Kuroneko (1968)

Written & Directed by: Kaneto Shindô
Full credits at IMDb


At the climax of Kuroneko (Black Cat), a dreamy Nihonese ghostie from 1968 in revival at Film Forum, a samurai thrusts his sword at an evil female feline-god who wants him to return her severed arm. She’s also a demivampire, and the warrior’s mom—at least, she used to be. This wacky-transcending movie is like the I Spit on Your Grave of rural Japanese peasantry, with an added anti-war angle. When it opens, a mother and daughter are robbed, raped and murdered by feral marauders—hungry, idle soldiers who then torch the house and burn the bodies. This, Shindo stresses with nonchalant silences, is the simple, horrible reality of life during wartime.


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Bride of the Monster (1955)

Directed by: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Written by: Ed Wood & Alex Gordon
Full credits at IMDb

Ed Wood’s reputation as “The Worst Filmmaker Ever” is bullshit; his talentlessness is a myth, begat in the Age of Irony as a haughty reaction to the filmmaker’s conspicuous compromises in the face of budgetary constraints. It’s easy to laugh, for example, at his Bride of the Monster from 1955—at its poorly edited-in stock footage, at many of its non-professional actors—but it’s just as easy to appreciate its virtues: the touching details (the police captain who pours a glass of water for his pet bird), its critical depiction of police (callously rounding up hobos, bullying newspaper peddlers), its sense of humor (“this is the 20th Century!” the police captain says. “Don’t count on it,” a reporter replies), its battle of the sexes banter, and its exploration of marriage vis-à-vis the vanquishing power of love.

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Scream of Fear (1961)

Directed by: Seth Holt
Written by: Jimmy Sangster
Full credits from IMDb

Despite its histrionic title and a handful of unsettling sequences, Scream of Fear is less a horror movie than a mystery: not Carnival of Souls so much as an episode of Scooby Doo. Its alternate title, Taste of Fear, might be more accurate: just a nibble, not much more. Susan Strasberg, daughter of acting-coach legend Lee, stars as Penny, a young woman in a wheelchair who leaves Italy, after the death of her beloved nurse, to live in the South of France (rough life, kid!) with the father she hasn't spoken to in ten years. Holt begins by setting a mood of deceptive tranquility, meant to lull viewers into a calm out of which he can then unloose them: snowcapped peaks; a lakeside idyll; the swaying palms of Nice; the cricket-chirping solitude of Penny's father's baroque mountaintop manor.

That house, with its gilded moldings and ornate candelabras—all the trappings for a Victorian ghost story!—becomes the setting for Penny's unfolding and unlikely madness...

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Baby Doll (1956)

Directed by: Elia Kazan
Written by: Tennessee Williams
Full credits at IMDb

Elia Kazan, who was instrumental in adapting Stanislavsky's acting method for the American stage and screen, is among the greatest directors of actors the cinema has ever known. And, after obvious titans like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront (the best-acted movie ever), case in point is 1956's Baby Doll. The film...has a lot going for it: Boris Kaufman's dreary gray-tone photography; the crumbling-plaster Southern Gothic setting; the face-weathered non-professionals—"some people of Benoit, Mississippi," according to the credits—who fill in the margins and enhance the sense of degraded place; and Tennessee Williams' caustic script, based on a one-act of his written a decade earlier. But above all this is an actor's piece, a supreme example of The Power of the Method.

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Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Written by: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern & Peter George
Full credits from IMDb

Kubrick’s only sustained comedy opens with fornicating planes and ends with a bouquet of nuclear explosions, representing its two dominant tones: farce and war film. A trenchant satire that posits international power players as goofy, dim-witted and mad, Dr. Strangelove is above all a showcase for the dynamic Peter Sellers, who was never given as strong a project as this in which to display his masterful comic range. Sellers takes on three roles: a nervous R.A.F. officer, the bumbling president of the United States, and the eponymous, riding-crop-carrying Kraut at war with his autonomous, Nazified right hand.

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Hoppity Goes to Town (1941)

Directed by: Dave Fleischer
Written by: too many to name
Full credits at IMDb

A bug lurches its head over the edge of a Manhattan skyscraper’s rooftop and watches the bustling Midtown mobs below. “Look at the humans ones down there,” the insect says. “They look just like a lot of little bugs.” The point being that we are the bugs—and they are us—in Hoppity Goes to Town, by contemporary standards a politically radical animated feature that pushes a progressive, quasi-socialist agenda in its depiction of a multi-species insect community harassed by land owners and, more severely, by shadowy and impersonal humans who function as fire-crashing, town-destroying Old Testament gods: callous at best and malicious at worst.

Also known as Mr. Bug Goes to Town and Bugville, Hoppity was the second feature film from Fleischer Studios, following Gulliver’s Travels two years earlier. Known for their shorts—Popeye, Betty Boop, Superman—the Fleischers were the only serious U.S. rival to Disney and its fledgling features division until this film’s failure: the Fleischers were removed and the company, renamed, resumed producing shorts. Hoppity, then, is a sort of small scale Heaven’s Gate, though it’s not a bad picture; its failure had to do more with a stroke of incredible misfortune: it was released in 1941, two days after December 7.

The title plays on Frank Capra’s film about Mr. Deeds, and it’s inaccurate; Hoppity, a lanky, Jimmy Stewartish grasshopper, does not “go to town” so much as he returns to his close-knit community—a weedy, overgrown lot in Manhattan—to find it in hard times, suffering frequent fire outbreaks from carelessly discarded smoking materials; a wealthy beetle maliciously plotting to steal a honey-peddler’s daughter; and the threat of neighborhood annihilation in the face of skyscraper construction. Sadly, there’s something so familiar about all of the buggy troubles in Hoppity: the misery of foreclosure; the forced sacrifice of happiness for security; the destructive effects of overdevelopment. When dreams of a new, Edenic garden home are flushed with a flood from a busted sprinkler, I couldn’t help but think, absurdly, of Hurricane Katrina.

Hoppity is both class and environmentally conscious. The bugs are exploited by a jowly beetlebaron, who’s exploiting their unfortunate situation for profit. But the real threat to the bugs is mankind (despite the picture’s odd reverence for postmen and songwriters—tunes by Frank Loesser and Hoagy Carmichael, though, excepting the lilting “We’re the Couple in the Castle,” they’re not as lovely as those names might suggest.) Unlike Wall-E, though, the movie’s not about humanity’s propensity to litter; repurposed detritus, in fact, makes up a bulk of the bugs’ world. As they can turn grass blades, flowers and spiderwebs into a wedding chapel, so too can they turn a harmonica into a pipe organ; a lady’s compact into a ritzy bed; a postage stamp into a poster. The animation’s clever and detailed backdrops are its greatest virtue.

