THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written in 2008 for DVDTalk.com as part of The Stanley Kramer Collection.

For this early production effort from Stanley Kramer, the pioneering producer enlisted the burgeoning talent Dr. Seuss to pen a surreal children's story about a young boy, Bartholomew Collins (Tommy Rettig), who hates playing the piano so much, he dreams of a world where his piano teacher, the nefarious Dr. T (Hans Conreid), is starting an institute where he will enslave 500 young boys and force them to tickle the ivories 24-7. Not only does this dream take on the childhood anxiety of being stuck in a life of boredom, it also addresses Bart's familial loneliness, imagining the nice plumber (Peter Lind Hayes) who has been working in his home as a father figure who will rescue Bart and his widowed mother (Mary Healy) from a life alone.

More of a cult hit than a children's classic, the clunky 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is most remembered for its enormous sets and bizarre villains, which bring Dr. Seuss visions to life in an overtly physical way. Made decades before digital effects, the gigantic locations were all built by hand, and it's fairly obvious. Watching the movie, you feel like you could reach in and pound your fist on the colorful walls. This gives the film a certain quaint charm that makes it possible to look past the barely-there story and wooden acting. Also of note is Hans Conreid, ever so delectable as the villain. He's largely familiar from Disney movies, particularly as the voice of Captain Hook in Peter Pan. It's a real treat to see him ham it up as the diabolical piano maestro.

CRIMSON KIMONO - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2014.

Samuel Fuller has a history of progressive, charged films about social issues, including multiple films about race. Shock Corridor [review] famously upended the debate by having an African American in a mental institution who believed himself to be a high-ranking member of the KKK, while his controversial later movie White Dog [review] was about a canine trained exclusively to kill black men.

Before both, however, came The Crimson Kimono, a two-fisted crime movie just on the other side of the film noir movement. Written and directed by Fuller, The Crimson Kimono stars Glenn Corbett and James Shigeta as two Los Angeles police detectives working the Little Tokyo beat. Charlie is white, and Joe is American-born Japanese, and their partnership was first forged in combat during World War II. (A veteran himself, Fuller shows his respect for the troops with insert shots of L.A. memorials for the Asian American soldiers that served--a short pause in the action but not out of place amongst other gritty shots of the Southern California streets.) The pair catches a case that will take them deep into the back alleys of their jurisdiction. A Caucasian stripper is chased out of a nightclub and shot on the sidewalk, and the one possible lead to the shooter's identity is a painting of the woman in traditional Japanese garb. It is signed "Chris."

Chris is short for Christine, not Christopher. Victoria Shaw plays the painter, the only one who can identify the mysterious Hansel that art directed the portrait, a promo for an act that the dead woman was putting together. Both Charlie and Joe fall for Chris (and who can blame them?), but things only get dicey when she also falls for Joe. The murder plot takes a backseat to the romantic melodrama. Fuller spends a long time on Joe and Chris talking about art and music and Joe's family. While any interracial relationship on film in 1959 would have been surprising, what makes The Crimson Kimono really interesting is that the one doubting the viability of their getting together is Joe, and it's not even because he's Japanese. At least not at first. Joe's initial misgivings come from not wanting to hurt Charlie. Only as the truth comes out does it become more about prejudice, though it's a prejudice that many argue exists only in Joe's perception. All the white folks are fine with it!

The Los Angeles that Fuller depicts in The Crimson Kimono looks like some kind of fantasyland. One can imagine James Ellroy chortling while watching this idyllic image of harmony in the City of Angels. It's as if Fuller were daring people to make a better world by putting up his own example on the movie screen. He even goes out of his way to include plot elements that require the characters to differentiate between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean players in the drama. There is no sidebar racist to contradict and demand no one cares, they all look alike. Fuller's Asian community is a smaller melting pot inside the greater national melting pot.

