Category Archives: Romance

Lili (1953)

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“She’s like a little bell who gives off a pure sound.”

Leslie Caron always cast an image of a sweet young gamine presaging Audrey Hepburn, and thus, early in her career, it’s a masterstroke to cast her in the role of a destitute orphan with nowhere to go.

Set in provincial Hollywood — somewhere vague and still distinctly French, Lili (Caron) shows up in a small town with an address and a name. Her father is dead, she has no relatives, and the acquaintance she meant to inquire about has since moved away. She has no leads, no food, no shelter.

A shopkeeper next door hears her sad story and is prepared to take advantage of her. She flees his abode and follows a troupe of performers like a little lost puppy. They feel sorry for her, and so they try and do her a favor.

Their world is a cornucopia of colors. The story itself is a trifle. Magician Marc is such a charismatic fellow. Lili is quickly devoted to him and taken by his lifestyle, mesmerizing people with his illusions. She, too, falls under his spell, smitten with her first crush. She’s so taken in fact she quickly gets fired from a temp job as a waitress. She was too invested in the floor show to keep up with her work.

While Ferrer is the biggest name, he somehow flies under the radar until we become aware he’s in love with this girl. He cuts a gaunt figure, mostly agitated and repressed as he nurses his wounds and bruised ego since he can no longer dance after being maimed in the war. He masks his feelings by treating Lili gruffly and pushing her away.

However, because he and his compatriot are puppeteers, Ferrer uses his alter ego to form a bond with her. There’s a fine line here for them to walk, and somehow it comes off because of Caron’s clear-eyed belief. Each interaction feels real and genuine. I liken it to the authenticity I always felt in the human-to-puppet interactions in childhood episodes of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe. There’s no condescension, and everything seems to be taken with true sincerity.

Lili expands on their performance because she imbues the puppets with meaning and attributes personality to them just with her gaze and a total commitment to their words. She believes they are real, and it becomes one of the enchanted conceits of the movie.

Otherwise, it would fall apart and feel disingenuous. Within the story itself, her interplay draws in an audience and helps their little trio grow a following. She, in turn, is given a stake in their profits and a small place to stay. For the time being, she has a home.

The meta conversations with the puppets become more pointed when they ask her, under the veil of performance, what she wants in life and how she feels about her love potentially leaving her. What’s special about her is that there is no compartmentalizing of fantasy and reality; she keeps them both together so they remain one and the same. The curtain between Lili and Paul makes it all the more intriguing. Because there is some kind of shroud mediating them.

Although Audrey Hepburn has already been mentioned, there is also a shared affinity between Lili’s performance on the green and the Punch and Judy Show in Charade. It might feel like reaching, but because of the connection between Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, it’s difficult not to intertwine them in my mind.

A turning point in Lili’s maturity is not so much one of passion or romance, but recognizing there is cruelty in the world, and it is something to buttress yourself against. We see Marc in a different light. He’s a married man and free spirit who plays up his bachelorhood for the sake of their show and perhaps his own desire to live the life of an uninhibited bon vivant. Fidelity is not one of his highest priorities.

Zsa Zsa Gabor is poised as the blonde “other woman” or rival for Marc’s affections, and yet she is given a more sympathetic position once we realize Marc is actually her husband. She has every right to be protective of him.

It occurs to me, just like how Lili says she was living in a dream like a little girl, this movie is like a fairy tale. As C.S. Lewis pointed out in close conjunction with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, these tales can be a kind of safe space to explore topics of evil and suffering while eliciting responses like wonder and joy.

When Mel Ferrer pulls back the curtains and makes his pronouncements about his character, a bit of something is lost, but not enough to look down upon the movie. Lili had me charmed, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s slight and enchanting in a way children can appreciate, and adults so often dismiss. You must come to it with a childlike heart.

It’s possible to be prejudiced against musicals that only have songs. Dance is something that taps into the visual medium in other ways. No pun intended. Caron, of course, made a name for herself as a ballerina, and although her opportunities here are minor, there’s a lithe elegance with which she carries herself that serves her well.

The ending evokes Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road with all her friends. And yet, for her, as the puppets become living, breathing beings in her dreams, it signals the end of something, not the beginning of the journey.

With each representing some part of Paul, their absence is too much for her to bear. Like all the great musical interludes, it’s almost wordless, but the confluence of movement and melody conjures up all the emotions we require between Caron and Ferrer to make their parting and reunification mean something.

Because of the child-like outlook of the movie, it brings to mind the words written by journalist Francis Church to a young girl named Virginia. He said:

“You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond.”

The magic of Lili is how its own veil is torn in two, and still the movie maintains the semblance of a fairy tale. When the divide is breached, it brings more supernal beauty and not less. Again, it’s a lovely paradox wrapped up in an often overshadowed MGM musical. Perhaps this is the eucatastrophe Tolkien talked about.

3.5/5 Stars

The Chase (1946)

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The Chase opens as a wonderful contrivance of noir done up in a couple of successive visuals. A bedraggled man (Robert Cummings) stares through a shop window at a griddle laden with fresh bacon and hot cakes. He leans in so his hat brim mashes up against the glass, and proceeds to cinch up his belt. He doesn’t have any dough.

Then, he looks down right at that precise moment and notices a wallet at his feet stacked with cash. Any person in the real world would have seen it immediately, but it’s set up perfectly for the camera. He proceeds to treat himself to breakfast and a cigar, and after he has a full belly, he decides to pay a visit to the address inside the wallet.

You get a sense of the milieu with a mention of a standoffish Peter Lorre staring through a peephole and questioning what the stranger wants. Our hero is unwittingly cryptic, saying he wants to see one Eddie Roman — he has something to give him…

It could be a belly full of lead or something more innocuous, and, of course, it’s the latter. They give him the once over and reluctantly let him in. The room’s stacked high with statues and ornate antiquities; somehow, they make the interiors feel not just capacious but hollow.

Who lies down the corridors is anyone’s guess because this isn’t where ordinary folks dwell, only cinematic creations. Sure enough, the ex-Navy man Chuck Scott has just happened to fall in with a psychotic lunatic (Steve Cochran). We’re introduced to his temperament when he gives his manicurist a slap for screwing up and sends her simpering out the front door.

