Tag Archives: Review

King Creole (1958)

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It might be on the nose, but Elvis Presley doing a call and response rendition of “Crawfish” from his balcony with the lady vendor (jazz singer Kitty White) on the street below places us instantly in the movie’s milieu.

We’re in the French Quarter of New Orleans, a place blessed with so much musical culture thanks to the Black community. Like many films of the era, they exist on the periphery underrepresented and unappreciated, but they must be acknowledged.

King Creole came out at an earlier juncture in Elvis’s career. He still has license to be himself, and yet the cult of Elvis doesn’t completely overwhelm director Michael Curtiz’s picture. It’s about “The King” in so many ways, yes, but it still has an identity outside of him as a genuinely absorbing story.

His movie career went down hill when everything was about formula and easy cash grabs relying solely on his personality. King Creole actually has substance and danger because it functions as both a vehicle for him and a genuine showcase for his talents and the talents of the actors around him.

Danny Fisher (Elvis) is a teenager who works bussing tables, morning and night, while he tries to squeeze in high school. It’s a tough schedule to maintain, and he’s already failed one year. But his father (Dean Jagger) is out of work so he feels there’s no recourse but to continue in the dive establishment. Danny’s a good kid dealt a tough hand.

It gets even worse one evening when a couple of drunken thugs induce him to sing for them, and then start pushing around one of their lady friends (Carolyn Jones). He comes to her defense, but he has a target on his back and his new female companion causes a mini scandal (and fistfight) on the last day of school. He flunks out again and that’s the end of his short-lived scholastic career.

I feel compelled to bring up Blackboard Jungle because although they’re set in different places, we’re dealing with the same segment of society: struggling working-class teenagers.

You could easily see Elvis in a version of that film especially because it was one of the instigators of the rock ‘n roll craze in movies. King Creole also depicts  delinquency though not purely in an instructive sense. We feel like we are watching a movie that’s entertainment first without an attached agenda (aside from banking on Elvis’s stardom before he was drafted into the military).

It evokes the aesthetic of gangster movies of old with Bogart and Cagney, which were directed by Curtiz two decades prior. King Creole has a self-contained world. There’s nothing outside these sets and the interiors that make up the movie. And there’s a sweaty claustrophobia to the tenements and cruddy street corners.

The French Quarter positively oozes with atmosphere, but there’s no way to run away because everyone and everything is tied together. It just so happens that Maxie Fields (Walter Matthau) pulls most of the strings.

The money, economy, and the inertia of almost everyone gravitates in and around the big kahuna. It’s just the way he likes it. He calls for Danny since he’s heard about his voice and his tenacity. Also, Ronnie (Jones) is his girl and he’s a jealous, vindictive man. He likes to keep tabs on what’s his.

Danny takes a job singing at the only spot Maxie doesn’t have his hands in — the modest club King Creole — and he becomes a local hit. Meanwhile, he reluctantly falls in with a few ambitious street hoods led by Vic Morrow. They’re vying to join Maxie’s payroll.

It’s the old story of Danny trying to stay out of trouble, and yet he’s constantly drawn in by want of money and further ashamed of his father’s subservient role as a stooge at the local drugstore. He also starts seeing a pretty shop girl (Dolores Hart). Although his intentions seem far from honorable, there’s still something sympathetic and not fully-formed between them.

All the narrative sinews don’t fit together seamlessly, but I appreciate the dynamics with different actors rubbing up against one another like matchsticks. There is a gritty, operatic quality to it. The music elements are a case and point, allowing us to stretch the parameters of reality just a tinge as Elvis entertains his audience both in-camera and beyond the screen.

Carolyn Jones could be a kind of one note Carmen-like Vamp — the other woman pulling Danny into the web, and she does this, but it’s all in spite of her best efforts. She wants him to get away from Maxie and the same hold the gangster has over her own life. Perhaps in the back of her mind is the hope of some freedom and a life beyond for both of them outside of this private hell.

What can I say about Walter Matthau? It amuses me to even make this comparison because I had never thought about it until this film, but Matthau had a trajectory similar to Bogart’s. Based on how I perceive him in hindsight, I always find it funny he started out as a heavy, and over time he became not only a comic hero but a leading man and a love interest. Here he’s everything despicable and abhorrent about local crime.

Dean Jagger could play characters with such bearing and integrity, and yet in a picture like Bad Day at Black Rock or here, he isn’t squeamish about portraying a bona fide weakling. It’s not a showy part, but there is a sense of bravery to it.

Vic Morrow’s still fairly early in his evolution as he moves on from Blackboard Jungle in the next stage of his dashing hoodlum career. It would be easy to typecast him in the role since it fits so seamlessly.

The same might be said of Dolores Hart but for completely different reasons. She embodies the good girl of the movie reminiscent of Eva Marie Saint a few years earlier, representing a reach for something more tender and resolutely decent opposite Brando in On The Waterfront.

Hart’s eyes are always so vibrant even in black & white. I find it fitting when she divulges to Danny about Father Franklin, a man of the cloth she’s known her entire life — someone who’s excited to meet him. And yet Danny’s despondent over his own failings. He cannot bear walking into a church given his current crisis. Nellie represents a level of graciousness to him and of course, Hart famously gave up an ephemeral acting career to become a nun driven by a similar higher calling.

There’s weight to everything Danny does and every mistake comes back to haunt him. His sister (Jan Shepard) strikes up a relationship with the older owner (Paul Stewart) of the King Creole; their relationship also hangs in the balance.

We see Elvis at his most tortured and earnest because he actually gets some material to tear through and try his hand at acting. The part gives him even a small sliver of what Brando had in Waterfront or Dean in Rebel. You can’t put them on the same plane, but then Elvis did what they could never do on the stage with his voice and his pelvis. King Creole is the finest showcase he got to do both in the same film.

The fist fights are pretty epic, and they mean something. Violence is not glorified, but it is an integral and unabashed element of this story. It’s one of the few ways to bring equilibrium to the world.

I’m no pre-germ medical theorist, but a lot of these Classical Hollywood movies seem to function by their own unique humoral theory where you have imbalances of all these different fluid forces at work: the good and the evil, the apathetic and the weak. There’s constant interplay and war between them until finally some kind of stasis is found at the behest of the production code.

The bad is lost and all the abscesses, both corrupt and sullied, are excised until all that’s left in the primordial moral soup is the good. It doesn’t matter how wild the undulations. Finally, our hero is given an existence made up entirely of hope and happiness as everything is brought back into balance.

With the antagonist gone and the promise of a pretty girl’s love, Elvis is able to sing out one final ditty as all the most important people in his life look on with smiles. It’s a classic denouement that doesn’t devalue the seedy sides of humanity. It really is a fine piece of work and it just might be Elvis at his very best. It’s a shame his career took a more insipid trajectory going forward. Because he had so much more to offer beyond a pretty face and peppy music.

