages). In this late-in-life documentary, a big hit at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, the then-88-year-old Varda travels throughout the small towns of France with a decades-younger artist known as JR, snapping photos and posting giant murals of the citizenry. On screen, she’s a charming gamine: with her tiny frame, huge eyes, and mop of auburn hair, she looks like someone’s most amusing elderly aunt, still spry after all these years. (The tall, thin, bearded JR provides a wonderful counterpoint.)

 Varda was married for almost three decades to the equally creative Jacques Demy, best known for his all-musical 1964 hit, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both gained fame as filmmakers during the rise of the French New Wave. (You can see them both represented in Nouvelle Vague, Richard Linklater’s 2025 salute to the making of a seminal New Wave classic, Breathless, directed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1960.) It’s been a very long while since I watched Varda’s much-admired 1962 movie of the Paris streets, Cléo from 5 to 7, though I remember it being very much in the seemingly impromptu New Wave style. I was not a big fan of her equally-honored 1985 drama, Vagabond. But I suspect that Varda’s real talent lies in documentary filmmaking, in finding the pulse of a place, a time, and a people.

 Always a wanderer, Varda spent part of the 1960s in California, where she reunited with an elderly relative, captured the dynamism of the Black Panthers on film, and goggled at the L.A. mural scene. For her, as the film’s off-camera narrator, L.A.’s street murals are “living, breathing, seething walls.” She considers them “as beautiful as paintings,” revealing “everybody dreaming together,” even though some of them are crude, amateurish, and marred by graffiti.

 The 1981 film she made to celebrate L.A.’s murals is called Mur Murs . Clearly fond of word play and multilingual jokes, she has adapted the French word mur (for “wall”) into a variation on the English word “murmur.” (Around the same time, she also shot a modest dramatic film that used L.A.’s murals as an occasional backdrop. That 1982 piece, Documenteur, is wittily subtitled “an emotion picture.” I watched it too, but couldn’t find much interest in observing the low-key characters go about their business. It’s as a documentarian that Varda shines the brightest.)

 In Mur Murs she introduces the viewer to some of L.A.’s major mural artists , like Kent Twitchell. It’s poignant to see Twichell’s iconic L.A. Freeway Lady captured on film, since this monumental portrait of his grandmother and a world-spanning knitted afghan no longer gazes down on the Hollywood Freeway, having been painted over in 1987. I also enjoyed the glimpses provided by Varda of several of Santa Monica’s liveliest wall paintings. And it’s lovely to see the giant blue whales someone painted on a large wall in Venice dwarfing a solemn row of live tai chi practitioners.

 But though she has an eye for aesthetic appeal, Varda also seems fascinated by the cruder murals of East L.A. She views these as continuing the tradition of Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, who for a time lived and worked in SoCal. These dramatic works, often painted by collectives of amateur artists, are marked by deep emotion and a strong community spirit, because they tend to commemorate homeboys who have lost their lives to street violence.   

 Varda loves it all—the refined and the raw—and I love her celebration of these loud, bright murmurs. 

 

Harold and Bud: The Pre-Graduate

It’s hard for me to think of Bud Cort as old. When playing a title character in 1971’s Harold and Maude, he was in his early twenties, but (with his small frame,  big blue eyes, and early Beatles haircut) he looked to be maybe seventeen. And, of course, acted on screen like a spoiled teenager, one who hates his life and everyone in it. But now, more than fifty years later, Bud Cort is dead of pneumonia, at the not-so-young age of 77.

 When I was a recent college graduate, Harold and Maude was considered a major film for my generation. Not that the off-beat story of the pairing of youth and age was a commercial hit at the start, The film, written by UCLA film student Colin Higgins and directed by relative newbie Hal Ashby, was almost universally panned by critics and ignored by potential audiences. Gradually, though, it was discovered by young people in rebellion against their elders. Famously it became a cult hit, playing for three straight years in a Minneapolis art-house with a youthful clientele.   

 Why did Harold and Maude prove so attractive to young Americans? I realized, when watching it again after fifty-odd years, that this film has a great deal in common with the hit movie on which I wrote my last book, 1967’s The Graduate. In some ways they’re similar: a youthful leading man, a mistrust of parents; a restless rebellion against what seems like a bleak future. On the other hand, there are ways in which the two films couldn’t be more opposite. As my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson points out, recent Ivy League graduate Benjamin Braddock is a star student, a star athlete, and a Big Man on  Campus. Back home in Beverly Hills,  he’s his parents’ trophy son. Bursting with pride about his achievements, they give him expensive presents (a sportscar, a diving suit) and don’t intrude when he chooses to spend his summer lounging in the swimming pool (and in Mrs. Robinson’s bed).

 Harold, by contrast, has done nothing for his mother to brag about. (His father seems to be totally missing in action.) His very wealthy mom, played by a screen veteran with the wonderful name of Vivian Pickles, seems bent on ignoring him, so caught up is she with her salon appointments and social events. When she decides that an early marriage might cure what ails him, she insists on filling out the dating survey herself, in his name. Maybe that’s why Harold keeps coming up with increasingly gruesome ways of feigning suicide. He also attends many a stranger’s funeral . . . and that’s where he finds someone with similar tastes, almost-eighty-year-old Maude (the great Ruth Gordon).

