Category Archives: Romance

The Barkleys of Broadway (1949)

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The Barkleys of Broadway was initially conceived as a reunion. It was meant to star Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, capitalizing on their successful partnership with Easter Parade.

Taking nothing away from Judy, it does feel like there’s something propitious about Astaire and Rogers getting back together one last time. Because Easter Parade is such a delight, it also makes what we missed out on a little less painful, and what we got in its place all the more enjoyable.

It’s been a decade, the studio changed, and the aesthetics are different in Technicolor, but it’s still an immeasurable pleasure seeing one of the movies’ most transcendent screen couples in yet another picture together. She was always a supernal star in black & white, but Ginger Rogers is a great beauty in Technicolor, too.

The movie opens with the credits as our stars stand on stage doing their routine as it should be. It’s just like old times. Josh and Dinah Barkley sing each other’s praises awkwardly, and their friend Ezra Millar pries them offstage before they compliment each other to death.

When the performance is over, they walk the gauntlet of all their well-wishers and admirers, signing autographs. I imagine I’ve seen this sequence countless times from All About Eve, Opening Night, and The King of Comedy. It’s like a rite of passage for the entertainment superstar.

They cuddle up in the cab full of lovey-dovey affection and effusive praise until a note of criticism creeps in and all sides blow up; it’s nothing if not a mercurial relationship. Oscar Levant is the peacekeeper and his usual mix of goofball and piano man extraordinaire, with an endless array of wry wisecracks.

His persona on film is such that it almost obfuscates the heights of his talents. The rapid-fire runs of “Saber Dance” are a tour de force compressed into a few minutes. A personal pet peeve involves actors who sit with their hands hidden behind the piano, and everyone knows they aren’t actually playing. It breaks the illusion. However, Levant, like Astaire, is so prodigious that the camera sits close by, unbroken as it admires the mastery of two artists.

Whether planned or partially happenstance, it’s difficult not to read into the meta qualities of the story, both real and imagined. The movie has a laugh playing up the tiffs between Astaire and Rogers as portrayed by the contemporary media. Whereas in reality, they seemed like two very driven people with a singular focus to do their work to the best of their abilities. They were generally well-liked and had nothing but high praise for one another. It’s gratifying to hear, though it hardly sells newspapers.

Billie Burke appears as a tittering patron of the arts who throws them a party, though they try to avoid their congenial hostess like the plague, sneaking out to the patio. Dinah meets a French playwright and admirer, Jacques Pierre Barredout (Jacques François), on her way out.

The young man strokes her ego, telling Dinah she’s wasted in musical comedy. ” You could be a great tragic actress,” he says. Her husband is distrustful of his fawning, and besides, he sees his wife as a “song and dance girl.”

He’s like the Svengali who molded her, and that image doesn’t go over well with her. She’s ready to get out from under her husband’s influence; she’s no Pygmalion creation or shrinking violet. The rest of the movie is built out of this seemingly trivial tension in the rom-com mode.

Of course, none of this conforms to reality, as Rogers had won adulation and an Oscar for her work in Kitty Foyle at the beginning of the decade, and she was largely the bigger star before they were ever teamed up. She maintained a fairly impressive film career throughout the ’40s and early ’50s. Reading into these tenuous parallels too much becomes laughable, but it is also part of the enjoyment.

The behind-the-scenes rehearsal environs do yeoman’s work in making this feel like the quintessential MGM: the studio of Freed, Gene Kelly, writers Adolph Green & Betty Comden, and all those wonderful collaborations like Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon.

It highlights the love of performance and the sensation of catching this brand of tap dancing like lightning in a bottle, as if we’re on the ground floor and privy to something only a select few get to see. That’s part of the magic of how they created these worlds for their characters to inhabit, where the backstage and everything in between is blurred, and the camera’s right in the thick of it to capture it all.

The couple agrees to go out for some fresh air in the country, much to Ezra’s chagrin. While Josh plays golf, Dinah agrees to become Jacques’s muse. Thereafter, the Barkleys have a photoshoot with Look magazine right at the precise moment Josh realizes his wife has the script for the Frenchman’s play.

It becomes a send-up of the perfectly quaint and manicured All-American Person to Person fireside chat as the married couple go ballistic once again, this time tearing through their house in a rage in between camera setups. These are mostly vapid bits of fun.

The true high points come when the stars are given these incubated moments to flash their inspiration in front of the camera. “Shoes With Wings On” conjures up a storefront milieu reminiscent of the toy shop in Easter Parade. Astaire puts on a pair of possessed dancing shoes and lets them carry him away. It leads into a magical interlude where he’s joined with an army of ghost taps all stepping in time, almost ready to run him off the stage until he takes arms in a surrealist defense involving a broom and toy guns.

