Frankenstein (1931) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

 In preparation for Guillermo del Toros' version of Frankenstein scheduled for Netflix in November 2025, Turner Classic Movies presented a Frankenstein double feature, the original James Whale film from 1931 and, then, The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer Studios' first color film, directed by Terence Fisher and released in 1957.  The two films share the same premise, but are radically different.

James Whale's version, of course, is the classic film adaptation that defines the story and its characters and provides the standard against which all other pictures in this mold are measured.  There has never been a time in my life that I can recall in which I didn't know this movie.  I saw it countless times as a boy, always on TV, of course, in afternoon matinees on Channel 11 in the Twin Cities and interrupted by innumerable commercials.  For a few years, I lost track of the movie, but saw it again in college and, then, on occasion, on TV thereafter  The movie is very accomplished.  It's so well-known that no one can really accurately appraise the picture -- it's iconic.  On this occasion, I looked at the movie for aspects that I had earlier not noticed.  The movie begins with a dapper little fellow emerging from behind theater curtains to warn the audience that they will be shocked and horrified by the film and that, perhaps, they should take warning and -- (he doesn't exactly tell them to run for the exits but implies that they should consider this).  In the credits, Frankenstein's monster is described as acted by "?"  The film begins with a majestic tracking shot from right-to-left depicting mourners at a grave site against a stormy dark sky.  Colin Clive as Dr. Frankenstein and his hunchbacked henchman are, then, shown avidly watching the burial -- they intend to disinter the corpse.  This exquisite moving camera shot establishes the films somber tone; Whale's tongue is in his cheek, but his craftsmanship is such that the movie is a bit alarming even though crammed full of ridiculous and portentous dialog and hammy acting.  The picture is noteworthy for the brilliant performance by Boris Karloff as the monster --he makes the creature pathetic and strangely sympathetic.  Karloff is immured in prosthetics and make-up, but he acts in the silent fashion with his eyes, his body, and his eloquent, scarred hands.  Karloff's compassionate performance climaxes in the famous scene where the Monster drowns a child --it's all a misunderstanding, but extremely poignant.  In the final scene in which Karloff is trapped in a burning windmill, the Monster's distress and panic at the flames all around him is palpable -- he charges back and forth like a terrified animal and the audience's sympathies are entirely with him and not the braying mob with torches and pitchforks outside the mill.  Colin Clive's Dr. Frankenstein, who spends most of the movie blaspheming and arrogantly proclaiming his Promethean ambitions, is too obsessed to serve as a romantic lead.  Whale and his scriptwriter make sure there is another fellow in waiting for the lady's affections, a handsome, if unimaginative, fellow who is pining for Elizabeth and, it is implied, will get the girl when the presumptuous doctor is out of the way  -- he gets pitched off the top of windmill and broken like a rag doll on the turning blades of the thing.  The movie is very short -- I would guess about 75 minutes (this was true of all classic Universal horror films).  It is incredibly efficient in its story telling and manages to cram all sorts of things into its short running time.  There's a Bavarian festival complete with dancers in lederhosen and beer maids that ends disastrously when the father of the drowned girl makes an appearance carrying the limp corpse of his daughter -- this is another purely visual and classic scene and brilliantly realized in a long tracking shot.  The sets are heavily stylized, particularly the laboratory built vertically into a fang of crumbling masonry on a black mountain top.  The place is full of narrow, steep steps, dungeons and the like, painted shadows on all the surfaces.  The Monster rampages through a jagged gorge, a sort of peak-top slit canyon full of dramatic serrated ridges and huge heaps of black-painted paper-mache rocks.  The old fellow playing Baron Frankenstein, an irritating character role, has an enormous tumor behind his ear that is obvious in most of the shots in which he appears and disturbing to behold.  Viewers are conflicted as to whether this is giant wart, lipoma (fat tumor) or a goiter -- I think it's some kind of lipoma.  But once seen this can't be unseen. 

The Curse of Frankenstein is gaudy and designed as a sort of gross-out picture.  The Creature's face is a deliquescent pale blue and green (possible a homage to Karloff's make-up which was apparently green although this can't be seen in the 1931 black and white film).  The monster's face is crudely stitched onto his skull and seems to be melting away.  (Christopher Lee plays the creature.)  In this version, Dr. Frankenstein is a cad.  He has a servant girl that he has made pregnant and has no scruples about feeding her, as it were, to the monster.  (Frankenstein, as acted by Peter Cushing, keeps a grim-looking sarcophagus full of acid in his lab and dissolves unneeded, or incriminating, body parts in that vat.)  The movie features a frame story -- Dr.  Frankenstein is in prison awaiting execution; he summons a priest to his cell and there tells him what happened, hoping to exculpate himself from the various murders (many of them by the monster) attributed to him.  In this film, Elizabeth, Frankenstein's betrothed, is first portrayed as a little girl with her pushy mother, one of the Baron's impoverished aunts that he is supporting.  The marriage proposed between the two is not a matter of love but convenience, arranged by the officious busybody of the Aunt.  There is no hunchbacked Igor in this film; rather Frankenstein is assisted by Paul, a handsome bachelor who ends up, it is implied, as the girlfriend of the rather frosty and scheming Elizabeth.  Paul helps Victor Frankenstein steal a few corpses and assists with some of the quiltwork, but gets cold feet when he sees how hideous the monster will be -- his rejection of Victor's insane scheme is primarily on esthetic grounds (at least so it seems). The movie wallows in the gruesome aspects of grave-robbing.  A hanged man cut from the gibbet can't be used because the birds have pecked out his eyes and "eaten half of his face" -- we get just a momentary glimpse of the corpse before Frankenstein saws off his head, an action tastefully screened by the bottom of the frame, and, then, tosses the head in the acid bath.  He gets gore on his hands which he wipes off on his lab coat.  Apparently, there's no laundry service because he wears the same ichor-smeared coat throughout the movie.  Later, Frankenstein studies a pair of eyes that he keeps in jar that looks like it previously contained Gerber's baby food.  There is an obligatory scene with a blind man, an old guy with a boy leading him inexplicably through a brushy thicket.  (I had forgotten that the famous scene with blind hermit isn't in the original version of Frankenstein but appears in the sequel, 1935's The Bride of Frankenstein).  The monster runs amuck in the last fifteen minutes of the movie but doesn't really do much damage.  Karloff was massive, weighty, a stolid Redwood Tree of an creature; Christopher Lee is lithe, willowy, with very narrow shoulders -- he doesn't seem capable of inflicting much injury on anyone.  The movie is set in some unnamed German metropolis that looks exactly like London.  Hazel Court, playing Elizabeth, wears low-cut blouses that plunge more and more as the film progresses.  Horror films are primarily visual, the last aspect of modern moviemaking that remains closely akin to pictures in the silent era.  Therefore, it's a disappointment that The Curse of Frankenstein features so much society-style banter -- it's a very dialogue heavy movie and tedious for that reason.  The original Frankenstein is austere and alarming and remains very effective; curiously, the 1957 iteration seems more dated.  The Bride of  Frankenstein is the best and most ingenious of the lot -- but it's not iconic; it's already functioning as a cerebral and witty commentary on the 1931 version.  The Curse of Frankenstein has good production values and fine acting but it's flawed and dull.  

Shadow

 Shadow is a 2018 wuxia film directed by the much-lauded Chinese moviemaker, Zhang Yimou.  Wuxia films are a Chinese genre -- these pictures involve narratives set in ancient China with a vaguely mythological bent; wuxia means "chivalry and martial arts."  Such films are to be distinguished from martial arts movies, films that feature elaborate and protracted duels either hand-to-hand or with weapons.  Wuxia is said to be sub-genre of the martial arts category, stories set in a legendary era involving royalty and knights but with extensive combat sequences as well.  Wuxia involves elaborate, rather gothic, narratives, a bit like plot elements in shows like Game of Thrones.  There are warring kingdoms, love affairs and intrigue, as well as court conspiracies and political assassinations.  Shadow has a complicated, nearly impenetrable plot, a slow, rather meditative pace, and impressive battle scenes in its last forty minutes.  The film is a triumph of design.  Although shot in color, the movie proceeds against landscapes and interiors that are a grim black and white.  Rain falls perpetually from grey skies.  The action takes place in various subterranean tunnels, medieval streets that, although exposed to the (wan) light of day, seem to be far underground, and misty gorges filled with deep pools of water.  The set directors have taken inspiration from Chinese scrolls, many of them a thousand or, even, two-thousand years old -- images of hazy columnar mountains, strange eroded rocks, and distant grey mountain ranges swathed in fog.  Even the blood depicted in this film looks diluted, dark, and, generally, mixed with a monochrome slop of mud and rainwater.  All of the big violent scenes are staged in a downpour that is unremitting.  The only hint of color in the images are the flesh tones.  People wear black and white gowns.  In the King of Pei's court, there are innumerable semi-translucent screens on which the King has painted elegant calligraphy, an "Ode to Peace" composed with artistoc swaths of black brushstroke.  The entire film is composed in the murky greys and debased whites of an old, half-destroyed silent film.  There is no relief from the color scheme or the largely vertical set design -- the action takes place at the bottom of funnels of ragged cliffs, underwater, or on the tilted streets of the medieval city, Jing.  One expects that the sun will come out at the end of the movie.  But this expectation is thwarted -- the ending is like the last act of Hamlet, an accumulation of deaths that leaves almost no one standing; therefore, this grim denouement offers nothing to celebrate -- the rain is still falling.  

