Reviews

This was an unusually frank film that addresses the effects of a scorched earth policy in war. It wastes very little on sentiment and is just short of first rate. Stewart may not have been the best choice to play an officer toughened by leading demolition rear-guard amidst the de-humanizing hunger and anarchy of a defeated ally, but he is up to the role. The confused military condition set the film's stage and moral tone, foreclosing any possibility of justice, mercy (symbolized by a goddess figure Stewart acquires along the way) or any other civilized virtue including love. Stewart slips into his lovable Mr.-Smith-in-Washington mode only once - and then as a concession of defeat. Mission accomplished, but we lost the battle.

The film's writing, filming, and casting, was suitably gritty and uncompromising, particularly regarding the patrol's limited arms and supplies as great wealth compared to the lot of the destitute refugees who swarm through every frame. I recommend the film as a reasonably courageous examination of what history at its worst can dish up for us hominids.

This 1945 musical remake of "State Fair" (earlier a Will Rogers comedy) may be one of the happiest films ever made. It was a thank-you to all of the young who gave years of their lives, or life itself, to wrest the world from one of its darkest wars. The final frame gives them a warm acknowledgment.

State Fair" is also a joy (despite oldsters' popular tunes) to behold. The Technicolor is brilliant. Rogers and Hammerstein were at their zenith. The stars, Jeanne Crain, Dana Andrews, Dick Haymes, and Vivian Blaine looked wholly appealing. The supporting cast seems straight from "Our Town," and what could be more American than rural Iowa after harvest?

There is just enough plot complication for interest, but satisfaction seems guaranteed to the most transient extra. When I first viewed this in our theater, on a Saturday at age 9, a cry of 'fire!" roused us briefly from our seats. It was a false alarm, almost as if the film's sweet aura had entered our lives - as if nothing could threaten or harm us ever again. I give it a 10.

Most reviews of this film are appreciative and respectful, recognizing the professional production qualities and creditable acting, including that of Joan Bennett and Lloyd Nolan. In fact, Nolan's portrayal of the tough, clear-sighted newsman may be one of his best.

The reviews and billing do a disservice, however, by using the term propaganda to describe the film and story line. My mid-20th Century dictionary describes propaganda as a movement to spread a particular kind of doctrine, or a system of information to help or injure a person or group. It also suggests, while not always including, bias and exaggeration. In other words, it is untrue. As a contemporary with the film's production, I offer hat there is no deception here.

Growing up when this film was made, I knew numerous refugees from the Nazi system, both before and after World War II. Their stories attested with little variation to the authenticity of the incidents portrayed in "The Man I Married." Nazi policies and actions were then common knowledge directly or indirectly known --not suspected. Children, as I was then, know. Accounts of survivors dispelled any idea that the film was one of propagandistic excess. Any excess was that of the Nazi system. "Schindler's Lit" and "Counterfeit Traitor" are no less accurate. If you are a reader "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" will prove enlightening.

Keep this in mind also when entertaining thoughts that time can soften every period of ugly reality.

Woody Allen turns his comedic cutting torch to the world he inhabits with a zest reserved for one's nearest and dearest. Like "Amadeus," "Bullets" is a match-up between creative genius and mediocrity, mediocrity personified here by an aspiring but limited dramaturge, David Shayne (John Cusack). To get backing for his first stage production from a mobster, Nick Valenti (Joe Viterellli), Shayne gives a part in the play to the mobster's talentless girlfriend (Jennifer Tilly's priceless Olive Neal). Olive comes to rehearsals with a young hoodlum, Cheech (Chazz Palminteri), as watchdog. Cheech and Shayne get chummy over beers and the playwright persuades Cheech to offer opinions about the play. Gradually Shayne grows to depend on the gangster's advice. As Cheech gets more involved in the creative end, he becomes increasingly intolerant of the dreadful effect on the play of Olive's incompetence. Finally, in desperation Cheech bumps her off, knowing that it is certain death at Valenti's hands. The moral of the piece: Cheech alone among the whole bunch is the one true artist, the only one willing to literally die for his art. But forget the moral. With supporting cast and dialog in top form, it is a fine time getting there, and Allen makes this the easiest and funniest medicine you will ever take.