3.5/5 Stars

Lucky (2017)

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Harry Dean Stanton, aka Lucky, feels like a bastion of a bygone era at the center of this story. The world around him still has the flavor of the West, though it has modernized. He is planted in a tradition reminiscent of The Misfits or Hud. Of course, he costarred with the likes of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and his credits are strewn with all sorts of footnotes to Classic Hollywood history, from westerns to revered cult classics and arguably his greatest achievement, Paris, Texas.

In his directorial debut, actor John Carroll Lynch made a love letter to his dear friend, and weak with illness, there’s a self-aware sense that this would be Stanton’s final film at 91 years of age. It proved to be true as he would pass away before the film was released in 2017. He always looked aged and world-weary decades earlier, and so you can only imagine what it is like to watch him here. Let’s make this clear. It’s an undisputed pleasure.

Because he’s a crotchety, ornery son of a gun, that’s most of the reason he’s still alive and kicking. His mornings are full of yoga in his underwear. He gets dressed in his cowboy boots and hat before stepping outside and walking everywhere he needs to go.

His favorite mental exercise is doing crossword puzzles at the local diner, he has favorite TV programs to watch, and he has a daily ritual of grabbing a carton of milk from the same family mart. All his rhythms are supported by the twang of harmonica music. It’s not quite Ry Cooder, but it gets the flavor across.

It’s unsurprising to say Lucky is profane and opinionated. He’s not afraid to say when he thinks someone has said something asinine; sometimes it just comes flying out because he’s in a foul mood. No one takes it personally. Because they know it belies a man who does have his share of tenderness.

There’s a collective responsibility where everyone cares for him, but they try not to press him too hard so he can live his life the way he wants. Still, there’s something idealized and idyllic about the small-town community.

If it’s not already apparent, Lucky has many obvious antecedents from The Straight Story by David Lynch and the road movies of Wim Wenders, like Paris, Texas. Of course, both of these films featured Stanton in critical roles. But there’s also something about the movie reminiscent of the contemporary movie Paterson by Jim Jarmusch.

Veterans like James Darren and David Lynch sit around the bar with Stanton, trading stories about romance and a lost tortoise named Mr. Roosevelt (who makes a very important cameo). It’s not some profound meeting of the minds, but to bask in their presence and see friends gathered together carries with it a special poignancy.

There are several specific passages, one where Stanton recounts his childhood and then another where he shares a conversation with a fellow veteran (Tom Skerritt), where there are very distinct echoes of Alvin Straight. It’s almost uncanny. Surely it’s not a coincidence. If they are not cut out of the same cloth, then they were formed under the same shared circumstances, be it the Depression or World War II.

Latin culture has a wonderful, well-deserved reputation for its hospitality and the importance it attributes to family across generations. When Lucky gets invited to a little boy’s fiesta for his birthday, he watches the scene, and though he’s totally welcome in that space, you can tell he desires what these people have. It’s communal and full of smiling people who know each other, who are close, and who share connections with one another.

He’s prided himself on being independent all his life, and yet he must come to terms with a life alone. Even though he makes a point of defining the difference between the choice of “being alone” and “loneliness,” that doesn’t make reality any easier to contend with. Then, Stanton elevates the moment by breaking into an impromptu rendition of “Volver, Volver.” Faces turn first surprised and then impressed that he knows all the words, and the mariachi players join in.  It feels like a final stirring statement looking back on a life of 91 years.

In terms of storytelling convention, Lucky is not totally without peer. We know this. The meditative swan song, allowing talents of yesteryear a final moment in the spotlight to reflect on their celluloid careers, is a very specific and still persistent guilty pleasure of mine.

Boris Karloff in Targets, John Wayne in The Shootist, Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, and even Peter O’Toole in Venus. The list could probably go on and on. Stanton was never as big a star as these men, but he probably garners just a fiercely devoted following, if not more so.

Lucky gets one last scene in the bar with all his “friends.” It’s not exactly an uplifting sendoff. He says we’re all eventually going to go away and we’re left with ungatz…nothing. How do you respond in the face of the bleakness? Not being a particularly religious man, he lifts a Buddhist practice he heard about in an old war story. You just have to smile in the face of your fate and accept it…

It’s a sobering worldview to come to terms with, but one must confess there is something poetic about Stanton clomping off on a desert trail and walking off into the sunset one last time. It reminds me of another fellow of a very different disposition who was always predisposed to “Smile.” That was Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp because he was a creature of unreserved hope.

I’m not sure if anyone would immediately count Harry Dean Stanton as lucky. It almost seems a bitter irony. He never had matinee idol looks. He only earned his first starring role well into his 50s. He never won major awards or plaudits. Not even a swan song like Lucky could get him that. And yet here is a man who seemed to make his own luck and by the same token wound up having a fairly charmed life.

He worked with some indelible directors, featured in mainstream successes, and earned an ardent following as a cult favorite. When I watch him in a throwaway episode of Chuck as The Repo Man, my reaction isn’t one of derision, but appreciation. By now, he is baked into our popular culture. What an extraordinary career.

3.5/5 Stars

The Straight Story (1999)

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The Straight Story is based on the real-life journey of one Alvin Straight to visit his brother, who suffered a stroke. What makes it extraordinary is that he lived hundreds of miles away, and Straight made the journey on his John Deere lawn mower, going about 5 mph!

The material doesn’t immediately scream David Lynch, a man who has left his mark with more bemusing visions of Middle America. Still, in keeping with the story’s ethos, Lynch taps into his midwestern roots in the most charming and straightforward manner.

There is a sense that The Straight Story was a movie out of a different era and even a different century. Whereas now even our eldest geriatrics interface with smartphones, have high-speed internet at their fingertips, and any number of technical marvels, there was a time, maybe 20 or 30 years ago, when men like Alvin Straight reached back into bygone generations.

Alvin can barely see and walks with the assistance of a cane, but he’s obstinate. He was a sniper during WWII. Eats franks by the campfire and always has his cigars handy for a puff or two in the evening as he ponders the stars. His wife, who’s gone now, bore 7 children, and he still lives with one of them, his grown daughter (Sissy Spacek). I won’t say people of his ilk don’t exist anymore, but as we get more and more modernized, it seems less and less commonplace.

There’s a sense of the late ’90s about the movie that I appreciate because I was alive then, albeit very young, on the cusp of the possibilities of a new millennium. The year prior, I traveled with my family across the very same Midwest, though we used a much more luxurious automobile (I had only minor experiences in Iowa with tractors and other implements that felt completely foreign to a California kid). For Alvin Straight, these were his lifeblood as common to him as the water he drinks and the air he breathes.

