"There’s Always Tomorrow" (1956)

“There’s always tomorrow,” is the type of phrase loaded with double meaning. It can be accepted as a statement of youth, where possibility and time feel endless. But it can also act as something sour and bitter, referring to missed opportunities and faded dreams, as it does in Douglas Sirks’ film There’s Always Tomorrow. Sirks made melodramas about how Eisenhower era conformity was, as James Dean might say, tearing everyone apart. "There's always tomorrow" is the kind of deceptively hyper-optimistic phrase we might expect from a time of Leave It to Beaver deluded hopefulness and self-conception. On the surface, Sirks was dealing with stories of heart-stringingly intense emotion, but underneath Sirks examines people trapped and overwhelmed by doing what society expected of them. There’s Always Tomorrow could be taken as a fascinating study of constricted masculinity; Fred MacMurray’s Clifford Groves is a man who’s tired of the daily grind of his job as the owner of a toy company and he feels as if his family doesn’t appreciate him. When old friend Norma (Barbara Stanwyck) returns into his life, old memories and feelings are stirred up; reminding him of how much life has gotten away from him. His children believe their father is having an affair with this old friend, which they’re mostly wrong about. Clifford deep down knows he’s only fooling himself and that his stodgy old life is going to keep consuming him, no matter how overwhelming his sense of ennui might be. Sometimes there’s no tomorrow, just a lousy today. 

Grade: A-

"Ziegfeld Follies" (1946)

Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was famous for his extravagant theater performances known as the “Ziegfeld Follies”. The Ziegfeld Follies rolled out the red carpet for every big name performer the producer could rope in for the show. They featured dancing, singing, comedy and everything in between. Ziegfeld Follies attempts to recapture the “let’s put on a show”-spectacle of the producer’s shows, touting itself on the DVD cover as the “Greatest Production Since the Birth of Motion Pictures”. It’s exactly the sort of hyper-overstatement you’d expect from something overflowing with this many top-billable performers, including Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Gene Kelly, and Judy Garland. Though Ziegfeld Follies has certainly dated, it’s more for lack of cultural relevance than for lack of entertainment value. There’s an admirable go-for-broke quality to the film that creates a not entirely unexpected lack of consistency; some sketches or bits are still really fun, but others feel more like filler than well-thought out acts. It doesn’t help that some of these performances aren’t the most memorable work by the players that are doing them. Ziegfeld Follies is more of a cultural artifact of its time, a time capsule from when an excessive Broadway revue could easily draw in a crowd. 

Grade: B-

"Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948)

There seems like few things quite as antithetical as the comedy routines of Budd Abbott and Lou Costello and the frights of the Universal horror monsters. The value of both of these film properties Universal had its hands on were fading, and in a desperate effort they threw them together. The result in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein was something that benefited from the mismatched elements of horror and comedy. The funny business is far funnier because it feels bizarrely out of place and yet uncannily appropriate. The Universal monsters, Frankenstein’s Monster (Glenn Strange), Dracula (Bela Lugosi) and the Wolfman (Lon Chaney Jr.), were always a little campy and recognizing that exaggerated nature and placing it against the cartoonish charms of the comic duo makes it appropriately amusing. Yet director Charles Barton doesn’t sacrifice scares in the name of comedy; some good moments of horror are provided for all the monsters and this became a fitting swan song for them. 

Grade: B+

"A Story of Floating Weeds" (1934)

Yasujiro Ozu’s sound films have the quality of a silent film. They rely on the strength of their imagery and the depths of emotions Ozu plumbs from them. Ozu told simple stories, typically family dramas, with increasingly radical compositions (in most of his films he breaks the 180 degree rule). A Story of Floating Weeds, one of Ozu’s earliest films, is a silent film about the leader of a traveling theater company who returns to visit a former lover and his grown-up illegitimate son, unaware of their biological relationship. The man’s mistress, another member of the troupe, discovers the identity of the son, and grows jealous. She asks a friend to seduce the son, as a way of getting back at her lover and in hopes of breaking apart the family. This becomes further complicated as the woman actually falls for the son as she courts him. The genius of Ozu though is how all of this grows out of recognizable human emotions, and the ways he keeps layering the story with situations that deepen this emotion. Ozu displays what might be called a “formal objectivity”; though it doesn’t have the same rigor of formal discontinuity and distance of his later works, Floating Weeds allows feeling to arise from our observations of these characters and their story. Ozu’s sense of distance only serves to increase our empathy, as we feel more deeply because the film chooses to avoid directing our emotional response.     