Conspicuously anti-smoking (watch where you throw yer matches and half-smoked cigars!), Hoppity is also worried with gentrification, the torching of tenement towns and the elimination of open spaces. It ends happily of course, with all the bugs’ dreams fulfilled, but not before exposing the gang of insect heroes, in one final act of cynicism, as a nasty mob quick to complain and cast blame. They are an ungrateful society of buck-passers; there are few true good-guys here. It’s not often that kids’ movies assume such a provocatively nasty position on the world and its inhabitants. If Wall-E marked a grand return to the intelligent and responsible animated feature, rediscovering Hoppity helps to reveal the deep dark roots of the tradition. Grade: B+


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Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

Written & Directed by: Charles Chaplin

Grade: B

In 1947, critics panned it and audiences avoided it, but in recent times Monsieur Verdoux has become a minor critical cause célèbre. Like many once and unfairly disparaged pieces of art, however, Chaplin’s cult film now boasts a reputation that exceeds it. Though its conclusion’s sharp leftwing speechifying is stirring, Verdoux, in spite of its admirable anti-capitalist politics, plays out too unevenly to be called anything but flawed.

With his signature moustache stylishly titled up at the corners, Chaplin otherwise abandons his usual tramp persona to play the title character, a bourgeois banker (i.e. icon of capitalism) who, after losing his position of 30 years, starts “liquidating members of the opposite sex” for profit: he hops around France marrying women, murdering them and making off with their cash in order to keep his wheelchair-bound wife and toe-headed boy in the lap of middle class luxury. Verdoux offers a contemptuous vision of the bratty idle class; Chaplin’s killer feels no compunction. (He is careful not to step on a caterpillar, though, and, yuk yuk, he’s a vegetarian!) Exposing the immorality, the murder, that logically follows free-market ideals, Verdoux is like a silver screen Godfather, executed with a wink and a smile.

As a comedy, the awkwardly paced film affords lots of laughs, but none boffo. (In a departure for Chaplin, the comedy is mostly verbal and vicious: suave sophistry—the usually silent Chaplin proves he has quite a way with words—and pointed barbs, respectively.) The idea, which Orson Welles devised, ought to be deliciously vile but what sounds daring on paper never comes across as pleasantly repulsive as it should. Taking such a class conscious idea to the screen in post-war Hollywood took courage (five years later, Hoover’s FBI would bar Chaplin from re-entering the United States after a trip to England), but little of that courage actually makes it to the screen. Dark without ever quite showing its darkness, Verdoux is executed too conservatively. Chaplin’s performance lacks nuance; his eyes never twinkle with a twinge of homicidal lust. Instead, he persistently maintains his composure; all we ever see is what the women he kills see—his unflappable charm. The murderer in him only exists off-screen.

Though in its second half, a few set pieces, classically Chaplin in their complex choreography, pick things up, as does a film-stealing performance from Martha Raye as one of Chaplin’s many murderable wives. These final scenes, more of which may have made a great film, culminate in the Great Depression, which, to Chaplin, means two things: mass suicide and Nazis. The real tragedy comes too late. After The Crash, only the munitions manufacturers are left with any money, Chaplin cynically suggests, and Verdoux ends with a sermon. On killing, he asks, “does the world not encourage it?...As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison…wars, conflict, it’s all business.” In New York last week, the audience began spontaneously applauding. Regrettably, what was once so radical has now become boilerplate fodder, rectitude-reinforcing historical artifact, for the modern armchair liberal. Like Michael Clayton, Verdoux no longer asks anything of us but to feel gratified, which must be why its reputation has, over the last several decades, blossomed.


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The President's Analyst (1967)

Written & Directed by: Theodore J. Flicker
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: B

"An unwieldy allegory for the freewheelin’ ‘60s’ ethos of responsibility shirking and self-discovery, The President’s Analyst feels hopelessly dated, from the title (who says “analyst” anymore?) to its central villain (what’s a “phone company”?)"

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Contempt (1963)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Written by: Alberto Moravia
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: A

After a decade lost at sea, Odysseus returned home to find his wife Penelope still faithful but surrounded by boorish suitors; he slew the whole lot of them, of course, out of righteous fury, thus restoring the reputation of his wife, home and family. Or, at least, so goes the conventional interpretation. In Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris), producer Jack Palance hires Michel Piccoli to tinker with the script of a film adaptation of The Odyssey that Fritz Lang, playing himself, is directing. Piccoli discusses Homer’s story with Lang and offers a more modern analysis—Odysseus left his wife because of longstanding issues in their marriage, and stayed away for so long by choice, not as a consequence of Neptune-orchestrated fate.

Piccoli is, of course, shaping art to fit his life. Odysseus’ heroics belong to Ancient Greece; in Twentieth Century Europe, Piccoli barely pauses a moment before he hands over his Penelope (Brigitte Bardot) to the first suitor that comes along. Why does he do such a thing? For money, of course. (Not in an overt Indecent Proposal sort of way, but close enough.) And thus Godard draws his stinging distinction between history and modernity, between capitalism and pre-capitalism. When a communist party pamphlet stumbles out of Piccoli’s back pocket at one point, it’s no accident.

It’s even a bit comical, actually, as is much of the film. At his best when his directorial manner is easygoing and his tone silly, even while shouldering serious subject matter, Godard here is constantly at play; a short musical theme runs almost ceaselessly throughout, for example, and in the first scene he keeps switching filters arbitrarily, from blue to none to red—foreshadowing the vivid reds to come, on everything from couches and convertibles, blouses and bathmats, to the painted eyes of Greek god statues. (The solemn audience at Film Forum, where the film recently screened, let out nary a chuckle, this writer not included, presumably out of a misguided academic respect for Foreign Film.)

Told in three distinct sections, the romance plays out most fitfully during the second act, a prolonged romantic squabble in which Bardot dances around the issue at hand—the way she has been sold, whether literally or not—and Piccoli dutifully follows suit, disingenuously laboring to discover the root of her sulking as if he doesn’t already know. But acts one and three also go after something act two only hints at, when Piccoli, in a fedora with a cigar between his teeth, admits to consciously modeling his look after Dean Martin’s in Some Came Running—with its back lot/on-location settings and its backstage story, Contempt is about movies.