He gives a glimpse into his own life on his parents’ farm, where he and his brother learned what hard work was as they turned daily chores and tasks necessary for their survival into games that they could play even as they looked up at the stars at night, dreaming about what might be out there.

Time and disagreements soured their relationship, so now, as they stand old and gray, they’re estranged from one another. You understand how it happens. Their generation was not always the greatest at expressing themselves or sharing their emotions. Still, we know they are present, and the fact that Alvin willfully makes this trip shows how deep the bonds of brotherhood go. He speaks through actions.

The film’s boldest and most valuable asset is its sense of time. It is pregnant with silence and comfortable with slowness out of necessity. It goes at the kind of languid pace that’s necessitated by the whole premise of Alvin’s journey from the very beginning. That tractor’s not going to sprout extra engines and zoom forward. The journey is the essence of incremental progress toward an inevitable end.

Like Pilgrim’s Progress, there’s a process to the journey, and it’s made up of all of these various interactions. Each one along the road feels like a specific representation of the human experience as Straight comes in contact with all sorts of folks. Lost souls looking for direction, Good Samaritans, fellow war vets content chewing the fat, men handy with tractors or quick to offer shelter or some form of hospitality.

There’s something radical about these folks in their very simplicity, running counter to the way the culture has moved even 30 years on. What we appreciate about them is their candor; there’s a laconic spareness and a straightforward reality to these people and their dialogues.

Alvin’s not needy, but he’s always obliging for accommodation. Some people try and blow him off the road, horns blaring, but others see the nobility in his mission. He will not be dissuaded or moved because there is something or someone at the end of the road to make all of this worth it. There’s never a second thought of his going through with it.

Sure enough, he passes through the valley and over a hill to find a dilapidated farmhouse. He yells out to his brother, and out steps Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton). They sit down on the porch to share their presence with one another. Words would be nice, but they hardly feel necessary. In a generation so often distracted by so many things (especially cell phones), what a radical thing to be completely present with another human being. Again, it’s a dying art that Alvin Straight all but mastered.

If we were not primed already, it’s possible the ending might seem underwhelming, but then we spent this whole time with this man. It was about his journey, the people he meets along the way, and what he represents. There’s something in his sinew and his makeup worth taking note of.

Richard Farnsworth was an actor I was familiar with thanks to Anne of Green Gables on VHS. He was instantly likable in a series full of so much drama and theatrics; there was always something so genial and grounding about him. The Straight Story would wind up being his last film, and as he neared 80 years, he was stricken with cancer.

This film stands as a testament to what he was as an actor and human being. Plain, straightforward, but ultimately replete with all kinds of truth and goodness. I haven’t gotten trite of late, so allow me just this one digression. Disney doesn’t make movies like this anymore. But then again, how would they ever top a G-rated David Lynch film about a truly mythical tractor ride?

4/5 Stars

Note: This review was written before David Lynch’s passing on January 16, 2025

The Seventh Cross (1944)

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Fred Zinnemann had one of his first Hollywood successes with the daring Seventh Cross. Since he was Austrian and lost family to the concentration camps, the personal nature of the material is unquestionable. He takes the novel by fellow Austrian emigre Anna Seghers and packs the story full with a wealth of European emigre actors and a few choice Americans as well. What it delivers is a stirring testament to humanity and the joining together of grit and determination in the face of oppressive evil.

I actually don’t mind Spencer Tracy playing the lead in the picture because it has the Hollywood bent of the studio system. Like casting James Stewart as a Hungarian in The Shop Around The Corner, there’s a collective understanding that Tracy’s attributes, as a kind of grounded everyman, are what matter most. It helps make this very specific and personal story a universal story for all men to see themselves in.

He is one of seven prisoners who make a nighttime escape from a Nazi concentration camp. As they all break off from one another and go their separate ways, we know the goal is the active pursuit of survival in a malevolent world. There’s nothing more fundamental, and we walk alongside George Heisler as he searches out any old friends and his former flame, who might be able to help him in his dire need.

Meanwhile, all the other prisoners are mercilessly rounded up and hung up on the crosses erected by the camp commandant; they are meant to be a warning sign to anyone else, but everyone knows the inherent metaphor. They are martyrs to the cause like the thief hung next to Christ. There is hope that they will one day see paradise.

The story utilizes a dead man’s voiceover before Billy Wilder took the device for Sunset Blvd. Here it feels a bit more like a crutch to distill Anna Seghers novel down; he lives as a ghostly subconscious entreating Heisler to remember the address 46 Morganstrasse…

At its best, the movie becomes a lyrical pilgrimage for this character as he’s privy to the kindness, passivity, and utter heartlessness of common people, each in turn. Because at your lowest, when you have nowhere to go and you rely solely on the good graces of others, this is where their true nature becomes evident.

I can see Classic Hollywood films, taking on Nazism, being derided in a modern context for going too soft, especially if you have a preconceived notion of what they might be. Certainly, these artists didn’t know every atrocity that had been perpetrated, but they were not stuck with their heads in the ground. In many cases, they knew far better than the general American public.

There’s immense consequence to everything within the frame, and Zinnemmann brings many searing evils to the screen, both seen and unseen. The aforementioned cross imagery is bleak iconography borrowed from Seghers. There are little boys with Nazi armbands rumbling around town to try and tattle and find fugitives.

One of the runaways, a formerly famed trapeze artist, must flee across the rooftops as locals gawk at the show and the Nazis hunt him down like cornered game. He takes one final curtain call after being mortally wounded and leaps forward in total serenity. It’s his final performance with his last breath. Heisler watches the scene, and before catching the ending, he disappears around the corner grimly.

His former flame Leni (Kaaren Verne) vowed to wait for him, but now she’s married and terrified to see him. The fear in her eyes manifests itself in brusque accusations. He has nothing but fondness for her; he’s requesting food and accommodation, and she will give him nothing. He stuffs a few crusts of bread in his pocket and disappears, feeling totally betrayed.

There’s another particularly unnerving scene. As the dragnet closes around George, he gets a tip about a doctor who might be sympathetic and can bandage him up for a wound. He pays a call on the man. Dr. Lowenstein (Steven Geray) states in accordance with the law that he must tell his patients before working on them that he is Jewish.

There might be other contemporary cinematic depictions of the Nuremberg laws or other anti-Jewish legislation like this, but the mundanity of this institutionalized prejudice is like ice in the veins. It’s right there in the open and in the face of this, the doctor still chooses to do an act of good.

