Criss Cross (1949)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Criss Cross (1949) – R. Siodmak

Burt Lancaster returns home to L. A. after kicking around the country after the war.  He won’t admit to himself that he’s there to see his old flame (and ex-wife) Yvonne De Carlo but he is.  Unfortunately, she’s now married to Dan Duryea (who has played many bad guys in films noir, so you know he’s trouble).  Still, there’s a flame.  We see in flashback how things began and also how the armored car robbery that Lancaster is planning with Duryea came to be.  After the flashback, we get the robbery itself and its aftermath.  It’s a downer but this is noir.  Perhaps there are similarities to that famous earlier Siodmak-Lancaster film, The Killers (1946), where Lancaster waits for the hired guns he knows will take him out (and we see why in the flashback) but it’s a winning formula.  Here again, Burt is none too bright, driven to the wrong ends by his obsession with a lady, and he pays for his mistakes.  Criss Cross has all the noir tropes and stylistic tics and a Miklós Rózsa score to boot.  See it for its sense of inexorable doom.

  

The Fugitive (1993)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Fugitive (1993) – A. Davis

A big hit in its day (based on the concept of the TV series from the 1960s), this is a Hollywood thriller, no more, no less.  That is not to say that it isn’t very enjoyable – it is! Harrison Ford (in serious/glum mode, not smart alecky) is Dr Richard Kimble, whose wife is killed by a mysterious one-armed man at the start of the film, a crime for which Kimble himself is given the death penalty.  But when the bus carrying prisoners crashes and is then hit by a train, Kimble escapes (hence, the title).  He is pursued by US Marshall Sam Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) and his team (including off the top of a very tall dam!).  After he comes to his senses, Kimble decides to return to Chicago and attempts to track down the killer, which means sneaking into hospitals to gather evidence which points in a certain direction (no spoilers here).  Whether or not the MacGuffin has further resonance in society (it surely does, these days), the film is superbly edited to produce the right amount of thrills (though not really any dread or true worry for Kimble). You know it is all going to work out and it is fun to see the clues fall into place.  Director Andrew Davis doesn’t seem to have had any subsequent hits, so this might have been one of those lucky times when the stars (Ford and Jones) were properly aligned. 

Sorry We Missed You (2019)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Sorry We Missed You (2019) – K. Loach

The gig economy is destroying lives! Director Ken Loach (b. 1936!) and writer Paul Laverty (b. 1957) use their neo-realistic (or is it kitchen sink) approach to depicting the lives of the working class to examine this thoroughly modern economic model (after examining how hard it is to get government benefits in I, Daniel Blake, 2016, which won the Palme D’or).  Ricky (Kris Hitchen) signs up to deliver parcels as a “franchise” owner – he has to buy his own van but receives the parcels and a route from the distribution centre run by brutish Maloney (Ross Brewter).  If he doesn’t arrive on time or misses a day without organising his own replacement driver or loses/damages the expensive contraption that scans the packages/signatures etc., he is in for hefty fines.  Of course, this situation immediately sets viewers on edge, knowing that something bad is going to happen.  But Loach keeps things personal and we first see the impact of this 14-hour day job on his family life – he has had to sell his wife Abbie’s (Debbie Honeywood) car, leaving her stuck on public transport to manage her job caring for elderly people in their homes (also treated as contract work paid only for limited time visits and not paid if clients require extra time, which a truly caring person would want to offer). When their teen son starts to get into trouble at school and then with the law, everything comes crashing down.  There is no sympathy from the distribution centre and the fines pile up.  We know that soon the competition will undercut Ricky by being willing to sacrifice their own lives to take his share of the market…and the rich business owners get richer, not having to pay insurance, retirement funds, vacation time, or anything else.  As they have been doing so well, Loach and Laverty hit the nail on the head but it’s a gruelling experience -- if only it can have some influence on society.