Part one is set on a movie studio that looks like Roman Ruins, the characters romping on what look like the last vestiges of cinema. The set has been sold and will probably be turned into a five and ten, Palance declares with hilarious histrionics. Godard suggests that the film is set during the end of the cinema; a projection room screen includes a popular Lumiere quote, translated into Italian: “cinema is an invention without a future.” (Despite the posters for Psycho, Hatari! and Godard’s own Vivre Sa Vie slathered on the walls.) Lang famously quips that Cinemascope, in which the film is shot, is only good for capturing snakes and funerals, and so we get a film full of slimy, serpentine characters and a memorial service for the cinema. On the set, after Piccoli asks whether some scantily clad women will undress, he’s told, of course. “Movies are wonderful,” he mutters. But if there’s something unsettling about women being used as objects of desire, as media of exchange (for sex or for translating) or, bent over, as tables on which to write checks, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Movies present “a world in harmony with our desires,” Godard tells us at the very beginning, quoting his teacher Andre Bazin, before turning an on-screen camera at the audience, letting us know that, in his estimation, we’re responsible for the objectionable behavior we see on the screen. “You long for a world like Homer’s,” one character says. “It does not exist.” Not even at the movies.


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Ace in the Hole (1951)

Full credits from IMDb

Directed by: Billy Wilder
Written by: Walter Newman, Lesser Samuels & Billy Wilder

Grade: A-

It would be easy to say that the trenchant and blistering Ace in the Hole was “ahead of its time,” but it might be more accurate to simply admit that things have just always been bad. It’s troubling to think so, but Billy Wilder’s dramatic treatise on how and when journalists cross the line—and how the audience eats it up—feels incredibly timely, as it must have upon its release, too. A ripping and bitter yarn, Ace in the Hole never mutes its caustic view of the world, nor does it let the audience off the hook for one second. Accordingly, it flopped upon its release, probably because America wasn’t willing to look into such a sallow mirror.

Kirk Douglas, acting a bit too hammy, stars as a hard-drinking, troublemaking east-coast reporter stationed out west, in exile after being fired several times over from all the big city papers. Stuck in what he calls a “sun-baked Siberia,” he bemoans, as though out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, the lack of garlic pickles and chopped chicken liver. “Even for Albuquerque,” Douglas says, “this is pretty Albuquerque.”

Douglas is doing time, waiting for a big story that’ll get him another job back east—that is, wishing for disaster for the sake of a juicy story. “Bad news sells best and good news is no news,” Douglas says. “If there’s no news, I’ll go out and bite a dog.” But before he can, he stumbles upon a cave-in at a mine with a fella, Richard Benedict, trapped in the rubble. Good news for the dog, bad news for the fella.

Colluding with the sheriff to keep Benedict trapped as long as possible, Douglas dictates how the news story progresses, seemingly ignoring that a man’s life is at stake. He does what he has to, even slaps a dame around, in order to get the story shaped just right, transforming the lonesome desert valley site into a full-blown media circus of the absurd in the process, complete with rides and ice cream—the film was re-titled, in an effort to give it a more box-office friendly title, The Big Carnival—all centered on Douglas’ ace, literally in a hole.

Early on, Douglas says of himself, defensively, “I don’t make things happen, all I do is write about them.” But that’s entirely untrue, we quickly learn—Douglas, to scoop the national story that could get him back to New York, crosses the line from impartial observer to active participant. (A conundrum revisited decades later in Capote.)

Wilder highlights, through Douglas’ cruel extension of the miner’s confinement, how journalism, at its most unctuous, compounds tragedy for the sake of a story. It’s what Douglas’ old publisher calls “phony, below-the-belt journalism.” (Douglas replies, “not below the belt, right in the gut!”)

At first, it seems like everyone’s making out from the tragedy—the trapped miner and his wife are making some serious scratch, Douglas is working towards getting his old New York gig back, his photographer-slash-apprentice is furthering his career, the sheriff is getting votes, and the public is being entertained—so why does it feel so downright filthy?

Probably because it’s obviously journalism at its worst—tearing democracy down rather than building it up. Douglas shores up support for the crooked sheriff to enhance his puff piece, while he ought to working his ass off to, say, expose a corrupt official. Not to mention that, in reality, more than a byline is at stake. Wilder skillfully undercuts the slick media perfidy, Douglas’ constructed “human interest” story, by interrupting scenes with genuine human interest: the grieving mother passes through a scene, on her way to light a votive candle to the saints, in prayer for her son’s life.

And that tragedy is just as much our fault as anyone else’s. Slowly, Wilder implicates the audience in the film’s treachery, accusing us of being complicit in such dirty dealings because we’re the ones who go out and buy the newspapers. In the end, of course, things don’t work out and the situation that seemed best for everybody turns out to the best for nobody, even the media consumers. The tragedy stings most pointedly when Douglas says in the middle of the film, “tomorrow this’ll be yesterday’s paper and they’ll wrap a fish in it.” So what’s the point?

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Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

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Directed by: Alain Renais
Written by: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Grade: A+

It’d be easy to write off Last Year at Marienbad (L’année Dernière à Marienbad) by calling it pretentious, but to do so is like calling it black-and-white, a simple statement of fact that makes no comment on the film’s quality or, more importantly, its meaning. Accept Last Year at Marienbad on its own terms and you can begin to get enveloped in its mysteries—it’s pleasures. At its heart, the film is less grandiose than simply grand, a stunning triumph of technique still unparalleled, unrivalled, even in the decades since its release. Though shot in crisp black-and-white, its story is an abstruse gray—Last Year at Marienbad is a moving puzzle that aims to set cinema free from its literalist sensibilities.

The film is set inside a sprawling, cryptic, labyrinthine hotel that mirrors the film’s narrative maze. It begins with a voice-over, describing the interior of the setting but also the movie itself: “endless corridors succeed corridors,” the narrator says of the film’s infinite possibilities of meaning. “Carpets so thick, so heavy that no sound reaches one’s ear,” he adds, suggesting that though it’s rife with clues, Last Year at Marienbad is an uncrackable mystery.

An ambiguous statue in the hotel’s gardens serves as an apt metaphor for the film, as well; the characters stand around and analyze its different possibilities of meaning, each of which makes enough sense but none of which is perfectly reasonable. Giorgio Albertazzi runs into Delphine Seyrig at the hotel and insists that they met the year before in Marienbad—or was it some place else? She insists he’s mistaken, but he has a detailed account that he goes over and over again, a story that, though told in fractured segments, seems to build to a moment of terrible violence, though said moment is never properly addressed, only hinted at from different directions.