Not that The Crimson Kimono is some kind of Stanley Kramer-style message picture. Fuller is far more stealthy than that. All of these added elements are merely part of the usual rough-and-tumble pulp story the director was known for. What makes his films so politically interesting is that whatever was being explored, be it Communist subversives in Pickup on South Street [review] or the "fallen woman" scenario of The Naked Kiss [review], it was always a natural part of the narrative. For as unnatural as his storytelling generally was, the rawness was a reflection of the world around him. To Fuller, these were people with specific problems and concerns, and it just made sense to include everything that made their lives what they were. It wasn't subtext, there is nothing "sub" about The Crimson Kimono, it's all just text.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review as originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2008 in a piece covering the Stanley Kramer Film Collection boxed set.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner endures because some 50 years on as a smart and daring movie that is about ideas as much as it is about family drama; yet, it avoids being overzealous in its message by weaving the debate through a very real narrative. Director/producer Stanley Kramer and writer William Rose put their words in the mouths of three-dimensional characters and let their communication drive the story.

The premise of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is that a young couple are coming home from the Hawaiian vacation where they met to tell her parents that they are getting married. The catch is that the girl, Joanna (Katharine Houghton), is white and the man, Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), is black. In 1967, this would be quite a shock for any parents, including Joanna's notoriously liberal ones. Played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, much of the pathos of the movie rides on their shoulders. It's their reactions that are going to make the philosophy and ethics of the scenario seem real. It's easy to believe two young people are in love, it's a whole other thing to see the people around them be daring enough to encourage their daring. This is where Kramer and Rose get it right, by not letting these characters be completely correct or make all of the proper decisions. Ideas are ideas, but until they are challenged, we don't know how firmly we believe them. Over the single night that John and Joanna have before he has to fly on to Geneva, everyone the couple encounters--including other African Americans--will have to ask themselves exactly how they feel.

For my money, Spencer Tracy is the man to watch here. I've always liked him, and in his final film role, the 67-year-old actor is just as fierce an orator as he always was (including in the Kramer-directed Inherit the Wind, a personal favorite of mine). The climax of the film hinges on a final, stirring monologue from Tracy, and despite his poor health, the legend still has all of his faculties. It's a moving speech, full of righteous fire. They just don't make them like Spencer Tracy anymore, do they?

Funnily enough, for all of the progressive social issues, the parts of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner that now feel hilariously dated are the representations of the generation gap. Dig that crazy rock 'n' roll, daddy-o!

HIGH NOON - CRITERION CHANNEL

This review originally written for DVDTalk.com in 2008.

"There's a limit to how much you can ask a man..."

At just after 10:30 on a Sunday morning, three gunmen ride through a small Western town and roost at the train station to wait for the noon train. As they pass, Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is marrying Amy (Grace Kelly), a Quaker whose unflappable belief in nonviolence means the sheriff will be surrendering his star and leaving town that very day. Only, fate has other plans. As it turns out, the trio of bad dudes at the train station is the gang of Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), a killer whom Kane sent to jail several years before and has now unexpectedly been pardoned. Realizing that Miller is coming to kill him, Kane decides he must stand his ground and fight or forever be looking over his shoulder. Everyone else in town, including Amy, thinks he should leave and let the bad guys have this round, but Kane is the type of guy who won't let the mob change the definition of what is right just because it's easy.

Directed by Fred Zinnemann and produced by the great Stanley Kramer, High Noon is an unassailable classic of the Western genre. Set in real time, so that the time that passes on screen is very nearly equal to the running time of the film, its story of a man that refuses to betray his own sense of self even when facing impossible odds captures a central quality of the mythology of the American frontier. It has stood the test of time because even though the movie wears the basic uniform of a simple western, it is so much more than just your average story or even one message. Made in 1952, and featuring a crew that included more than a few members who were facing possible charges in the Red Scare gripping Hollywood at the time (writer Carl Foreman and actor Lloyd Bridges among them), High Noon was intended as an allegory about the political strife in America and how people were pursuing their own self-interests rather than standing up for what was moral and correct. Multi-layered and full of a rich cast of characters, High Noon touches on race, religion, social structures, and the driving force of the human condition, one's sense of self.

It's also damn entertaining. High Noon ends up getting screened at least once in any film student's academic career because it's a near perfect example of how to put together a film. Cutting back and forth throughout the town, seeing the various players scurrying through this crucial hour, Zinnemann is whipping up a cinematic meal via pressure cooker. Marshal Kane goes through his town looking for deputies, and with each refusal he feels the tide building against him. Frequent shots of clocks, along with the tick-tock time signatures of Dimitri Tiomkin's score, keep reminding us there is a deadline. Images of the empty tracks and the twitchy cowboys waiting by them are indicators of what is coming. Nothing need to be said at that moment, the empty horizon says it all. The stillness works in direct juxtaposition to Cooper's constant movement--one side is calm and assured, the other side not so much.