  

Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) – I. Bergman

In the end, it’s the story of two unsatisfied people who look for other options but realise that instead they just need to muddle along the way they’ve been going and make the best of it (until other options come along, I guess).  Is that depressing? This _is_ an Ingmar Bergman film, after all.  Åke Grönberg is Albert, the leader of the circus, who has left his wife (when she inherited money and decided to leave the circus).  He has fallen in with young Anne (Harriet Andersson), the bareback rider, who is jealous of the wife, as she suspects (rightly, it turns out) that Albert would like to leave the circus too and settle down with his former family.  So, she takes an opportunity to cheat on him with an actor at a theatre in the town the circus has stopped at, dreaming that this will open a new chapter in her life – but it doesn’t.  When their options don’t pan out, the circus and the couple move on.  Bergman uses expressionistic lighting and sets and camera angles to good effect – and the acting is strong throughout.  I guess it’s ultimately a downer, but I feel somehow that perhaps Bergman wants these two to accept their plight and get on with living.  What we yearn for may be only a fantasy anyway. The problematic part in accepting what we have is getting past the cruelty and injustice that we seem to inevitably inflict on each other (especially when we are chasing these fantasies).

 

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Jojo Rabbit (2019) – T. Waititi

It may seem a brazen or tasteless move to make a comedy about the Holocaust but Kiwi director Taiki Waititi pulls it off – and he wasn’t the first: Mel Brooks joked about Springtime for Hitler in The Producers (1967), Jerry Lewis’s unfinished The Day the Clown Cried (1972) is embargoed until 2024, and of course, Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997) won some Oscars with its sentimental comedy taking place in an actual concentration camp.  Waititi’s film has more of a Diary of Anne Frank slant with a young Hitler youth boy (Roman Griffin Davis) whose father is away (purportedly at the front) discovering that his mother (Scarlett Johansson) is hiding a Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) in a hidden room upstairs.  Waititi himself plays the boy’s imaginary friend Adolf – yes, that Adolf but a lot more goofy than you would expect (but still a jerk who is prejudiced against those who are different).  The vibe here is similar to Wes Anderson’s films – colourful and with pop songs (both Beatles and Bowie singing in German) – which flies in the face of the content.  True, things do head in a sentimental direction (albeit with some jarring events) but Waititi and his writers use their comedic impulses wisely and stick it to the Fuhrer while also championing the stigmatised (Sam Rockwell is great as a subversively supportive Nazi officer).  They also demonstrate some insight into how a fatherless young boy might feel.  I had my doubts but Waititi succeeds at helping us to never forget the atrocities of the 20^th century while being cute and funny at the same time.

 

Dark Waters (2019)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Dark Waters (2019) – T. Haynes

I don’t know whether this belongs to the “conspiracy thriller” genre (popular in the 70s) or a new genre that involves people fighting the system for justice (social or environmental; Erin Brockovich, 2000; The Report, 2019; more).  In this case, Mark Ruffalo is Rob Bilott, a lawyer for a big firm that usually works to defend corporations (particularly chemical companies) against lawsuits.  But when he is contacted by a farmer from West Virginia with sick cows as a result of a nearby landfill owned by Dupont, he decides to challenge the big chemical company. Director Todd Haynes (who also made Safe, 1995, another film about environmental contamination) knows all the right moves for this genre:  Bilott finds some clues suggesting malfeasance, then experiences setbacks when the company and his own firm (led by Tim Robbins) bristle, then has what appears to be a win but sees that win dissipate as the evil corporation uses its power over the government to get its way.  Haynes and Ruffalo easily conjure up the expected emotional reactions to the highs and lows in the story.  But remarkably, the effect is more powerful because Bilott is a real person and he really did sue Dupont and uncover the horror that was their willingness to sacrifice public health for profit (experimentation on people while testing whether Teflon was safe or not; dumping chemicals in the rivers of West Virginia).  Dupont’s stock price took another hit when this film was released – if what is presented here is true, they deserve it.  But the truly depressing part of the story is the moral: we can’t trust business and we can’t trust the government to look after people’s health and welfare.  This deserved lack of trust may have now opened the door to conspiracy theorists who run amok with crazy and dangerous pronouncements on the internet (about vaccinations, for example) that seem believable because, yeah, we’ve been betrayed before.  To conclude: the system has let us down and we need to rebuild community to fix it.