Last Year at Marienbad creates an irrational sense of place and time that the cinema had never before approached. It’s pure dream-logic—characters stand frozen in place, pop in and out of frames, and leap to other locations without missing a beat in their conversations. Albertazzi may be telling Seyrig something in a hallway, and suddenly they’re on a dance-floor, continuing the same conversation. It adds up to film unbounded by the quaint constraints of physical reality and its limitations.

Winding tracking shots soak in the setting’s ornamental detail, including the copious mirrors that create false perspectives—like the film’s story, the visuals are full of false leads. Who are these people? Where are they? Did they really meet a year ago? And who’s that terribly serious looking man, played by Sacha Pitoëff? Seyrig’s husband? Death? Satan? Is his knack for never losing a game of nim a symbol of his power as warden of the imprisoning hotel?

Like its garden statue, Last Year at Marienbad could be read in number of ways, each seemingly valid: the characters might be dead, they might be mental patients, etc. If anything, the film seems set inside cinema itself, at least director Alain Renais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet’s vision of it and its potential. A place where, as is said of the film’s hotel setting, words do not and cannot mean anything. All of the film’s substance is implied through image, the dialogue just a series of red herrings and tautologies. (“Yes, we did meet, or no, we didn’t,” seems to be Seyring’s solution to the enigma posed by the film.)

Fragmented, uncertain, repetitious and frozen in time, the film seems to be full of ghosts, trapped in a static limbo and wandering the annals of memory. Phrases, stories, images, moments and details are constantly repeated in a seemingly endless loop, with the specifics slightly changed and the tone different by just a touch. The filmmakers establish that film has enormous poetic potential and that there’s a lot more room for adventures in cinematic storytelling than other filmmakers usually dare. Unlike the majority of films, Last Year at Marienbad’s obscure structure does not reflect the tendency we have to make sense of our own lives in the logical, narrative terms of cause-and-effect. Instead, it takes as its model the abstract senselessness of our unconscious recesses.

City Lights (1931)

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Written & Directed by: Charles Chaplin

Grade: A+

Without looking back, so to speak, at the silent cinema it was gleefully abandoning, moviegoing audiences embraced the novelty that was the "talking picture" as the norm almost immediately upon its introduction. That wasn't enough, though, to deter Charlie Chaplin from sticking with silent movies as late as 1931—when no one was making silent movies anymore—the year he released City Lights, a whole four years after The Jazz Singer had premiered. (Granted, because of his perfectionism, Chaplin's film had been in production for three of those years.)

City Lights makes no secret of Chaplin's faith in the silent film or in his distaste for the talkie; in its first scene, a group of public officials are making speeches to celebrate the unveiling of a new statue—or, at least we can only assume they're making speeches, as we see their mouths moving but Chaplin, as director, has replaced what would've been dialogue with so much amusing squawking. It's a good gag, but it has more serious undertones: he's not only aggressively mocking the talkie, but challenging the value of speech itself. Aren't mere words deficient, Chaplin provokes us to ponder, against the purity of physical expression?

After all, as hilarious as the Marx Bros. or Woody Allen are with their verbal one-liners, no one is, comic pound for comic pound, as belly-bustlingly uproarious as Chaplin. (Sorry folks, not even Keaton.) But as Chaplin demonstrates in City Lights, nor are most filmmakers capable of producing such a startling degree of poignancy. Not only is City Lights incontestably hilarious—rarely, in the movie theater (where I was fortunate enough to see the film recently), does one get to hear the strange sound of people laughing from the gut for so long—it's perhaps the purest example of the cinema's potential for pathos.

City Lights is constructed as a series of slightly interrelated vignettes, each a modest masterpiece of moviemaking in their inventive uses of form, comic timing and romantic expression. Together, they add up to filmmaking at its very best, the unadulterated visual expression of high-end slapstick flawlessly combined with the most basic, and most powerful, elements of love and romance. The two comic highlights of the film are two bonafide tours-de-force: an extended nightclub sequence with the iconic Tramp and a drunken, suicidal millionaire in which one hilarious gag follows another, and a brilliant, balletic boxing sequence that, as it's unedited, proves to be a triumph of complex comic choreography; Chaplin's comic sequences are not just a whole bunch of jokes thrown together all higgeldy-piggeldy, but they're each like one big, overarching master joke, constructed like short stories with each gag building on one another like sentences in a paragraph.

But balancing out the laughs is a serious story (even though it still provokes the occasional joke) about the tramp's courting of a blind flower girl who mistakenly believes him to be a rich man. In the end, City Lights is, like Annie Hall, less a comedy with a romantic side than a romance with comic highlights. I never cry so sincerely or so much at the movies than during the end of City Lights; all summed up in its final shot or two, it's the movies at their most tender and satisfying.

The Reckless Moment (1949)

Full credits at IMDb

Directed by: Max Ophüls
Written by: Henry Garson & Robert W. Soderberg
(adaptation by: Mel Dinelli & Robert E. Kent)

Grade: B+

A taut and nifty melodrama-noir with a strong reactionary bent, The Reckless Moment is essentially about love and the the redemptive acts of seflessness it can inspire, but it's also about teaching a woman to know her place and the chaos that occurs when the nuclear family unit is splintered. The story is compelling enough, concerning Joan Bennett and the heap of trouble she gets into when she covers up a murder committed, accidentally, by her daughter, Geraldine Brooks. Yet The Reckless Moment's main attraction isn't its script, however crackling it is at times, but that it sports master stylist Max Ophüls behind the camera (here credited as the mildly Americanized or, given the proximity to the end of WWII, de-Germanized "Opuls". Nothing cries "Kraut!" like an umlaut.)

Ophüls, a bona fide master of camera movement and mise-en-scene, densely packs the frames with people and objects, allowing the camera to soak up the ornateness while emphasizing the crowded, crushing character of both Bennett's domestic and criminal lives. ("You don't know how a family can surround you at times," she laments at one point.) Though set in the boondocks, 50 miles outside of Los Angeles in a small, somnolent seaside town, Bennett and her family's waterfront house, the film's primary location (it feels like a lightly opened-up stage play) is lavishly decorated. The camera, for its part, often winds through the film's narrow aisles and hallways, following Bennett as she passes through them, figuratively navigating the labyrinth-of-lies that she's wrought.