The film's plot is convoluted.  The picture starts with some exposition about the war between the City of Jing and the Kingdom of Pei. Pei's great commander and his wife are summoned to the court where rows of sycophantic courtiers kneel next to translucent screens in a perspective extended to the vanishing point.  The childish and self-absorbed King wants to conquer the City of Jing.  But he has (I think) agreed to wager the war on a single combat, a duel between the Commander and the enemy general Yang Cang.  To celebrate this endeavor, the King with his proud sister Qingping demand that the Commander and his wife play a duet on the zither.  Inexplicably, the Commander refuses and defiantly cuts off his top knot of hair.  The Commander declines the zither duet for two reasons:  first, he can't play the zither and, second, he isn't really the Commander at all.  The real Commander, dying like the grail king in Parsifal from a chest wound that won't heal, is holed-up in a secret grotto below the castle.  We learn that a peasant named Jingzhou is the Commander's "shadow" imitating the famous general and warrior.  From age 8, Jingzhou (who confusingly has the same name as the City of Jing), has been raised to act and fight like the Commander.  Although not of noble blood, he's a formidable combat soldier as well.  In the Commander's chambers, the maids set out futons for the Commander and his wife.  But, after everyone has left, Jingzhou goes off by himself, virtuously sequestering himself from his double's real wife.  (The plot bears some resemblance to Kurosawa's late film, Kagemusha which was subtitled, I think, the "shadow warrior.")  Yang Cang proposes an alliance between Pei and Jing City; he wants to join his son Yang Pang to Qingping, the King of Pei's daughter.  Indeed, he sends a token of the alliance, an ornate dagger.  But, it turns out that he is proposing to make Qinping his concubine, a degrading offer that enrages the young woman to the extent that in the hostilities she will take a decisive part as a woman warrior.  The real Commander has learned a new fighting style from sparring with his wife who repels his bamboo cane blows with her umbrella.  Although fighting is a Yang enterprise -- that is, male, the Commander has developed a Yin (female and liquid) technique -- this involves graceful, fluid motions in which an umbrella equipped with detachable spines and blades is deployed against the male swords and lances.  (In several key scenes, duels are filmed from a vertical perspective aiming down at a huge Yinyang symbol engraved on wooden platforms.)  After an hour of preliminaries, the army of Pei attacks Jing City while the Commander's shadow double duels with the great swordsman, Yang Cang.  These two threads of action are cut together.  The duel takes place on a yinyang decorated platform exposed at a height between two sheer cliffs of black rock.  The battle in the city involves a legion of metal umbrella-wielding warriors fending off crossbow shots with their whirling bronze parasols and unleashing storms of jagged steel in the direction of the enemies.  There's a Trojan horse aspect to the invasion -- the army of Pei has to swim underwater in the gorge where the flood is impounded by a dam to surface in the town.  The army wears primitive versions of scuba gear and breathe through hollow reeds connected to air balloons on their backs.  Yang Cang is defeated and the city of Jing taken by the Pei forces.  Quingping is struck down and, with her last breath (she's been stabbed repeatedly) uses the ornate gift dagger to kill Yang Pang, the young man who was supposed to be betrothed to her but wanted her to accept the role of concubine -- thus, she is revenged.  The shadow double finds his elderly mother has been murdered by someone -- at this point, I lost the thread of the film, and who couldn't exactly understand who was killing whom and why.  The real commander emerges from his labyrinthine tunnel and kills the foolish young king of Pei.  He also kills the shadow double.  Then, for some reason that is imponderable, he stages the scene to make it look like the shadow double and the king killed one another.  

The film is elegantly made and, generally, intelligible.  It's slowly paced but the stylized acting, the profoundly artificial sets, and misty gorges and mountains are entrancing -- the viewer watches this thing in a state of half-hypnotized enchantment.  Unlike many heavily stylized and artificial (set-bound) films, this picture is humorless, but exciting -- it reminds me a bit of the second half of Fritz Lang's Nibelungenlied film, Kriemhild's Revenge with its ultra-violent combat scenes and manufactured woods and rocks.  At no point did the film oppress me with the sense of claustrophobia that could be implicit in such a completely contrived and intensely disciplined mise-en-scene.  Shadow is so beautiful and strange that you forgive the film for its flagrant artistry -- of course, it's utterly pretentious but the pretense is about something real and the ridiculous stuff on-screen has a sort of grave and dignified elegance.    

One Battle After Another

 I grew up with movies made by the studios in the late fifties and early sixties.  These films were plot-driven but with the narrative designed to climax in a showy battle scene or gunfight.  Usually, action movies stirred in a little romance to keep female audience members attentive.  As a boy, I yearned for these plot elements to be streamlined, minimized, or, even, eliminated if possible -- after all, the plot was transparently only a device for justifying a violent climax.  Similarly, I didn't like the "mushy stuff" -- that is, the romance elements obviously thrown in as a sop to the women  in the theater.  I thought it would be a wonderful thing is a film could be composed of only the violent action during its last half hour -- what if a movie were all action with no plot at all or all battle without any character development or exposition or romance.  Now, sixty years later, I have got my wish and, of course,  there's only one thing worse than an unfulfilled wish and that's a wish come true.  Starting with Cy Enfield's Zulu (1964), war movies gravitated to pictures that were nothing but combat -- Sergei Bondarchuk's picture Waterloo (1970) is another example.  Movies like the John Wick franchise and the first half of Kill Bill are nothing but extended action scenes, unremitting duels and gun battles.  The title of Paul Thomas Anderson's recent film, One Battle after the Other, show that it is, in large part, a continuation and, indeed, perfection of this trend.  This long film (about 2 hours and forty minutes) is nothing more than an extended chase sequence, or, more accurately, one chase after another, a relentless series of car chases, foot races, double and triple chases with the pursuers themselves pursued by other adversaries.  It's a film that is physically exhausting, You walk out of the theater breathless as if you've run a marathon.

One Battle After Another, which justifies its perpetual motion by combat between revolutionary terrorists and ICE paramilitaries, is a bete noir with the Right.  For instance, The National Review has published harangues suggesting that the movie is a particularly bestial form of propaganda and that it is akin to treason to admire the picture.  In fact, the movie "inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland" is essentially apolitical -- this is signaled in an early sequence in which the hero is seen watching Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, a movie with an ostensible political subject but one that is primarily famous for its suspense thriller sequences and its triumphant action movie-climax. The politics of One Battle After Another are those of Wile E. Coyote versus the Roadrunner -- the coyote chases, the roadrunner runs and that's about it.  The film that the picture most resembles is another wide-screen epic 1963's, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, a movie that, after some creaky introductory scenes, consists of nothing more than one chase after another, all the characters in wild pursuit of one another throughout the entire lengthy picture.  

The premise of One Battle After Another is that a group of urban terrorists called The French 75 stage a raid on an ICE detention facility.  There are some chases and a villain (the coyote) named Captain Lockjaw (played in monster-movie fashion by a grizzled Sean Penn) pursues the terrorists.  The terrorists are led by a fierce woman-warrior named Perfidia Beverly Hills -- the names come out of Pynchon.  She is as determined and ruthless as her opposite number, Colonel Lockjaw.  It's personal between Lockjaw and Perfidia -- she took him hostage and sexually humiliated him.  But it's the kind of humiliation that Lockjaw likes and, so, he's obsessively attracted to her.  Their liaisons which are like scorpions mating result in Perfidia becoming pregnant.  (In one indelible scene, she blazes away with a machine gun pressed up against her naked pregnant belly.)  Perfidia attributes the child to her boyfriend, Bob Ferguson, called Rocket Man, so-called because he is an explosives expert.  (Bob is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a continuous haze of marijuana smoke and with a look of anguished bemusement constantly on his face.)  After some more chases, Lockjaw manages to capture Perfidia.  She rats out the members of French 75 who are exterminated in a series of violent scenes -- it's like the demise of the SLA in Berkeley when they were hunted down and wiped-out after kidnaping Patty Hearst.  Perfidia goes into witness protection but bored by civilian life escapes into Mexico.  Sixteen years later, Perfidia's  child Willa is living with Bob somewhere in California.  True to her genes, Perfidia and Lockjaw's child is ferocious herself -- we first see her studying karate with a Hispanic sensei.  Colonel Lockjaw has been invited to join the Christmas Adventurer's Club, a cabal of sinister, White Supremicist, millionaires and industrialists.  Lockjaw has to establish that he is 100% Aryan to join the Club.  Their investigation has revealed that Lockjaw may be the father of a "mixed race" child.  In order to advance his admission to the White Supremicist cabal, Lockjaw leading ICE paramilitary cracks down on immigrants in the sanctuary city in California, hoping that, in this way, he can lure Willa and her father, Bob, into the open.  Lockjaw's plan is to subject Willa to genetic testing -- if she turns out not to be his child, he will simply release her.  If she is his child, Lockjaw decides that he has no choice but to make her disappear thereby eliminating any obstacle to his admission to the Christmas Adventurer's Club.  

Lockjaw conducts a raid on the high school where Willa with friends is attending a school dance.  Willa is escorted out of the school by another Black revolutionary, a woman, who drives her up into the hills where there is a convent of marijuana-growing nuns -- that is, a kind of safe house.  Lockjaw and his minions pursue both Willa and Bob.  Bob tries to flee the government forces by escaping over the Barrio roof tops with a group of Hispanic skateboarders -- but he falls into an alley and gets stunned and, then, captured.  (A network of Hispanic nurses in the hospital help him to escape from custody.)  Bob is trying to activate the sleeper cell of radical terrorists but the dope has addled his brain and he can't recall the password necessary to get those people engaged.  (Ultimately, he asks to speak to his interlocutor Comrade Josh's boss and breaks through on the basis of his fame as the bomb specialist "Rocket Man.")  The ICE commandos, now supported by some kind of neo-Nazi paramilitary, capture Willa.  Colonel Lockjaw tests Willa and determines that she is, in fact, his daughter.  He, then, tenders the girl to a Bounty Hunter named Avanti and tells him to get rid of her.  Avanti is troubled by this assignment and ends up killing most of the paramilitary that are holding Willa, allowing her to escape.  She flees in a car pursued by ICE agents who are, in turn, pursued by an assassin working for the Christmas Adventurer's Club with instructions to murder both Willa and Bob and, possibly, Colonel Lockjaw since they are  convinced that he is the father of a half-black girl.  This sets up the final set piece, an elaborate chase scene that takes place on an empty highway passing through badlands that make the road rise and fall precipitously like a roller coaster.  At various times, various characters are pursuing one another.  Lockjaw who was grievously wounded when Avanti massacred the paramilitary is also humping his way along the road, his face partly shot off, and trotting along the highway in his characteristic stiff and ramrod straight gait.  It suffices to say that Willa escapes.  Later, she reads a letter from Perfidia urging her to join the revolution.  Bob continues to smoke dope.  Colonel Lockjaw, who admires both his daughter and Perfidia for their ferocity, is eliminated by the Christmas Adventurers.  Word reaches Willa that there is an ICE raid planned for San Francisco and, so, she hurries away to help the immigrants evade federal officers.  