Our hero is graced by another generous soul when he’s put up in a Hofbrau on his perilous road to freedom. By now, his name and likeness are all over the papers; Toni (Signe Hasso) the barmaid, could turn him, and yet she doesn’t. They share the kind of solitary love story that exists suspended in movies or those real-life moments where there is no time to stop and think before two ships pass on in the night.

George Macready even gets one of his first opportunities to play a conflicted, if ultimately sympathetic man caught in the crosshairs of the war and his own personal comforts. It takes all kinds for the sake of the cause.

Hume Cronyn shows up over halfway into the movie, and he is our respite. Paul Roeder might have the first genuine smile in the entire film with his domestic life alongside his wife, Liesel (Jessica Tandy), being a refuge from the hopeless world at large. He treats George well, symbolizing the growing tide toward human decency.

What he also represents is another viewpoint. The movie has the right to paint the Nazis as villains, and yet it does present a German character like Paul, who has been mostly shielded from the horrors.

What he sees is the economic prosperity and the help he’s received as he goes about providing for his wife and caring for his kids. The government has done good by him, and this is what he holds onto. George must help him see the other side and bet on the human proclivity toward good, even if we must forgive how easily Paul gets away from SS interrogation.

For being a film with so much grief and oppression — even if it’s fashioned on a Hollywood backlot — the movie does ring even more resolutely with this affirmation of human dignity. Instead of labeling it mere naivety, I prefer to see the optimism as represented by Paul and the little people.

Felix Bressart has the briefest cameo as the local delicatessen owner who brings George sustenance for the long journey ahead. Like his Shylock speech in To Be or Not To Be, he comes to signify the entire picture with his resolute encouragement. He doesn’t know the man, and yet he extends this generous hand; he’s just one of the faithful worker ants who will not let goodness die. Together, they can overcome.

What the film does well is distill these sentiments into individual human interactions we get to observe and imbibe as an audience. So although we are not completely inured to the state of the world, we are not blinded to it either, like Paul.

In 1944, there was still much of the war to be fought and won. Thus, The Seventh Cross does feel like a daring picture and one with immeasurable worth. I’m not sure if it was appreciated in its day, but looking back on it, there is much to admire in its incisive self-awareness.

3.5/5 Stars

A Guy Named Joe (1943)

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Although I would probably choose 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, a movie also penned by Dalton Trumbo and featuring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson, there are numerous reasons to search out A Guy Named Joe.

This was Van Johnson’s first starring role, allowing him to craft a stage presence that would only become more self-assured with time. It nearly got derailed by a gruesome car accident that purportedly left him with a plate in his forehead. And yet out of this came one of the most popular young stars of his day.

Also, Irene Dunne, one of the often unsung comediennes and finest dramatic actresses of the 30s and 40s, gets the opportunity to show her stuff opposite Tracy. I will never miss an opportunity to see her because she’s easy to rate next to other luminaries like Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck.

Some well-informed viewers might also be aware that Steven Spielberg transposed the action to the 1980s with his light remake, Always, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Holly Hunter, and a cameo by Audrey Hepburn. It’s easy to surmise the later film misses out on the historical context, making A Guy Named Joe about something immediate.

Pete Sandidge (Tracy) is your stereotypical loose cannon, hotshot who’s always receiving the ire of his superior (James Gleason). Nevertheless, the two of them maintain a playful game of cat and mouse because deep down, they both know they’re invested in the same cause.

Pete’s also reunited with his effervescent girlfriend, the alliterative Dorinda Durston (Dunne). She also flies planes, albeit not in combat. All the lovey-dovey grousing and such isn’t new, but between Tracy and Dunne with Ward Bond as the third wheel, it’s inherently watchable. They channel a love-hate relationship: getting sore at each other and making up in a passionate reverie.

Tracy and Dunne aren’t normally associated, and yet watching them together is an immeasurable pleasure because they have a grand capacity for bits of sly humor and shared humanity, elevating the material above mediocre fare.

The movie also boasts some impressive and truly immersive aerial sequences as Pete leads his men on one of their perilous bombing raids against the enemy. This latest mission also signals a shift in the story; a fatal crash occurs, and Pete’s last gasp of heroism means he’s good and dead.

He’ll spend the rest of the movie as a guardian angel, though he’s more like a ghost. So A Guy Named Joe quickly shifts from a purely WWII picture to another film in the cinematic angel canon (It should come as no surprise that producer Everett Riskin also worked on Here Comes Mr. Jordan).

Pete walks through the clouds of the afterlife not with a harp but a decidedly more militaristic objective. There’s a pointed weightiness in casting by making Lionel Barrymore the CO of the heavenly realms. He passes down to the newly deceased his marching orders: He will be serving as an unseen co-pilot to some new recruits.

Again, the movie shifts to focus on Don DeFore and Van Johnson as two problem flyers still wet behind the ears. Johnson plays a wealthy, if diffident, young man named Ted Randall who can barely keep his plane airborne. Tracy shudders at the future of the war in the hands of such callow talent, but he tries to get them up to speed anyway, albeit subconsciously.

These sequences are rather mundane because, unlike other stories in the angel canon, Tracy’s connection to the real world is very thin compared to Claude Rains, Cary Grant, or even Henry Travers in It’s a Wonderful Life.

The movie picks up again when Van Johnson is on the ground and progressing in confidence. We see an early pairing of Johnson and a nearly unrecognizable Esther Williams, perhaps because she’s not robed in Technicolor and a swimsuit. They share a dance, and he extends an act of kindness to a homesick soldier.

Tracy is forced into being an observer in the physical sense, and somehow, the passivity doesn’t suit him. It’s good for a few gags and dress downs of former friends and colleagues who can’t hear him, but it becomes a bit of a gimmick.

And after waving a movie about Tracy and Dunne in front of us, it tries its best to stitch together something between Dunne and Johnson that just feels a bit disjointed and forced.

Still, A Guy Named Joe has these compartmentalized moments of human connection, laughter, and tears, making it more than worthwhile. You get the sense of the war years, the transience that these young men and women felt on so many accounts. Be it the death of friends and comrades, or even the distance of loved ones so far away. Everything spells heightened emotions.

To its credit, I never thought I would see a movie with Irene Dunne breaking ranks to fly a bombing raid solo and drop a payload on a Japanese target. There’s something both ludicrous and oddly progressive about it, never mind how it seems to muddle the collectivist themes the movie seems to be aiming for.

However, the fact that there can be no catharsis for Tracy and his lost love might be a final lesson about the war years. It is a dream and a desire that cannot be fulfilled. In its wake, Johnson and Dunne must chase after each other instead in a swelling romantic ending without any earthly consequences as Spence disappears into the distance. It’s a pale imitation, but it will have to do.