After Bennett hides the body of the dead man, an Irish blackmailer comes a-callin', played by a strapping James Mason with a come-and-go brogue to match his fleeting meanness. Mason soon falls for Bennett, acting as surrogate husband (her man is away on business); he tries to help her deal with the threat posed by his boss, a tough-as-nails Roy Roberts, as Bennett scrambles to come up with an unreasonable amount of cash. She goes so far as to pawn her jewelry, echoing a scene Ophüls would revisit four years later in his renowned film The Earrings of Madame de..., a French melodrama whose main character is a pair of earrings; for an opulent stylist like Ophüls, a woman losing her jewels, her source of pride and grandeur, comes across as high tragedy.

Bennett begins the film as the only stolid figure surrounded by a tic- and gesture-crazy cast (eg. a nail-biting daughter; a watch-setting, hair-combingly slimy Shepperd Strudwick.) But as the situation becomes increasingly dire, she gradually loses her composure, until by the film's end she is sprawled out on her bed in a fit of tears. Despite having sassy lines like, "when you're 17 these days, you know what the score is; you're not a child anymore," The Reckless Moment is a deeply conservative tale, one about a woman who's punished, essentially, for making big decisions without consulting her husband, for trying to wrest control of a situation and a family she has no business, as a woman, controlling. Her selfless act of love for her daughter, cleaning up her manslaughter, gets her into more trouble than she can handle; her act of love makes her a prisoner and a victim. She's finally saved, though, when her love is paid in kind by the selfless act of another, of a man (Mason), that finally sets everything right. She ends the film on the phone with her husband, telling him that everything's going to be OK...once he gets home, and the family unit is restored.

Short Film: La Jetée (1962)

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Written & Directed by: Chris Marker

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Grade: A


La Jetée (The Pier, or Jetty), in its brief 27 minute running time, plays like a French New Wave episode of The Twilight Zone, though it's singularly unlike anything you'd ever see on television, or even in a movie theater for that matter. La Jetée, best known to today's kids as that movie that tends to pop-up in the first paragraph or two of 12 Monkeys reviews, is a film about memory, told entirely in still photographs, emphasizing the static and piecemeal character of memory, accompanied by voice-over narration—"un photo roman," (a "photo novel") Marker calls it. (Though at 27 minutes it's more like un photo romanette!)

"This is the story of a man haunted by an image from his own childhood," the narrator tells us, the image of a man dying at an airport (sur la jetée éponyme) right before our protagonist's juvenescent eyes. Set in a post-WWIII future, where the Arc de Triomphe has been de-arched, Davos Hanich is sent back in time by his fellow underground-dwelling refugees to find food and energy, or so he's told, since the outside world is a death trap of nuclear fallout and supplies are running low. Instead, he winds up running around with a woman he recognizes from that fateful airport memory. Together, they visit a number of monuments to time: a dissected tree trunk (right out of Vertigo, an objet d'obsession for Marker) and a natural history museum/taxidermist's showcase. As the narrator suggests, it's like a tour through "the museum of his memory".

Ingeniously crafted as both complex in its execution and universal in its pathos, La Jetée is a short, stinging and haunting parable about the destructive nature of the past as idée fixe; Hanich's pleas to remain in the halcyon pre-war era of his younger days ultimately leads to his undoing, captured in an iconic image of an outstretched arm against a tall and strange metal tower. Running away from the present and future, he discovers the hard way that "there was no way out of time." It's a sad lesson for the nostalgic in all of us.

Something Wild (1961)

Written by: Jack Garfein & Alex Karmel
Directed by: Jack Garfein

Grade: C+

Something Wild, a bizarre love story—and not really in an interesting way—doesn't quite provide what its title or trailer promises; it's more like Something Weird and Too Long. It opens with New York tableaus characterized by (often symmetrical) patterns, whether it's traipsing pedestrians, soaring pigeon flocks, moving traffic or the schematic arrangement of high-rise windows. But the safety implied by the appearance of order is a deceptive facade, which Caroll Baker, a fresh-faced baby doll, learns the hard way; disembarking from the elevated Kingsbridge subway station near her home with a blithe skip and a jump, she enters a quiet park where she is pulled into the bushes and raped, her chain with a small Protestant cross, in a nice touch, torn from her neck.

A long, wordless portrait of the aftermath follows, as Baker saunters home, creeps through the door and up the stairs to the safety of her bedroom, before breaking into tears and passing out on the floor; when she awakens, she bathes and cuts up the clothes she was wearing when attacked, flushing the small squares of fabric down the toilet. It's all very affecting, especially as the film goes on and Baker gradually loses her mind, freaking out whenever anyone tries to touch her, including even her mother. Leaving her school books on a bench, in a symbol of defiance, she drops out of high school and runs away from home, getting a job at the Woolsworth sales counter and a tenement apartment about the size of an airplane's bathroom. (Jean "Edith Bunker" Stapleton turns up in a bit part as, against type, or before type, her garishly kooky neighbor.)

Before she runs away, Baker's mother delivers a grand, mildly racist speech about the changing condition of their community; "some more dirty people have moved onto the next block," she complains, adding that "this used to be such a nice neighborhood," full of polite, well-dressed churchgoers. When Baker hits the streets, she sees only sweltering New York streets teeming with strangers, hoboes and empty lots; Something Wild seems an allegory for the transformation, the decline, of the American city, specifically the Bronx, with increasing diversity leading to crime that's not only drives away the old residents but turns a nice kid naughty, a sweet kid nasty.

But the story is thin and moves along rather clumsily, like that rather clumsy political statement—somewhat qualified when Baker barks back, "everyone's dirty!"—serving only as a vehicle for the always exceptional Baker to unravel within psychologically, against the backdrop of an unravelling town. (Well, that and to create images to accompany Aaron Copland's brash score.) Finally, she walks onto the Manhattan Bridge with the intent of hopping off, but she is pulled down by Ralph Meeker, the Henry Travers to her Jimmy Stewart. Meeker is just about the only kind, generous or normal person who's appeared hitherto, but it's too good to be true; he takes her to his apartment on the Lower East Side, another cramped apartment, ground-level with the requisite bars on the windows, giving it the character of a dungeon; and that's a fitting characterization, since he effectively kidnaps Baker, holding her captive and forbidding her to leave, the compensation for having saved her life. The ransom? Marriage.