I have simplified the convoluted plot.  The movie uses characters invented by Thomas Pynchon in Vineland, but otherwise doesn't have a whole lot to do with the book.  Pynchon's influence is most apparent in the names of the characters and some jokes about the passwords used by the terrorists -- they have an elaborate Q and A procedure for identifying themselves more than a little like Bud Abbot and Lou Costello's "Who's on First" routine.  Anderson pushes his camera close to the characters and films most scenes in tight close-ups.  The camera is seldom still, restlessly following the action often in a hand-held format.  The film is shot in 35 millimeter format known as VistaVision.  In a lot of shots, characters are dimly lit or half-hidden in shadow.  The action scenes are immaculate, set pieces involving an urban car chase down alleys, the ICE raid on the sanctuary town in which a federal provocateur throws a Molotov cocktail and precipitates a riot, people running and hiding in the barrio, then, a series of car chases in barren territory culminating in the final up-and-down sequence on the desert road -- the road dips so suddenly and steeply that the audience feels the downgrade in their bellies (the camera seems mounted on the front of the moving car).  The climactic scenes with the cars lunging over the hills are similar to the final minutes of Spielberg's Sugarland Express, also an extended chase scene in which half-wrecked cars bounce over desert dunes in a sort of exhausted ballet.  The movie's mise-en-scene is masterful and the film is smoothly efficient -- there are very few memorable shots; rather, it's the editing and mobile camerawork that carries the burden of meaning.  One Battle After Another is extremely thrilling -- the picture feels far shorter than its almost three hours running length. The acting is good if rudimentary -- there are very few speeches of any consequence, mostly the characters are just running for their lives.  In fact, there's very little in the way of memorable dialogue -- the characters speak in slogans and acronyms, using military jargon and code.  Anderson is not afraid to use ugly-looking footage when it suits his purpose -- the camera work which is all close-ups isn't eloquent but it has a punch and keeps everything moving.  Although teasers for the movie show Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Bob, running around with a big long gun on his shoulder, a neo-Western image, as far as I can recall DiCaprio never fires a shot in the movie.

If this film had been released in October a year ago, most critics, I think, would dismiss the plot as a febrile fantasy, a wildly implausible conspiracy picture.  But that was then.  This is now.  People in masks and unmarked cars have been "disappearing" people off American streets.  Sanctuary cities have been raided and churches, hospitals, and schools invaded.  Elon Musk with Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, all of them billionaires and White, were prominently displayed behind Trump at his inauguration.  Trump has unconditionally pardoned more than a thousand violent rioters who tried to overthrow the election of Joe Biden.  The levers of government are being pulled to weaponize the Department of Justice.  Contrary to the National Review's criticism, this film feels far more prescient as to our current dilemma that it would have been in October of 2024 when most of the mayhem visible in Vistavision on the big screen was merely a twinkle in President Trump's eye.

Parthenope

 The great Italian director, Paolo Sorrentino, works in images and doesn't seem to have mastered the craft of narrative.  This is a minor deficiency -- Fellini was one of world's most famous and finest directors and, at least after La Strada, more or less abandoned coherent narrative.  Sorrentino is a disciple of Fellini and, similarly, uninterested in devising a plot for his films -- instead, he orchestrates moods using lavish, opulent cinematography, operatic characters, and surreal, baffling imagery.  Parthenope (2023) is one of his most characteristic works -- like its leading lady, the film's sheer beauty has been held against it.  Surly critics note the production involvement of Saint Laurent in the movie's credits and accuse the picture of being as empty and glamorous as a perfume ad.  The movie is excellent, but, as with late Fellini, often a matter of taste and, certainly, a test of the viewer's "negative capability", that is, willingness to abide with mystery and enigma.  

Parthenope is a beautiful young woman.  The film bearing her name depicts her life from birth through old age -- the movie ends with her retirement from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Trento where she has become a beloved and influential professor.  She is born in the water of a lagoon, a blue basin near the Palazzo where her wealthy family lives.  Her godfather, the Commandante, names her Parthenope for the sea-nymph who sought to seduce Odysseus with her voice, failed, and, then, drowned herself in the sea.  Her body washed up at the site of Naples and she is regarded as the mythic patron to the city.  (There are images in renaissance emblem books of water from Parthenope's breasts quenching the furious fires of Vesuvius).  Parthenope's supernatural beauty entrances her brother Raimondo as well as the housekeeper's handsome son.  Parthenope, like the young Jesus in the Temple, amazes the doctors at the university with her sagacity and self-assurance.  She adulates Marotto, an aging professor of anthropology and expresses a wish to become a scholar herself.  With her brother, Raimondo, and the maid's son, she goes to the island of Capri where she meets, by amazing coincidence (Sorrentino's plotting is very perfunctory) John Cheever, played by Gary Oldman.  (Parthenope loves Cheever's writing.)  When  she asks Cheever to walk with her, the elderly depressed man says that the won't because he "doesn't want to rob her of a second of her youth."  An oligarch whose helicopter hovers over the beach where she bathes, courts her unsuccessfully -- when she rejects him, he bluntly tells her that she is very stupid.  Ultimately, Parthenope has sex with the maid's gorgeous son; her brother, Raimondo, is heart-broken and his incestuous desire causes him to commit suicide.  During his funeral in Naples, his hearse is met by a hideous-looking VW bus spewing fumes from arthropoid spider-leg nozzles (the bus looks like a centipede) -- this is disinfectant against cholera which has come to Naples.  Parthenope, who excels in her studies in anthropology, drops out of school briefly because a talent agent has told her she could be an actress  (The talent agent, always swathed in veils or steam in her steambath, tries to seduce Parthenope, also unsuccessfully.)   Parthenope is told to visit a woman (stage-)named Greta Cool.  This is a "diva", a famous actress on the order of Sophia Loren.  At a celebration, Cool denounces Naples, which is her home town, as being corrupt, shabby, venal, and wretched.  This leads to Cool's confrontation with a City Father, a sort of gnome or ogre, whom she kicks repeatedly in the shins and, then, tries to bite off his ear.  He knocks off her red wig revealing that Greta Cool suffers from alopecia.  Discussion with Greta Cool leads Parthenope to renounce her ambitions to be an actress.  She tours Naples' teeming slums with a mafia boss who leads her through the mean streets to a pool hall where a pale young man and young woman are forced to copulate in public, some sort of weird ritual featuring the "fusion" of two houses of criminals in the Gomorrha ghetto.  Parthenope is pregnant with the mob boss's child but gets an abortion.  She returns to the long-suffering Professor Marotto to complete the doctoral dissertation -- Marotto tells her to write on the cultural and anthropological aspects of the miracle of San Gennaro.  Parthenope goes to the Cathedral to watch the miracle, which involves the liquefaction on Gennaro's feast-day of a clot of Christ's blood.  The miracle fails but a woman in the congregation spills her menstrual blood on the cathedral floor -- the coming of her period is another sort of miracle.  (The sequence is very redolent of the miraculous apparition of the virgin that causes a riot in a rainstorm in La Dolce Vita.)  Parthenope visits the Bishop of Naples, Teserone in his luxurious apartments.  He decks her naked body with jewels from the Cathedral's treasury and puts his hands on her genitals.  At that moment, the camera retreats from the love scene, through the various spectacular corridors of the palace, to the San Gennaro relic where we hear a faint dripping as if the clot of blood has, at least, partially liquefied.  Professor Marotto retires.  He lives alone with his disabled son.  Marotto's wife has left him and the old man sleeps on a cot  in the room where his son is confined.  Parthenope visits Marotto's home and is ushered into the room where the retarded boy is watching TV.  (He's like a grotesque Italian version of Beavis or Butthead; he crows about the Tv announcer saying the word "asshole.")  The boy is a vast ballon of marble-white flesh, a huge swollen mass the size of house with a tiny smirking face on the front of his globular head.  Parthenope declares that the boy is "beautiful" and strokes his marmoreal flesh.  In a brief epilogue, we see Parthenope, now about seventy, retiring from the anthropology department where two young women declare her influence to have been decisive in their lives.  That night, Parthenope goes outside and sees a huge parade -- the enthusiastic supporters of Naples soccer team are marching in the street under fireworks.  The team has won the Italian equivalent of the world series.  Parthenope is excited herself and says:  "Much time has passed.  But I'm still here.  I defend the City."  (Sorrentino is an avid soccer fan; the movie he directed before this film The Hand of God is a coming-of-age picture keyed to soccer and a controversial goal by Diego Maradona in Mexico City in 1986, the so-called "hand of God" goal.)

The movie is wonderful but, also, somewhat indecipherable.  It many ways it resembles Sorrentino's equally bizarre and enigmatic series made for HBO, The Young Pope (2016)and The Old Pope (2019)-- indeed, some scenes are almost identical including the horror-movie reveal of Stefano, Marotto's deformed and grotesque son.  Many allusions are lost on non-Italian viewers -- for instance, the frog-like Commandante represents Achille Lauro, the Italian right wing political figure and shipping magnate.  The mafia scenes are particularly difficult to interpret and there is a showy student riot complete with slow-motion molotov cocktails exploding -- I don't know what this represents.  There are two leit motifs:  men project onto Parthenope their own ideas and thoughts, often asking her "What are you thinking?"  Everyone wants to know what is going on behind her gorgeous face.  Another more academic aspect of the film is a question that keeps being posed:  What is anthropology?  After various inadequate responses, the question is answered:  "Seeing."  With that statement, Sorrentino aligns anthropology with film-making -- his movies are a form of anthropology.  Of course, Sorrentino's break-out picture is called The Great Beauty and, I think, the rather picaresque narrative in Pathenope is about the destiny of beauty in our world.  Celesta Dalla Porta plays Parthenope and, of course, she is a sight to behold.  