Ezra tries to trick his friends into a reunion, and they stand backstage at a benefit while he conducts a performance of Tchaikovsky. The man really has range, but then again, he was a compatriot of the Gershwins who famously cut so lithely between popular, classical, and jazz composition. From my understanding, they made them one and the same with no delineation between high and low art.

The Barkleys, or rather Fred and Ginger, are paired one last time with the Gershwin tune “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” If it’s not immediately apparent, there’s actually a bit of poeticism to its inclusion. So many years ago — in 1937, in fact — Astaire sang the song to his costar in Shall We Dance.

This time around, they turned it into a dance with their typical elegance and joie de vivre. The Barkleys of Broadway is unreserved proof that they’re back, and they never lost it.

It’s so good to see them together; it’s also exactly what our hearts yearn for, especially those who have lived vicariously through them for many years. Somehow, they embodied us and still reached for heights we could only dream of, and they did it with pure class.

3.5/5 Stars

Follow The Fleet (1936)

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Taken in the lineage of movie musicals, Follow The Fleet feels like a prototype for On The Town, or maybe there were just more movies focusing on sailors on leave back in the day. It’s like romances set on ocean liners. With the proliferation of commercial air travel, it’s possible a whole subgenre went kaput. For now, it’s safe, and the boys descend on Frisco.

Fred Astaire stars as a gum-smacking sailor, Blake Baker. He wears the abrasiveness lightly because he was always an appealing personality beyond his graceful taps. Randolph Scott takes on the role of the best bud, Bilge Smith, as they continue their pairing from Roberta. Astaire similarly has a girl he wants to check in on…They had a falling out, and you can just about imagine who might be playing her.

As the sailors roll into the city, it has the distinct stench of a pile of pesky high schoolers infecting the place. They sneak into a local joint on one ticket, and Bilge hooks them up with a couple of paper bags of beer from the outside. All they require is the establishment’s table, and they do the rest themselves.

Connie Martin (Harriet Hilliard) plays a homely, bespectacled brunette girl who makes Randolph’s acquaintance; she needs a man to get inside, and he obliges, though he’s quick to brush her off and forget about it. Connie also just happens to be the sister of Sherry (Ginger Rogers), who’s the floor show at Paradise.

It’s the old trope we’ve known since the dawn of time. Ginger Rogers hails from the Gentlemen Prefer Blondes school. As she points out, men like blondes because they look dumb. The operative word is “look” since you would never believe someone pulling one over on Ginger Rogers.  “It takes a lot of brains to be dumb.”

Lucille Ball enlisted to make Connie look presentable. The ugly duckling arc feels dead on arrival. This movie just needed another plot to bide its time. Her new look makes a startling impression on Bilge, and we know she has feelings for him already. His problem is living a transient life; he’s also easily swayed by shinier, more affluent objects in the form of divorced socialites.

Rather like Roberta, the sluggish romance all but writes itself, making Astaire and Rogers the primary reason to stay with the picture and see it through. There’s the fun pretense of a dance-off with another couple, and then Astaire and Rogers go nuclear into another stratosphere. The scene becomes there’s, and there’s alone. The movie almost seems to forget there were ever any other dances spliced into the scene, and we do too. 

The sailors are whisked away on a moment’s notice, and the women — as the title implies — must take up pursuit! The movie requires it. Connie vows to get a boat so the man that she loves can captain it.

It’s rather hypnotic seeing Astaire tapping on deck with a whole host of sailors keeping time behind him; there’s a military cadence to it with a certain added level of artfulness. It’s like the maritime context creates a playground for him to then work within and offer us some novel hoofing.

There’s also a cruel comic irony watching him return to town trying to nab his girl an audition and derailing a “sure thing’s” chances by spiking her drink with bicarbonate of soda. His wires get horribly crossed. You can fill in the rest because Ginger’s the poor woman who suffers at his hands. Being pretty plucky herself, she’s more than equipped for some brutal payback.

These moments of “plot” are the movie’s saving grace because at least A & R’s romantic entanglements are mostly comedic. Rogers has the feistiness to make them a joy, and Astaire doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body, so the comedy comes off mostly affable and light.

The final act is comprised of putting on a show to keep Connie from losing the refurbished ship she sunk her savings into — she did it for Scott, but you hardly need to know this. Nor the fact that Blake has to go AWOL to get to the benefit in time. It doesn’t matter.