3/5 Stars

Keeper of The Flame (1942)

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Keeper of The Flame strikes me as good ol’ fashioned Hollywood storytelling. It’s conveyed through a fatal opening car crash and a flashing montage of newspapers spelling the death of that great American institution, Robert Forrest. We’re hooked immediately as the story keeps on rolling.

The world itself in the formerly sleepy town has the definitive consciousness of Home Front America, full of interiors and then exterior-looking interiors, all on the studio lot. Moreover, there’s a frantic industry and a general chaos in the face of shortages, bringing out American know-how and good humor in the face of everyday adversity.

Namely, a bevy of journalists and well-wishers descending on the place not fit to handle such an overflow, especially during wartime. A harried Donald Meek monitors the telephone line and does his best to get the flood of people in front of him booked in any vacant rooms still available.

Steven O’Malley (Spencer Tracy) wanders in unannounced and mostly unseen. He pays respects to an old friend who barely recognizes him. It’s the eyes. He gives Janey (Audrey Christie) that quiet congenial Spencer Tracy look, and she asks quizzically if it hurt much when Hitler gave him the boot.

We glean he must have been a war correspondent, either based in a concentration camp or the Berlin press bureau. Their jokes are casual. You know they must do this in their line of work and in 1942, we can hazard a guess they don’t know the full extent of what they’re saying.

Christie has the whip smart repartee of a journalistic working woman a la Rosalind Russell. Since the house is packed, she coyly registers him as her “husband,” though there’s another colleague up for her affections (a young Stephen McNally).

O’Malley has an aspiration to get into the grieving Mrs. Forrest so he might share her husband’s story with the people. Riffing off of It Happened One Night, his pals quip that she’s the Queen of Jericho and he’s no Joshua. The walls of her castle won’t come down for just anybody. Though Tracy always had a certain dogged tenacity about him, and that’s what makes him a compelling, active hero.

Algonquin Round Table alum Donald Ogden Stewart builds out his screenplay in the opening act with all these intriguing nooks and crannies and characters who seem capable of existing of their own accord with intricate backstories.

Howard Da Silva is a guarded vet of the Argonne and de facto groundskeeper of the Forrest estate. A little boy (Darryl Hickman) grieving the wake of this great man from a lamppost; we learn he too has an intimate connection to the deceased.

There’s another relation to Mrs. Forrest who’s equally distrustful of the press and drinks his sorrows away with ginger ale. The dead man’s bespectacled press secretary (Richard Whorf) chooses a different approach: He’s highly elegiac and accommodating because his job requires levels of PR, though there’s plenty he’s not letting on about.

Beyond Christie, a personal favorite is the peculiar old cabbie (Percy Kilbride), laconic and chewing his cud while offering up homespun wisdom. He provides O’Malley transportation to and fro as the journalist pokes around for his story.

We know from a fair distance Keeper of The Flame is a kind of grade-A American propaganda piece, and it finally becomes most explicit when Tracy gives a little soft-spoken speech to Daryll Hickman about not letting the unseen enemy make them slaves and kick them around by putting chains on their minds and tongues.

In its defense, it’s mostly soft-pedaled moralizing because Tracy’s soapbox is small and he has a way of making the serum of slightly hokey words tolerable thanks to his usual candor.

However, the local doctor (Frank Craven) provides one of the most telling remarks after paying a house call to the imposing estate: “Ever since we’ve been falling out of touch with God, we’ve become pushovers for hero fever.” When he speaks of a young woman who was sent away, he surmises,  “You don’t fall in love with a god, you just worship him.” He’s a sympathetic fellow and in making his opinion of Forrest quite clear, it’s one of the first dubious signs we have to go on.

These ideas are thematically rich with potential, not to mention controversy. The movie becomes less so with the tinges of forested and thunderous gothic melodrama. Coincidentally, it’s not material I would immediately attribute to George Cukor although the 1940s were replete with such fare.

And it’s true there is a vague Citizen Kane-like bend to the story of a prominent man now dead. Although I also think of Welles’s other great figurehead Harry Lime for casting a shadow over the film, which is not too dissimilar to Hitchcock’s Rebecca, albeit gender swapped. These are mostly uncharitable comparisons and few can argue the point.

Katharine Hepburn might seem uncharacteristic in something so grim and restrained, but she proves her capacity for it. While I always am skeptical of her as a shy wallflower in a picture like Undercurrent, she handles this tormented role with a certain inscrutability. Although I don’t know if even she can manage keeping the story from getting out of hand.

There’s something in it on the tip of my tongue tying into almost John Fordesque mythmaking, whether it be Fort Apache or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Sometimes you print the legend to protect people because the truth is too destructive to reveal. Except Tracy isn’t squeamish about giving the electorate a sober reality check.

In this regard, it feels like a daring sort of picture and you wonder if this was the saving grace, making it a draw for audiences beyond the conspicuous nature of the romance and brooding genre elements.

Still, the initial propaganda moments burn off only to come back like a raging conflagration. Hepburn brings them back again and she drops them right in our laps when she mentions fascism as embodied by her late husband. In one sense, it’s an impressive rallying cry and also an utter disappointment given the film’s best parts.

The finale of literal fire and water is all things histrionic and ham-fisted. Hardly the film’s finest achievement. All of this comes with a convenient ending, but I suppose in wartime you give the people what they want — assuming this was it.

Even with the underlying sentiment, Keeper of The Flame still has its moments that feel downright groundbreaking, and better yet, the wit of the supporting characters lives on in the mind’s eye. Alas, this was not meant to be.

Most of all, I regretted characters like Audrey Christie and Percy Kilbride fading away without consideration; I suppose they were sacrificed on the altar of a greater cause. I understand the sentiment and still, it feels like a waste of a stellar set-up for such conventional ends — even if it was for the sake of galvanizing wartime propaganda.

Perhaps this is all the more reason to want more out of the film. This is a good impulse because it means there are more than a few things worthy of praise.

I’ve only one final thought. In many ways the movie presages what Jacqueline Kennedy chose to do in the wake of her husband’s tragic death. More than once in the movie, an allusion is made to Abraham Lincoln, and Jackie made sure her husband had a funeral evoking that of the nation’s first slain president.

Then, at his final resting place in Arlington Cemetery, there burns an eternal flame. She was the keeper of that flame — solidifying his stature for generations of Americans. I won’t get into conjecture about her husband’s legacy, but it does play as an intriguing counterpoint to this film’s central figure.

3.5/5 Stars

Safety Last! (1923)

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The great thing about The Big Three — Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd — and all the great silent clowns, is how they engender a kind of audience identification with profoundly comic results. Because each had their own unique persona that remained constant throughout all the trials and tribulations they went through.

