Crosscuts a Troubled Housewife, Over Thirty-Five, and Tor Jack Hill Set in the World of Figure-8 BRIEF BLU-RAY REVIEWS Bored
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NAR ■ Pit Stop (1969), Arrow Films, 2015, 91 hangover. Jean Simmons is Mary Wilson, mins, $39.95 • Arty action film from direc- Crosscuts a troubled housewife, over thirty-five, and tor Jack Hill set in the world of figure-8 BRIEF BLU-RAY REVIEWS bored. She pops pills, drinks excessively, racing. Shot in black-and-white, at night, seeks escape in romantic movies, has a Hill’s realistic film casts a greasy aura of GRANT TRACEY face-lift, and eventually leaves her hus- desperation, a road-to-nowhere vibe. You band for a getaway adventure in Jamaica. can almost smell the scorched rubber, the Will she find the self she lost when she left oil slicks, the burn off of high-octane fuel. college midway through her senior year Dick Davalos is Rick Bowman, a street to get married? Simmons’s performance racer, who, after being arrested, is signed is nuanced, multileveled, and should have by race promoter Grant Willard (Brian won an Oscar. She’s depressed and desper- Donlevy as an amoral heavy). Davalos, ate, seeking solutions to “the problem that hair puffed up in an anachronistic pompa- has no name.” Mary believes she ought dour, is an overaged JD, full of 1950s-era to be happy and yet sex doesn’t lift her existential angst. Director Hill said that emptiness. Brooks has written a sequel to Bowman was a figure who wins at the cost Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. of his soul, but Davalos’s muted, subtle And to help lift the veil on so-called happy performance questions whether he ever marriages, he has assembled a stellar cast: had a soul to begin with. Cold, fatalistic, Nanette Fabray, a pill-popping cocon- obsessive. spirator; Bobby Darin, a phony baloney gigolo with as many accents as Tim Hor- Anatahan (1953, 1958), Kino Classics, ton’s has donuts; Shirley Jones, a tough 2017, 91 mins, $29.95 • Strange capstone sounding mistress who yearns for real to director Josef von Sternberg’s career: romance (and may have found it); and a group of twelve Japanese sailors are the great Teresa Wright, in denial over her stranded on a small South Pacific Island; daughter’s dissatisfactions, and, perhaps, military discipline and human decency her own. Poignant, haunting. breaks down when they encounter a Reynolds and Sally Field fill the screen woman (the stunning Akemi Negishi as with their charisma, teasing, flirting. She’s The Man from Planet X (1951), MGM/ Keiko). In an offbeat exercise in narra- vulnerable and proves that smart can be Scream Factory, 71 mins, $27.99 • SF tive telling, von Sternberg’s voice-over funny. She also has the charm to break classic from cult film fave Edgar G “De- summarizes what we see and flash- Burt of his good-old-boy posturing and tour” Ulmer, about an unknown planet forwards to what’s to come. There are get him to reveal some real vulnerabilities that has somehow commandeered itself no subtitles. Non-native speakers only behind the bravado and fey laugh. Jerry from its orbit and is heading toward know what von Sternberg tells us. This Reed has written one incredible theme earth. Meanwhile, in Burry, Scotland, creates layers of uncertainty between song that always gets my boogie foot a tap- a man from Planet X plots, or so it dialogue and summary. Visually, von ping, and who can forget the understated would seem, our takeover. Margaret Sternberg fetishizes the female body, performance of Fred the dog? Or the Field (Sally’s mom) is Enid, a nearing- placing a nude Negishi behind netting, Method work of the Trans Am? Director thirty ingénue who aids Robert Clarke plant fronds, and gauzed curtains; more- Hal Needham even throws in a Brechtian (reporter John Lawrence), sporting a over, the voice of a European on the flourish: Burt, after avoiding a smokey, lifts macho bomber jacket and Clark Gable soundtrack, taking the position of one his head and smiles right into the camera, mustache, in thwarting the threat. The of the story’s drones (the powerless men telling us, hey, this film is a total phony, but alien, with a face that resembles a wide- drawn to Keiko’s beauty but unable to ain’t it all a barrel of fun, boys and girls? screen image squeezed into Academy attain her) forms an even more troubling Alfred Hitchcock loved Smokey. I do, too. aspect ratio, never speaks. His eyes, gaze: that of the European looking upon Guilty pleasure. apparently, have no pupils, creating Asian culture and claiming a position further levels of dissonance. Okay, this within it. A real curio. The Happy Ending (1969), Twilight Time, film is strictly low-budget: the rocks on 2016, 112 mins, $29.95 • Incredible the moor appear to be made of paper- Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Universal, second-wave feminist film from writer/ mache, the backdrops are painted, and 2017, 96 mins, $19.98 • This high-octane director Richard Brooks that deconstructs miniatures of various buildings look classic, full of daring stunts, humor, and classic fairy tales. It begins with gauzy like, well, miniatures, but Ulmer’s verve badass attitude is back, celebrating its images of skiing in Colorado, passion and chiaroscuro lighting give the film a fortieth anniversary with remastered before a fireplace, and a wedding, and poetically ethereal and expressionistic beer-drinking, rubber-burning fun. Burt then explores the “lived happily ever after” vibe. Loads of fun. ☐ 46 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW Fall 2017.