Still, he’s impressed by Chuck: An honest guy shows up on his doorstep, and he even tells him he treated himself to breakfast for a dollar and a half (those were the days!). For being such a standout guy, he repays him with a gig as his chauffeur. When you’re destitute, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

There’s an uneasy tension in everything Cochran and Lorre, his right-hand man, have their hands in. The controlling Eddie is married to a young lady (Michèle Morgan) named Lorna; he’s hardly allowed her out of the house in 3 years. It says so much about their relationship.

The sadistic slant of the movie becomes increasingly apparent as they stick a different dinner guest in the wine seller to be ripped apart by Eddie’s prized pooch. He has something they want for their business dealings, and any semblance of hospitality burns off as his bubbly conversationalism quickly turns into despair.

For a time, The Chase becomes a kind of contained chamber piece drama. It’s not obvious if it will break out and be something more as Chuck forms an uneasy existence between the backseat driving of his new boss and the despondency of Lorna, who stares out at the crashing waves of the ocean, all but bent on presaging Kim Novak in Vertigo by jumping in and ending it all.

Lorna and her newfound advocate book two tickets to Havana and are prepared to skip out together. Even these scenes evoke a foreboding mood more than anything more concrete because there’s only a vague sense of plot or purpose. From here, it builds into this debilitating sense of obscured conspiracy in the bowels of Havana.

There are obdurate carriage drivers, slinking foreigners, and cloak-and-dagger antics that find his woman harmed and Chuck fleeing from the authorities. The surreal tones of the story just continue to proliferate with novel characters and new environs materializing rather than moving systematically from one scene to the next.

This inherent sense of surreal atmosphere might place the picture ahead of its time, with a select few films of the era. However, it comes off as rather stultifying after auspicious beginnings because it doesn’t accomplish what many of the great Classical Hollywood films managed by telling compelling three-act stories with a sense of economy.

The underlying perplexing tension set against a dreamscape, siphoned from Cornell Woolrich’s source material, is not enough for The Chase to fully pay off on the goods. It feels more like an intriguing experiment than a successful crime drama.

3/5 Stars

Marty (1955)

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To my mind, Marty is the only movie adapted from TV to win an Oscar and certainly to get as much publicity as it did. During the surge of the Golden Age of Television, Paddy Chayefsky was king and Marty became a pinnacle of what could be accomplished by a writer with a singular voice.

It’s a triumph of the small screen brought to the large, breaking down the boundaries and some of the prejudices that come with it thanks to the particular story it chooses to tell.

Marty is easy enough to place. He takes up residence in the territory Chayefsky would canvass in many of his stories including later efforts like The Catered Affair or Middle of The Night. There’s a “write what you know” imperative to his work. If it’s not quite realism — the words are too precise in their cadence and meter — then it certainly makes for unadorned cinema away from the normally watchful eyes of Hollywood.

Marty is a butcher and an unmarried man who lives with his mother. He’s kindly enough cutting up meat as the ladies of the neighborhood chide him that he should be getting married. All his siblings are hitched, and he’s the eldest and still alone.

It’s the earnest simplicity of the story that always appealed to me in the past. But as I grow older Marty speaks to me more and more. Because you begin to see it differently in light of new experiences and the kind of tensions that come with familial relationships and adulthood in general.

As I’ve gotten older and recall periods of singleness in my life and the lives of others, I’m all the more moved by Ernest Borgnine’s performance. He was always relegated to heavies. Like Raymond Burr, the only way to play the hero was on the small screen. Burr got Perry Mason and Borgnine got, well, McHale’s Navy. But before that, there was Marty (1955), and it was an unassuming film that proved to be a stirring success. It’s an underdog story in an industry predicated on prestige, star power, and publicity. Borgnine plays it beautifully.

On a Saturday night, he and his best bud Angie (Joe Mantell) drink beer together perusing the newspaper and quibbling over what they’ll do for the evening like a pair of vultures out of The Jungle Book.

At his mother’s behest, they make their way to the Stardust Ballroom to hopefully meet a couple of “tomatoes.” It feels a bit like a watering hole with dancing and fast music. All the various enclaves stand around looking for mates and finally stirring up the courage to meet someone. It’s a space where everyone gives everyone else the once-over before making a decision.

Social psychologists tell us that certain traits like facial symmetry, height in men, or hip-to-waist ratio in women have been the unconscious cues throughout the history of humankind. We’ve progressed toward swipes and likes and what have you, from the dance hall circuit, but it’s not too dissimilar. Just less personal and more commoditized.

It’s all still founded on the same premise of surface-level attraction. Obviously, there’s something to this. But whatever generation you hail from, it’s still a game of wooing and putting the best version of yourself out there.

Flaws and vulnerability might come but far later down the line when you know someone and can let your guard down. What makes Marty is how this butcher, who feels chewed up and spit out by the world’s mating game, finds someone to connect with on a far less superficial level. It begins with an observation.

He notices someone else’s humiliation and reaches out to her because he knows what it is to be looked down upon and disregarded. And just like that Marty and Clara (Betsy Blair) are brought together into one another’s orbits. They start to share about their livesb and we learn she’s a school teacher who still lives with her parents. Marty gets so comfortable in her presence and starts babbling incessantly — it’s over the top — but it’s also lovable.

Borgnine and Blair are cast so well together, and it’s not because ’50s Hollywood assumed them to be plain. There’s such a sincere candor about them that comes out on the screen, and the movie requires this for their chemistry to work and for the sake of the story. We like them because they feel like us.

Marty admits, “Dogs like us, we’re not really as bad as we think we are.” He’s internalized the language of the culture at-large, but in the presence of a kindred spirit, he feels happy and more like himself, totally at ease in her presence. It makes me think of the advice that you should enjoy talking with your future spouse because contrary to popular belief, that’s probably what you’ll be spending most of your life doing together. Spending mundane moments in one another’s company.

They have a bit of a bubble for themselves of near-delirious happiness; the drama comes from all the outside forces weighing on them. The guys like Angie and that crowd are gruff and crude. They try and set Marty up with other girls and tell him Clara’s not attractive. Meanwhile, their conversations are full of vulgarities involving Mickey Spillane novels and magazine centerfolds.