Excited Delirium: Alien: Earth and M, Son of the Century

 This is a true story. When I was in college, I entered a radio contest for free tickets to the Minnesota premiere of Ridley Scott's Alien.  I no longer recall what the contest involved, probably just making a phone call and praising the radio station (it was old KQRS in St. Louis Park), but to my surprise, I won, and found myself with two tickets to the opening night show at the Skyway Theater on Hennepin Avenue.  I had admired Ridley Scott's first feature film, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's short story, "The Duelists".  With my girlfriend, I attended the show with the movie projected to a packed urban audience -- it was an unpleasant experience, too intense, and the picture scared the hell out of me.  Later, I read a review of the movie that said that it was a disappointment, "just a gorilla in a haunted house horror movie."  That description cheered me up and can also be applied to the TV limited series Alien: Earth (2025) broadcast on HULU.  The show is written by Noah Hawley, the author of the very good scripts for the Fargo knock-off series.  Hawley is pretty skilled but Alien: Earth, so far as I can see, is a disappointment although the show has had good reviews and is impressively produced.  Hawley has the difficult task of expanding on a premise that remains, now, fifty years later, still just "a gorilla on a rampage in a haunted house."  He tricks out the show with a complicated plot involving intrigue and competition between two homicidal corporations and devises a good villain (the monsters have long since ceased to be villainous), a smarmy technocrat on the order of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk named "Boy Cavalier".  (Hawley's villain in the most recent Fargo series, played by the Golem-like Jon Hamm was one of the best bad guys in recent memory.)  The corporations are distinguished by their different approaches to AI:  one corp. uses so-called "hybrids", that is human clones in which the consciousnesses of dying people are installed; the other corp. produces "cyborgs" --  that is, half-human and half-machine personages with enhanced strength and intelligence.  These two different types of artificial beings are ostensibly important but don't seem central to the plot, a story about a gang of 'hybrids' confronting the space monsters in the context of some kind of convoluted intrigue involving industrial espionage.  A space ship transporting a menagerie of monstrous critters from deep space crashes into a huge tenement somewhere on earth -- it may be Singapore or Indonesia.  The monsters who come in various forms have escaped on the space ship and massacred the crew.  Of course, the crash into the apartment building allows the critters to escape, although, somehow, they are, more or less, captured and confined in some sort of laboratory, apparently on the island where Boy Cavalier is engaged in his sinister experiments -- in a parody of Peter Pan, Boy Cavalier has inserted the souls of a group of dying children into young adult bodies, a metamorphosis that much confuses the children who find themselves suddenly sexually mature and no longer riddled with cancer.  This experiment is conducted on a lush island that looks a bit like the environs of Jurassic Park.  The leader of the lost boys (and girls) on the island is a comely maiden named "Wendy" in homage to the pastiche of Peter Pan.  Wendy is super-smart.  She figures out how to communicate with the monsters and spends the last part of the series chatting-up the bloodthirsty critters and transforming them into her private army.  Wendy's also equipped with a fully human brother who has to be protected from the machinations of the wicked Boy Cavalier and the onslaughts of the monsters.  The creatures include some centipede-shaped bugs, malign walking stick insects like genus Argosarchus Horridus from New Zealand, ticks that creep into you bodily orifices and suck out all your fluids from the inside, and, of course, the so-called Xenomorph which exists in three instars:  octopoidal face-grabber, chest-burster, and the primate-like, long-tailed adult xenomorph with is sloppy hydraulically-automated jaws and acid blood -- the Xenomorph, of course, is the canonical alien and well-known to audiences from films in the fifty year franchise.  The best monster is a blob with squid-like tentacles and a globular, mucous head in which a half-dozen blood shot eyes are floating.  This beast is very fleet of foot, dances around like a tentacular Fred Astaire, ambushes you, and attaching to the side of your head gouges out one of your eyes -- the parasite, then, inserts its spherical six-eyed head into the bloody vacated socket whereupon all six eyes, then, become one great blood shot orb malignly surveying the world from the head of the person or creature (in one case a goat) who has been so colonized.  The monsters are great, but the special effects seem shaky -- the show doesn't seem to have much confidence in them and stages all the creature sequences the standard dim blue shadows that filmmakers use to conceal sketchy FX.  As in the original movie, there are corridors full of flashing red lights, gusts of steam, dark shadows, and jump-scares.  There's a lot of mayhem on screen but I found it weirdly soothing, soporific even -- I spent half my time ostensibly watching this show asleep, seized by slumbers just as the horrors became most intense.  I suppose this was because I didn't care about of the characters, felt nothing when the monsters reduced them to heaps of gory innards, and, although I detested Boy Cavalier, my distaste for the character was apparently not enough to keep me awake.  In the last episode, Wendy uses her powers to communicate with the monsters to unleash them on the various factotums loyal to Boy Cavalier -- apparently, the money had run out at this late stage because the climactic creature attacks are shown on surveillance camera footage, that is more grey-blue darkness with very little contrast, a very disappointing ending to the show. (It's been renewed and I expect we'll get, at least, another season of this stuff.)  

M - Son of the Century is a baffling biopic of Mussolini.  It's well-acted but seems to be completely pointless and mindnumbingly repetitive.  Mussolini preens and struts and, then, delivers about three extended speeches per episode.  When the Fascist isn't speaking, he's inciting his thugs to beat up and murder socialists in bouts of spectacularly choreographed street-fighting.  Each show features several battles, staged like incidents in World War One -- hordes of blackshirted goons beat socialists (in one case with rigid batons of codfish), gouge out their eyes, or set them on fire.  Mussolini watches theses fracases from afar, then, his libido stirred by all the ultra-violence -- it looks like poorly lit outtakes from A Clockwork Orange -- brutishly paws and fucks his malevolent-looking flapper girlfriend.  Mussolini also has a long-suffering wife, Rachelle, at home -- she has frizzy red hair and he also has sex with her, slaps her around, and, then, has to deal with her attempts to kill him with a revolver that she hides under her pillow.  Mussolini's rival is the poet Gabriel  D'Annunzio who is also a flying ace.  If anything D'Annunzio is farther to the right then Benito.  Mussolini is very prone to speechifying -- he gives speeches in the streets, to crowds of his thugs, and, then, in the Italian parliament.  His speeches are all the same -- in fact, each episode is, more or less, the same.  Mussolini schemes and like an Italian Richard III sucks the viewer into his confidence, declaiming his various Machiavellian strategies.  Between speeches, the Black Shirts beat everyone up and shoot many dead.  Mussolini has sex with his girlfriend, using her so harshly that she seems about half-dead when its time for the Duce to hurry to parliament or a political meeting to give another speech.  This material, which doesn't ever cohere into a plot, is extravagantly filmed -- the style of the movie is like Baz Luhrmann on speed:  it's all elaborate tracking shots, weird camera angles, sweaty close-ups like a Sergio Leone movie, with a soundtrack that is either operatic (Puccini and Wagner are much favored) or techno-rock.  The sets are seething with smoke and fog and gouts of fire (a lot like the corridors in Alien: Earth) and there are rickety scaffoldings everywhere, tenement-like slums, and misty riversides through which horseman ride in columns -- these scenes look like Bertolucci's 1900.  It's all either stylized or staged in elaborately decorated rococo palaces.  This show presents a single relentlessly frenzied libidinal texture that's almost completely featureless:  bouts of gruesome violence, rapes, and orations by Mussolini.  It's completely soporific -- I have never been able to stay awake for a single episode:  I'm always asleep at about 30 minutes into the hour-long shows, awakened by the theme music at the end, or, even, more belatedly by the opera or techno-rock accompanying the next episode.  Once, after I had fallen asleep to my dismay, I forced myself to watch the part of the episode during which I had been asleep.  I wondered if it would be different from what I saw before succumbing to slumber -- it was not:  Mussolini struts around, puffs out his chest, gives a long speech and, then, his thugs beat a score of socialists to death while the hero has sex with his mistress.  The program is spectacularly made, full of startling and wonderful images, and completely without any interest -- so far as I can tell it's just the same thing over and over.  (This is an Italian- British coproduction shot in Italian and directed by the Englishman Joe Wright).

Velasco and Gatsby at 100: MIA

 It's my ambition to spend the waning years of my life looking at art and reading books on art history and  criticism.  Too late, it seems.  My legs hurt now when I amble around art museums and my eyes don't focus well on the pictures -- it seems that I spend most of my time with my eyeglasses in my hand, stooped over to read labels.  Gradually, it seems that my experience of museum art is more about the labels on the wall than the pictures which seem increasingly blurry to me.  I've always favored graphic work, prints and engravings, and, indeed, this may be the only kind of image that I see clearly -- I can push my face up close to the image and, without my glasses, inspect the hachure and bite of the burin as exhibited by the print or engraving.  It would be nice to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art every month, but I can't seem to make the time and, so, I am at the museum usually at intervals of three months.  I've been going to MIA since I was six and have been there many times and the place is very familiar to me although, on each occasion, I find something new and intriguing.  On October 2, after a brief business meeting in St. Paul, I drove over to the Institute, planning to see just one or two galleries before driving back to Austin.  But, as is always the case, I spent more time than I expected and, even, saw some things worthy of reporting to my readers.  Hence, this note.