If the Meeker section of the film had been kept to about fifteen minutes, Something Wild would be a curiosity; instead, at about an hour, it's a chore. While the film manages, at least, to muster up a comedic scene here in which Meeker keeps jumping up to help while Baker eats dinner, for the most part this section of the film—its entire second half—is way too long, visually and narratively dull and repetitive. In a way, that reflects the character of the defacto marriage, loveless and literally imprisoning, that Baker finds herself involved in; the point is well taken, but it doesn't make the film any less insufferable, Meeker's performance notwithstanding. Played as dumbly sweet but with an unfortunate temper, he remains achingly sympathetic throughout—"you're my last chance," he pitifully confesses—despite the cruelty he displays towards Baker, not least of all in a scene in which, drunken, he goes at her on all fours like a dog. (Garfein was a member, like much of the cast, Meeker included, of the prestigious Actors' Studio; he was also an assistant director on the tour-de-force Baby Doll, where he obviously learned a bit from Kazan, such as working with actors, but not, unfortunately, for effective pacing and visual puissance.)

Minor Spoilers Follow
In the end, Something Wild is a study of the institution of marriage, ultimately affirming the traditional belief that habit breeds real emotion, that cohabitation, if engaged in long enough, will lead to love. Baker overcomes the incapacitation caused by her rape by falling in love with her subsequent abductor. It's Stockholm Syndrome, ad absurdum. But Something Wild could also be speculatively (over)read on a more personal level; Garfein survived a stint in Auschwitz as a child, and I think it's fair to suppose that such an experience would leave one in a state analogous to Baker's post-rape devastation. The film, then, is a statement about how love can be enough to turn someone around, heal the wounds caused by the horrors to which they were once subjected. Baker, his wife at the time, then plays the Garfein part and the film is a Valentine to her, both as a starring vehicle but also as a testament to the strength she gave him to overcome the dark place that time in a Nazi concentration camp would put anyone in, especially a child.

Killer's Kiss (1955)

Written by: Howard O. Sackler & Stanley Kubrick
Directed by: Stanley Kubrick

Grade: B

The opening credits of Killer's Kiss announce that the love theme is by Norman Gimbel and Arden E. Clar, the ballet is choreographed by David Vaughan, and the direction (and pretty much everything else) is by Stanley Kubrick. Wait a minute—love theme? Ballet? What kind of Kubrick picture is this? Well, for practical intents and purposes, his first. (Just try finding a copy of Fear and Desire!) As a debut feature, despite its independent financing (before such a thing was common), Killer's Kiss makes a lot of generic concessions presumably in the name of potential box-office draw and, of course, budget constraints; in many ways, it's a run of the mill film noir, complete with voice-over narration, a main character who's a boxer, and a flashback framing device—which makes the happy ending apparent within the first reel—but it sports a visual sense so sophisticated that the nascent talents of a future filmmaking titan are on full display.

Sporting the keen photographer's eye that Kubrick developed during his time at Look magazine—and prominently featured in the nostalgia-inducing New York location shooting, such as the Times Square store window displays—much of the film, especially the opening and closing sections, are told with minimal dialogue. (Thankfully, as much of the actual dialogue is quite silly; cf. "you smell bad" or "can happiness buy money?") Killer's Kiss is the story of a boxer, played prosaically by Jamie Smith, who can't win a fight and is planning to hang up his gloves and move back to his aunt and uncle's ranch near Seattle. But before he can pack his trunk and make it to Grand Central, he's summoned to the aid of his screeching neighbor across the way, a sultry blonde—though not much of a femme fatale—played by Irene Kane. Once she's safe and rescued, they speedily plan to go away together, having fallen in love within a few hours (Kubrick has the sense and wit to lightly mock this ridiculous generic convention throughout), but it isn't so easy to get her away from her employer and lover, the seedy proprietor of a dance hall played by Frank Silvera.

Previously, Kubrick had filmed a documentary short, called Day of the Fight, about a pugilist, and with that experience perhaps the most impressive part of the film is the energetic and thrilling boxing sequence, captured with a handheld camera and artfully framed, whether from below (a technique used again, memorably, decades later when Jack Nicholson is imprisoned in the Overlook's food locker) or in jarring close-up. (It's also, like the rest of the film, captured in beautiful black and white, which Raging Bull ratified is the only way to film a boxing match.) The film is full of that sort of provocative imagery, such as a close-up of Smith, through the bowl water, feeding his goldfish; or Silvera becoming so furious that he hurls a tumbler straight at the camera, visibly fracturing the lens; or the black-and-white checker-tiled staircase, that leads to the treacherous dance hall, which features an enormous and cautionary "Watch Your Step" sign hanging above. (The film's dominant leitmotif is warnings from, literally, above, whether as the mean, bright eye of god, in the recurring form of a single-bulb, directly-overhead light, or the long dangling fingers of disembodied mannequin hands.)

The most stunning moment, really something to behold, is the finale, a final showdown in a mannequin warehouse that starts off as a cat-and-mouse hunt and ends in an axe duel, with each contender hurling artificial women's legs and torsos at the other as they consequently chop up countless ersatz female bodies. Also, the aforementioned extended ballet sequence is really quite stunning, as a lone dancer performs plies while Kane recites her life story, rife with jealousy, misery and death, the dance moves choreographed to coincide perfectly with the mood of the dime-novel, voice-overed tale.

If this review just sounds like a strung together series of my favorite shots and scenes, lifted, perfunctorily, straight from my notes, it's because Killer's Kiss plays out that way, as a rather boilerplate film save for the occasional bursts of personality that, arrestingly, cut through. Smith is described as being strong and a clever boxer, but unable to win a fight because of his Achilles' heel, his week chin; the same, loosely speaking, is true of Kubrick at this point in his directorial career. "I guess the whole thing was pretty silly," Smith remarks, at the end of the film, of the story's he's just annunciated. Yeah you guess right, thank goodness Kubrick was there to help you tell it in pictures, otherwise nobody'd be talking about it today.

The Wages of Fear (1953)

Written and Directed by: Henri-Georges Clouzot

Grade: A

At its outset, Clouzot's Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur) plays out like a Howard Hawks fraternity play set against a sweltering Tennessee Williams backdrop. Set in an unnamed South American village, and shot on palpable location, the film opens with a symbolic shot of tethered, scrambling beetles, whose anthropomorphic counterparts are soon introduced: a swarm of pan-Euro expats stuck in the sticks, broke, desperate for work and baking to death in the equatorial sun.