 Despite her appreciation for a good funeral, Maude is hardly as gloomy as Harold. Instead she’s a true life force, someone who poses in the nude for artists and steals cars for fun. In her presence, Harold discovers joy, though his “Elaine” is a great deal older than Benjamin Braddock’s. All of which leads to an ending that seems surprising, but (given a few hints of Maude’s backstory) perhaps not entirely illogical. No, Harold and Maude don’t end up together on a bus, à la Ben and his beloved, but—for the young people who made this film and the young people who watched it—it still seems an ending filled with optimism and love. (And, of course, a rejection of anything to do with President Nixon and the U.S. military establishment, representing a world that the youth of my generation hardly wanted to celebrate.)

 

 

After Hours in Nighttown

Circa 1988, when I came to work at Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons Pictures, a strange new script crossed my desk. Called Daddy’s Boys, it was an outrageous dark comedy about a family of Depression-era bank robbers. If it read like something that had been cranked out in a hurry, this was because it had. It seems that Roger, looking at the rather effective period sets that had been built for Big Bad Mama II, became nostalgic for those early days when he’d shoot an outlandish movie (like Little Shop of Horrors) over a weekend, on sets left over from someone else’s project. My soon-to-be buddy, Daryl Haney, wrote the weird and wacky screenplay, while also playing the film’s hillbilly lead.. And its director, making his very first feature, was Joseph Minion.

 I doubt it was accidental that Roger knew Joe Minion’s work, because Joe had written the screenplay for one of Martin Scorsese’s most unique small films, 1985’s After Hours. Scorsese, of course, was one of Roger’s outstanding protégés, having made Boxcar Bertha for Corman’s New World Pictures in 1972. But after such major artistic and commercial successes as Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), Scorsese had hit the skids. His 1982 The King of Comedy was not well received, and a major studio had backed out of funding his passion project, based on Nikos Kazantzakis’ controversial novel, The Last Temptation of Christ. At a creative impasse, Scorsese decided to take a chance on Minion’s eccentric little script, teaming with Griffin Dunne, who also played the hapless lead.

 After Hours is not the obvious Scorsese film: no gangsters, no major production values. It’s a simple but riveting story, set on the streets and in the seedy byways of Lower Manhattan, over the course of one very long evening. Dunne plays Paul, an uptown Manhattan office worker, now heading down to artsy, scruffy SoHo at the invitation of a quirky young blonde (Rosanna Arquette) who appreciates his taste in Henry Miller novels. He finds her in an artist’s loft, where her mostly undraped roommate (Linda Fiorentino) proves challenging company. I won’t go into too many details: suffice it to say that Paul is thwarted at every turn: his last $20 bill flies out the window of a cab; a new acquaintance abruptly commits suicide; he’s drenched by a sudden rainstorm; every woman he meets quickly turns against him, to the point where he’s racing through back alleys because someone suspects he’s the burglar who’s been preying on the neighborhood. All he wants is to go back home, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.  

 After Hours presents am increasingly phantasmagoric view of the world as the night plays out south of Houston Street. (One detail I’ll long remember: Paul fleeing through the mean streets of Lower Manhattan, chased by a Mister Softee ice-cream truck driven by none other than the late Catherine O’Hara. And then there are those strange moments involving hippie comics Cheech & Chong, as well as the papier-mâché bagel-and-lox paperweights that keep showing up when least expected.) Film scholars have some fascinating things to say about Scorsese’s borrowing of stylistic elements from surrealists like Hitchcock and Kafka, I’d add that there’s something here reminiscent of the “Circe” section of James Joyce’s greatest novel, the part that became an unlikely 1958 Broadway hit titled Ulysses in Nighttown.    

 Which hardly means this film is for intellectuals only. It should appeal to anyone who looks for a way out of a humdrum existence but finds the adventure ultimately too much to bear.  I’ve been there; have YOU?   

 

 

 

Los Angeles Plays Itself

I’ve long been convinced that Hollywood writers of romantic comedy secretly pine for their own early years in New York, when they had no money but a great capacity for love. Just look at When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail, and of course Annie Hall. On film, Manhattan often seems like a playground for lovers, who stroll through Central Park, nuzzle one another on subways, and find inspiration at the top of the Empire State Building. But if cinematic New York is for lovers, my L.A. hometown sometimes seems reserved for disasters: like earthquakes, fires, and terrorist attacks upon skyscrapers on Christmas Eve.

 The Los Angeles Times, obviously determined to show that there’s more to L.A. than Die Hard, recently published an Entertainment section devoted to the topic of “101 Best L.A. Movies.” Their sleuthing (and the follow-up section that features angry readers’ own suggestions) has served to remind me that L.A. is many sorts of places in one. It’s, of course, where movies are (or used to be) made: its agreeable weather and its amorphous nature have allowed it to pose as many other cities and countries. (Did you know that Martin Scorsese’s quintessentially New York-based Mean Streets was mostly shot in L.A.?) But a true movie fan knows that a Los Angeles location can imply many different aspects of life in the SoCal megalopolis. First place on the Times list went to Chinatown, showcasing crime, corruption, and a certain exotic flavor (“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”) Near the top of the Times 101 there’s also the weird fantasy world of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and, of course, the faded movie-star glamour of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. The Times’ top five also include the ersatz flair of the Beverly Hills nouveau riche (Clueless) and the futuristic nightmare of Blade Runner.