Grade: A-

"Kind Hearts and Coronets" (1949)

Kind Hearts and Coronets postures itself like an English gentleman, literate and dry, but with a lacerating, understated wit. The film was one of Ealing Studio’s famous droll comedies, and it tells its story with an ironic sense of detachment, contrasting its dark story with how matter-of-factly it’s recounted. Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) has recently become the duke of the a’Asocyne family and he recounts his story in voiceover from prison, where he will be soon be hung to death. Mazzini’s mother married beneath her social standing to an Italian tenor, was disowned by the family, and instilled hatred into her son for the aristocrats who’ve taken away everything from them. When his mother dies, Mazzini plots the murders of his family members standing in line to his ascendency to the dukedom. All eight of these heirs are played by Alec Guinness, but you never notice that he’s playing all these roles. Make up, costuming, and choices in posturing and voice transform all these characters into wholly original figures. Mazzini might be a remorseless psychopath, but much like the film he’s in, he’s a sophisticated and well-spoken one, and ultimately that’s all that really matters. 

Grade: A

"Big Doll House" (1971)

The women’s prison movie had a pretty simple formula: shower scenes, threats of rape, a sadistic warden, etc. These films were never going be great works of art, but within this premise a director could do whatever they wanted, so long as they hit the necessary exploitation marks. The best of these films demonstrated surprising craft being snuck through very trashy, extremely lurid plots. Jack Hill’s Big Doll House is one of the best examples of this weird little sub-genre. The film is about a prison break at a corrupt Philippines prison, which for some odd reason has a lot of attractive American women locked away in it. Hill doesn’t hold back on the titillation; he’s not above lingering on a body or aestheticizing violence, almost to an unhealthy extent. And even Hill’s assured directing can’t make up for a number of lukewarm performances (Granted, many of these actors were not chosen for acting chops, but their good looks and willingness to expose themselves). The exception here is Pam Grier playing a prisoner who essentially amounts to a variation on her real life persona. Grier had charisma and a magnetic screen presence that makes even the most inadequate dialogue acceptable. But underneath the sensationalism Hill creates lively power dynamics that give a sense of weight and tension to the narrative. Hill knows this is all in good, tantalizing fun, and he never pretends it’s anything else; he’s light and playful here, embracing the sordid charms that a film like this entails. 

Grade: B-

"Post Tenebras Lux" (2013)

The thing about the nature of evil is that in real life evil is far more insidious than we often give it credit. Real evil isn’t Anton Chigurh, evil incarnate practically walking around with a sign saying “Hey, I’m evil!” No, real evil is tiny acts of pettiness, selfishness and disregard that add up to slowly eat away at ourselves and the people around us. Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux attempts to get at this idea, or something (I could be totally wrong with a film this evasive), in tremendously impenetrable and highly personal ways. The film is a deeply introspective look at a family living in rural Mexico. The film doesn’t abide by any sense of conventional storytelling, underplaying moments that would be climactic moments or major setpieces in another film, and jumping around in time. Instead, Reygadas opts to soak up the breathtaking natural environment and observe as people precisely do awful things to one another. The notion of primordial evil lurking in nature and awakening malevolent forces in humans is definitely at play here. But really Reygadas is telling things in a state of almost abstraction; what’s interesting isn’t what’s being shown so much as how it’s being shown. Most of the film is filtered through claustrophobic, fish eye lens-like perspectives that make everything feel like it’s off its axis. Reygadas seems to have little concern with audience reaction though; this is a film that isn’t really understood so much as experienced with bafflement and wonder. The film’s most stunning, dream-like moments come in the film’s disorienting opening moments before settling into an exhaustingly elusive and uneventful series of nonstarter developments, of varying compellingness. 

Grade: B