All that matters is that Fred is there to dance with Ginger, and everything else falls away. The apex of the movie is “Let’s Face The Music and Dance,” which feels like a quintessential American Songbook number that I’ve been sleeping on. My sincerest apologies to Irving Berlin.

It’s classic  Astaire and Rogers at their classy best, dancing on the deck of the ship and making us forget the sitcom fluff for something transcendent like they gave us so often. It’s a worthy place to end.

I said my apologies to Berlin, and now I owe one to Ms. Hiliard. I didn’t realize she was thee Harriet of Ozzie and Harriet fame until I was practically finished with this review. The longevity of her career in itself is quite remarkable.

3.5/5 Stars

Roberta (1935)

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Roberta opens with a troupe of musicians known as the Wabash Indianans who perform a wonderfully kooky organ routine in the middle of a train depot. It’s so inventive in fact, including the verbal gymnastics of Candy Candido, that they get sacked before they can even begin their gig in France. The proprietor was looking for some more exotic entertainment.

The boys need a fallback plan fast. Huck Haines (Fred Astaire) vaguely knows a girl named Lizzie, and John Kent (Randolph Scott), well, his aunt just happens to be the most famous dressmaker in the city. Only in the movies…

Time is of the essence, and so he pays the famed monoymous Roberta (Helen Westley) a visit. Scott gets stuck in the gilded elevator and has his meet-cute with Irene Dunne. It took a moment to recognize her because she addressed him in French. Stephanie (Dunne) is Roberta’s designer and most faithful staff member.

Scott is instantly smitten and goes leaping up and racing across the room just to have the chance to open the door for her. He rumbles around with the giddy energy of a colt; his aunt likens him to her favorite Newfoundland puppy.

If you’re keeping score, there’s one name that hasn’t cropped up yet. Ginger Rogers shows up as a feisty countess; her accent is worse than Dunne’s, but it doesn’t matter. She’s got the spunk to make it count. She stands at the balcony listening to the band do their performance, and when she actually gets face-to-face with Astaire, there’s really some fun to be had.

Flying Down to Rio found them coming into their own; they were sidekicks who caught the eyes of the audience with their craze-creating “Carioca” routine. With Roberta, they had already hit it big with The Gay Divorcee, and now they get to have a good time with the material without the onus of the story being on them.

They seem to relish this kind of sidekick role; it’s almost like they’re playing a level of meta comedy here because they know all the beats of the story and what it takes to have the commensurate repartee. After all, outside the film, they’ve already built up a cache of goodwill.

We really begin to understand it when they both drop the act. Because she’s not a countess but the same fast-talking dame named Lizzie he knew in a former life. Now their familiarity makes sense for the sake of the story.

In “I’ll Be Hard to Handle,” they get reacquainted with some flirtatious dancing as they reminisce about old times. This devolves into a dance-off with a slap for good measure, all captured in a rush of an unbroken take between two consummate performers loving what they do in front of us.

It feels like things are humming along. The demonstrative nightclub owner Alexander Petrovich Moskovitch Voyda, who communicates only in raised octaves, is coaxed by Lizzie into offering the boys a job this time around. Things are looking up.

There’s even a French lesson with Randolph Scott and Fred Astaire, which so obviously lays the groundwork for “Moses Supposes” in Singin in the Rain. It’s impossible to see it any other way.

Admittedly, Scott and Dunne have a rapport I like, though I’m equally tempted to say I want to see the movie with Astaire and Rogers at the reins. They almost need two separate movies because the story’s not big enough for all they have to offer. The script goes tugging and seesawing good-naturedly enough between the players, but the story almost doesn’t know how to handle it all.

It’s an embarrassment of riches, and it’s not even named for any of them. This distinction goes to Helen Westley. Then, Auntie Auntie dies peacefully — Scott and Dunne have a pact to run her fashion empire together, and John’s old flame Sophie comes from America for the obligatory complication.

She and Astaire don’t mask their mutual disdain for each other, and her entrance is great for the sake of comedy if little else. The fact that they have a bet over how her dress will be received by John pays dividends simply with the opportunity of watching Astaire’s smug face as he struts off and palms her dough.

Roberta could be a stolid affair straight through, and it is from time to time. No disservice to the lovely Irene, but her style of singing went out about 80 years ago, and I will always be enraptured by the Platters’ cut of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”

I realized what made the Astaire and Rogers formula work was that they cut out the middle man: they were the floor show, the romance, and comedy all wrapped up into one. Roberta almost has too many parts.