But this is not the only criticism. Marty also hears from his mother, a deeply devout Catholic and Italian mother who cares about her family and her boys. She does not want to be discarded as an old maid and worries her son’s new, non-Italian girl will cause a rift between them like she’s already seen in their extended family.

It’s almost too much for him. Marty lives under the lie that he must conform and listen to what others speak into his life, and certainly there is some truth in considering the counsel of those around you.

However, sometimes it can also be pernicious and he realizes amid this sea of tedium and insecurity being projected onto him, he has something worth pursuing. Why would he ever consider giving that up? And so he gives up everything miserable, lonely, and stupid in pursuit of a priceless gift. In his relationship with Clara, Marty is a richer man than most.

4/5 Stars

It Should Happen to You (1954)

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It Should Happen to You was the brainchild of screenwriter Garson Kanin and director George Cukor with Judy Holliday as their lead. As such it’s easy to cast the movie in the same lineage of Adam’s Rib (1949) and Born Yesterday (1950). Except in this movie, there’s also a featured newcomer, a young man named Jack Lemmon.

The movie opens as any respectable New York movie does in Central Park. In the outdoor reverie of men at their chess boards and kids running around, Gladys Glover causes a hullabaloo for feeding pigeons. One man takes particular umbrage at having her try to pick him up while he was minding his own business, listening to the horse races.

In the aftermath, she meets a documentarian, Pete Sheppard (Lemmon), who has his camera at the ready and an eye for people (Think a precursor to Humans of New York). He’s fascinated by this barefoot woman, and strikes up a conversation before they go their separate ways.

There’s an ethereal, fated tone I can’t quite put my finger on, but we know they will meet again and something is bound to happen. Judy Holliday perfectly exemplifies this airy bubbliness. I would never condescend to exhibit her as a dumb blonde archetype because there is far more going on here.

Gladys Glover sees an open billboard and resolves to buy up the prominent real estate on Columbus Circle. For what purpose we can’t be sure exactly. She says its personal. But she goes through the paces, speaks to the proprietor, and forks out the money that’s normally attributed to marketing corporations, not individual citizens.

Soon the words GLADYS GLOVER appear up on a street corner in lettering that looks like high rises. It’s an extravagant decision and Gladys beams with pride seeing her name like it’s never been before. But that’s not the end of it.

The rest of the movie is about the cascading effects it has since movies are meant to feed off delights of serendipity. It Should Happen to You is that kind of movie.

Peter Lawford plays a disgruntled marketing exec miffed to find out someone else has shouldered in on the billboard that has always been theirs in the past; it was an unspoken agreement between them. When he finds out about Gladys he wants to strike a deal with her. Surely a lady can be bought.

It must be said an angry Jack Lemmon is not always becoming and after moving in down the hall from Gladys, he seems to think more and more that he owns her. A more charitable reading of it is that he’s the only person who actually cares for her well-being beyond her growing reputation as a minor celebrity; he’s also falling in love.

Meanwhile Gladys strikes up an agreement to get her name put up on signage all over the city. When she’s shopping with Pete, a saleswoman helps them only for her demeanor to change instantly when she realizes who she’s helping. It’s like being queen for a day as a crowd forms around Gladys soliciting autographs from the local phenomenon.

She has effectively given them something — a nice souvenir to take with them in their day — and in this way it’s hard not to compare her to Elwood P. Dowd of Harvey. In the movie world they’re able to break into the everyday and give people some common decency and kindness.

However, we also watch from a distance as Gladys gets carried away by the mechanisms and machinery of television. She’s paraded out in front of America without much consideration of who she is as a human being. In one segment she’s even featured on a prim and proper panel show with the likes of Constance Bennett and Wendy Barrie. It feels twee by today’s standards, but the point is made.

Soon she finds herself caught between the indignant protectiveness of Lemmon and the business conferences of Peter Lawford including some extracurricular activities. His company has transformed the typical ethos marketing appeal into the Gladys Glover everywoman appeal for the average American girl. It’s a smashing success.

It Should Happen to You doesn’t feel like a groundbreaking story and part of this might be the fact we’ve seen so many analogous film’s in its wake. There’s this tension between celebrity and success and the kind of down-to-earth humanity that keeps one grounded.

I must say I was taken with the ending where Lemmon says goodbye to his girl using a film, and yet again it presages many of the meta qualities of a film within a film that have enamored writers and directors for decades.

In this particular instance, it’s in service of a romance. The happy ending is that he actually receives a reply. Gladys writes it in the sky for him with letters as big as her billboard. She hasn’t lost her knack for the spectacular, but she simultaneously recognizes someone who has her best interest in mind.

If you said you were going to make a romantic comedy with Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon, it wouldn’t immediately strike me. Still, if you have two likable performers and put them together, the results speak for themselves, even if the returns are mostly modest.

3.5/5 Stars

Mickey 17 (2025)

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It was my pleasure to see Mickey 17 and it was because I was in the company of new friends. The film itself comes with complex feelings. 

Bong Joon Ho joins forces with Robert Pattinson for a story that defies easy categorization. It’s full of a myriad of ideas in line with the South Korean’s usual preoccupations including class and pervasive humor. There are some potentially cute creatures and, if not cute, then they are decidedly more sympathetic than many of the humans we come in contact with. 

While watching the film following Mickey Barnes, a schlub of a man who signs his life away for an excursion to outer space, I couldn’t help but return to two reference points. The first being Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and then Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

We meet Mickey as he is discarded in a snow cave on an icy planet — ostensibly left for dead. Given his costume and the circumstances, it’s difficult not to see echoes of a frozen Luke Skywalker facing imminent danger in a Wampa’s lair. Except we are dealing with a drastically different world.

Because this is actually the umpteenth iteration of Mickey, and he is part of a program that prints copies of human beings to do the morally dubious dirty work no one else is willing to undertake. 

After all, since he can just come back as a new version of himself every day, what’s it to him if he contracts a deadly virus or gets eaten alive by a snow creature all in the service of the greater good? Most of the early montage is made up of Pattinson being moved around like a ragdoll Frankenstein constantly being tested and incinerated when his utility is used up. 

As you might imagine the connection I see to Blade Runner are these fundamental questions of what it means to be human and who we give dignity to. In other words, is this an inalienable human right? Because although he was a nobody back on earth, on the run with a wily conspirator Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey still is a human with thoughts and feelings even as he’s relegated to second-class citizenship. He doesn’t want to die any more than anyone else, but he resigns himself to the cycles of life. 