The Mexican landscape artist, Jose Maria Velasco, lived from1840 to 1912, dying two years after the first great revolution of a century of revolutions, the Mexican Revolution, began in 1910.  Velasco is well-known, even revered in his home country, but, almost, completely unknown in the United States.  About 20 works are on exhibit at the MIA; these range from small watercolors and studies (rocks, jungle vegetation, and clouds) to heroically sized canvases that are akin in subject matter and photo-realist detail to paintings by the American artists Bierstadt, Moran, and Fredric Erwin Church.  (To my eyes, Velasco is most similar to Church with a little admixture of the visionary strain visible in Thomas Cole.)  The selection of Velasco paintings include a number of perspectives on Mexican snow-capped mountains looming over the Vale of Mexico, a grim-looking apocalyptic waterspout (the picture is very small -- if it were larger, the thing would be overwhelming) and the eruption of a volcano.  There's a startling picture of a feathery silver comet hanging over of one of Mexico's eerie endorheic lakes -- the huge comet is reflected in the dismal water trapped in a desert basin.  (The label treats the painting as a harbinger of Mexican revolution -- the image portrays a celestial apparition about twenty years before the canvas was made at the time of the uprising.  Velasco painted desert scenes with cactus and textile mills occupying the middle distance.  A Cardon tree in Oaxaca looks like a platter held up on a trunk and bristling with sixty saquaro cactuses -- a little fellow is visible at the foot of the surrealistic tree to provide scale.  A small painting of what Velasco calls a "rustic bridge" looks a bit like Menzel, it's a jerry-rigged collection of splintery planks hanging in trees drooping over a pond of murky water; however, the bridge, almost indiscernible in the tattered trees seems to have a pale skeleton tangled up in it -- on closer inspection, the skeleton is just a group of white anthropomorphic roots, although one must query why those roots have suddenly sprouted from the side of the tree about 10 feet above its base.  Velasco's masterpiece is a majestic canvas called "The Valley of Mexico from the Hill of Santa Isobel", a large-scale work that the artist painted for an exhibition in Vienna and that exists in, at least, three versions, two of which are in the show.  Meticulously painted, the image, when reproduced for a book or Art Institute flyer, seems to be a photograph -- at full size, the canvas covers the wall (it's dimensions are 161 x 228 cm) and reveals its brush strokes.  But, viewed from middle distance, the picture has a photo-realist quality.  In the second iteration of the picture (1875), a woman carrying a baby walks along the stony hillside, two dogs and a small boy dancing in front of her;  the woman imparts a sense of scale to the huge barren landscape spread out below the hill.  In the middle distance, a pale grid with minute buildings marks the cathedral and outbuildings sacred to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the Tepec hill; farther away, a white stain on the valley floor, like an encrustation of salt, represents Mexico City -- the shallow lakes near the city extend to the right across a brown treeless steppe stretching to twin volcanoes on the horizon.  The 1877 version of the scene is brighter; the texture of rocky hills and slopes is more visible.  There are no figures.  A skeletal nopal cactus stands roughly where the woman and dogs were earlier located; to the right, a hawk bearing some creature in its beak skates across a gorge cast into deep shadow.  The bird of prey and the nopal cactus refer to the Aztec origin story; after emerging from caves from far to the north, the Aztec marched across the deserts for generations until they reached the promised land, a valley with a great salty lake filling its basin and an eagle perched on a nopal devouring a serpent.

Gatsby at 100 occupies two small rooms.  The exhibit consists of paintings and objects from the Institute collection accompanied by quotations from Fitzgerald's novel.  There's a first edition of the book with its spooky cover showing two disembodied eyes hovering over the title and a blue, hazy landscape.  I don't think the juxtaposition of art and citations from the book is particularly successful -- the images seem mostly unrelated to the passages from the novel.  But there are some fine things in the exhibit.  A large 1928 lithograph of a very freely drawn nude by Matisse ("Nude, Left Hand over Shoulder") is particularly fine.  A huge photograph showing mostly horizon with two farms at opposite ends of panorama is striking -- 2017 Tei Nguyen.  A lithograph entitled "Minneapolis" (Louis Lozowick, 1925) show the city as square slab towers and great pillars of grain elevators, their columns round as the ranks of a pipe organ.  

Every time I walk the corridors and exhibition spaces of the MIA, I discover new things, little treasures that I haven't seen before.  An eerie late painting by Winslow Homer looks like Robert Motherwell; it's called "Cape Trinity, Soqueney River."  A ribbon of moonlight illumines a huge black bluff overlooking water in which an odd, untethered strip of pale reflection shows.  The label pursues the post hoc fallacy suggesting that the big, abstract black forms prefigure Homer's death in 1910 -- but the canvas was painted in 1904; it's not a premonition of anything but Abstract Expressionism forty-five years later.  In a big room full of architectural models -- usually a place I ignore -- there's a metal ornament marked "Consultation Rooms" designed by Sullivan for the Farmers National Bank in Owatonna.  The "t" letters in the legend are an architect's tee-square -- the thing is green, verdant with ornamentation, a beautiful object.  Upstairs where the American folk paintings are hung, there's a huge canvas that seems to be a copy of Alfred Bierstadt's iconic painting, "The Last of the Buffalo".  This painting is a parody by someone named Keith Monkman made in 2009 and is called the "Death of Adonis".  A blonde cowboy, a bit like a young George Armstrong Custer, is falling backward from his steed.  Another bison hunter lies dead on the ground.  Aphrodite, portrayed as a sort of Vegas showgirl, with red spike heels and a naked ass squats next to the corpse.  Another blonde cowboy ("cowboi"?) is being gored by a big, furious buffalo.  (The image is cartoonish but striking and, particularly interesting, in light of another show in the Institute, a small room full of very strange renaissance prints called "The Weirdening of the Renaissance" -- the title suggests the jocular, cavalier tone on the explanatory labels.  In one of the engravings, a nymph is scrubbing away at Aphrodite's private parts while Adonis, halfway transformed into a stag, struts forward, advancing like a post man carrying a letter or some kind of perverse butler or valet. (In the background of the engraving, poor Adonis, now fully metamorphosed into a stag is being torn apart by his own dogs.)

I was thrilled to find my favorite painting in the whole world on show, the miniature Indian image of "Lovers Watching an Approaching Thunderstorm".  This small image was made between 1780 and 1790 by an anonymous craftsman of so-called Kangra School (workers in Himachal Pradish wherever that may be.)  This picture is something that I would be happy to gaze upon forever, or, until my retina detaches under the pressure of the image, or until my eyesight is destroyed by wet (or dry) macular degeneration.  It is the most wonderful thing and has not been on display for several years and so I am ecstatic to see it again.  

Our Man in Havana

 A very dark, absurdist comedy Our Man in Havana is an oblique precursor to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove released five years later in 1964.  Our Man in Havana is shot in high-contrast black and white, alternating between lurid expressionism and documentary realism -- this is exactly the photographic style that Kubrick uses.  Further, the themes of both films are related:  Our Man in Havana is an eerie and prescient precursor to the Cuban missile crisis -- the film's plot involves a supposedly advanced atomic weapon hidden in Cuba's Sierra Madre; of course, Kubrick's movie exploits anxieties about nuclear Armageddon current in the early sixties.  Both films are about the idiocy of the military-industrial complex.  Strangelove is more apocalyptic but both movies posit that our collective existence is dangling by a hair manipulated by forces motivated by deceit, lust, and greed.

Alec Guinness plays Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman eking out a meager living in Havana, a place that has only intermittent electrical power.  Wormold's wife has run away leaving him with a feisty and self-absorbed teenage daughter.  It is very expensive for Wormold to maintain his daughter's life-style -- she is a convent-educated spoiled brat who makes Wormold buy her a horse and, then, join the country club so that she will have a place to ride.  Even worse, she is being courted by Captain Segura, a greasy-looking gendarme with a reputation for torturing people -- he has a villainous moustache and is ferried around in a big limousine by thugs; the part is played, more or less, straight by the great comedian Ernie Kovacs.  Noel Coward dressed in suit and bowler hat comes calling on Wormold and recruits him as an MI 5 agent, a spy serving the British government as "our man in Havana."  Coward seduces Guinness' Wormold in a  toilet at the Country Club and, throughout the movie, spy encounters take place in rest rooms, leading to the suspicion that the cell of informants also comprises a network of homosexuals.  Coward's recruiter gives Wormold some invisible ink and instructs him in a "book code" sending messages by references to pages and letters in Charles Lamb's Stories from Shakespeare.  Wormold proves to be an incompetent agent, although the extra money that he earns makes him sufficiently prosperous to support his daughter's profuse spending.  Under pressure to recruit more operatives, Wormold simply names people in his circle as his associates and claims that they are working for him.  The spymasters in London obligingly send him more money to pay for his country club membership and to reimburse the new agents that Wormold has invented.  Wormold satisfies London's demand for more information by providing elaborate schematic pictures of vacuum cleaners that he represents as large and sinister weapons hidden in the mountains.  London is impressed and sends Wormold an attractive secretary, Beatrice, and a radio operator named Rudy.  When Wormold is supposed to introduce Beatrice and Rudy to his agents, he contrives a plan to keep the non-existent spies off-stage.  But, then, someone starts murdering the people whom he has identified as  agents, even though in fact they are hapless patsies.  In fact, this adversary spy network plots to kill Wormold by poisoning him at a vacuum-cleaner retailer's convention -- Wormold escapes although an unfortunate dachshund eats the poison and expires.  Captain Segura is nosing around and Wormold plays checkers with him using little airplane-sized bottles of whisky and bourbon.  When you take your opponent's checker piece, you have to drink it.  Segura gets blind drunk (he's a better checkers player than Wormold) and Guinness steals his revolver.  He, then, meets the enemy agent who tried to poison him, a fellow who, in fact, seems to be a homosexual, and squires him around Havana's night spots.  At last, he guns down the enemy agent in a very poorly edited and confusing sequence.  The fraud, Wormold, is summoned to London to meet with the big bosses at MI 5.  Realizing that exposing Wormold will make them all look foolish, the spymasters decide to honor the film's hero, admitting him to the Order of the British Empire.  Wormhold gets to canoodle with his attractive secretary and his daughter, now more adult, has outgrown her horse and is ready to cut a swath through London's young men.   

This is all light-weight genial stuff, although there is a subplot with Burl Ives playing a German emigre to Havana that is more serious in tone and, in fact, tragic.  Ives takes the role of Karl Hesselbacher, someone who fled from Germany in 1934, and who works as a doctor in Cuba.  Due to his association with Wormold, he is mercilessly persecuted by both the thugs in power (the film takes place on the eve of Castro's revolution) and, also, by the enemy, presumably Soviet, spy network.  Ives is affecting as the German healer and alchemist -- he's working on some kind of formulae for blue cheese.  At first, the regime (or the enemy spies) smash his laboratory and, then, he's gunned down in an open-air bar to which he and Wormold have often retired to drink daiquiris.   Hesselbacher fancies himself a kind of virtuous soldier -- as he is persecuted, he dons his WWI vintage pickelhaube and the pointed helmet is set on his casket when he is buried.  