I am not the only viewer who believes that "Threshold," a very low key drama at first viewing, is outstanding film. One online review considered it one of a personal "unknown 'ten best.'" I watch it again and again, completely absorbed by the intense concentration with which Donald Sutherland plays Dr. Thomas Vrain, a highly skilled and dedicated cardiovascular surgeon. Vrain meets, and has his hospital retain the services of, an offbeat biologist, Aldo Gehring (Jeff Goldblum), who is pursing the invention of an artificial heart. Against all advice and straining medical ethics, Dr. Vrain performs a successful transplant of Gehring's artificial heart to save a patient with an otherwise hopeless congenital defect. "Threshold" is a meticulously crafted production with impeccable, nearly mesmerizing performances in the even most minor roles. Sutherland is at his best in this film, creating so realistic a portrait of a brilliant surgeon that one physician reviewer on this site claimed to recognize several surgeons known to him personally, with Sutherland embodying both their strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps the most notable attribute of the fictitious Dr. Vrain is his total, and no doubt indispensable, commitment to and absorption in his skill. One of the film's advisors was Dr. Denton Cooley, a pioneering Dallas Surgeon; under whom Sutherland studied, and seems to have managed to portray with utter fidelity as the leading character. Cooley was the first surgeon to use an artificial heart in a patient with an irreparable heart. He was professionally reprimanded for doing it with¬out approval and so started his own hospital, The Texas Heart Institute. The film very loosely follows this little known event, and it is worth seeing if only for the strength of Sutherland's portrayal, no less than its high production values and the assured performances of the entire cast. This was a Canadian production. For some reason it was never transcribed to DVD in Canada, although versions are available from the Czech Republic, Germany, even Greece. I have a gradually deteriorating VHS tape, which will no doubt wear out in the watching of it. The vagaries of licensing agreements seem to have claimed yet another creative victim.

I have watched this film more than once and like it better each time. If Ronald and Nancy Reagan in leading roles are not enough, it has Admiral Chester A. Nimitz, Commander in Chief, Pacific, during World War II, in a speaking role. And it is not just a bunch of flag waving (except in the best sense, of course). It addresses the burdens of command and making difficult decisions unemotionally on the basis of good judgment. Reagan is a submarine commander who has to dive fast, leaving a crew member overboard, because a Japanese destroyer is bearing down on them. His exec and some of the crew despise him for what looks like cowardice. The captain tells his exec exactly how and why he made the decision, but the exec is unconvinced. The exec demands and gets a Navy board hearing, which confirms the decision. It is a remarkable film if only for seeing a president and first lady in romantic film roles discussing marriage. He declines marrying, telling her, "I want a wife and children not a widow and orphans." Stern stuff there. Then when the "hellcats" (submarines dispatched to cut off shipping across the Sea of Japan) are ready to go Admiral Nimitz gives their captains a preparatory speech on camera. I found watching the film in this and other ways exceptional and not your standard Hollywood war rattler. The story wraps up with the exec having to make the same decision Reagan made in the earlier scene. Movies used to have braver messages than today, but that figures.

This film is a splendid specimen of the genre. An all-time favorite I can't see enough of, and, well, let's do give a thought to those Aztecs. Captain from Castile is a fine rendering of that class of fiction from the first half of the 20th Century described best as book club novels. Written to a literate and culturally attuned market, they combined dramatic history with compelling characters enmeshed in swashbuckling dilemmas. The novelists never wrote down to their readers and always kept a literary trick up their sleeve for the tight spots. Kenneth Roberts, F. Van Wyck Mason and Frank G. Slaughter were of that class, and Frank Shellabarger's Captain from Castile is a worthy exemplar of their craft. The storyline, to reiterate briefly, centers on the young Spanish nobleman, Don Pedro de Vargas (Tyrone Power), who offends an official of the Inquisition and is forced, as are his parents, to flee from its net. His parents escape to Italy, and he embarks to the new world for adventure as much as to recoup the family fortunes. Leading the way for him is a seasoned soldier of fortune played by Lee J. Cobb, and following de Vargas is the Spanish equivalent of a pretty barmaid played by Jean Peters. Landing in Spanish Cuba they sign on with Hernan Cortez's expedition to conquer and colonize Mexico. There is little need to expatiate on the plot details, which provide plenty of entertainment to embellish the historical account, and so far as both go the film is instructive and entertaining. (There was no need to draw on fantasy in cinema of that day.) What may trouble younger viewers is whether Captain from Castile treats native Aztecs, Olmecs, and like tribes with sufficient respect, given the certainty that their way of life was doomed by the Spanish invader. On whole, the film treats indigenous peoples with dignity and understanding, although some may quibble about that. Key to the film's overall ethnic take is the last rather triumphalist scene. As Cortez's steel clad legions march past the lightly armored native defenders, Jean Peters, now Don Pedro's wife, wraps a bright red native shawl around herself and her newborn to march behind the army, in appearance a nascent Mexicana, neither Spanish nor Indian - Mexican. In this sense, I found the film sympathetic and in its way inspiring, no matter how the more fastidious may differ about that. I have to add my approval for the scenery. With much of it set around the Aztec pyramids, it is dominated by a distant active volcano, which injects a unique quality and makes the film worth at least a second look just for that backdrop.