 But not every film on the Times list showcases the rich and famous. I was pleased to see the inclusion of Tangerine, Jackie Brown, and particularly Boyz N The Hood, all of which pay attention to the down-and-out, as well as to the pervasive racial tension affecting L.A.’s misfits. There’s also suburbia (Valley Girl, Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and the ethnic pockets where English is not really the lingua franca (Real Women Have Curves, Mi Vida Loca). L.A. as a place of aspirations is showcased beautifully in everything from The Karate Kid to Bowwfinger, while LA. as the land of dashed dreams shows up in movies as different as Barton Fink and Slums of Beverly Hills. And the list also covers films that dive deeply into local occupations we Angelenos would rather ignore, like the San Fernando Valley pornography biz in Boogie Nights.

 When I first beheld the Times list, I anxiously scanned it to make sure it included The Graduate. (It’s #37, capturing the soignée lives of the swimming-pool set.) But some Times readers expressed dismay at the non-appearance of such films as the Oscar-winning Crash (a slightly overwrought movie definitely attuned to L.A.’s  car culture)), the screen adaptation of Nathanael West’s classic Day of the Locust (for me it misses its mark) and the hilarious Get Shorty. My own biggest complaint is the absence on the main list of 2009’s poignant romantic comedy, (500) Days of Summer.

This film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, is a 2009 charmer in which an young  couple fall in and out of love while living and working in Downtown L.A. Local landmarks (the Bradbury Building!) and hidden corners are given their due. Hey, this is a “New York is for Lovers” movie set in my own hometown! 

 

 

 

 

Confronting “The Beast in Me”

Since around the time that my Roger Corman biography came out, I’ve been part of a lively group called Biographers International Organization. This group, officially founded in 2010 by the indefatigable James McGrath Morris and some of his biographer peers, is devoted to the art and craft of biography. BIO’s advisory council has included a who’s who of famous biographers (including Pulitzer Prize winners like Debby Applegate, Robert Caro, Ron Chernow, and Stacy Schiff), but anyone who finds biography of interest is welcome to join for a nominal fee. Perks include an annual conference, an informative monthly newsletter, and Zoom gatherings galore. And, of course, a Facebook group in which biographers from around the globe trade info, cheer one another on, and generally stay in touch.   

 I bring this up here because of a hot recent topic on the BIO Facebook page: the limited Netflix series called The Beast in Me. The dauntless biographer Carl Rollyson (who’s credited with almost as many books as Heinz has varieties) was, I believe, the first to encourage his fellow members to check out the eight-part series. It’s a cracking good thriller, featuring two of filmdom’s finest, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. Danes plays Aggie Wiggs, a best-selling author grieving the loss of her young son in an accident involving a drunk driver. Rhys (a Welsh actor who speaks flawless American English in this series) plays Nile Jarvis, a wealthy entrepreneur notorious in the press because of the mysterious disappearance of his wife.

 One reason Rollyson and other serious biographers are keen on The Beast in Me is because Aggie’s fame comes from her publication of a non-fiction book about her late father. When the series opens, she’s struggling to move ahead on a joint biography of two recent Supreme Court justices, Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who were both courtroom adversaries and personal friends. A fertile topic for a book, perhaps, but maybe not one that Aggie’s equipped to handle. So when her new neighbor, the cheerfully sinister Nile Jarvis, proposes himself as her new biographical subject, she pays attention. Next thing you know, they’re having long tête-à-têtes in which, while proclaiming himself innocent of serious crimes, Nile Continues to find ways to get under Aggie’s skin.

 The series is riveting, though maybe its wrap-up is not quite as effective as it might be. It’s exciting to see Danes (who surpasses even Keri Russell of The Diplomat in looking worried and disheveled) struggling to know how to handle the disarmingly chummy new next-door pal she’s pledged to present to the world on the page. As Carl Rollyson has pointed out to his fellow authors, biography can also be seen as autobiography. The way a biographer approaches his or her subject is very much a secret glimpse into that biographer’s own psyche. Aggie, for instance, must ultimately admit to seeing in herself something resembling Nile’s cold-blooded approach to the world.

 I agree completely. I’d even say that my three books reveal to the reader three very different aspects of my own path through life. Writing about my longtime boss, filmmaker Roger Corman, I was something of a cynic: sassy and even snarky. My Ron Howard bio brought out the optimist in me. Suddenly I was hopeful about the human capacity for goodness. My 2017 study of The Graduate, officially titled Seduced by Mrs. Robinson, saw me as a member of a youthful generation  hugely influenced by this smart little comedy, but also—fifty years later—as someone who had learned a great deal about life as the decades wore on.

 

 

 

In Jeopardy

As the 2026 Winter Olympics played out, I was an up-close-and-personal observer of a competition of another kind. While figure-skaters Ilia Malinin and Amber Glenn graphically showed us what performance anxiety is all about, I was watching perfectly nice mental athletes trying to best the reigning champ on that old TV standby, Jeopardy! The show, around since 1964, rewards arcane knowledge that contestants must offer by way of a question. Categories are obscure; clues are designed to be tricky. If you do well, you can win major money and pride yourself on being a designated brainiac. But, even though host and staff go out of their way to be welcoming to all participants, the assumption is that two out of the three contestants will eventually go home with empty pockets and dashed dreams of glory. For some of the losers it’s fun, despite it all. Others will take longer to get past the disappointment they feel about their less-than-stellar performance.