Carol Reed stages the night-time scenes with canted camera angles and violently expressionistic shadows and light -- the scenes of Havana at night with its lurid-looking arcades, prostitutes, and flaring streetlights looks like footage from Welles' Touch of Evil.  It is flamboyantly spectacular and, also, of course, similar to Reed's imagery in The Third Man, a picture to which Our Man in Havana seems to have been intended as pendent.  Reed stages nightclub scenes with crowded tapestries of squirming female flesh and many of his interiors are jammed with people, costumes, and weird bric-a-brac to the extent that the imagery often resembles Pabst in The Love of Jeanne Ney or Three-penny Opera.  The street life in Havana is affectionately observed.  Coward's straitlaced British businessman is always flanked by musicians serenading him and there are lottery numbers displayed in the bars, jovial blind men and all sorts of half-naked girls cavorting in front of orchestras playing the habanera.  It's a great-looking movie and very well acted but just a little bit off, as it were; something indefinable is lacking.   The movie was shot in Havana in the months after Castro took power.  Fidel visited the set and reportedly chatted with Alec Guinness. The wide-screen format is beautifully used in an opening sequence in which a brawny stevedore gets eyed by a voluptuous hooker, approaches her, and, she flips him an piece of fruit that she has been eating -- the arc of the fruit extends all the way across the screen to where the stevedore is standing, defining the width of the frame (this shot freezes to let us contemplate the amorous couple and the celluloid distance between them.)  Watch carefully and you will see them strolling the streets in some of the later scenes. 

Sudden Fear

Sudden Fear (1952) is a Joan Crawford vanity picture that manages to be reasonably entertaining, if irritating -- Crawford is featured in almost every shot, frequently in enormous close-up.  The diva acts as if "fit to tear a cat", but she's not really very expressive -- her face is an abstract, mostly immobile wide-eyed mask; as someone once said in another context:  her performance runs the gamut from A to B. The film is extraordinary in some respects -- it's one of the few movies to directly acknowledge and exploit the ghastly appearance of its leading man, Jack Palance.  Palance is a goblin but his bizarre looks are generally taken for granted in other films in which he performs, just part of the equipment of a character actor specializing in heavies (this is the part, for instance, he plays in Shane).  Sudden Fear is a "beauty and the beast" story and Palance's uncanny features are, in fact, thematic to the film.  This is dramatized in the opening sequence in which Crawford, playing the part of an ultra-wealthy heiress and successful Broadway playwright, orders the director of her upcoming romance, in rehearsals, to fire Palance -- "he doesn't look like a romantic leading man," Crawford opines and, indeed, no truer words have ever been spoken.  Palance's character tells Crawford to go to San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor Art Museum to see a portrait of the great lover Casanova -- his point is that Casanova was an unprepossessing man with a large wart on his chin and that great lovers are, often, rather homely and plain-looking.  (Palance isn't just plain-looking; he's as scary as a movie monster).  I characterized this film as "beauty and the beast" but, in fact, it's better described as "the beast and the beast" -- Crawford is strange-looking also with glaring eyes under midnight black eyebrows and a sort of cardboard cut-out figure that is strangely formal and not sexy at all.  Both Crawford and Palance, accordingly, are Hollywood monsters -- it is unchivalrous to note that Crawford was 47 when she ramrodded through this project, an unabashed vanity production.  

Although Joan Crawford and Jack Palance have names in the convoluted plot of Sudden Fear, I can't remember them and, indeed, there's no point to referring to the characters using their sobriquets in the film -- so I'll just retain the usage of calling the stars, in this star vehicle, by their actual names.  After insulting Palance, Joan Crawford leaves Manhattan by train, traveling to her home (actually, at least, two homes) in San Francisco.  Palance turns out to be on the same coast-to-coast train and he courts Crawford, winning her heart during their several days of travel.   The movie is shrewd about concealing Palance's motives -- perhaps, he really loves her or, maybe, this is an elaborate scheme to punish her for firing him from the Broadway show.  In San Francisco, the couple continue their love affair and, in fact, Palance marries the playwright.  But, it turns out that Palance has a hussy on the side, Irene, played by Gloria Graham.  (Graham envisions the role as a sort of pre-pubescent nymphet; she's a sexualized brat.)  Irene and Palance plot to murder Joan Crawford before she can convey her enormous inherited wealth to some kind of non-profit foundation -- she wants to live solely on the proceeds of her plays.  The scheme to murder the playwriting heiress ends up being recorded by a dictation machine in Crawford's mansion and, of course, she hears her husband and his whore conspiring to the kill her.  At this point, the script, never particularly persuasive in the first place, goes off the tracks.  Crawford doesn't flee or report the murder plot to authorities; instead she contrives an elaborate plot of her own to kill Palance and pin the murder on Irene -- we get a fantasy-version of the plot complete with Irene being sentenced to death for the murder of her paramour.  This plan is too complicated to be executed successfully -- it involves carefully forged letters setting up assignations, a written time-table composed in 10 minute increments, Crawford dressing so as to imitate Irene's garb, and all sorts of other tricks and strategems.  At the last moment, Crawford can't bring herself to gun down Palance.  She ends out on the empty, mountainous streets of San Francisco, darting through an elaborate chiaroscuro of expressionistic alleys and lanes with Palance hunting her in a big boat of a car.  This is a spectacular tour-de-force involving glaring lights, dense darkness, canted camera angles, and very deep focus with figures fleeing across the remote background of empty urban landscapes -- all de Chirico's "Mystery and Melancholy of the Street" but with figures playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game in the shadowy arcades and plazas.  

I've called Sudden Fear, a vanity project for Joan Crawford.  There are three set-pieces featuring her emoting in big close-ups.  These sequences are unduly protracted and exist solely to allow Crawford to exhibit her acting chops.  In the first scene, Crawford voicelessly reacts to hearing Palance and Irene plotting to kill her.  Her eyes dilate, she breathes like a creature that is being relentlessly hunted, darting about in confusion, and, at last, simulates nausea (albeit in a very lady-like way) fleeing off-screen to vomit.  In the second protracted sequence, Crawford struggles with herself as to whether she should shoot Palance -- again, she's wide-eyed, anguished, clutching at herself.  The sequence just goes on and on.  At last, in the final shot, Crawford walks toward the camera that tracks with her:  we see her grief and horror become resignation and, then, transformed into something like triumph or, at least, resolute and courageous determination -- it's intended as a showpiece.  The script is overly intricate and profoundly implausible.  There are a number of red herrings or just downright errors in the scenario:  a bottle of poison is introduced into the film but not used and there's a scary winding set of steps without guardrail that lead fifty feet down  from a castle-like villa on the Bay to the stony rocks in the harbor -- but no one gets pitched off the steps.  Palance says that he's never been to San Francisco -- if this is true, how did he know about the picture of Casanova in the museum at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.  Palance's face is one of cinema's great, disturbing icons:  he's like an animate jack-o'-lantern, his taut skin stretched to the breaking point, a caricature of movie-handsome that is, in fact, hideous with a profile that looks like Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.  Mike Connors, credited as "Touch" Connors, later famous as TV's Mannix, has the thankless role of Irene's escort and ostensible boyfriend -- of course, she's really having sex with the monstrous Palance (Connors' cliche good looks are not as intriguing as  the mug on Palance's monster); the poor guy is perpetually teased by Gloria Graham's perverse Irene but, always, comically rebuffed. 

All We Imagine as Light

 Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine As Light is a deceptively simple film, an example of poetic realism, examining the lives of three women who work at a hospital in Mumbai.  The film has rough edges and, for 2/3rds of its 115 minute length, approximates a documentary --there are many hand-held shots, tracking scenes shot from subway cars, and images of monsoon storms in which the sky turns to a blue flood over the forest of high-rises.  Mumbai is shown in images that emphasize its claustrophobic aspects -- the tiny apartments and crush of people on the streets.  Lovers petting in a park appear against a backdrop of boys playing soccer just beyond a tattered veil of trees.  The subways are crowded to the point of appearing suffocating.  On the soundtrack, voices describe Mumbai as chaotic and lonely, a sort of funnel into which all the villages of south India have poured their people to make this thronging ferment -- everyone in the movie is a stranger and they are homesick for the impoverished rural places from which they have come.  But the last third of the movie, filmed along the Kerala coast, is bucolic and takes a strange turn into something like magical realism.  This part of the movie is integral to its meanings and, although describing the plot twist near the end is a spoiler, I don't know any other way of doing justice to this unique and wonderful film.  So, readers, beware...