Pattinson channels an accent like you’ve never heard from him before that has a bit of a young Steve Buscemi in it. It’s a bold choice but then for the entire movie, Pattison just goes for it because there’s no vainglory in a part like this if you’re squeamish about taking it to bizarre ends. 

For me, Bong’s latest film works best as a cosmic character piece with Pattinson front and center. There could be a version following his existential arc in outer space as he comes to terms with his station in life while falling in love.

However, because it’s 2 hours and 15 minutes, Mickey 17 attempts to be about a lot more with an epic scale. The primary problem is there doesn’t seem to be a compelling narrative thrust even as Mickey is part of a vague expedition to colonize a distant planet. 

The film’s most obvious villain is the failed political figurehead Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), who now has aspirations to colonize space with a superior race of human beings no doubt made in his image; he’s no Marcus Garvey, and I won’t even begin to guess if he’s a caricature of other political figures as Ruffalo hams it up with all the self-aggrandizing buffoonery he can muster.

Toni Colette plays his wife who is primary confidante and probably the brains behind the operation a la Angela Lansbury in the Manchurian Candidate. However, the deficiency here is that they do feel too much like cartoons. What are their genuine motivations besides being easy to tear down and be infuriated by?

On a positive note, Naomi Ackie plays a security officer on the ship who, for some inexplicable reason, falls for Mickey becoming his advocate and protector. It is an ongoing theme in the movie that the women are strong, but with Nasha we would like to believe she sees something genuine and unsullied in Mickey’s personhood.

However, when she’s on screen it feels like Nasha stands for something as both a romantic being and a person of principle who heroically champions good. In the fashionable parlance of the age, she speaks truth to power. Still, Ackie plays it in such a way that the performance feels modulated and not simply driven by a platform or plot mechanics but by her genuine affection for Mickey. 

Two other notable heroines are the timorous scientist Dorothy, who becomes an ally with her chosen expertise, and then Kai, a grieving security officer who comes to Mickey’s aid when he goes before Kenneth Marshall for an arranged dinner. Marshall wants her for her superior genes, perfect for colonizing his new planet, but she turns out to be a person of compassion too — something he couldn’t care less about. It feels like a turning point in the story even as she all but disappears from much of the final act. 

The great leader has deigned to have this expendable at his table where he feeds him raw meat, and they pray and sing hymns with a bombastic faux religiosity. He prays only to be heard by others thinking he will be heard because of his flowery words.  

It’s one of many moments where we see this state-sanctioned religion derided for what it is by Bong. There is an irreverence that is prototypical for Bong, but it seems as if it is directed at what we might call “Christendom” or in this case the accouterments of religious culture that feels disingenuous and more about propping up leaders to accrue power than any kind of piety or true virtue. 

However, much like Parasite, if we dig under the surface, the framework of the world still functions on logic that we all comprehend. There are the aforementioned questions about what it means to be a human and whether or not that should ascribe us a certain dignity. 

And in the same sense, while Marshall and his wife prove to be a pernicious, narcissistic tandem as they look to eradicate the endemic ‘creepers’ in a contentious standoff, they fall into the age-old fallacy.

Because their whole economy is predicated on showmanship and creating fear around the “other.” Mickey knows these creatures have more to them because he has come face-to-face with them. In a weird way he is an intercessor so even as the humans cause destruction and needless death, there is a requirement for a scapegoat. Someone to atone for the blood that has already been shed…

So while Bong’s latest film is not without merit and there’s plenty to quibble about, it feels like the film falls admittedly short in one primary department. It languishes in telling a focused story even as there are plenty of individual performances to single out.

As an Asian-American, it seems like Steven Yeun has currently cornered the market on these kinds of skeevy or despicable characters which feels like his well-won prerogative to upend a generation of model minority stereotypes. He’s played ceaselessly interesting characters of late. Even Steve Park gets a chance in the limelight as he continues to build a wonderful second act for himself thanks to Wes Anderson. 

Mickey 17 gets his happy ending and in a sense, it feels well-deserved. In this way Bong allows himself to be a romantic at heart even in a world beholden to his comically dark proclivities. I commend the movie more for its themes than its storytelling and given Bong’s track record it seems a shame because he’s one of the foremost genre smugglers working today. 

3/5 Stars

Born to Be Bad (1950)

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“When you came here that first day, I fell flat on my face over your suitcase. I never really got up.” – Joan Leslie as Donna

Born to Be Bad is not high-grade stuff. Its trashy exploitive title says as much, but it’s also worthwhile for exactly these reasons. Nicholas Ray would make a name for himself in Technicolor — not black and white — capturing a bevy of emotive performances from the likes of James Mason and James Dean. But it’s easy to forget some of his earlier films are equally stirring. Bogart in In a Lonely Place or Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground.

There’s something lighter, more convivial about the performances in Born to Be Bad, but straight down the line, it offers up a thoroughly intriguing cast. It has to do with how they can play off one another and couple up with various character dynamics forming between them.

We have a disorientating beginning because we don’t see Joan Fontaine, but someone who turns out to be Joan Leslie. She’s older now, mature, assured, and still more ebullient than I ever remembered her before in the early Warner Bros. days.

Within the context of the picture, she has reason to be. She’s deliriously happy, about to marry the love of her life, a rich moneybags (Zachary Scott), and yet she still finds time for a job and other wisecracking male companions. One’s a painter (Mel Ferrer), the other a purported novelist (Robert Ryan). There’s a happy-go-lucky familiarity to it all. We almost forget what the movie is meant to be about.

Then, Joan Leslie trips over a suitcase, her hair tossed violently askew, and she looks up to see the soft features of none other than Joan Fontaine perched on a couch. The unassuming beauty is her usual diffident self. However, this iteration of her screen image holds a manipulative underbelly.

As Cristabel ingratiates herself into Donna’s good graces and initiates designs on her man, it’s almost easy enough to dismiss her actions as first. She wheedles her way bit by bit until it’s more and more evident her ingenue from Rebecca or Suspicion has gone sour and self-serving.