Gary Cooper was never better than he is in this movie. A stoic yet homey screen presence, his confidence slowly deteriorates even as he shores up his resolve. Though there are fine supporting performances by Lon Chaney Jr. and Katy Jurado, it's really Cooper's film, the narrative resting entirely on his sturdy shoulders just as the task of subduing Frank Miller is being left to Marshal Kane. There's a reason he won the Oscar for Best Acting. In fact, Oscars were also awarded to High Noon for Best Editing, Best Score, and Best Original Song for "Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'," the recurring theme, sung by Tex Ritter, that follows Kane around like a melancholy cloud. These are the essential components that make this film work so well, and they deserved to be zeroed in on when it came time to hand out the statues. (Carl Foreman's finely tuned script also deserved a nod, but he was on his way to being blacklisted by that point; a redress in his reputation would come later.)

Naturally, with such a build-up, the whole film would be for nothing if there wasn't a big finish, and High Noon has a doozy of a climax. Rest assured, the shoot-out will not disappoint, and the very last scene of the picture drives everything home with quiet force.

RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 - #704

Don Siegel's Riot in Cell Block 11 is an interesting motion picture: seemingly simplistic exploitation that reveals itself to be a multi-faceted debate about crime and punishment that sneaks its message in by baldly adhering to the production code even as it pokes holes in every single one of the censors' anti-noir, "crime doesn't pay" strictures. Like 12 Angry Men [review] set inside a penitentiary, it offers a group of differing personalities brought together by a common goal. How to achieve it is something they will never agree on, even as the audience accepts certain outcomes as a foregone conclusion. The aim here is to use story to stir up all these ideas, to inspire different thinking, and to maybe vilify, if not an individual, then the system he represents. 

This is not a plot-heavy movie. Riot in Cell Block 11 does not hinge on a clever scheme or a last-act twist that reveals the ringleader had a different, selfish reason for leading the revolt all along. On the contrary, this is a movie that stays the course. Dunn (Neville Brand, Stalag 17) organizes the breakout with the other maximum-security prisoners because he believes change is necessary--the inmates, for instance, want mail and other pipelines to the outside world--and he doesn't waiver from the stated intention. The drama comes from how much his fellow prisoners agree with his methods, the bureaucratic reaction to what's going on, and how that tests Dunn's resolve and changes what he's willing to do to achieve the desired results.

The ruling counterpart to Dunn is the warden (Emile Meyer, Paths of Glory [review]), a good man strangled by budgets and regulations. He knows he could do better if  given more resources, but once the uprising occurs, his mission is to defuse the situation with as few casualties as possible. And nothing will dissuade him from his task, either. Of anyone, he's the most determined to avoid easy solutions if doing so ensures getting the right one. The deathblow for idealism may come at the end when it's revealed how much he really believes will happen in the aftermath--reality is a harsh beast--but  even then, did he not save lives all the same?

Siegel and writer Richard Collins stack their ensemble with counterpoints and opposites. The warden has Haskell (Frank Faylen, the dad on the The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis), a pencil-pusher sent by the mayor to mind the optics and watch the bottom line. He also has the wives of the guards taken hostage serving as his conscience, calling over the telephone to remind him what’s at stake, and a gaggle of reporters serving as Greek chorus, presenting the difficult truths fueling the conflict as so much exposition. On the other side, Dunn has Carnie (Leo Gordon, Buckskin), the muscle who would rather bust heads than negotiate, and the Colonel (Robert Osterloh, The Wild One [review]), an actual war veteran, put in prison through bad circumstance, who can see the outcome of this battle and doesn't care for the strategy or the eventual cost. Through these many voices, we surpass the surface conflict and delve deep into the more difficult nuance of the disagreement. This is about human dignity vs. public image, budget vs. empathy, and maybe kind of about how these guys did bad things even though maybe that shouldn’t matter when talking about their civil rights.

