I

I Am a Camera (1955)—Derived from the same Christopher Isherwood Berlin stories that were later used in Cabaret, but aimed at a simpler, frothy, madcap quality. Julie Harris is Sally (“Shall we have a drink first or shall we go right to bed?”) Bowles, and Laurence Harvey is Isherwood, with Shelley Winters and Anton Diffring in the subplot. Henry Cornelius (who directed Genevieve) did this erratic version from John Collier’s adaptation of the John van Druten play. b & w

 

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)—One of the best of the social-protest films—naive, heavy, artless, but a straightforward, unadorned story with moments that haunted a generation, such as the hungry hero (Paul Muni) trying to pawn his Croix de Guerre. And there is one of the great closing scenes in the history of film: the hero is asked how he lives and he answers, “I steal.” Those involved in making the movie hoped it might help to ameliorate the condition of convicts, but it did more to ameliorate financial conditions at Warners and was a factor in making it the “socially conscious” studio. With Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson, Preston Foster, Edward Ellis, Allen Jenkins, and Berton Churchill. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, from an autobiographical story by Robert E. Burns; produced by Hal B. Wallis. b & w

 

I Am Curious—Yellow Jag Ar Nyfiken (1967)—In her search for political commitment, the angry young heroine, Lena Nyman, goes around as an inquiring reporter questioning people about non-violence, the labor movement, socialism, and so on. The picture improves when sex and politics mix; there are some free—and very funny—sequences of simulated copulation. The film caused a great stir here because the U.S. Customs Office seized the first print that the distributor (Grove Press) imported; by the time the ban was lifted, people expected something really sizzling. Written and directed by Vilgot Sjöman, who also appears as the director. With Anders Ek as the Instructor and Holger Löwenadler as the King, and also Martin Luther King, Olof Palme, and Yevgeni Yevtushenko. (The second part of Sjöman’s material was released as I Am Curious—Blue.) In Swedish. b & w

 

I Confess (1953)—A priest with a past (Montgomery Clift) caught in a trap; either he must betray the secrets of a murderer’s confession or he himself will be convicted of the murder. The premise of this Hitchcock thriller is promising, but the movie, set in Quebec and partly shot there, is so reticent it’s mostly dull. Clift seems determined not to move more than the tiniest facial muscles. With a miscast Anne Baxter, and Brian Aherne, O. E. Hasse, Karl Maiden, and Dolly Haas. From a play by Paul Anthelme, adapted by George Tabori and William Archibald. Warners. b & w

 

I Could Go On Singing (1963)—Dreadful, but often fascinating: Judy Garland in the sort of movie that is usually made about a performer long after the events, and with someone else playing the lead. Her face puffy, her manner distressed, she goes through a sort of Madame X version of a selfish singer’s life, in which she belts out numbers at the Palladium. Made in England and directed by Ronald Neame. With Dirk Bogarde, Jack Klugman, and Aline MacMahon. United Artists. color

 

I Cover the Waterfront (1933)—Up front, this is a commonplace romantic melodrama about a wisecracking, hard-drinking reporter (Ben Lyon) who exploits his love affair (with Claudette Colbert) in order to get a good story for his paper, but the background is far from commonplace. Colbert’s father (played by Ernest Torrence) is a huge wreck of a sea captain who smuggles Chinese to the West Coast; he’s a moody, illiterate mercenary who throws his passengers overboard tied to anchor chains when the Coast Guard approaches. There are several strong, memorable scenes, and such unusual moments as the heroine’s passing the time of day with the madam of a brothel while waiting to take her boozed-up father home. James Cruze directed; from Max Miller’s book. United Artists. b & w

 

I Dood It (1943)—Red Skelton’s best movie musical. It’s a lavish M-G-M production with a comedy-of-errors story about a pants presser who is mistaken for a millionaire, and it features Lena Horne and Eleanor Powell, and Hazel Scott at the piano and singing in the extraordinarily intense “Jericho” number—which is in the hot, revivalist, jazzy style of 20s theatre. The direction is credited to Vincente Minnelli, but he took over after someone else had started shooting—he didn’t direct the battleship number or the rope-twirling scene. With Butterfly McQueen, Sam Levene, Richard Ainley, Thurston Hall, and Lee Young on drums, Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra, Helen O’Connell, and Bob Eberle. Script by Sig Herzig and Fred Saidy, loosely derived from the 1929 Buster Keaton film Spite Marriage. The songs include “So Long Sarah Jane” and “Taking a Chance on Love.” b & w