The enduring charm of the Harold Lloyd character is his nebbish yet indefatigable spirit. He’s bespectacled, always smiling, and there’s a bit of a hapless daredevil in him. He doesn’t always do so purposefully, but he’s accustomed to ticking clocks — racing against time against the odds — and of course Safety Last famously put him in contact with another literal ticking clock. More on that later.

At only 73 minutes, it’s easy to place a silent comedy like Safety Last with other rudimentary forms of movies from the nascent film industry. The two reelers and other silent fare which might seem like a dime a dozen and disposable. We might mistakenly think we have nothing to learn from them because they are over a century old and we’ve already grown beyond what they have to offer.

And yet the very first shot belies any erroneous impressions. There’s the shadow of what looks to be a hangman’s noose. Our hero, Harold, looks to be behind bars saying a last adieu to the love of his life. Then, the perspective shifts and we realize not a man shuffling off to jail but one waiting at the train station to head to the city to make good. Eventually, his girl Mildred can come out to him and they can get married!

There’s not a specific utility to the gag and if you’re not thrown off by it tonally, it shows a sense of visual invention that easily transfers from early shorts and reel comedies. It shows these early movies were not made by a bunch of hacks but technicians with a great deal of ingenuity and knowhow. The proof is in what they left us.

The first half of the picture is most defined by its bits. There’s a gag to avoid the rent collector where Harold and his roomie hide under their hanging coats with their legs pulled up.

In another vignette Lloyd is stuck in the back of a laundry truck baking like a sauna with a driver who is deaf; it leads into his extended attempt to get back to his work in time by any means necessary so he can clock in. It’s to no avail so he sneaks in under the guise of a mannequin, as one does. No one can say he’s not plucky.

We can all commiserate with him as he deals with time wasters on the department store floor and then the hordes of blue-blooded ladies who come for a sale prepared to pull the clothes off his back; some things haven’t changed. There’s another scene where he combs his hair in the shine of a bald man’s pate. Again, it’s yet another whimsical example of ways to stretch the form for the sake of a visual gag.

Then, Harold tries to put on airs for his girl masquerading as the general manager, though he’s only a mere grunt who’s easily discarded. Like us all he wants to be important and appreciated; he doesn’t want to let his loved ones down or be seen as a failure.

The final act of climbing all 12 floors of the department store feels like the birth of the high-wire thriller genre before our eyes. After all, he’s as much of a free climber as you or me. Still, he has that smiling girl in the back of his mind and the prize money if he reaches the top.

There’s some visual trickery but the cutaways and overhead shots give us a sense of scale all in service of the movie. The fact we can’t make out all the fault lines and there is still this harrowing sense of unassailable danger is a credit to the picture a century on. Both as a physical feat and a technical marvel of early Hollywood.

Harold’s conspiring with his acrobatic friend to get up the building devolves into a charade with cops and a drunk, a bit like a Keystone Kop reel with chases and “Kick Me” signs. It might be the lowest common denominator of comedy, but that’s hardly a bad word.

Lloyd has a myriad of gags at his disposal as he begins his ascent. They are play things that complicate what already feels like a daunting task: pigeons, scurrying mice, rope, a spring, and of course that famed clock face.

Lloyd clinging for his life has become one of the most iconic images in cinema history, and that’s across the board regardless if people have ever seen the movie or not. His exploits live on in the ubiquity of the public consciousness.

My final observation is noting how the movie ends with a gag just as it came in. His shoes get stuck in the tar on the rooftop as he walks off with his girl, the always and forever irrepressible hero Harold Lloyd.

There’s an added layer to the silent movie romance when you realize Lloyd would actually marry his leading lady Mildred and they would be together for the rest of their lives. It’s a stretch but it’s hard not to see how this big smash of a movie was to the actor Harold as climbing the department store was to his alter ego. They came out on the other side larger than life and beloved by the public. Most importantly, they got the girl. It’s the stuff of Hollywood.

4.5/5 Stars

The Gold Rush (1925) at 100

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It feels necessary to begin with a prelude to The Gold Rush. I came to a realization I’ve only ever seen Charlie Chaplin’s updated version from 1942 with a new sound introduction and soundtrack. In some ways, watching the original feels like seeing a new film.

It was the first Chaplin feature I watched, and I’m pretty sure I liked every subsequent one more. I’m recognizing now, perhaps it was the Tramp character who grew on me. Because so much of his appeal is not only the audience identification, but also this sense of continuity over all his shorts and features. The more and more you watch, the more you love him.

Chaplin understood how powerful this could be, and it’s made his alter ego the most visible figure the cinema has ever known. Out of Chaplin’s films of the ’20s and ’30s, I think I still like his other ones more, but why does this matter? It’s all a collective body of work centered on the Little Tramp who could.

The movie itself opens during The Great Gold Rush of Alaska. The opening shot showcases a line of miners snaking their way through the desolate mountain landscape, and there’s a scope to it that has a definitive cinematic eye. Chaplin, as both actor and director, is on full display as he sets the stage for his protagonist.

The first act feels like a traditional Chaplin two-reeler. It’s scenario-based. The characters are larger than life, with a wanted fugitive (Tom Murray) and Big Jim McLain (Mack Swain), who strikes it rich only to be stricken with memory loss.

It’s also a comedy of errors involving snow flurries, gales of wind that would make Keaton proud, and surreal gags with an overgrown Chaplin chicken. They also go through the bizarre ordeal of systematically eating one of the Tramp’s shoes. Hunger will do that to you.

At the end of it all, the killer’s gone and the gold’s still hidden away; it’s sitting there for the rest of the movie just waiting to be dug up. We know intuitively we will return to the spot.

The Gold Rush truly hits its stride when introducing a romantic element, and it’s because of what it means to our lead character. There’s something transcendent in it that I can’t help but express. He’s so pure and honest in love. It’s comprehensible to anyone who’s admired, even loved, someone from afar.

Maybe a crush in high school, a Juliet who runs in different social circles than you, or a long shot who has someone else already that you could never compare to. It’s a tale as old as time, though so is The Gold Rush. The Tramp makes it universal.

The girl in question, Georgia (Georgia Hale), is a vivacious woman who frequents the local dance hall. She seems to wave to him, except there’s another man just behind him. In a subsequent moment, he thinks they might strike up a conversation as she comes near, only to look right through him. It discourages him, but he’s not daunted.

Later, he finds a discarded picture of her and picks it up, looking sheepishly at the old man standing nearby. He’s seen what the Tramp has done, and our bedraggled hero tries to play it off like he’ll throw it away. But of course he doesn’t.

We eventually find out that he keeps it under his pillow with his most prized possessions. The reason we find out is that Georgia pays him a visit with some of her friends; they think it will be a lark to see him. It’s nothing to them, and it’s everything to him just to speak with her and be in her presence.