Irene Dunne’s a star deserving top billing to be sure, but it’s easy to say the same about her costars even if it’s in retrospect. Still, there are enough delights in this one to look kindly on it.

3.5/5 Stars

Claudia Cardinale: The Facts of Murder (1959) and Bell’Antonio (1960)

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With the passing of Claudia Cardinale in 2025, I took it upon myself to watch some of her movies that I had not seen before. Below, I included capsule reviews of two of her earlier performances:

The Facts of Life (1959)

At first, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the picture. I thought it might be a comedia italiana or maybe a crime picture, but one in the vein of Big Deal on Madonna Street (Claudia Cardinale turned up in that one as well). However, the Facts of Murder feels like a more traditional police procedural, mystery story, albeit told in the Italian milieu.

Two events become crucial to the plot. First, a burglary in broad daylight where the culprit manages to flee the crowded scene without being apprehended. The police are called to investigate

In the midst of their investigation, a body is found, a person now dead next door. As the detective notes, lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, and yet in this case it has. There’s something rather intriguing about the lead investigator being played by director Pietro Germi (Divorced Italian Style, Seduced and Abandoned).

It took me some time to catch on, but even though it’s not a flashy part, the role does hold the picture together because he must drive the story forward, interacting with all sorts of folks and beginning to decipher what actually occurred.

There are a number of possible suspects, including a doctor cousin (Franco Fabrizi) who, at the very least, is a selfish opportunist. Then there is the spouse of the deceased, who is understandably shaken up and initially sympathetic, though he has the most to gain. There’s also something he’s keeping hidden from the authorities.

Eventually, the police round up the hands that had a part in the theft, but they still have to solve the second part that has eluded them thus far. A film such as this can so often be dominated by the men, and yet there are three performances from the actresses worthy of note

Claudia Cardinale has a fairly small but crucial role as a faithful maid to Eleonora Rossi Drago’s character. And Cristina Gajoni shows up at the end of the picture in a notable part that holds a lot of sway over the story. However, it is the indelible image of Cardinale sprinting down the dirt road after the receding car with tears in her eyes that stays with me.

If her career weren’t so ripe with many memorable films, it could just have easily been a moment she was remembered for. As is, The Facts of Murder was just the beginning of an illustrious career.

4/5 Stars

Bell’Antonio (1960)

My first inclination is that Marcello Mastroianni is technically too old for a role such as this (he purportedly joined mere days before the production started as a favor to the director). Yet, there’s also really no one else to play this role, as it stands as a romantic ideal. Antonio, the title character, is almost a mythic figure in his local community. He comes back to his parents’ home from Rome.

His reputation precedes him with stories of women throwing themselves at him and wives of government ministers left smitten. Whether it’s blown out of proportion or not, we certainly see some evidence of his romantic sway. It’s almost like everyone else wants to prove for themselves if the stories are true, and so they build and play up the mystique. You would think Antonio is the one cultivating his image, but it feels like he wants to be rid of it.

There are these social layers to the movie, also.  We witness men in power, and they have a desire for women who know how to trade in their feminine wiles. The film is transposed from a novel set in fascist Italy, and these scenes bear this out the most obviously (it felt reminiscent of scenes in a later picture like The Cremator).

There is the brokering of social transactions even between families like crusty barons or haughty royalty of generations gone by. Initially, Antonio is vehemently opposed to the union, only to receive a picture of the woman his parents have orchestrated for him to marry. He can’t stop looking at it. She’s remarkable!

In her own way, an aura is built around Barbara as well, just like with Antonio. Thankfully, for the sake of the movie, she is portrayed by none other than Claudia Cardinale. They are eventually wed as the social script suggests. However, status and social economy are, again, predicated on virility or at least the projection of it.

The society seems to idolize womanizers even as much as they condone a narrative of men sowing their wild oats. This includes Antonio’s father. And sadly, we see the hypocrisy of the church within these same power structures invested in the letter of the law and not the heart or posture behind it.

The punchline of the movie is the fact that the church will annul the marriage because they haven’t consummated it and gotten pregnant within 12 months. It’s a catastrophe on all fronts! Compared to how they treat infidelity and affairs, it makes one queasy.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the architects of the script, and if it’s not too presumptuous, it’s easy to see him bleed through. The movie feels like a bleak precursor to the likes of Divorce Italian Style and Seduced in Abandoned because there’s no hint of comedy in the same way as those subsequent satires. Everything is done with the sincerest of straight faces. And yet the way it burns is an indictment against the backward mores of the society we see before us.

