What I’ve Caught Up With, September 2024 Part 2:
Film: The Border (1982)
Immigration agent Charlie (Jack Nicholson) and his wife Marcy (Valerie Perrine) move from their trailer in California to the greener pastures of El Paso and into a duplex attached to Marcy’s friend Savannah (Shannon Wilcox) and her border agent husband Cat (Harvey Keitel). Charlie tries to run on the straight and narrow, but desperate for the good life, Marcy can’t stop herself from burning through all of their money, and soon enough Charlie is forced to work alongside Cat running undocumented workers into the country. Meanwhile, Maria (Elpidia Carrillo) has her baby stolen by one of Cat’s human traffickers. The Border feels like the other side of El Norte, and it’s about as depressing, but the performances are damn good. Director Tony Richardson makes the landscape and the border its own character, which only makes all of this bleaker.
Film: Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Much more a character study, Jeremiah Johnson is most famously the source of the “mountain man nods approvingly” gif. The eponymous Johnson (Robert Redford) goes to live a hermit’s life in the mountains but finds that he cannot. He takes a native wife (Delle Bolton) and adopts a son (Josh Albee) from a woman who has gone crazy after being attacked by an indigenous tribe. All goes well until Johnson is forced through a sacred Crow burial site, which causes a decades-long feud. This is a cool idea for a movie, but the revenge/feud plot doesn’t happen until the film is almost three-fourths of the way over. It’s a lot of build-up to get us to the stuff that we’ve signed up for.
Film: The Grey Fox (1982)
Stagecoach bandit William Miner (Richard Farnsworth) is caught in 1868 and released from prison into a completely different world in 1901. Not seeing himself suited for work and with stagecoaches no longer running, Bill Miner sees The Great Train Robbery and decides that waylaying trains is the next logical step. He robs a train or two and lays low in Canada where he encounters Kate (Jackie Burroughs), a photographer and early feminist who he is immediately taken with. The Grey Fox is a slow film, but a fine one, and Farnsworth is a charmer throughout. This is simply a pleasant story despite the criminal element, and Bill Miner is an easy guy to root for.
Film: Circle of Friends (1995)
Remember when Chris O’Donnell was the flavor of the month and you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a film he was in? Circle of Friends certainly remembers, because this film is from right in the heart of that period. Three Irish girls, Bennie (Minnie Driver), Eve (Geraldine O’Rawe), and Nan (Saffron Burrows) grow up together in the post-War years, go to university in Dublin together, and fight over boys. Alan Cumming is sleezy and Chris O’Donnell, who is the human equivalent of plain yogurt, is somehow the sexiest man on campus. I’ve clearly never liked O’Donnell that much, and I’ve also never really cared that much for Minnie Driver, so there’s not a great deal for me here.
Film: Blithe Spirit (1945)
Novelist Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison) hires a medium to do research for a new murder mystery he is writing. The medium, Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford), manages to summon Elvira (Kay Hammond), his late first wife, but he’s the only one who can see or hear her. This causes a great deal of stress with his second wife, Ruth (Constance Cummings). Eventually, Ruth figures out that Charles isn’t faking and Elvira is really there. This is perfectly pitched, funny, but just dark enough to have an edge to it, especially when Elvira decides she doesn’t like being alone in the afterlife. All of the main performances are good ones, and I’m not at all sure how Margaret Rutherford missed being nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Film: Lured (1947)
People tend to remember Lucille Ball as the wacky comedienne, so it’s easy to forget that she was quite the dish in her film career. In Lured, she is a taxi dancer whose friend gets targeted by a murderer preying on beautiful young women. She’s enlisted by the police to help track down the killer. It’s a dandy story, and a solid romance between her and George Sanders. There are a lot of odd red herrings here, though, including a subplot where she is attacked by Boris Karloff and another that involves her almost being sold into prostitution in South America. Charles Coburn plays a rare serious role as a Scotland Yard detective. It’s good, but very unfocused.
Film: Noises Off… (1992)
Farce is hard to do well, as evidenced by just how many farces are actually pretty terrible. Noises Off… is precisely how a farce should be done, and it does it both as a play being performed, and as the scenes behind the play being performed. A stage director (Michael Caine) attempts to bring a farce to the stage with a cast filled with idiots who have a series of problems and relationship issues. The play itself that they are performing is actually very funny—a bunch of timing gags and sexual inappropriateness. Mixed with a disastrous dress rehearsal and a pair of riotously terrible performances, our director dreads the show opening on Broadway. This is a packed cast—all of the main players—Carol Burnett, Christopher Reeve, Nicollette Sheridan, Marilu Henner, Denholm Elliott, John Ritter, Julie Hagerty, and Mark Linn-Baker—are in perfect form. This should have been a massive hit, and it’s evidence that both Linn-Baker and Hagerty should have had much bigger careers.
Film: Language Lessons (2021)
Mark Duplass does interesting work. Most of his films are small, low-budget, and don’t get a huge audience, but they are almost always worth seeing. In Language Lessons, Adam (Duplass) is given a series of 100 Spanish immersion lessons as a gift. Over the course of a few lessons, his relationship with his teacher Cariño (Natalie Morales) blossoms as both of them individually go through terrible personal tragedy happening in their lives around the lessons. The film is told essentially over Zoom, sometimes from her perspective and sometimes from his. It’s open, honest, and poignant, and the sort of film that can be made brilliantly for almost no budget. It’s not an easy watch, but both performances are impressive.