Even when he’s partially a victim, Zachary Scott manages to give off a smarmy veneer. Robert Ryan has his own curious introduction, berating Cristabel when she’s on the phone, but it’s not a party line. He’s in the house and she wanders into the kitchen to see the stranger raiding the icebox. At first, she’s indignant. Then she starts to fall for his blunt charms.

Ryan would join forces again with Ray in On Dangerous Ground, and he seems like the kind of actor the director can use well. There’s a raw incisiveness to him that can function durably without sacrificing certain levels of emotional honesty. Because he has an unsparing frankness about him that one can either appreciate or become royally turned off by. Very rarely does Ryan elicit an apathetic response.

Fontaine does her part beautifully — her eyes constantly flittering around. In one particular conversation between Scott and Ferrer, she casually listens as she takes in the scene around her, just happy to be in such a place. She manages to be so helpful and so helpless getting everything she wants as a result.

Donna’s preparing to storm off to London, her relationship with Curtis torn asunder. Her pointed remarks to her rival have a delightful sting: “Somebody should have told the birds and the bees about you.” I don’t know what to make of it, but there’s something in Joan Leslie’s eyes when she’s been slighted that’s reminiscent of Marsha Hunt — a glint that Fontaine never owned. Leslie provides her a fine foil as we continue to explore a variation on the All About Eve dynamic.

Two exemplary shots of juxtaposition happen in adjacent scenes with Fontaine’s sparkling features framed on the chest of her man as she reposes there and, of course, there are two of them. She’s so good at flitting back and forth between two men. They both speak to her in different ways or rather, they both offer something unique that she can benefit from.

The jilted lovers, Leslie and Ryan, fall in together as friends and business associates if not romantic partners because there is something more in the works. Cristabel finally gets caught in her lies, though Born To Be Bad has a fairly lightweight ending. No one gets tragically wounded and everyone seems to laugh it off or get their wrist slapped. It’s not noir, nor is it effectively weighty, but it’s an intermittent pleasure to watch if you’re fond of the players. It more than lives up to its title.

3.5/5 Stars

His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) and The Rocking Horsemen (1992)

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His Motorbike, Her Island (1986)

There’s an immediate aesthetic artifice to His Motorbike, Her Island. Our hero is cool and simultaneously cruel representing a husky-voiced, brusque masculinity that feels no doubt appealing and equally toxic. He recounts his life’s observations through voiceover — the monochrome dreams making up his memories — and as such the movie slaloms easily between black & white and color.

It feels perfectly at home in its moment as part ’80s biker movie full of style. Some of this no doubt comes from director Nobuhiko Obayashi who always seems to have a propensity for commercial pop culture imagery. I would hesitate to call him a technician, and yet since he both edited and directed many of his films, maybe I don’t want to use the label because it sounds too austere.

His films are suffused with a vibrant energy and although the comparison misses the mark, the only reference I could think of was Richard Lester. I’d be interested in hearing who others bring up.

The movie’s premise is quite simple. Koh Hashimoto (Riki Takeuchi) runs errands on his motorcycle part time. His idle hours are taken up with a docile beauty name Fuyumi. He even gets in a duel with the girl’s older brother, who’s worried for her honor. Whether the outcome impacts his view of her or not, Koh, breaks it off. By his estimation, she’s boring (all she knows is crying and cooking).

Koh is looking for the Japanese version of the aloof dream girl, and he finds it in Miiyo. She captivates him with her confident vivacity, taking pictures of him, chatting in the onsen, and ultimately taking up his first love of motorcycles.

Their relationship blossoms when he visits her hometown out in the country during Obon, and we witness how the summer holiday is rooted in both a veneration and a celebration of dead loved ones. Koh’s captivated watching Miiyo dance during the festival proceedings. It’s something about her spirit he finds so attractive.

It also signals the film’s dangerous edges. Because if I wanted to distill His Motorbike, Her Island, down to its essence, we would need to talk about the intoxicating and reckless abandon of youth. It’s mesmerizing when it’s projected up on the screen in all its glory existing without worldly consequence of any kind.

Miiyo follows Koh and becomes infatuated by his singular passion: a 750cc Kawasaki. But it’s not just a supercharged motorcycle, and it’s not so much about an object made of chrome and an engine. It’s the adrenaline hit and emotional high of riding a motorcycle and riding it fast. It’s almost a dare for life to come at you head-on. For them, living life on on the edge like this is an obvious antidote to the malaise.

It’s both what attracts them to one another and threatens their ultimate undoing. Live fast, die young, has a poetic inevitably to it. I feel like I will need to watch the movie again down the road sometime, but there’s a pervasive sense that this motorbike, this island, this young man and this young woman take on a kind of mythic proportion.

Just like I never caught onto a perceptible rhythm of the monochrome and color, what we witness is not always an objective, tangible world. It exists in the hinterlands of memory, love, passion, and emotions just out of reach. The irony is obvious.

Sometimes, to feel alive, people need to get as close to death as possible. I’m not sure if this star-crossed, high-octane hedonism is still en vogue, but it’s easy to understand how it could seem attractive albeit misguided. There’s a hubris to it.

3.5/5 Stars

The Rocking Horseman (1992)

When I lived in Japan, I was flabbergasted to learn that there was a group that was bigger in Japan during the ’60s than the Beatles. It was The Ventures! This instrumental act kicked off the “Eleki Boom” as their iconic onomatopoeic glissandos (deke-deke-deke) captivated a generation of youth. These teenagers subsequently rushed out to buy their electric guitars and start their own bands during the “Group Sounds” explosion.

Although I didn’t think about it at the time, I’m a sucker for a good musical coming-of-age movie, and this landscape was ripe for such a story. Recently, when I came upon The Rocking Horsemen, I realized a void in the cinematic landscape had been filled thanks to Nobuhiko Obayashi

Fujiwara (Yasufumi Hayashi) feels like the most innocent and congenial of Obayashi’s boy heroes, a Ferris Bueller-type who instantly takes us into his confidence by not only providing voiceover but speaking directly to us.

OB’s films are easily placed in this provincial milieu outside the hustle and bustle of the big city. This gives them a kind of comfortable intimacy, and it’s only a small jump to place them in the past. In this case, Japan during the 1960s. I already mentioned that the movie covers a subgenre I have a private preoccupation with: form-a-band origin stories. That includes That Thing You Do! and Sing Street to The Commitments, Nowhere Boy, and School of Rock. What sets this one apart is the unique context and cultural moment.