 What is it about quiz shows that we Americans love? I’m old enough to remember early game shows like The $64,000 Question, in which questions were more factual than tricky, and we in the home audience found ourselves rooting for contestants with particularly moving backstories. Our enthusiasm for these shows was of course tempered by the eventual disclosure of massive behind-the-scenes cheating, contrived by the networks to increase fan excitement. The secret coaching of contestant Charles Van Doren on the show called Twenty-One led eventually to a fascinating 1994 film, Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford. (Ralph Fiennes played Van Doren, and John Turturro starred as Herb Stempel, a less aristocratic contestant who was forced to lose to Van Doren, scion of an impressive literary family.)

 There’s been no cheating scandal connected with Jeopardy!  One thing is clear: people really want to be in the studio audience. Jeopardy! is taped at Sony Studios, which of course used to be the fabled MGM lot. So just getting past the guard gate is a bit of a thrill, and the parking structure décor—with its towering photos of host Ken Jennings right next to the metal detector—is designed to make you feel part of something special. After some waiting around, and receiving the all-important wrist band, you are escorted . . .  not to the soundstage but to a gift shop where all manner of branded game-show merch (T-shirts, pajamas, water bottles) is on sale. After making your purchases you assemble in a large hallway where videos of excited contestants play in a constant loop.

 Finally you are escorted to Jeopardy! central, where a veteran greeter explains the code of conduct. Yes, laugh and cheer, especially when the applause sign is lit, but don’t mutter the correct answer, even under your breath, because a sensitive microphone might pick it up. The crew on hand all seem part of a very large family: the greeter makes sure to let us know how many decades he’s been with the show, how much he adored late host Alex Trebek, and how Ken Jennings (a 74-game Jeopardy! winner before snagging the host’s job) is perfect as Trebek’s amiable successor.   

 The Jeopardy! set is a marvel of exotic swirls and dramatic lighting. But perhaps even more exciting is the lobby, which guests can visit between taping sessions. There’s a huge case filled with Emmy statuettes won by the show. And you can pose for photos behind a mock-up of a real contestant’s desk. Alex Trebek’s very own desk is posed in a niche like a treasured relic, complete with futuristic lighting. I’ll take nostalgia for $800.

 

 

 

Meeting Two Strangers on a Train

A cab pulls up to a big urban train station. A man gets out, but all we see are his snazzy two-toned spectator brogues. Another cab arrives; another man emerges. We spot some his luggage, including a pair of tennis racquets, but also his sensible dark dress shoes. Both pairs of feet stride through the station.. We next discover them beneath the table of a club car, where one man’s foot accidentally nudges the other’s shoe.

 This, of course, is the very enticing opening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train. This film, made midway through a directing career that began in the 1920s and ended with Family Plot in 1976, is considered one of Hitchcock’s most effective in ramping up suspense by way of skillful screen artistry. The original plot, involving two young men who seek to evade the long arm of the law by committing murders on one another’s behalf (“cross-cross”) was concocted by Patricia Highsmith, for whom this was a first novel, five years before she gave the world the talented but lethal Mr. Ripley. Still, Hitchcock and company made some key changes to Highsmith’s story. For one thing, the Guy Haines character is far more culpable in the novel than he is in Hitchcock’s version, wherein (possibly to get past the censors) he can’t ultimately be tempted to follow the murderous path of Bruno (an eerie Robert Walker).  Hitchcock also deleted a key detective character, and added a famous merry-go-round scene that is one of his all-time most climactic. 

 Critics often discuss Hitchcock’s use of symbolic doubling in this film.  It focuses on the similarities (as well as differences) between two young men who accidentally meet in a train car: each of them is burdened by a relative who would perhaps be better off dead. We can’t miss the fact that Walker’s character—wealthy and superficially charming but deeply dissatisfied with his lot in life—responds to Granger’s attractiveness and is determined to bind the two of them together via the committing of two perfect crimes. There’s also the key parallel between two young women who wear thick spectacles: one is violently assaulted and the other soon finds herself in deeply symbolic danger.

 Barbara, the second of these bespectacled young women, is played by Patricia Hitchcock, the Master’s only child. She’s a distinctive character, much  different from her elegant sister (Ruth Roman) who is Guy Haines’ beloved.  Small and definitely rather Hitchcock-like in her appearance, Barbara is introduced as someone who is much fascinated by criminal behavior. The implication is that she shares Hitchcock’s own obvious delight in the macabre . . . until dangerous doings seem to be heading her way.

 Though Pat Hitchcock is fascinating (and Ruth Roman is, frankly, not), the crux of the film involves the interaction of the two male leads. As the preppy tennis player, Farley Granger is appealingly handsome and gentlemanly, which makes him slow to recognize the evil lurking in his fellow passenger. But it is Robert Walker who is unforgettable. We see his Bruno Anthony first as a fancy dresser and a glib talker, someone who can get under the skin of a complete stranger and bend him to his will. With an enigmatic smile on his face, he can pursue a young woman through an amusement park tunnel of love, and then commit a murder that is reflected in her glasses. This moment is perhaps the film’s grim high point: there are other shocks and scares to be had, but somehow the ending just doesn’t live up to what has come before.