Prabha is an efficient, experienced nurse at a teaching hospital in Mumbai.  Her husband, whom she barely knew (it was an arranged marriage) has emigrated to Germany where he works in a factory.  For a time, he called her and sent money home, but, now, has gone silent.  When Prabha calls him in Germany, she gets a woman's voice on the answering machine.  Prabha is isolated, like most of her associates, a refugee from a small, poverty-stricken Malayalam-speaking village somewhere a half day's train ride from the big city.  She repels invitations to go to the movies with her colleagues and rebuffs men who tentatively attempt to encourage her interest in them.  She seems sad and remote.  One day a rice-cooker arrives in the mail, a product of Germany -- during the monsoon, with sheets of water falling outside the window (and through as well since the shutters have blown open) she squats on the floor to embrace the fire-truck red cooker; it's all she has of her husband.  Prabha's roommate is Anu, an attractive nurse probably about fifteen years younger.  Anu is carrying on a forbidden affair with a Muslim boy, Shiaz.  All the other nurses know about this liaison, except perhaps, Prabha, who has turned a blind eye to the matter.  Prabha is trying to help Parvaty, a matronly lady also from the Malalayalam-speaking hinterlands.  Parvaty has lived for 22 years in what is called a chawl -- that is, a one-room apartment with an open balcony in a tenement building.  Mumbai is under construction and huge high-rises are being built everywhere, including on the tract of land where Parvaty's chawl is located.  The landlord intends to evict her without compensation since her papers are not in order and she can't even prove that she exists -- the lease was in the name of here deceased husband.  Prabha finds a lawyer to represent Parvaty in the landlord-tenant dispute but the attorney can't do anything to help her -- she's officially a non-person.  The first two-thirds of the movie documents these women's daily lives -- we see them on the subway, the lovers wandering in a night market or embracing by a soccer field, Prabha training young nurses who turn up their noses at a placenta that the women are studying in class.  The doctor whom Prabha serves tries to flirt with her very, very tentatively -- Prabha is teaching him the local lingua franca, that is, Hindi.  When Prabha discovers that Anu is involved with Shiaz, she insults her as a "slut", but, later, apologizes and makes Anu's favorite dish, fish curry -- Anu is also from a Malayalam village near the coast.  A cat is about to give birth.  The monsoon rains drench the city.  When it is apparent that the lawyer can't help Parvaty, Prabha and the older woman go out and throw stones at a billboard advertising the soon-to-be-built high rise resulting in the destruction of her chawl.  Anu is invited to visit Shiaz's home with his parents in a Muslim neighborhood.  Shiaz' parents are about to leave town for a wedding and the lovers will have the house to themselves.  Meanwhile Anu's mother keeps sending her pictures of possible fiancees.  Anu buys a burqa so she visit Shiaz' Muslim neighborhood.  But, then, he calls to tell  her that the subways are all flooded and that the wedding has been canceled as well.  A religious festival is underway -- earthmovers and tractors tow towering religious floats through the streets and there are fireworks.  This sequence, involving the appearance of something like the gods, marks the transition to the last third of the film that takes place far from the big city along the coastline with its rocks, coastal mountains, and beaches.  Parvaty, who is a cook at the hospital, has found a job cooking at a beach-front hostel in the village where she still has a house.  With Anu, Parvaty and Prabha go to the coast where they take rooms at a resort on a beach. Shiaz has come also and is hiding out somewhere in the environs.  He takes Anu to a sea-cave filled with ancient, eroded carvings of gods and goddesses -- Anu says that the voluptuous goddesses look like Anu.  We see a sheet or blanket spread out in the cave, apparently where Shiaz hopes to have sex with Anu.  In fact, they do have sex but the film is conspicuously vague about the location -- their mostly naked bodies are bathed in light; it is as if they are making love in a great torrent of bright light.  Prabha who has gone off into the brush to relieve herself, sees Shiaz and knows that Anu's lover has also come to the seaside resort.  A man has drowned in the sea.  Prabha runs out onto the beach where she applies CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the man who slowly revives.  There is no hospital anywhere nearby and so the man is taken to a hut where a wizened, tiny old lady lives.  The little old lady thinks that Prabha is the man's wife and she asks her to stay by his bedside as he revives.  The man wakes up but has no recollection of where he is, or how he came to be in the sea.  Prabha feeds him and washes a large wound on his side and, then, recognizes that the man is her husband, somehow, returned from Germany.  (This is the remarkable event that animates the last part of the film.)  She caresses the confused and injured man and, then, in an eerie voice-over accompanied by shots of twilight blue hills fading into mist says that she never wants to see him again.  Parvaty and Anu are sitting on the beach.  Prabha joins them and tells Anu to bring Shiaz to their beach shack.  In a long shot, under a sky resplendent with stars, we see the beach shack lit up, with music, and people dancing.  

The last part of the film is very delicately handled.  The transition from realism to dream-like fantasy is gradual.  At first, there is no electricity in the shack, but, then, miraculously there is power.  The lovers in the cave seem to be making love on the beach in bright daylight.  The strange, eroded gods watch over the young lovers.  The half-drowned man is confused about his identity and we have no way of knowing whether, in fact, he is somehow Prabha's husband who has abandoned her.  (This part of the movie reminds me of Lijo Jose Pellisery's Nanpakal Nerathu Majakkam, a film in which religious pilgrims find themselves stranded in a tiny village when their bus breaks down -- gradually, the pilgrims become disoriented and experience memories of their reincarnations; the little town is almost completely devoid of men who have all gone to Europe or Dubai for work.)  We have seen that Prabha is a kind of ghost herself, estranged from others due to her marriage to a man who has abandoned her.  Her profession is that of a rescuer and, when the nurse resuscitates the man on the beach, she perceives him as her lost husband -- she has rescued him and so, now, can escape from his baleful influence...at least, this is my interpretation of the film's ending.  The drowned man says:  "It will be different this time," but Prabha rejects him -- is this a sign of her growth?  Or just more evidence of her isolation? The pace of growth in Mumbai is irresistible; the city is being transformed into something not recognizable by its generations of immigrants from the poor villages in the area.  Parvaty says "the future is here but I'm not prepared for it."  She remarks that  she feels "scared"; Shiaz is scared by his love for the rather frivolous Anu.  An inhabitant in Mumbai says in Marathi:  This is a city of illusions.  Another woman says in Bengali:  "Even if you live in the gutter, you must not be angry.  This is the spirit of Mumbai."

The film resembles Jean Renoir.  It is very tenderly made and inexplicably moving.  In Malayalam, Shiaz writes on the wall of the cave, among other grafitti:  "Our love is like the endless sea."  And, it is from this endless sea of love, that the drowned man is pulled from the waters.  All We Imagine As Light was awarded the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.

A Very British Scandal

 A Very British Scandal is a 2018 BBC three-part series based on a non-fiction book about a celebrated political contretemps and criminal trial.  The program is very slightly opaque to American viewers because it involves aspects of the British class-system that are unclear on this side of the pond.  However, the series is so expertly and vigorously directed by Stephen Frears, so robustly and pungently acted by its principals, that the rather exotic subject matter is, at once, fascinating and gripping.  In fact, the show develops a sizeable emotional charge in the viewer -- the whole thing is so childish, unfair, and, ultimately, unreasonable that the audience feels a tangible sense of grief at the outcome.  

The series begins with a couple of MP's, apparently members of the House of Lords, dining on beef tartar and discussing their sexual conquests with Trump-style "grab 'em by the pussy" bonhomie.  The two upper crust gents claim to be bisexual and boast about experiences with both genders; the show's protagonist, a politician named Jeremy Thorpe is, however, homosexual.  Thorpe is played by Hugh Grant who is endlessly resourceful is dramatizing the MP's sense of entitlement, the impunity with which he exploits lower-caste young men, as well as the character's noblesse oblige and his virtues as a politician.  It seems that Thorpe has embarked on a torrid affair with a sweet young thing, Norman, played by Ben Whishaw.  Norman seems to be a bird with a broken wing, a melancholy victim whose demeanor suggests a damsel in distress, someone much in need of rescue.  Thorpe smitten with Norman's haplessness takes him home to his mother's house where he nonchalantly gets out a jar of vaseline, sets it on the nightstand and tells Norman to keep quiet (so as not to affright his mother) and "assume the position."  Unfortunately for Thorpe, he falls in love with Norman, sets him up in a London apartment, and nicknames him "Bunny" is letters that his sends to his boyfriend.  Of course, an unequal relationship of this kind can't persist and so Thorpe discards Bunny.  To his amazement and to the shock of the show's audience, the effeminate and timorous Bunny turns out to have a spine of steel -- he has hidden resources and, when spurned by Thorpe, aggressively seeks revenge, ultimately blackmailing him.  Thorpe brazenly tells his political cronies to have Bunny killed -- it's not clear whether he's serious or just joking but several shady demi-monde figures take the MP at his word and plot to murder Norman.  These co-conspirators are complete morons and comically inept -- they fail at their half-assed attempt to kill Norman.  The police are called upon to investigate and they easily discover evidence implicating Thorpe in the murder plot.  The bulk of the third and last episode is devoted to a spectacular trial in the Old Bailey.  Thorpe has hired a barrister named Carmen as his defense lawyer and there are plenty of fireworks in the best style of the old Rumpole shows -- witty asides, a curmudgeonly and prejudiced Judge, and scathing cross-examination.  Everyone betrays everyone else.  The MP to whom Thorpe confessed  his sexual exploits, Thorpe's best friend, is summoned to court where he give testimony against his former pal.  Norman gives an impressive speech about the travails of being homosexual in England during the era of the laws forbidding sodomy.  Further, people always underestimate the effete Norman -- he massacres Barrister Carmen during cross-examination.  Of course, a conviction of a former MP is unthinkable.  Thorpe is acquitted but his political career lies in ruins.  Throughout the film, Norman has said that he actually loved Thorpe and that his only motive in bringing the affair to light is to force the government to provide him with a National Health card expropriated by an offended former employer.  At the end of the show, we are provided glimpses of the real protagonists involved in these scandalous transactions -- Norman is the only one of the principal protagonists still alive -- and he still hasn't received a viable National Health card.  

The show is extremely witty, well-written, with lots of biting repartee in the manner of G. B. Shaw or Oscar Wilde.  The acting is beyond reproach and the complex plot moves along at a gallop.  Frears doesn't linger on scenes and cuts from place to place with aplomb, keeping the audience at his elbow with titles that tell us where the scene is playing out.  It's all exceedingly lucid, very funny, and, yet, ultimately tragic.  Curiously, in a film that is about male homosexuals, there are many excellent female parts.  Most notably, Thorpe has a plain matronly wife who absolutely refuses to be shocked or, even, judgmental about her husband's sexual exploits -- she notes that she "was raised with Benjamin Britten" and worked as an opera singer:  "I've seen things you can't even imagine," she tells her straitlaced and formal husband.  Her loyalty in the face of the awful scandal enveloping her husband is one of the most touching things in the program.  Norman also has a wife who supports him through thick and thin and the show wends its way to its courtroom climax.  Stephen Frears has always been an excellent director -- I recall his early films including My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie get laid (1987), both very fine pictures involving themes.  This program, available on Amazon, is exquisitely directed and memorably acted.  I recommend it highly.  

Black Bag

 Apparently, Great Britain is infested with top-secret, amoral, nihilistic secret service agencies for whom the end always justifies the means.  In The Lazarus Project, time-traveling agents re-set the world clock every time there is a nuclear holocaust or armaggedon,  Lazarus Project operatives are globe-trotters always in hot pursuit of purloined nuclear weapons.  The Lazarus Project is a cleverly written TV series produced in London; Black Bag, which has a similar premise, is a spy movie also set in the UK.  In Black Bag, the agents are engaged in murder and mayhem to stop a Ukrainian terrorist from planting something called "Severus" in a nuclear power plant.  Severus will bore through the shell of the reactor to set off a cataclysmic chain-reaction, predicted to end the war between Russian and Ukraine but at the cost of 20,000 civilian casualties.  (Severus is a pure example of what Hitchcock called a "MacGuffin" it's the object of intense efforts but nothing more than a plot device with no significance in itself.)  In both The Lazarus Project and Black Bag, the agents who are attractive young men and women have no real outlet for their super-confidential secrets and confessions and all suffer guilt at their misdeeds -- therefore, the characters solace themselves by having incestuous in-house love-affairs.  After all, there is no one else with whom they can share the violence and tragedy of their existences.  