As sophisticated as it may sound, Riot in Cell Block 11 is a ragged B-movie. Siegel begins the picture as a docudrama, complete with newsreel narration, aided by the stark photography of Russell Harlan (Red River). This drops once the riot begins, and Siegel shifts into stoic melodrama. From the sob stories of the inmates--the prisoner with the sick child, the Colonel’s tale of vehicular manslaughter--to the exaggerated villainy of Haskell or Carnie’s mad-dog machinations, Riot in Cell Block 11 is pure pulp. It’s hard to tell if its social conscience is a cloak it wears to get away with showing violent beatings or if the lurid conflict is the capitulation to box office concerns. Both elements weigh equally in the final cut. Statistics may be shoehorned in by the gabby press men, but they are there all the same.

Plus, even if we excise the social message, there is a morality play at the heart of all this. Siegel is looking at how communities function, how the have-nots feel beaten down by the haves, as well as how those same communities fall apart. 1950s politics being what they are, Dunn’s all-for-one speechifying seems a little suspect. While he wants all prisoners to be treated equally, it doesn’t take long before his lieutenants abuse the system he puts in place, or for others to push harder to earn their own advantage. Little is made of race, despite the integrated population; the only hint of any kind of class comes more from an ethical hierarchy. One prisoner is singled out by all others, black or white, as being beneath contempt, and though they don’t say it outright, the coded language suggests he’s some kind of sex offender. 

To be honest, Riot in Cell Block 11 could have used a little more of that inside knowledge to show how the prison really operates. The inmates are all a little too clean-cut. When picking his players, Siegel cast interesting faces, but these are still Hollywood hooligans. Neville Brand is tough without really being threatening. The lack of backstory makes his high-minded intentions seem a little forced. We have no reason to believe Dunn would have really emerged over any of the others as the man with the plan.

Still, Siegel’s production is a lot less earnest than many of the other message pictures of the era, giving it an edge over even work by Elia Kazan or Stanley Kramer. This must have felt like pretty rough stuff right about then, and its more lowbrow tendencies allow for Riot in Cell Block 11 to remain entertaining, even as its still-relevant preachiness threatens to bog it all down. Not to mention the downbeat revelations in the final scene, which all by themselves remind us that very little has changed, and America’s capitalist approach to incarceration just continues to get worse.

SIDELINE: MORE REVIEWS FOR 12/12

My reviews for non-Criterion movies, plus other articles, written in December.

IN THEATRES... 

* Django Unchained. Quentin Tarantino continues to play his perfect game.

* Hitchcock, the biopic of the Master of Suspense centered around the making of Psycho. With Anthony Hopkins as Hitch and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh. It's actually quite fun.

* Jack Reacher, a no-nonsense action pic from Tom Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie.

I also wrote this article for the mini Wes Anderson film festival coming to Portland for Christmas!

ON BD/DVD...

* 10 Years, a surprising, funny, and honest high-school reunion movie.

* Alps, the strange second feature from the director of Dogtooth.

* Baron Blood, a 1972 monster/slasher movie from Mario Bava, featuring Joseph Cotten as the monster.

* Beloved Infidel, a stick-up-the-butt portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last love affair. Starring Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr.

* Justified: The Complete Third Season, one of my favorite TV shows gets its third go-around. An Elmore Leonard adaptation starring Timothy Olyphant.

* Looper, the second time around with Rian Johnson's time travel film is just as good, if not better.

Also, be sure to read Natalie Nourigat's Looper reaction comics.

* Lord Jim, Peter O'Toole may star, but James Mason steals the show in Richard Brooks' adaptaton of a Joseph Conrad novel.

* Oklahoma Crude, a quirky 1970s western with a sociopolitical twist. Starring George C. Scott and Faye Dunaway, directed by Stanley Kramer.

* The Point: The Definitive Collector's Edition, an upgrade for the Harry Nilsson-penned animated special from 1971.

* The Sarah Silverman Program: Season Three. I love Sarah Silverman. 'nuff said.

* Upstairs Downstairs: Season 2, the reboot of the BBC perennial is the smarter ancestor to Downton Abbey. So of course it got cancelled.

* The Well-Digger's Daughter, esteemed French actor Daniel Auteuil adapts Marcel Pagnol.

To cap it off, the DVD Talk writers have voted for their best discs of 2012. Here are the results! I personally wrote the blurbs for the David Lean/Noël Coward boxed set and also Les vampires.