 

Imploding in Atlantic City

Moral ambiguity is a quality that director Louis Malle knows very well. Maybe this has something to do with his awareness, as a part-Jewish child at a Catholic boarding school, of a 1943 Nazi raid that sent a close friend and a teacher to Auschwitz. (The memory ultimately led to Malle’s monumental 1987 film, Au Revoir, les Enfants.) Though most of his movies were made in France, he tried his hand at America-set dramas too, including 1981’s My Dinner with Andre. Malle’s most notorious American movie is surely Pretty Baby (1978), in which a eleven-year-old Brooke Shields plays a child prostitute in 1917 New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder. But he received major awards nominations for his next film, 1980’s Atlantic City, which became perhaps star Burt Lancaster’s last major film role.

 The snowy-haired Lancaster plays Lou, a small-time crook hunkered down in a rapidly decaying resort town where classic hotels are being imploded to make room for modern gambling casinos. Though Lou likes to boast about when he and Bugsy Siegel were prison cellmates, he makes a living—such as it is—as a numbers runner in a poor part of town, while also serving as full-time valet and part-time bedwarmer to a neighbor, a bedraggled former beauty queen who’s the widow of a mobster type. His only true pleasure, it seems, is spying on another neighbor, the luscious Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works at an oyster bar by day and sponges off her body with a freshly cut lemon come evening time.

 Pretty soon, Sally’s world will be rocked by the reappearance of a Canadian ex-husband, Dave, who shows up with her hugely pregnant sister and a whole cache of stolen cocaine. Before long, Dave will be pulling Lancaster’s amiable Lou into his orbit while he tries to make a lucrative drug sale. But of course some really bad guys are soon after Dave: there’s a marvelous chase scene, followed by a murder.

 From there, things get truly complicated. Sally and Lou draw closer together, while he enjoys spending on her the drug money the mobsters didn’t manage to collect from Dave. But ultimately, the thugs are still out there, looking for a big payday.  I won’t go into what happens, other than to say that Lou—a fascinating mix of generosity and self-preservation—ultimately makes a heroic gesture, while at the same time reveling in an unfamiliar sense of his own powers   as a tough guy. It’s a marvelously nuanced Lancaster performance, delivered when he was almost 70 and well past the athletic vigor of earlier star turns like his Oscar-winning role in Elmer Gantry. And Sarandon (only five years after her ingenue role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) matches him with a portrayal that is fierce,  poignant, and sensuous.  At the close of the film we wish them both well, but aren’t quite clear about where either one of them will land. Both were Oscar-nominated for their portrayals, as was Malle as director, but this was the year of Chariots of Fire and On Golden Pond.

 Curiously, despite Atlantic City’s very American setting, it was not technically a U.S. film, but rather a French and Canadian co-production. (Outside of the leads, most of the performers hailed from Canada, like Kate Reid as the blowsy onetime beauty queen and a mesmerizing Robert Joy as the manic ex-husband.) Still, the film has enjoyed a rare All-American accolade. In 2003 it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, so I guess it belongs to all of us now.

 

 

The play’s NOT the thing in “Clash by Night”

It was while exploring the mid-century American films of Fritz Lang that I recently saw Clash by Night. I had previously watched two RKO films directed by Lang and starring the great Edward G. Robinson. The Woman in the Window (1944) turned out to be an influential early noir, with the kind of “surprise” ending that in retrospect seems more than a bit cheap. I enjoyed it, despite its predictability, much more than I liked Scarlet Street (1945), which supposedly is the first Hollywood movie in which the creep who fries in the electric chair is NOT in fact the killer. The third Lang film I watched starred the always interesting Barbara Stanwyck along with burly Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan, of whom critic Manohla Dargis has written, “[he was] born to play beautifully tortured, angry souls.”  During the opening credits I was surprised to find this film was adapted from a Broadway play by Clifford Odets.

 The Odets connection made me turn once again to my personal Odets expert, Beth Phillips. Beth, who is finally close to finishing a monumental biography of Odets, reminded me that, though Odets wrote some marvelous original screenplays (like Sweet Smell of Success), none of the Hollywood films adapted from his groundbreaking plays had the benefit of Odets’ input. When approached by studios, “he just took the money and ran.” So it’s no surprise that the screen version of Clash by Night differs hugely from the stage version: the location is switched from Staten Island to Monterey, California; a key ethnicity shifts from Polish to Italian, so that Lang can shoot a big fat Italian wedding scene. More importantly, as was typical in this era, the stage play’s brutal ending is considerably brightened in the film, with Stanwyck’s character finally embracing domesticity and the husband who loves her beyond reason.

 Beth is hardly a fan of the original Clash by Night, which she calls “probably Odets’ worst play, a blatant melodrama” without much in the way of social ideas behind it. Not knowing any of this, I found the film interesting to watch, mostly because the central characters were well realized. I liked the film’s opening, with ocean waves dramatically crashing on the shore, and I suspect Lang enjoyed filming some of the gritty on-location introductory scenes, full of fishing boats and women earning their pay in a sardine cannery. (Yes, that ‘s Marilyn Monroe, in dungarees, toiling over a trough full of wriggly fish.)  