Black Bag (2025, Steven Soderbergh) begins with an elaborate and wholly pointless Steadi-cam shot following the hero, George, a stiff fellow with black hornrimmed glasses, into a club after passing through a labyrinth of corridors to encounter a fellow operative who tells him that there is a mole in the group of agents charged with neutralizing Severus.  George is supposed to ferret out the traitor, a problematic task because his own wife, Katherine, (also a spy) may well be the double-agent.  George stages a dinner party for the members of the Severus team and laces the chana masala with truth serum.  This leads to a noisy, and recriminatory, gathering that plays like something from Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  The couples commence bickering, sexual infidelities are disclosed and ferocious insults exchanged.  George orders the participants to play a game in which they have to announce a resolution, not for themselves but for the person seated to their right.  This leads to more vicious fighting among the various couples until Clarissa, the tech who is expert in surveillance satellites, pins her boyfriend Freddie's hand to the table with a butcher knife.  (Not to worry -- he forgives her.)  An elaborately complex plot follows in which various clues are collected, all of which lead George to the reasonable suspicion that his wife is the Judas.  In this world, when anyone asks a question that is inconvenient to answer, they simply respond with the evasion:  "It's in the black bag."  George, who loves his wife, is met with her denials but, also, the "black bag" evasion.  A satellite is used to gather high-tech evidence and there's an extended scene involving a polygraph test that is confounded by Clarissa "clenching her anal sphincter" -- I have no idea whether this would work, although I assume the screenwriter, the  redoubtable David Koepp, has researched this issue.  (Koepp is a very famous Hollywood writer -- the Jurassic Park films are his scripts as are a number of other Spielberg projects including some of the Indiana Jones pictures.)   After many twists and turns, some aerial bombardment accomplished by a drone in a showy sequence, and several more revelations of sexual misbehavior, George and Katherine order their team to another dinner party, a reprise of the first horror-show in which the identity of the culprit is finally revealed.  Since all evidence points to Katherine, the viewer can be pretty much assured that she is not the mole.  

This is a well-made movie that is always exciting.  The acting is good:  Michael Fassbender plays the mild-mannered George -- he looks like a surrogate for Soderbergh himself.  Cate Blanchett is good as Katherine, a sort of femme fatale.  Much of the script is written in intentionally unintelligible jargon.  This is a  phenomenon that I call the Succession effect.  In the HBO series, Succession many scenes were composed in a rebarbative, nightmare lingo that is spoken so swiftly and confidently that the audience doesn't have time to figure what is actually being said -- you can generally get the tone of the remarks but not their precise meaning.  This is how Koepp has written the script for Black Bag -- people says stuff like "The Sat handover is 3 minutes and 20 seconds just long enough to gather several sigs."  Big chunks of the movie have that tone which the viewer has to interpret as hyper-technical spy-speak for high tech data gathering.  The use of this sort of impenetrable jargon was annoying in Succesion and it's no less annoying (if better justified) here.  The movie is fairly civilized, with intelligent nasty dialogue in the Albee manner, and I thought it was entertaining.  But there's not a lot of there there. 

The Witches of Eastwick

 George Miller's The Witches of Eastwick (1987) is a lavishly produced, operatic comedy starring Jack Nicholson in a menage a quatre with three women played by Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon.  The actresses are not ingenues but exhibited in this picture at the very height of their mature beauty.  The camera wielded by Vilmos Szigmond loves them almost as much, or, even, more, than their devilish gentleman-caller played by Nicholson.  They are filmed with supernatural radiance infusing their tangled locks of hair, posed like pre-Raphaelite Madonnas or Tuscan angels -- sexual love, it seems, makes them shine like icons in candle-lit niches.  Although deeply erotic, the film never really sexualizes its leading ladies -- there is no nudity and they are always dressed, more or less, in a lady-like if glamorous way.  Eros, in this film, is palpable but, also, somewhat abstract, almost Platonic in its manifestation.  At times, the film veers unsteadily into horror but Miller is so accomplished that he manages to juggle the ghastly with the romantic and comical in a way that doesn't rupture the tone of bemused adoration directed at women in the cast -- they are goddesses and not to be besmirched.  (I can understand this film better having seen Miller's most recent, highly feminist-inflected, iterations of the Mad Max movies -- the heroines of The Witches of Eastwick are earlier versions of the indomitable women warriors that we find portrayed in the post-apocalyptic road warrior films.)  Although there are several scenes set in a strait-laced Protestant church in the hamlet of Eastwick, the film is fundamentally and exuberantly pagan --  the picture pits the voracious energy of the masculine Devil against the serene and complacent trinity of the three goddesses, clearly muses for both Miller and his director of photography.  

Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer) has been deserted by her husband who has absconded leaving her with six daughters (whom miraculously all seem to be the same approximate age). Sukie works for a small-town newspaper that mostly retails local gossip.  Janey (Sarandon) is shown in the film on the first day after her divorce --she teaches music at an elementary school and is sexually harassed by the bombastic Principal.  Alexandra (Cher) is a sculptor who makes clay figures of fertility goddesses to sell in the local gift shop catering to tourists to the picturesque sea-side village, located apparently somewhere near Cape Cod.  Alex's husband has died.  At a Fourth of July picnic, the loathsome Principal makes an elaborate and boring speech.  The three women daydream and imagine the oration cut short by a violent thunderstorm -- and, no sooner thought than done.  A storm boils out of sky and sends the crowd scattering with bolts of lightning.  Later, when the women meet for drinks -- a weekly custom, it seems -- they muse that their wishes came true to bring a precipitous end to the Principal's tedious speech.  As they get drunk, the three women talk about their desire for a mysterious stranger to arrive in town, woo them, and bring sexual passion to their presently celibate lives.  Out of the storm, a long black vehicle appears, rushing through the tempest to their town.  Jack Nicholson playing a sinister figure called Daryl Van Horne is riding in the sedan driven by his servant, the uncanny giant Fidel (he looks a bit like Lurch on the old Addams Family shows.)  Van Horne buys the Lenox Mansion, said to be built on a seaside bluff where witches were executed, and fills the place with objets d'art and musical instruments -- the interior of the mansion is an elaborate, opera set with filigree, plaster bas relief and the huge blue lagoon in an enclosed natatorium.  First, Van Horne seduces Cher's character, Alex.  He is unremittingly vulgar, obscene, and lascivious.  Alex tells him that she despises him, thinks he's dressed like a fool (he lolls on a bed in pajamas like Hugh Hefner) and, even, smells bad.  But Van Horne, who describes himself as a "horny little devil", prevails on her and she becomes his lover.  He, next, consoles Janey to improve her musical skills by encouraging her to play with more passion.  Delicately, he parts her thighs to place her cello between them.  As he accompanies her, she plays with such unbridled passion that the cello and its strings ignites and burns up on the floor.  Alex and Janey, who learn that Van Horne has had sex with both of them, go to his mansion to confront him.  They find Sukie lounging around, sitting in a sort of caparisoned tent on the front lawn under the Downton Abbey-like facade of the mansion.  Van Horne summons the women to a game of doubles on his tennis court -- he uses magic to make the ball hover in the air, dart here and there, and fly into the sky where it ruptures a cloud to cause another downpour.  The women come to accept their roles in this Devil's menage -- we see them hovering in the air over the swimming pool, eating cherries out of a great floating bowl, and flying through clouds of pink balloons to the music of Puccini's Nessun dorma.  Meanwhile, another woman, Felicia, the newspaper editor's wife, (played by Veronica Cartwright) senses that deviltry is afoot in Eastwick.  She plays the part of Linda Blair in The Exorcist -- she seems entranced, possessed, spouting admonitory obscenities about the devil and his "whores".  (Characters vomit cherry pits somehow transferred to their gullet from the orgies at Lenox mansion.) The three heroines wish Felicia gone and, once again, this wish is fulfilled -- her husband, the mild-mannered newspaper editor beats her to death with a iron fire poker.  Appalled at what has happened, the three women vow to end their relationship with Van Horne.  Although Van Horne has played the part of the cynical caddish seducer, in fact, he has fallen in love with each member of the trio.  He's miserable that he has been rejected and tries to re-ignite his love affairs with them.  By now, the balance of power has shifted to the three women.  Van Horne tires to coerce them back into bed with him by various devilish tricks and, in fact, tortures Sukie, causing her extreme pain.  Alex and Janey fight back and, ultimately, make a wax voodoo doll representing Van Horne.  Sukie is cured and she joins her sisters at the Lomax mansion for the final showdown with Van Horne.  This is a noisy spectacular affair, involving all sorts of picturesque mayhem.  In the end, the Devil is defeated.  But the women are now all pregnant.  In a short coda, we see them bathing their sons, all of whom are, of course, the spawn of Satan.

The movie is very impressively shot, with fabulous locations, and wonderful action sequences -- parts of the picture are reminiscent of the Road Warrior films with Nicholson wildly crawling over the top of his sedan as its spins out-of-control down a winding seaside highway.  There is a sequence in which Janey's fifth grade band plays Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik with satanic inspiration -- the kids throw aside their music and perform like demonic infant prodigies.  Nicholson is fantastic, strutting around cock-sure with banter of this sort:  "I like a little pussy after lunch".  He wines and dines his prey in an oriental-looking Saracen tent set up on the front lawn of his vast manor.  The characters are always gorging sensuously on exotic fruits, whipped cream, chocolates.  In the last 15 minutes, Nicholson gets to pull out all the stops and reverts to the character he played in The Shining seven years earlier -- he rolls his eyes, grunts, and bellows and runs around like an enraged chimpanzee:  "all I want is my family all together," he laments.  I don't know the extent to which the film adapts and follows John Updike's source novel.  Nicholson gets to howl some spectacularly misogynistic harangues:  "When God makes mistakes, we call it nature.  Woman is a mistake."   Notwithstanding the Devil's misogyny, the power in this film is decidedly female -- it is the women who summon Van Horne; he doesn't call them.  And, when they find him inconvenient and dangerous, they don't hesitate to cast him aside notwithstanding all his wiles.  In the end poor Satan is desperately enamored with three heroines -- and this makes sense, we are also.