Stuart Galbraith Iv

The Hairdresser’s Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse, 1990) is an eccentric film about eccentric people basking in idealized romantic love so perfect it’s not without its consequences. I admired filmmaker Patrice Leconte’s previous work, Monsieur Hire (1989), and after seeing Roger Ebert rave about the film on At the Movies all those decades ago had wanted to see it but never did, until now. It wasn’t quite what I expected, nor I daresay it’s what anyone might expect.

When Columbia Pictures groomed Kim Novak (b. 1933) for stardom, they envisioned a kind of cross between Rita Hayworth, the studio’s top star of the ‘40s and early ‘50s, and Marilyn Monroe. In truth Novak ended up nothing like those personalities, but became a top star nonetheless. She starred or co-starred in just two dozen or so films, many forgotten, a few justly so. But she starred in Picnic and The Man with the Golden Arm and, of course, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. She was also in the noir gem 5 Against the House and, later in her career made appearances in movies of widely varying quality, including the strangely beguiling The White Buffalo. For me, her finest performance was as Polly the Pistol, the sweet-natured prostitute who finds that she enjoys masquerading as an ordinary housewife with a fiercely protective husband in Billy Wilder’s hilarious, sweet, and much-underrated Kiss Me, Stupid.

Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), a film of William Inge’s 1950 Broadway play, is one of those award-winning, acclaimed and commercially successful pictures that hasn’t aged as well as other such movies. It’s a commendable work overall, despite Burt Lancaster being wildly miscast, though what was fairly innovative by Hollywood standards then isn’t particularly unusual now. The core aspects of its human drama still hold up fairly well, however.

A pleasant surprise, You’ll Never Get Rich (1941) is a very entertaining Fred Astaire-Rita Hayworth musical from Columbia Pictures. I was expecting a lot of superior dancing built around an innocuous, flag-waving wartime propaganda piece, but the screenplay is clever and funny—and quite different from the typical Astaire vehicle. Instead of playing his usual top-hat-white-tie-and-tails screen persona, Astaire is atypically something else, rather hard to describe, but almost a kind of goofball when he’s not dancing. Unless you’ve seen a lot of Astaire musicals you probably wouldn’t notice, but the character he creates here is subtly a notch-and-a-half broader, leaving one to wonder why he didn’t play amusing characters like this more often. Further, the picture is less the standard A-picture musical-comedy and more like a musical-screwball comedy with a lot of funny, inventive material.

Known as Marie: A True Story on the posters but just Marie on the film itself, this is a fact-based, small-scale drama-thriller similar in approach to the better-known Silkwood (1983), and in the tradition of other movies about determined women fighting for their rights in a male-dominated, corporate landscape, e.g., Norma Rae, The China Syndrome, and even Coal Miner’s Daughter, also starring Sissy Spacek.

Director Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003) is remembered as something of a master of Italian crime films of the 1970s, pictures including Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, Shoot First, Die Later and others, though like his contemporaries Di Leo dabbled as both screenwriter and director in myriad other genre films, including giallo and erotica. Madness (Vacanze per un massacro, or “Vacation for a Massacre”) was made at the tail-end of this cycle, when the genre was dying out and the local theatrical film industry was struggling. Unlike his past work, Di Leo was on Madness little more than a hired hand. The picture was produced on a low-budget, the 89-minute film shot on a very brief 12-day shooting schedule. Di Leo himself was not happy with the results.

A vigilante thriller amusingly incorporating a monster truck (Blu-ray! Blu-ray! Blu-ray!), Rolling Vengeance (1987) may be utterly ridiculous—with plot holes big enough to drive a monster truck through—but as an exploitation film for audiences attracted to such movies, it delivers the goods. Set in Ohio but filmed on the outskirts of Toronto, Ontario, the film has a peculiarly Canadian approach, with its clean-cut hero and family, bad guys who are almost like cartoon characters, and when the film is obligated to deliver its quotient of sleaze, it does so in a kind of good-natured, slightly embarrassed manner. Violent deaths are virtually bloodless, and during car and truck chases vehicles rarely seem to be going faster than 20 miles per hour.

Genuinely strange, You and Me (1938) is a romantic comedy-drama-gangster-quasi-musical directed by Fritz Lang with music by Kurt Weill. Visually, at times it resembles Lang’s classic M (1931) or one of his Dr. Mabuse films more than it does a ‘30s Hollywood musical. It stars the seemingly mismatched Sylvia Sidney and George Raft, and was one of the last NRA (National Recovery Act)-influenced films, operating from an outrageous premise. Yet, somehow, the film is pretty entertaining and engaging with lots of charm. A major box-office flop that even Lang didn’t care for, it’s better than its reputation suggests.

Powerhouse Films’ Columbia Horror is a pleasant surprise, its six titles a mix of obscure and familiar titles: Behind the Mask (1932), Black Moon (1934), Air Hawks (1935), Island of Doomed Men (1940), Cry of the Werewolf (1944), and The Soul of a Monster (1944).

The third of MGM’s four songwriter musical biopics, Three Little Words (1950) is arguably the best of the lot. At a time when the studio’s big Technicolor musicals typically cost around $2.75 million, Three Little Words was produced on a tighter, more economical budget, just $1.47 million. While the other three pictures—Till the Clouds Roll By (about Jerome Kern, 1946), Words and Music (Rodgers and Hart, 1948), and Deep in My Heart (Sigmund Romberg, 1954)—were bloated, all-star affairs, really musical revue-type films with thin storylines, this film about songwriters Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby is more intimate and character- and story-driven, showing off its stars—Fred Astaire, Red Buttons, and Vera-Ellen, to good advantage.