 Within the central love triangle, I was most impressed by Paul Douglas as the good-hearted but not too bright Jerry D’Amato, who certainly deserves better than he gets from Stanwyck’s Mae.  Stanwyck herself is notable as always, playing a dame (that’s got to be the right word for her!) who can never be satisfied by the life she leads. Robert Ryan, the third side of this triangle,  effectively conveys his general bitterness toward the world in which he finds himself. Still, I had some gripes. Monroe’s character, the soon-to-be fiancée of Stanwyck’s fisherman brother, doesn’t make a lot of sense in her continued admiration for Stanwyck, despite it all. And I have a special grudge against “Where’s the baby?” movies. Supposedly, both Douglas’s and Stanwyck’s characters are deeply affected by the love they feel for their infant daughter, Gloria. So—while Douglas is at sea, how can Stanwyck and Ryan sneak off to spend hours enjoying themselves at a local carnival, apparently leaving poor Gloria all alone in her cradle? The carelessness suggested by this kind of plotting speaks to me of a film that was hustled to completion.

 

 

Getting to Know “The Worst Person in the World”

My lukewarm feelings for Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which has just been nominated for nine Oscars, has made me wonder: in watching the film on my big-screen TV, was I missing something? Or was I just not in the right mood to appreciate a low-key domestic drama about a Norwegian absentee father and his grown daughters? Particularly in regard to the film’s leading lady, the Oscar-nominated Renate Reinsve, I read several times the comment that she’d been even more memorable in Trier’s previous film, 2021’s The Worst Person in the World. Great title, that! I decided to see for myself what the critics had found so mesmerizing.

 So now I know: Reinsve is indeed mesmerizing, in a film apparently built around her charmingly contradictory personality. (The role won her a Best Actress award at Cannes, and shot her to international fame.) In The Worst Person in the World, she plays Julie, a very bright but quite mixed-up young woman who can’t decide on a direction for her adult life. En route to becoming a surgeon, she suddenly decides to chuck the scrubs and study psychotherapy. That doesn’t work either, when she concludes that “I don’t want to become a spectator in my own life.” So she tries photography, but basically works in a bookstore while trying to solve the riddle of her impending future.

 That riddle comes to revolve more and more around her love life. There’s a semi-famous underground cartoonist (Aksel), who adores her, but also—at age 45—is starting to crave a family. There’s also a barista (Elvind) with whom she shares some naughty fun while on the lam from a dull reception, though he has romantic commitments elsewhere. The single most special part of the movie occurs about midway through, when Julie realizes (for the moment, at least) that she wants to leave Aksel for Elvind. This is the section of the film that cast and crew refer to as “Frozen.” A casually-dressed Julie leaves Aksel’s flat and runs down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. There she starts to jog and then run . . . passing multitudes of Oslo residents, all of them frozen in place as they swing their briefcases, wheel their bikes, check their cellphones, smooch their girlfriends. Throughout Norway’s busy capital city, she seems to be the only person who’s truly alive as she races to the coffee bar to claim her new love. In a DVD featurette, director Trier explains both how the footage was shot and what it means: when you realize you’re in love, “you’re in your own time zone.”

 After this bravura midpoint, far be it from me to reveal where we find Julie at film’s end, though it lines up with Trier’s own passion for the cinematic arts. The conclusion meshes nicely with several other kinds of endings we see (or intuit) among this film’s characters, but there’s also a hint that perhaps Julie has finally arrived at an unexpected sort of peace. Which, of course, is not quite the same thing as happiness. On the strength of the two films I’ve seen, Trier (who’s both a writer and a director) has a special gift for bringing his films to a conclusion, one that both wraps up the current story and suggests where we go from here.

 Perhaps the secret ingredient of Trier’s cinematic tales is time. Like Julie coursing through the busy streets of Oslo, time doesn’t stand still. It brings changes—both good ones and bad ones—and it’s the role of human beings like Julie to go along for the ride.

 

 

 

Getting to Know “What Maisie Knew”

Several of the great novels of Henry James (1843-1916) have been made into films of the Merchant-Ivory variety. Such James works as Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, all of them marked by psychological insight and a fascination with upper-crust life, have successfully been brought to the big screen, filling the eye with bustles and parasols and cravats. (There’s also a terrifically spooky period film, The Innocents, that came out in 1961, based on James’ The Turn of the Screw. I saw it in its first release, and have never quite gotten over it.)

 James’ plots don’t usually translate well to the present day. Certainly, his characters don’t talk in the way we do now, for better or for worse. But in 2012 a cluster of producers brought forth a film that had been languishing in development hell since 1995. It’s a modern adaptation of a slim James novel in which the author chronicled the impact of a divorce upon a six-year-old girl. Although the novel, What Maisie Knew, was published back in 1897, its story of warring parents, their new mates, and an emotionally challenged child seems astonishingly contemporary.

 The film shifts its action from Victorian London to modern New York City, where Susanna and Beale have acrimoniously parted. Susanna, a successful singer/songwriter with a big tour coming up, is highly volatile. (She’s played by the always impressive Julianne Moore, whose participation helped get this project off the ground.) Beale, played by Steve Coogan, is an art dealer with an international clientele: he’s jolly indeed when he’s in a good mood, but spends most of his life jetting to foreign climes. Six-year-old Maisie (the truly adorable Onata Aprile) rotates between their condos, cheerfully adapting to wherever she happens to be. Her poise when a pizza deliveryman shows up at her dad’s place—as the grown-ups fight, she calmly gathers enough dough for an appropriate tip—tells us that in many ways she’s old before her time.