Now I’ve been inculcated from an early age that the Beatles had the greatest music, but Fujiwara is coming of age with an ear raised to the admonitions of his elders. Pop music is puerile entertainment, cultural dregs compared to the sophistication of classical music. The Beatles included.

Then, his radio played “Pipeline” and he is changed forever. Any kind of snobbery quickly dissipates. The new sound assaults him as he reclines in his bedroom. There’s no escaping its force, and he converted for good, caught up in the same boom I read about. It was electric liberation.

Since a rock musician can’t look like a Buddhist acolyte, the first course of action was to grow out his hair. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I find these movies compelling is it involves some kind of youthful industry. When you’re young you don’t need to be told the odds. If you want to start a band, and that’s you’re impetus, you can go ahead and do it. No permission is necessary (parents notwithstanding).

In this way, Fujiwara meets his future bandmates. The first shares his interest in rock and turns his back on the more traditional setlist the school club follows. The rest of the members include a priest’s son, who’s the band’s source of worldly wisdom, and then a gawky dork who gets coerced into playing the drums for them.

If initially they fall together organically enough, they also premeditate how to best go about their business. In the end, they resolve to get summer jobs at a local manufacturing plant to save up to buy their instruments. These scenes are mostly transitory — only an end to the means — but as “Woolly Bully” plays over their assembly line, there’s a sense of optimism. They’re getting closer to their goal.

Ittoku Kishibe shows up again after Lonely Heart as a good-natured teacher who supplies American lyrics and ultimately offers to become their club advisor. It’s a small addition, but his tacit affirmation of their endeavors speaks volumes.

I’m fascinated by how pop culture can infiltrate and suffuse through the cracks of a society, especially in an international context. I met Japanese folks with very specified knowledge about Korn or Olivia Newton-John, Sam Cooke, Jazz or Punk music. Or think of the two teens in Mystery Train who go on a pilgrimage to Memphis in search of The King. Where does this come from?

While I wouldn’t call the general Japanese populous particularly aware of world culture, you do find these hyperspecialized niches of expertise. These boys glean their inspirations thanks to radio and import records, even older siblings who pass down a love of Nat King Cole.

A perfect example is Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” played as our hero rides his bike through his neighborhood. It’s a totally different context from the California surf culture I was born and bred in. But it still reaches them on the other side of the world. The same might be said of The Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

It doesn’t feel like a mistake that the first time the new band convenes and brandishes their new name — The Rocking Horsemen — they start playing, and it’s a flawless rendition of “Pipeline” (exactly like the Ventures recording). They make their debut at a show during Christmas with mixed results, but they disregard the critics and play their hearts out. What’s more, they gel and become galvanized as a group. How can you not under the circumstances?

But as school comes to a close, their journey together winds down too. Their first and last big show comes at the annual school cultural festival and with a set list including “I Feel Fine” and “Johnny B. Goode,” they can’t miss. We’ve seen this moment before in many a movie so it’s a kind of expected wish-fulfillment watching them go out.

When you’re an adolescent these are the kind of memories that stay with you. And in a final act of solidarity, Fujiwara now listless and despondent over the future, has his newfound brotherhood to come around him. They christen him their “Bandleader for Life.” So even as their journey as a band might have met its logical conclusion more than an impasse (not many make it like The Beatles), The Rocking Horsemen do have some amount of closure. The music and those relationships will never leave them.

4/5 Stars

Lonely Heart (1985)

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Lonely Heart is a film bathed in the golden hues of nostalgia (“natsukashii” in Japanese). It also boasts a rural landscape with a topography that’s the utter antithesis of Tokyo’s urban skyline. This in itself already evokes a certain quaintness, regardless of the story being told almost 40 years ago.

Hiroki (Toshinori Omi) envisions his world through the shutter of his camera — though he rarely has actual film to use — and so he imagines what he might capture. After school, he can be found scampering through the village streets in his school uniform with his two best friends doing backflips and cracking all manner of jokes. They have a youthful ingenuity that’s clever when it’s not getting them in trouble.

For instance, their use of Bunsen burners, forceps, and various pieces of lab equipment to cook up a delectable meal is inspired. Then, Hiroki’s friends razz him about following his father’s footsteps to be a Buddhist monk — he must give up meat lest he goes to hell for cutting corners on the road to enlightenment — and they’ll gladly eat his portion.

The next moment, they’re ushered off to the principal’s office to clean as a minor punishment. Instead, they teach vulgarities to the principal’s prized parrot and their mothers have the ignominy of coming into school to atone for their indiscretions. Hiroki’s mother is your typical portrait of a Japanese parent, at the very least because she’s always on her son to study more and pick up his grades. Their underlining failure to communicate is a universal adolescent struggle.

But his life stage is also about love, something that still feels naïve and untarnished by regrets and ample experience. He often looks through his camera viewfinder at the mystery girl, “Lonely Heart,” as she plays the piano, rides her bike, and takes the ferry home. If this was all it was, Lonely Heart might be a fairly rudimentary exploration of youth — another boyish awakening where the girl is cast as an object rather than a human being with a unique inner life.

Some of this happens in the movie with the ethereal Yasuko Tomita, but there’s also a parallel tale leaning into these themes in a more profound way. In fact, it takes them a step further. Hiroki receives a visitation from an impish ghost of a girl who materializes on numerous occasions even going so far as berating his mother and toying with her.

This seems like a curious development, but then Japanese culture has a greater tolerance for ghosts. If you’ve seen some of Miyazaki’s movies (arguably Japan’s most beloved cinematic export), you already know there’s a kind of acceptance of these things. They aren’t so much supernatural and if she’s labeled as “weird,” she’s also more or less accepted as fact.  Just as magical realism and surrealism can often permeate Japanese cinema.

This is easier to accept as I often have trouble with Japanese humor because it feels broad (whatever that means). The film is full of juvenile shenanigans and adult caricatures who overwhelm the screen from time to time blindsiding us with absurdity.

However, in juxtaposition, there are these instances of sensitivity playing out in Lonely Heart’s more pensive parts, personifying what Hiroki grapples with all throughout the film. It’s this long-lost love — the deep longing within all of us — resigning us to be these lonely creatures.