3.5/5 Stars

Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956)

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Dan Dailey has the Texas charm played up a bit as he walks into the Sands Hotel on a first-name basis with everyone. He’s invested heavily in the place — meaning he’s lost a lot of money there.

There’s a blatant absurdity in the premise of Meet Me in Las Vegas. Sitting on the casino floor, Chuck Rodwell grabs hold of a passing woman for good luck (This would not fly today). However, this particular lady is the management’s new floor show, and she’s prepared to walk out if she has to perform in front of a bunch of grubby socialites having a good time and clinking their glasses and silverware. Cyd Charisse foreshadows her turn in the Ninotchka remake Silk Stockings by playing a surly, put-upon entertainer who castigates her indulgent employer (Jim Bachus).

In their subsequent meet-cute, she’s prepared to dress down the audacious Texan because she’s already in a foul mood, and what he does is uncalled for. And yet she just happens to have the magic touch! He literally can’t miss when he keeps her company and keeps hold of her hand like a rabbit’s foot. The hokey metaphor of the movie is clear: When they hold hands, something magical happens, just not romance, not yet, that is.

They both have someone in their corner. For Dan, it’s the dealer Lotzi (Oskar Karlweis) who always offers encouragement. For Cyd, it’s Sari (Lili Darvas) who has an impish sense of humor when it comes to men and her employer’s uptight attitude around them. They’re a couple of veterans with a genial old European charm.

Cara Williams shows up as an old confederate of Chuck’s. I’m sure she sees the opportunity for them to get together, rekindle flames, and maybe have a few laughs. She has a confident air about her.

Her presence turns Maria Corvier (Charisse) off completely. The contentious threesome shares a table during an evening floorshow, and Maria becomes more inebriated and uninhibited as the night goes on with the ambition to take back what’s hers (if it ever was hers). She hops up on the stage in her stupor and hams it up much to Chuck’s embarrassment. Perhaps it’s the first time she realizes she’s jealous for the affections of this man.

What makes the film a true delight is how the world is stuffed full of in-jokes and cameos. It’s not quite the Rat Pack and Ocean’s Eleven, but there’s a sense of this kind of ubiquitous celebrity. We see Debbie Reynolds and Vic Damone, performers who are familiar from director Roy Rowland’s earliest assignments, including Two Weeks with Love and Hit The Deck.

There’s a sweltering song from the always exquisite Lena Horne and a comic number very on brand with Jerry Colonia, primping his mustache surrounded by a stage of bodacious beauties.

Frank Sinatra getting lucky at the slot machine is a blink-and-you-miss-it gag, followed by Peter Lorre looking visibly demoralized, slowly being bled dry at the blackjack tables. Even Charisse’s husband, Tony Martin, shows up in a cameo that I didn’t catch immediately. Of everyone, it feels most unnatural to see George Chakiris as a young newlywed with his wife (Betty Lynn) out on the casino floor instead of the dance floor (Apparently, he had a number that was cut).

Cyd doing a volleyball ballet is something I never thought I’d see. It seems as unprecedented as it is bizarre, though she also manages to give it her usual stylized class. Forgotten Japanese star Mitsuko Sawamura does a charming duet with Dan Dailey of “Lucky Star,” which is decidedly absent of any cultural condescension.

For the story’s sake, Chuck finally takes Maria out to his ranch to introduce her to his irascible but loving mother (Agnes Moorehead) and his way of life. The upbeat rural charm of “The Gal with the Yaller Shoes” gets the point across, and Charisse is more than game to go along.

However, the real showstopper is a reworking of “Frankie and Johnny” back in Vegas, starring Cyd Charisse with John Brascia (of White Christmas fame) and the vocals of none other than Sammy Davis Jr. Yes, please.

If you look up “svelte” in the dictionary, it must be an entry on Cyd Charisse. Her numbers usually balance between two poles. There’s something so sophisticated about them, and yet they can be equally provocative. It’s all in the manner she pirouettes, slides, slinks, and slithers with her body. It defies banal description. It’s better witnessed.

How do you even begin to categorize something like this glitzy confection of a movie? The plot makes no rational sense, and there’s no reason to even try to justify it. People don’t act like this, but what do I know? I’m a Vegas novice. It’s also almost two hours long and probably could have used some trimming.

But the operative word is entertainment. Vegas is on full display, and it’s packed with all sorts of decadent delights. Every scene we get Cyd Charisse doing what Cyd Charisse does best draws us back into her inertia. It’s impossible to look away. In the end, it’s almost an afterthought to forgive the ludicrous script because it’s a blast, and Charisse does some more first-rate work.

3.5/5 Stars

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