 Beale, it seems, is now shacking up with Maisie’s former nanny, Margo, whom he soon marries. On the rebound, we gather, Susanna ties the knot with a virile young bartender, Lincoln. Maisie, always open to sudden changes in her chaotic family life, quickly comes to adore Lincoln. That’s a good thing, because her mother is soon off in a big tour bus and her father departs yet again for Europe, leaving Margo and Lincoln to manage the child’s daily life.  Everyone loves Maisie, and she loves all of them, but her daily needs are not being considered. At one point she’s stranded at Lincoln’s bar, not sure where she’s going to sleep that night. (A moment in her first-grade classroom tells us that she’s not the only child of her generation and affluent circumstances dealing with a fractured family life.)  

 I’m not always a fan of tykes on the screen: too often they seem mannered and excessively “cute.” But this project, built on Maisie’s reactions to the world going on around her, is lucky to have found a child who genuinely seems both innocent and wise beyond her years. We sense her craving for love, and feel like cheering when she finally takes a stand on her own behalf. The ending is not quite that of Henry James, but it will do nicely. (The young actress, now 20, is still around, but without any recent credits I know of. The implications in her bio is that her own parents have separated too. Perhaps that’s why this performance seems so close to the bone.)

 

 

 

The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

While much of the U.S. has been shivering through snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk, not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now, and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.

 In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.

 Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the National  Film Registry, I’ve concluded that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era; sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.

  What do I mean? Well, let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list. They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both, curiously, have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters, while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High Society is a musical throwback to 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love to experience.

 There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989) is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.

 We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how we (or our children) loved The Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

Peering at “The Woman in the Window”

It’s  sometimes comforting, at a time of extreme tension, to return to the past. Maybe that’s why I decided to turn off the news reports coming out of Minneapolis and watch a movie from 1944, The Woman in the Window. This Edward G. Robinson starrer, which I’ve heard described as helping to launch the “film noir” genre, is a taut little thriller also starring Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea. The director is the great Austria-born Expressionist Fritz Lang, whose credits include Metropolis and M, along with (after he came to America) such noir classics as Scarlet Street and Clash by Night.

 One thing that’s refreshing about watching old movies is that we all know the tropes. If a mild-mannered college professor is first seen lecturing his students about the ambiguity of the Biblical injunction “Thou shalt not kill,” we know for certain that someone’s going to die. If a husband stays behind in the city when his wife and kiddies leave for a family vacation, it’s a good bet that he’ll soon have unexpected company. And if he admires a woman’s sultry portrait in a shop window, there’s an excellent chance that said woman will come into his life in a major way. Moreover, those of us with any knowledge about the studios’ adherence to the so-called Hayes Code in this era are quite clear on the fact that any on-screen moral transgression is eventually going to be punished.

 The marvelously versatile Robinson, who had over a hundred acting credits in roles ranging from good guy to bad guy, from leading man to supporting player, has been called the best actor who was never nominated for an Academy Award. (The Academy belatedly granted him an honorary Oscar in 1973, just after his death at age 79). In “The Woman in the Window,” he’s not without complexity. Though a committed family man, he proclaims to his cronies, over drinks at the local club, that life shouldn’t end at forty. He speaks out for the male need to assert oneself, though he ruefully admits that  too often “the flesh is strong but the spirit is weak.” In other words, in the absence of his (rather bland) wife and kids, he’s ripe for an adventure. When the mysterious artist’s model (a stylish Bennett) invites him first to a cocktail lounge and then to her apartment, he’s ready for anything. (Her come-on is that she wants to show him the artist’s sketches that preceded the painting of the portrait he so admires.)

 We don’t know quite what to make of Bennett’s character, nor of the intruder who changes everything. But an escalating series of events leaves Robinson’s Professor Richard Wanley taking charge of hiding a body. This is made even trickier because one of his close pals,  played by the imposing Raymond Massey, is a district attorney who loves talking about the details of his latest big case, and even invites Wanley along to see where the body was found by law enforcement. Uh oh!

  Suspense definitely mounts. But perhaps we have a hunch where all this is going. The film’s trailer, very much in the style of that hyperbolic era, breathlessly promises “the most startling ending ever filmed.” True, the conclusion is well handled by all involved, but I must admit that I wasn’t truly surprised. I had guessed the secret outcome of this film just ten minutes in. Sometimes, though, it’s fun to go on a journey even when you anticipate its outcome. Better by far than being hit by terrible surprises every time we turn on the news. 

 

On the Couch with "Sentimental Value"

For months I wanted to watch Sentimental Value, the Norwegian family drama (by auteur Joachim Trier) that won the Grand Prix at Cannes and has just been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Though recently more and more foreign-language films have been nominated for top Oscar honors, this film’s haul has been particularly impressive, including Best Original Screenplay and four acting noms (for Renate Reinsve as Best Actress, for both Elle Fanning and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas as Best Supporting Actress, and for screen veteran Stellan Skarsgård as Best Supporting Actor). Among the kudos already won by Sentimental Value is recognition from AARP’s annual Movies for Grownups, which has its own unique categories for films of special interest to older folk. AARP named Sentimental Value the year’s “Best Intergenerational  Film.”