At the hall, he finally gets the opportunity to dance with her, and it has nothing to do with him. It’s part of her scorning of another man, but in his little universe, it means something — it means the world to him — and our hearts beam and simultaneously break. She’s not going to want him, and yet in the same breath, we want the fairy tale for him, or at the very least, someone who would love him for who he is.

Chaplin’s character reaps the benefit of her coquettish game only to have his pants come loose, and he ties them back on with the leash of a nearby dog. It’s The Tramp’s inadvertent comedy on full display — comedy that just kind of happens to him out of his own wealth of eccentricity.

He rides the wave of the evening, however, with the elation at the prospects of guests for New Year’s. It’s so earnest watching him positively trashing his cabin with feathers out of pure jubilation, only to be left heartbroken.

The communal singing of “Auld Lang Syne” cross-cut with the Tramp all alone is an implicit reminder: every year, there are the lonely people who must make a go at life by themselves, forgotten again. The despondency spawns fitful dreams, including Chaplin’s iconic gag with dancing bread feet. If it sounds mystifying, then watch it for yourself.

For the final act, the Tramp is reunited with the prospector, who promises him a piece of his stake if they can track down the cabin. Instantly, the Little Man’s outlook changes, and he scales the balcony of the dance hall just to profess his love to Georgia and let her know he will come back a millionaire…

The best bit follows the two men as they hunker down for the night, only for the blizzard to displace their cabin to the cliffside so they’re jutting out on a perilous cantilever. “Flight of the Bumble Bee” perfectly captures the frantic nature of the moment without totally counteracting the comedy of it all as they slide this way and that, trying to escape to safety.

The two hapless prospectors succeed in their quest to get rich. The Tramp gets a lavish makeover so he looks like a Saks Fifth Avenue multimillionaire, catching an ocean liner home. Some photographers want some shots in his mining clothes, and somehow, all is right in the movie again when he’s back to looking like The Tramp. What would we call him otherwise? By this point, it feels like his proper uniform.

And yet there’s also a poetic reason for this development. It’s easy to read what will happen and what the film is building to. He must see Georgia again. Circumstances have changed, but for all intents and purposes, he looks like the same down-and-out Tramp, at least to her. It’s the exquisite irony underpinning their glorious reunion. Dreams really do come true.

In a cinematic sense, Chaplin effectively took a character who could easily be a bit part or a stereotype in any type of picture and proceeded to give him the level of depth and feeling that enraptured the world over.

I never said this out loud because I’m only formulating it now. Percolating under the surface, there is some dissonance within the Tramp persona because here you have this impoverished, chaste character played by a man who at least had the reputation of a womanizer and was wealthy the world over. This is only a perception. And yet I settled on this: The Tramp is a romantic and personal ideal for Chaplin and for all of us.

He bears all the difficulties of the world with heart, unassuming grace, and a healthy dose of laughter. As long as there is hardship, poverty, and romance in the world, The Tramp will be relevant because he makes us laugh, but most importantly, he makes us love him.

Because he is one of us, or maybe we are him as we traverse our own journeys. That’s what we’d like to believe anyway, and Chaplin allows us to. He also gives us a hopeful ending. It’s what makes him, even to this day, the fitting archetype of Classical Hollywood storytelling. He is the standard by which all others are judged.

4.5/5 Stars

Jerry Schatzberg Films (1970-73)

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Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970)

Jerry Schatzberg took his career as a fashion photographer and integrated it into a splintering portrait of a model based partially on his experiences with real-life inspiration Anne St. Marie. Like Blow-Up it is a film about the image, but in this case the visuals often play against disembodied voices obscured from view. The camera also seems to have a general infatuation with lips and speaking voices.

Out of these inspirations, the film becomes a stellar showcase for Faye Dunaway at the height of her powers, giving a scintillating performance — striking and yet perilously fragile. Her very diction fascinates, how it’s stunted — rising and falling — in a very particular cadence, attempting to modulate. It’s just precisely false enough to suggest instability and the film is built on this theme. She is the cypher — the puzzle to be put back together.

As she confides in friends, the picture charts this fractious course of Lou’s career, personal relationships, and insecurities. She slaloms through her memories, past and present, stitching together her life into a disordered patchwork. It becomes a perplexing ever more morose portrait of a woman in need of comfort and support in her vulnerable mental state. But the film really functions best as form over content.

The intrigue comes not in any manner of narrative cohesion but precisely because of the dissolution, a woman becoming more and more fragmented with time. It’s not an altogether original concept. Many great actresses have tried their hand with much success. Still, Carole Eastman’s spin on the dimensions of a gorgeous woman with faltering psychology feels like a nexus in the tradition. It’s also an unjustifiably underseen showing by one of the ’70s biggest attractions. Faye Dunaway admirers take note.

3.5/5 Stars

Panic in Needle Park (1971)

“Needle Park” is a nod to the shorthand of heroin addicts and it totally throws itself in their world and subsequently became one of the most harrowing depictions of drug use in the ’70s. The screenplay was written by none other than Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne from a novel by James Mills.

We get the opportunity to watch an up-and-coming stage actor, Al Pacino, submerging himself in a role and showcasing a depth that would become the bedrock of all his successes throughout the 1970s. He would join a group of actors, the De Niros, Nicholsons, and Hoffmans, who would help come to define the New Hollywood as it was being formed on the spot.

From the outset, it’s easy to be a bit wary of his mannerisms, the lip-smacking, and the sense of bravado. Then, he proceeds to go for the jugular.  It’s an ugly, tawdry sort of world dictated by sex, drugs, and theft. This is how people subsist if you can call it a living at all. Where everyone’s brother is a two-bit crook and everyone else has done a stretch of time.

It’s a film that has very much a Midnight Cowboy milieu. We have the walk and talks down the streets of New York, but like Schatzberg’s next film, Scarecrow, it’s also fundamentally a film founded on a relationship of two.

If they have so many demons, the one thing they have is their tight-knit community. However, they are personally crippled by relational turbulence, always desperate to find their latest fix. It drives their desires and turns them into momentary ghosts of human beings, self-serving and a shell of their best selves.

Kitty Winn is naturally beautiful like audiences grew accustomed to seeing in the ’70s with actresses like Ali McGraw and Katherine Ross.  However, her particular meekness plays well with the raw ferocity of Al Pacino, and they remain the nucleus of the drama. It doesn’t have to be about much. It simply needs to keep them at its core.

Pacino would get The Godfather next partially on the shoulders of this performance and it’s almost inconceivable to think of Michael Corleone without those deep, searching eyes of his. It’s so easy to look in their eyes — Winn’s too — and see an inkling of who they are. You can condemn their self-destructive tendencies and then turn right around and pity them.