In Japanese culture, there’s also something innately beautiful about this sacrificial melancholy for the sake of some greater good or greater call. If I didn’t get my cultural signals crossed, it ties into the essence of “mono no aware” — an impermanence or transience of things. I’m not sure if Japanese culture would speak about love with these same terms, but please allow me to, even if only momentarily.

I’ve gotten to a juncture in my film-viewing life where, if I haven’t quite matured, I’m willing to take things on their own terms. Lonely Heart does not function within our western logic. If you asked me to explain everything away I’d be hard-pressed to say all the whys and wherefores. And yet something about this movie, mixed in with all its various forms and flights of fancies, left me with an indelible sense or feeling that will remain with me.

Somehow it reminded me of the more recent gem Petite Mamman. It has to do with honing in on a magical and poignant connection between parents and children. It developed differently than what I was expecting — the fantasy has a unique kind of functionality — and so by the time the movie’s over it has done work on us.

It’s offered up a quiet epiphany that we might tuck away for later enjoyment. Hopefully, if you get the chance to watch the film you’ll understand exactly what I mean. However, I wouldn’t dream of divulging that here.

3.5/5 Stars

La Piscine (1969): Alain Delon & Romy Schneider

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On a superficial even subliminal level, La Piscine (The Swimming Pool in English) shares some nominal similarities with The Swimmer and The Graduate. Certainly, drawing the connections isn’t too difficult.

It’s a mood and a feeling as much as it is subject matter. We open on a rural villa in the French countryside with a veranda and a swimming pool. Perfect for lounging. There we find France’s great Adonis-turned-action hero Alain Delon.

He already gave his audience a taste in glimmering fare like Purple Noon, but he’s the personification of disaffected cool, and it’s little different in Jacques Deray’s film.

What’s developed in the first idle moments of the movie is this splendorous sun-soaked aesthetic. It’s akin to Benjamin Braddock floating in his parent’s pool or Burt Lancaster in his short cutoffs journeying from pool to pool in East Coast WASP country.

Jean-Paul (Delon) is at the tranquil getaway with his current lover Marianne (Romy Schneider), and it’s apparent they are in the frisky honeymoon stage full of delirium and amour. Viewed from the outside, the two stars feel like a European “It” couple though they hadn’t been officially together since the beginning of the decade.

Their auras are too big not to still associate their scintillating stardom. The movie relies on it heavily, and it’s quite effective. Because they are effective as the definition of intercontinental movie stars. You’d be hard-pressed to find two more photogenic people than Delon and Schneider.

Within the film, there’s no sense of how they came to own this property, but it’s a non-factor in the story. We come to accept their idleness, the fact that their housekeeper brings them breakfast on trays, and they have the complete freedom of the place be it sleeping in, languishing in the noonday sun, and really doing whatever they please. It’s a state of mind for the movie.

In such a space it becomes a question of what can happen and what will upend and break through the reverie. Our first signs of life come in the form of an old friend named Harry (Maurice Ronet) who makes an auspicious entrance.

He’s a bit of a ne’er-do-well, likable, but roguish, and difficult to pin down. He hardly seems the domestic type, and there’s a sense that he’s always on the run, chasing after the next adventure and fling.  Maintaining his personal freedom at whatever the cost. What’s the most surprising is he’s brought his aloof teenage daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin) along.

As someone always trying to hang onto the capriciousness of youth, he’s not the kind of person you expect to have a child; there’s some mention of her mother being a British girl he had relations with, but he’s not so much a parental influence as he is a companion. Mostly he just seems proud that she’s beautiful, and it’s fun to brag to his friends about her.

Critical to the film, he also had a past relationship with Marianne. How could he not, but then again, that was many years ago, and she’s now in love with Jean-Paul. It doesn’t take radar to recognize what might conceivably happen since it’s the ’60s and beautiful people are involved. It’s no coincidence Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice came out the same year.

True to form, Harry is the life of the party, and he always races off in his Maserati and comes back whenever he pleases; one night he comes with a gang of young bohemians in tow. He terms them his “bosom buddies,” and they dance the night away.

It becomes a point of friction watching who everyone spends most of the night with.  We see potential trouble from a mile away as they link up and an inkling of jealousy begins to seethe under the surface.

What a strange little family they make. One evening they sit down for a dinner of Chinese food of all things. Marianne and Harry went to town together — a perfectly romantic getaway — and Jean-Paul took Pen away to the sea.

Whether or not it’s an act of retaliation or not, it’s easy to perceive it as such. They sit around working their chopsticks, fidgeting, and trading glances. If the movie is about something it would be this. The elephant in the room as it were.

However, there is a lack of an interior when you break the film open and that’s part of what puts it below its contemporaries, at least in my estimation. There are gorgeous exteriors with gorgeous people, fabulous sartorial style, and not much else.

It’s a testament to the performers and their innate charisma because they make it compelling. But it lacks the kind of commentary or wit of The Graduate or even the fabular qualities of The Swimmer.

The final act of La Piscine takes it into the territory of a true thriller. For the first time, something happens that might have its place in a Henri-Georges Clouzot picture or even Jean-Pierre Melville. Until this dramatic inflection point, it’s a work of latent psychology and desire. I’m not sure if the shift is warranted or not.

However, there is something else worth noting. As of 2024, Alain Delon was still with us, but all his primary scene partners are all gone. Birkin died most recently in 2023, and both his friends, Romy Schneider and Maurice Ronet, were lost to us too soon.

This realization adds a different kind of knowing austerity to the proceedings, though it’s hardly required. Even without this insider information, we leave the film mostly empty, and it’s difficult to know whether this is a statement or merely a formalistic reality.

3.5/5 Stars

Note: This review was written before Alain Delon’s passing on August 18, 2024. 

George Sanders: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Ivanhoe

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We’ve been doing a rather casual retrospective on the films of George Sanders and as part of the series, we thought it would be fitting to highlight three more of his performances. They run the gamut of literary adaptations, fantasy romances, and medieval yarns. Sanders remains his incorrigible self through them all, and we wouldn’t have him any other way.

Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

“Lead us not into temptation, forgive us our sins, wash away our iniquities”

Whether you say he cornered the market or simply got pigeonholed, George Sanders could always be called upon to play snooty Brits bubbling with wry wit and aristocracy. His Lord Henry Wotton is certainly wanton — an incorrigible influence on many a man — and his latest acquaintance becomes Dorian Gray.