It’s easy to see why Seniors who appreciate art-films might go for this one. No guns, no spilled guts, no things that go bump in the night, unless you’re talking about painful memories. Just a quiet family drama, involving two grown daughters, their estranged father, and several others caught in the orbit of a Norwegian household whose members are prominent in the European arts community. I have loved many Scandinavian films over the years, starting with the masterpieces of Ingmar Bergman, and I suspected Sentimental Value would be a pleasant change from recent highly lauded but deliberately over-the-top American flicks like Sinners and One Battle After Another.

Here’s what surprised me: when I watched on the big-screen TV in my living room, Sentimental Value seemed almost too low-key. Its characters’ struggles to bind old wounds struck me as  convincing, but not always interesting. I wanted something exciting to happen, beyond talky scenes in various quiet locales—a bedroom, a café, a beach. The low-key conversations did contrast in an interesting way with the theatricality built into the subject matter. The father is a world-famous director; his #1 daughter Nora is an acclaimed stage actress. At the start of the film, it’s opening night at a huge and prestigious theatre, and Nora (dressed in a period gown that suggests she’s playing an Ibsen heroine) is in a state of total panic. She’s absolutely convinced that she can’t possibly play her role, and she does everything she can think of—to the consternation of cast and crew—to avoid going on stage. Then, finally, she does make her entrance . . . and the performance is a triumph.

So we know Nora is a self-centered neurotic, but it remains to meet the rest of the family, This occurs after the funeral of Nora’s mother, when friends and relatives gather at the historic family homestead. An unexpected arrival is Nora and her sister’s estranged father, who long ago left the family behind to pursue his directing ambitions. Now he’s back, at least partly to further the new project with which he hopes to revitalize his career. The script he’s written focuses on the final days of his own mother, who had been an heroic anti-Nazi partisan in World War II. He wans to film in the family home, and he wants Nora to step into his mother’s role. By the film’s end, we understand everyone’s emotional connections, and see the possibility of reconciliation. But it takes a long time to get there, and I confess I was a bit confused by the off-screen characters (a mother, a grandmother) who are so much responsible for these family members’ deeply-felt emotions.

I wonder: would I have liked this film better in the cineplex? Do certain quiet, serious movies just not work as couch-films? 

 

Once in a Blue Moon (Richard Linklater tries something completely new)

Filmmaker Richard Linklater was born and raised in Texas, so perhaps it makes sense to call him a maverick. A listing of his more than twenty films reveals how widely he has roamed, artistically, and how eager he is to try on new subjects and new styles. Early films like Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993) explore the aimlessness of Texas youth culture. Two years later Linklater was in Paris, shooting Before Sunrise, the first of three romantic meditations on love and time. (The others are 2004’s Before Sunset and 2013’s Before Midnight; all three films feature Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.) 

 While directing amiable studio comedies like School of Rock and Bad News Bears, Linklater was also writing and shooting the remarkable Boyhood. Filmed at intervals between 2002 and 2013, Boyhood is the close-to-the-bone story of a young Texas boy who grows from age 6 to 18, learning to cope with life in the face of his parents’ divorce. (Hawke plays young Mason’s father, and Patricia Arquette won an Oscar for portraying his mother.) Continuing his interest in the passage of time, Linklater is currently working on a cinematic version of Stephen Sondheim’s stage musical, Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim’s play moves in reverse chronological order, with characters starting out as middle-aged cynics and moving backward to their college years, when they were young and idealistic. Linklater’s idea was to start by filming youthful performers in the play’s later scenes and keep at it intermittently until (approximately) 2040, when the actors would match the age of their characters’ older selves.

 All of this, of course, involves a lot of lag time, as Linklater waits for his lead actors—Paul Mescal, Ben Platt, and Beanie Feldstein—to be affected by the passage of time. Meanwhile, though, Linklater has found other ways to pump up his creative juices. Remarkably, he released two major films in 2025, both of them very much interested in exploring what it takes to be an artist.

 Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, was clearly made for a specialized audience, those cinéastes who are keen on the heady period known as the French New Wave. The film (shot in black & white, almost entirely en français) re-creates the dynamic period—circa 1960—when bright young French film critics like François Truffaut and Agnès Varda were making the move into becoming directors. The focus here is on the capricious Jean-Luc Godard, shooting on the streets of Paris an eccentric gangster thriller that seems to break every rule of standard filmmaking. It’s fun to peek behind the scenes of À bout de souffle (better known to most of us as Breathless), a film that every serious film buff knows practically by heart. I was most impressed with Aubry Dullin as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Zoe Deutsch impersonating Jean Seberg, a refugee from Hollywood not at all sure what she thinks about Godard’s guerrilla brand of filmmaking. 

 Last year Linklater also released Blue Moon, a biographical drama set almost entirely in New York’s famous Sardi’s. That’s where the great Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart has gone after ducking out on the triumphant opening night of Oklahoma!, written by his former partner Richard Rogers with newcomer Oscar Hammerstein II. A drunk and a self-hating homosexual, Hart tries to soothe his bruised ego with liquor, flirtation with a pretty co-ed, and delusions of future grandeur.  We know, though, that he’s very near the end of his road. Though Ethan Hawke hardly shares Hart’s looks and tiny frame, his is a masterful and fascinating performance as a man who talks (and talks) to silence the pain within.