3.5/5 Stars

Scarecrow (1973)

With Schatzberg, the salient features connecting his movies isn’t overtly apparent, but it does feel like the material really guides the output. So much relies upon and flows out of the sense of performance whether Dunaway, Pacino, or Hackman and Pacino here in Scarecrow. But first, can we take a moment to acknowledge what a stroke of luck it is: Pacino and Hackman in a movie together, a movie predicated on character, and they could not be two more disparate personalities.

Because this was on the other side of The French Connection and The Godfather, two of the biggest hits of the ’70s so far, and yet our two stars find it within themselves to do a picture like this. It’s not big budget, with a lot of thrills or prestige, but they more than make it something worth watching regardless of scale.

It feels a bit like Waiting for Godot with tumbleweeds rolling by as photographed by Vilmos Zsigod . Finally, they trade words and make their way to a diner. Their odd brand of friendship is born.

Like any good drifter you might find in the work of John Steinbeck, Max’s idea of a slice of paradise is getting his own car wash. In truth, if the Monterey laureate had been alive and kicking in the ’70s, Scarecrow is exactly the kind of story he might write because it almost feels suspended in time. They have a friendship and camaraderie that feels deeply indebted to George and Lennie. It is almost difficult to unsee it once you’ve drawn the parallels.

Pacino’s philosophy in life is a lot more amenable if a bit eccentric. To borrow the film’s main analogy, he believes scarecrows are not frightening. They actually look so ridiculous that they got the crows laughing and they fly away. So while Max is bellicose, constantly taking umbrage with others, running off his mouth, and getting in brawls, Lion’s always there to provide some equilibrium. As performers and actors, they feel totally at odds and yet we’re ceaselessly fascinated to have them together as a creative battery.

There’s a scene where Hackman tries to chat up the bodacious Frenchy. She’s brought them beers as they move items in the junk heap. But all throughout the scene, Pacino is clunking around making a racket and getting in his way. In another moment of lunacy, he’s sprinting through a department store as a diversion that winds up leaving his accomplice flabbergasted. Max’s so hoodwinked by it all, he sets back down the purse he planned to nick.

Because Lion’s a bit of a jester, simpler in spirit, yet fiercely loyal. Even when they have a spat, he’s hesitant to leave his friend. Hackman’s performance is founded on his irascible nature. He’s loud and obnoxious, begrudging, and yet his slivers of goodness begin to show. He becomes a friend and protector to his buddy. It’s heartbreaking when he finally reveals his tender-hearted feelings. That car wash and Pittsburgh seem so far away. But then again, it was hardly a real place to begin with.

3.5/5 Stars

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

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“The Cast and Crew of Star Trek wish to dedicate this film to the men and women of the spaceship Challenger whose courageous spirit shall live to the 23rd century and beyond…”

The opening remarks of The Voyage Home honoring the “courageous spirit” of those lost on The Challenger is a perfect encapsulation of the ethos of Star Trek.

Because it was always very much a franchise that was a social allegory for our world and by taking place in a sci-fi future, it was able to champion all that was good and valorous of people living through a space age even as they tried to reconcile with living with one another on earth with fraternity.

As a kid, Voyage Home was always my favorite Star Trek movie, and probably still remains so now. I’m not quite sure what it was exactly, though I do have some ideas. It’s important to acknowledge it right out front. Voyage Home has a wild and wonky premise full of a certain incredulity, but it’s also a good deal of fun.

Spock is back after Star Trek III, but now there is a new problem: Not only is Kirk a wanted man, but a frequency of humpback whale calls is causing chaos to reverberate all throughout the galaxy. Yes, you heard that right.

Kirk leads his fugitive compatriots on a Klingon ship with cloaking capabilities to time travel to the past — that is, the contemporary moment the film came out — 1986. The wheels start turning.

I’m no Star Trek savant, but it didn’t evade me that this is a subtle twist on the notable “City On The Edge of Forever” episode that sent Kirk and Spock (with his ear-concealing bandana) back in time to the soup lines of the Great Depression.

Voyage Home mines most of its comedy from your typical fish out of water premise, in this case pitting the Enterprise Crew of highly intelligent and advanced space cadets against a world that feels so analog and decidedly archaic to their sensibilities. Meanwhile, to the average guy on the street they look like helpless weirdoes.

A particularly memorable vignette involves a spiky-haired punk rocker on the bus with his blaring boombox. He does look rather like an alien to anyone left unawares from a different century. A little Vulcan nerve pinch gets the whole bus clapping with appreciation for curbing the noise.

Pairing Bones and McCoy off together is a pleasure in its own right, though it need not be expounded upon in depth here. The rest of the crew is entrusted to build a tank to carry the whales across the galaxy and also locate a nuclear reactor to help power their ship home.

Spock’s coming up to speed with the modern vernacular offers its own hilarity as does his commune with the whales in their enclosure at a Sausalito aquarium. It’s in plain view of everyone and another breach of societal norms. This just isn’t done in the 20th century. Spock has greater concerns as Kirk tries to guide him through this strange world like a blind man leading a blind Vulcan.

The resident biologist Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks) is incensed. She cares about these animals’ well-being deeply. Later, she offers a ride our two lovable nut jobs up in her pickup because she has a penchant for hard-luck cases.

The addition of Hicks in a fairly substantial role begins as a screwball comedy with her skeptical incredulousness around Kirk and Spock. It then builds into a kind of swelling romantic comedy served with a side of pizza pie. Somehow it plays as the less tragic inverse to Joan Collins turn in “City on The Edge of Forever.”

Because they push the boundaries of her belief and still, if she doesn’t quite have faith in their clear-eyed tall tales, she recognizes their shared mission to protect the whales. If it’s not quite faith, then her trust in them is rewarded in an extraordinary way as an unimaginable world of the 23rd century opens up before her eyes.

She always feels a bit out of step with the world around her, and then she finds these like-minded people, a little eccentric, and yet they suggest to her that she was made for so much more. It’s an extraordinary development.

Chekhov gets captured in a restricted area and is shipped off to a hospital in the city after he suffers an injury. Kirk and Bones lead a search and rescue mission masquerading in scrubs, then Gillian finds out the whales were shipped off early. They have to intercept them en route if they ever hope to save the whales and thereby the galaxy. No big deal.

Hanging out with the crew of the Enterprise in San Francisco sounds like a good time, and it’s a pleasure to assure everyone that it is. For such gargantuan stakes, Voyage Home feels surprisingly lightweight, lithe, and generally fun because we rarely feel burdened by them. It’s not bogged down by a lot of self-importance and this is to its credit. So it worked then, in my childhood, and it still holds up now eliciting the same kind of stirring reactions.

3.5/5 Stars