Clouzot displays his mastery in his immense patience, spending the first hour soaking in the local atmosphere and indulging in immersive characterization; it's the key to the film's success. Eventually, four of the men are chosen for what's essentially a suicide mission—moving a ton of nitroglycerin down unpaved roads in unprotected trucks. The mere sound of a revving engine suddenly assumes the gravity of a menacing portent, the aural representation of death. The Wages of Fear changes gears—fitting for a film about truck-driving—shedding its travelogous stylized verite, its South American romance, to become a tense roadtrip through the mountainous countryside, as the drivers confront one perilous and potentially fatal obstacle after another. "Think they pay you to drive?" asks Charles Vanel to his partner, Yves Montand. "They pay you to be terrified."

If an early sequence, a barroom brawl, evinces a master of form at work, it's simply a warm-up for the rest of the film, a crafted exercise in maintained suspense; as the trucks, packed with a bumper crop of ultra-sensitive explosive, lurch forward, the nails I'd spent weeks growing out were suddenly gone, spattered in pieces on my hardwood floors. The tension culminates in one climactic, spectacular and nearly unbearable sequence in which an obstructive boulder must be cleared from the road; it is slowly, carefully filled, drip by drip, with a bit of the volatile, "could explode at any moment" liquid explosive. Under the immense pressure of perpetually teetering on the edge of death, the characters begin to drastically transform: the stupid turn strong, the scared turn arrogant and the once tough tuck their tails.

While touching on age's effects on attitude—youth's hubristic false sense of invincibility vs. old age's cautious anxiety—The Wages of Fear, the ultimate truck driver picture, is primarily a general exemplification of how the rich take advantage of the poor, how they're happy to send them out on missions of certain death for their own personal, capital benefit. It works as a devastating allegory for war, among other things, with American oil companies cast as the central, callous villain, abusive towards native populations and exploitative of the desperate. The Wages of Fear hasn't lost an ounce of its whiteknuckleness, and the contemporary aptness of its politics make it seem downright prophetic, although the actual lesson to be learned is that oil company perfidy is nothing new; they have, for decades, been engaged in such disreputable pursuits.

Le Doulos (1962)

Written & Directed by: Jean-Pierre Melville

Grade: B

The iconic French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo stars in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos (roughly translated as, say, The Police Informant or The Stoolie), but he looks like he's being restrained, playing a gangster rather straightly. He has his impassioned moments, sure, at one point coming off like Richard Widmark without the bug-eyed madness (but with the cruelty in tact), but coming off such free-wheeling Godard vehicles as Breathless and A Woman is a Woman, in which he delivered the playful performances that cemented his reputation for generations, watching Belmondo here is akin to seeing a bird in a cage—pretty enough to look at, but you'd rather see it soar.

That's not necessarily a drawback for the film, just a disappointment; Belmondo is nevertheless something to see even while reigned in by the traditionalistic Melville. Le Doulos is a straight-up gangster flick, like it or not, that's more classical Hollywood than French New Wave; it's more John Huston than it is Jean Godard. (Something of an Americophile, Melville assumed his nom de camera in honor of our, arguably, most eminent novelist.) Like Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, it's stylistically cool and sumptuously shot in black-and-white. Set in and around a dilapidated Paris—it opens with a long tracking shot by, one assumes, is the banks of the Seine but looks more like the edge of a sewer—Le Doulos focuses around an ugly-mug named Faugel (Serge Reggiani, admirably dour), who spent the bulk of the last six years in prison. He's got scores to settle and capers to manage, but when one heist goes wrong and his partner in crime is cut-down, he suspects his old pal Silien (Belmondo) is not the chum he pretends to be, but in fact un indicateur du police!

Who's exactly scamming whom is kept a tight secret until the end; appearances are deceiving in Melville's world: Faugel speaks in a friendly tone, as friendly as his perpetual frown can muster, to a buddy before shooting him in the gut; Belmondo flatters a girl's brown eyes before he beats her and ties her to a radiator by, among other ropes, a belt around the neck. As vile as they sound, Melville is constantly realigning the sympathies throughout the film, ultimately fashioning a rather cynical portrait of the world in which the cops are conniving creeps, dames are nothing but backstabbers and having a friend always results in death.

The problem with Le Doulos is that riding along with its plot, and it's a plotty film, is an up-and-down process, having all the vacillating emotionality of a snowy day spent sledding—the thrill of the rapid descent, and the trudgery of the uphill return. For every brilliant sequence, such as the final reel (amazing!) or a mid-film encounter at a jazz club (fantastic!), there are fidget-inducing scenes of dialogue that are so talky they approach the interminable. There is, for example and in particular, a scene in the middle, an interrogation at the police station, that takes all the credibility the film has earned to that point and sucks it dry. It's a dastardly case of the second act murdering the first. While the Film Forum says, of the sequence, that it was "one of the two shots Melville was most proud of in his entire oeuvre," for all the dazzlingly fluid camerawork I was simply left bored by the content; as much information that the audience already knows is revealed as is information that we don't.

Apostatically, however, I felt similarly about last year's critical cause celebre, Army of Shadows, appreciating it as a share of masterful sequences set together, like bricks, by inferior mortar. Still, when Le Doulos is strong it's strong; when Belmondo checks his hat and gets ticket number thirteen, there's little else Melville needs to say. Unfortunately, however, he keeps on talking.

A Face in the Crowd (1957)

Directed by: Elia Kazan
Written by: Budd Schulberg

Grade: A

Why A Face in the Crowd isn't more popular, let alone universally revered, is anybody's guess; a good twenty years before Network, Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg—who'd previously teamed up for one of the masterpieces of American cinema, On the Waterfront—tackled the dangerous manipulative power of television in their story of a drunken hobo, "Lonesome" Rhodes, turned celebrity. Whereas much of Network hasn't aged well, A Face in the Crowd, which even predates the famous Nixon-Kennedy debates, feels more relevant than ever, as its prescient commentary on television's effect on America's culture—and, most notably, its political sphere—has proven true ten times over in the decades since it was made.