Hurd Hatfield is the picture of handsome youthfulness, dark and aloof, though his piano playing leaves much to be desired.  His reputation must precede him and perhaps an actor with greater gravitas could have done more with the part. Hatfield feels generally inert and uninteresting. Over time, it’s hard to confuse his distance with inscrutable mystery.

The primary object of his desire begins with Angela Lansbury, an entrancing tavern singer with an equally gorgeous voice to go with it. Lansbury and then Donna Reed (his second flame) both deserved better, at least in their romantic lead if not the roles they were given.

It’s a quite loquacious film thanks in part to Sanders, who always has a cynical word for every situation and thus lays the groundwork for Dorian’s total immersion into hedonism.

The movie must work in mood and tone because there isn’t much in the realm of intemperate drama, and for some reason I found myself crying out for something more substantive than elliptical filmmaking. Whether it was merely to assuage the production codes or not, so much takes place outside the frame, which can be done artfully, and yet the distance doesn’t always help here.

The impartial narrator discloses Gray’s internal psychology to the audience as he’s perplexed by his evolving portrait — the lips now more prominently cruel than before. The ideas are intriguing in novel form in the hands of Oscar Wilde. Here it’s all rather tepid and not overtly cinematic watching a man traipse around his home tormented by his own inner demons.

It’s easy to contrast them, for their exploration of warring psyches and the duality of man’s morality, but this is not Jekyll and Hyde. However, on a fundamental level, I must consider my own criticisms because this is a story about pride, narcissism, and the selfish roots of evil in the human heart. They can be unnerving as we consider the portrait that might be staring back at us.

I find it a drolling, monotone movie other than the inserted shots of color that shock us into some knee-jerk reaction. It’s made obvious there’s a moral leprosy eating away at Dorian and the ending showcases much the same, doing just enough to hammer home the core themes of the story in a rousing fashion. Though your sins be as scarlet, I will wash them white as snow. It’s possible for the portrait to be remedied, though not without consequence.

3.5/5 Stars

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

“Haunted. How perfectly fascinating!”

If you don’t love Gene Tierney before The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, surely you must adore her afterward. She’s totally her own person; strong but not unpleasant thanks to her ever-congenial manner. She has immaculate poise and knows precisely what she wants.

Even in her mourner’s outfit in honor of her late husband, she has a regality drawn about her, vowing to leave his family and take her daughter (Natalie Wood) and their housekeeper Martha (Edna Best) to carve out a life of their own.

The film has a score from Bernard Herrmann post-Citizen Kane and pre-Vertigo that’s warm, majestic, jaunty, and frantic all at the precise moment to counterpoint Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s rather peculiar take on a romance film.

I realized an appeal for the picture I had never considered before. I find old haunted house movies, aside from those played for comedic effect, mostly overwrought and uninteresting. And yet even this early on in the lineage, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir effectively subverts the expected conventions.

Instead of merely being frightened off by the specters in an old seaside haunt of a deceased sea captain (Rex Harrison), it becomes her pet project. She’s intent on making it her home because she’s an obstinate woman — a descriptor she takes as the highest of compliments.

It’s pleasant how their immediate distaste and ill-will soften into something vaguely like friendship (and affection). They take on a literary voyage of their own as she helps transcribe his memoirs and vows to get them published for him.

George Sanders — always the opportunistic ladies’ man — shows up with his brand of leering, if generally good-natured impudence. In this case, he’s living a double life under the beloved pen name of Children’s book author Uncle Neddy. If his introduction seems sudden, its purposes quickly become evident. He is a real man of flesh and blood. It only seems right that Mrs. Muir makes a life for herself with him…

It’s curious how both men evaporate around the same time: one out of sacrifice, seeing her happy in reality, and not wanting to complicate her life more. The other’s gone because, well, he’s a cad. For those fond of Rex Harrison, it’s rather a shame he is absent from much of the picture, but this is by design because it is his very absence — this perceptible passage of time developed within the movie — that allows for such a meaningful conclusion.

It’s what the entire film builds to and between the rapturous scoring of Hermann and the simple but efficient special effects, it allows them to walk out together arm in arm as they were always meant to be. If they are apparitions, then at the very least they are together again no longer separated by chemistry, mortality, or anything else. These themes have been melded together innumerable times before but rarely have they coalesced so agreeably.

4/5 Stars

Ivanhoe (1952)

As a child, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe always lived in the shadow of Robin Hood. The same might be said of this movie and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood from years prior. By now Ivanhoe is both a feared and beloved mountebank and although late-period Robert Taylor is a bit old for the part and removed from his matinee idol days, it’s easy enough to dismiss.

Taylor and Errol Flynn were both heartthrobs around the same time. Now a generation later he looks a little weathered and threadbare for his tunic though he proves stout-hearted enough. Joan Fontaine also effectively replaces her own sister as the guiltless romantic interest.

However, there are some other intriguing elements I would have not expected of the film. It becomes a fairly robust dialogue on anti-Semitism and the relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles. We always think of British history or this particular period as a war merely between the Saxons and the Normans. Here we are met with a bit more complication.

Ivanhoe must play the rebel in the absence of his beloved King Richard, but he is also called upon to be a friend to the downtrodden even those of a different religious faith. In the moments where he’s called upon, he’s an unadulterated hero, and it’s all good fun watching him bowl over his rival knights like a row of five bowling pins. However, this is pretty much expected. It gets far better when he’s faced with mortal wounds in the wake of a duel (with George Sanders of all people).

Both Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine stand by ready to dote over him. The ambush by the Normans sets up a rousing finale every lad dreams about. Because my old friend Robin of Locksley comes to their aid prepared to lay siege to the enemy’s castle. Meanwhile, Ivanhoe leads a rebellion on the inside, freeing his friends and stoking a fire to smoke them out into the open.

Watching the choreographed craziness full of arrows and swords, shields, and utter chaos, I couldn’t help relishing the moment because we feel the magnitude of it all being done up for our own amusement. And it is a blast. Regardless, of the romantic outcomes, it’s a fairly satiating treat; I do miss the age of Medieval potboilers.

3.5/5 Stars