In the first scene, Marcia (Patricia Neal), host of a smalltown radio programme called "A Face in the Crowd", enters an Arkansas jail to gather some soundbites for her show. (The Southern atmosphere, in all its sweaty, crumbling, filthy grit is rendered as palpably as it was in Kazan's previous effort, Baby Doll—another heck of a film.) After the inmates don't prove too accommodating to Miss Marcia, the sheriff suggests she try the drunk with the guitar, Rhodes, that they picked up last night. Who is that animal, curled up on his back in the corner—Marlon Brando? James Dean? No, it's none other than Andy Griffith! (My how far Sheriff Andy Taylor has fallen, one thinks watching the film now, as the jailer has become the jailed.) From that moment on, Griffith, rarely off-screen again, tears through the film in a honest-to-goodness tour-de-force, roaring through every scene, his enthusiasm only stopping short at defying gravity and dancing on the ceiling. "I put my whole self into everything I do," Lonesome boasts early on, mirroring Griffith's commitment to his screen debut—and Kazan doesn't have a reputation for being a masterful actor's director for nothing. In a soiled t-shirt, and with the nickname "Lonesome" bestowed on him by Marica, Rhodes proves an instant radio smash, singing improvised songs and telling stories with an irrepressible, avuncular, Southern-bumpkin charm. He endears himself to the audience right away, even giving an impassioned speech on the plights of the typically overworked housewife that attracts their gratitude as they scrub the scum out of the oven at home; later, he wins over the black folk in a similar fashion, by putting the TV station's cleaning lady on his show. (Kazan shows Rhodes' effect on the American people by cleverly cutting to random families at home expressing their admiration for the man on the air.) Such an immediate success, he's given his own radio show, which leads to a television show in Memphis, and eventually a nationally syndicated program; Lonesome completes the transformation from country hoodlum to New York suit in no time at all, with all the changes it would seem to imply. "You're getting to be all the things you used to harpoon," Marcia tells him accusatorily, and the story arc is vaguely reminiscent of another fictional fella from below the Mason-Dixon, Willie Stark.

Rhodes' persona is a fraud; he's simply a performer with an invented backstory, which, as an unlikely shrewd businessman, he uses to rise to prominence, aided by the medium perfectly suited to him—television. "I'm sure glad to leave that dump," he casually tells Marcia, to her surprise, on their way to Memphis, giving the nondiegetic audience their first look at the real man behind the facade, the true personality that'll ultimately be his undoing. But, for a time at least, the manipulative power of the television medium gives Rhodes something bigger than mere popularity; it gives him real sway and influence over hypnotized Americans—it makes him a "force"—which he uses first to hock the sponsor's cheap pills and later to affect the American political process, agreeing to help a reactionary, right-wing Senator become the next President of the United States. A Face in the Crowd unabashedly confronts the way that television has reduced politicians, previously "statesmen", into saleable products. As one character notes, "politics have entered a new stage, a television stage...the people want capsule slogans...more bang for a buck, punchlines and glamour." (Schulberg's script can be a little heavy-handed, but with Kazan's assured direction it never becomes overbearing.) The film also hits on the increasing Southern dominance in American culture and politics, and the concomitant hayseed anti-intellectualism. "Back where I come from," Lonesome tells the Senator, encouraging him to soften and dumb-down his approach, "if a fella looks too dignified we figure he's looking to steal your watch." When Lonesome is at a state fair against a backdrop that reads, "The Voice of the Mid South", it's hard to forget that in nearly twenty years we haven't seen an American president who at least didn't pretend to be from the South. "This whole country's just like my flock of sheep," Lonesome explains, "they're mine, I own them. They think like I do, only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em!"

"If they ever heard the way that psycho really talks," the sound engineer laments. The bitterly cynical A Face in the Crowd does just that—it tries to take the plugs out of America's ears so it can hear itself, take the mask off so it can see itself in the mirror—and its leaders and leading figures for who they are. But, as people rarely like to confront the truth, particularly about themselves and the nation they've begat, the film was a flop in its own time and still struggles to overcome obscurity today. See it as soon as you can, readership—it's a masterpiece.

The Devil-Doll (1936)

Directed by: Tod Browning
Written by: Guy Endore, Garrett Fort & Erich von Stroheim

Grade: B+

The Devil Doll, directed by Tod Browning (Freaks, Dracula), has a few things going for it aside from its reliable director; most strikingly, it has Lionel Barrymore in drag for the bulk of its running time. (If only George Bailey had known his rival's dirty secret! He may have had some leverage.) Barrymore plays Paul Lavond, an erstwhile banker framed for embezzlement, who escapes from prison along with a mad scientist, Marcel (Henry B. Walthall), who brings Lavond to his secret laboratory in the swamp to show off his incredible shrinking potion; it can transform anything—or anyone—to pint-size, and also conveniently allows the shrinker to control the shrunken's mind. The science is a little fuzzy here—free will depends on the size of our brains?—but before you could call anyone on it the scientist character is killed off (and coincidentally, shortly after filming, Walthall died in real life as well), leaving Lavond in control of his potions and ripe for revenge against the three slimy bankers who set him up, soiled his name, shamed his daughter, drove his wife to suicide, and sent him to the clink.

But, as a jail bird and Public Enemy No. 1, how can he stay in and get around Paris to exact his vengeance without being re-arrested? How about by opening a "doll" shop and dressing as a little old lady? Barrymore is a hoot, but this is a horror movie, not a comedy and, thankfully, he manages not to allow his performance to become bawdy in that Mrs. Doubtfire/White Chicks sort of way common to contemporary crossdressing films. (I know, I know, it's a tired complaint: "they don't make drag queen pictures like they used to!") In fact, he’s often so convincing throughout that it’s easy to forget it’s even him underneath that costume.

Reflecting the dual nature of Barrymore's transvestism, there's a lot of double entendre in the dialogue, such as a self-reflexive moment in the final scene as well as a conversation early in the film between Lavond and Marcel's wife. “I may not look it,” he tells her, “but I was once a successful banker.” The slumming Barrymore seems to be saying, with gravelly disappointment, “you may not be able to tell from the silly horror movie I’m in, but I used to be a respected actor of the stage.” Not even B-movies, however, could diminish Barrymore’s acting prowess, and he gets to show off his range, from his familiar Mr. Potter scowl to the sweet and funny disposition of an old woman; he is at his best in a hilarious scene in which a police officer comes to ask questions and s/he goes into hysterics. "Oh, what will the neighbors say?" he screeches in a falsetto. Indeed!

Lavond shrinks a couple of people, and uses them to kill, paralyze, and torment his foes one by one. The special effects are sophisticated, showing the miniaturized assassins with a clever combination of rear projection and oversized set design. Also notable is that The Devil Doll is somewhat class conscious, a rarity for a Hollywood film; for a slight example, while Lavond stalks his enemies as the old lady, he's constantly shooed away with disgust and disdain for being a lowly peddler. But while The Devil Doll might seem to be subversive, pro-Soviet agitprop, with its literally “little" guys exacting justice by knifepoint on wealthy and powerful bankers, it's actually moreso a subtle shade of anti-Communist, as its mini-killers are the victims of a madman's mind control. Lavond's soldiers are brainwashed slaves, like Lilliputian Manchurian candidates.