 

I Know Where I’m Going (1945)—This romance is set in large part during a gale in the Western Isles of Scotland. It features dense fog, a squall, and a huge, roaring whirlpool. It also features Art Deco images of the young Wendy Hiller as an assured, impudent working girl who is scheduled to marry a rotten-rich, middle-aged tycoon, until she’s caught in that storm. She meets a kind-faced naval officer (Roger Livesey); he’s the impoverished Laird of Kiloran, and after a few days and nights of his gentle Gaelic voice she’s thoroughly confused. Written, produced, and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this is a charmer of a movie. In a party sequence, everything else stops while we listen to the rapid group singing of the Highlanders: it’s a soul-satisfying interlude. The cinematography is by Erwin Hillier; the art direction is by Alfred Junge. With Pamela Brown, Finlay Currie, Nancy Price, Jean Cadell, Catherine Lacey, Valentine Dyall, George Carney, Margot Fitzsimmons, John Laurie, and Petula Clark. (In his autobiography, Powell explained that Livesey couldn’t get out of his role in a London play, and a double filled in for him in the exterior scenes; Livesey “never came within 500 miles of the Western Isles.”) The Archers. b & w

 

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)—A giddy, slapdash, entertainingly inconsequential comedy, written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, and starring Peter Sellers as a Los Angeles Jewish lawyer who turns hippie. With Joyce Van Patten as his anxious fiancée, and Leigh Taylor-Young, Jo Van Fleet, David Arkin, Herbert Edelman, Salem Ludwig, Edra Gale, Lou Gottlieb, and Grady Sutton. The picture makes you laugh surprisingly often. Directed by Hy Averback. Warners. color (See Going Steady.)

 

I Love You to Death (1990)—When Joey (Kevin Kline), the self-admiring pizzeria owner, walks down the street, his little rump is alert to everything. That’s what gets him into trouble: he’s surrounded by opportunities for seduction, and he’s a practiced master of the art. Easing into conversation with a young beauty (Phoebe Cates) at a bar, he skillfully convinces her that the man she’s with isn’t worthy of her, and she apologizes for being with such a second-rate guy. You can’t dislike the narcissistic Italian-American Joey; he’s essentially innocent. That’s why it takes so long for his loving wife (Tracey Ullman) to see what’s going on. When her eyes are opened, she gives in to her hardbitten Yugoslavian mother (Joan Plowright) who arranges to have Joey killed. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan, from John Kostmayer’s script, this amiably slack screwball farce is based on an actual case in which five botched attempts were made on an errant husband’s life. The picture is often on the verge of being really funny, but it doesn’t have much energy, and it lacks comic precision until (near the end) the wildly gifted Miriam Margolyes, who plays Joey’s mother, whacks him on his bandaged head; her explosive timing lifts the scene sky-high. Kevin Kline is a little too conscious of his deadpan style, but Keanu Reeves and William Hurt are a fine pair of dopeheads who hire on as hit men. (Reeves shows a flair for spaced-out clowning.) Plowright has a few near-inspired routines, and River Phoenix, playing a busboy, comes through as a giddy comedian. Watching the cast you may feel tolerant, the way you do watching a bunch of boisterous pros enjoying themselves in a sloppy summer-stock production. With Victoria Jackson and Heather Graham. Set in Tacoma, Washington. Tri-Star. color

 

I Married a Witch (1942)—Moderately amusing romantic fantasy, with Veronica Lake at her prettiest (and getting the full star treatment) as a witch burned in Puritan days who comes back in modern times and discovers that “love is stronger than witchcraft.” René Clair directed, and the cast includes Fredric March, Robert Benchley, Cecil Kellaway as a warlock, and Susan Hayward as a bitch. From Thorne Smith’s The Passionate Witch. United Artists. b & w

 

I Married an Angel (1942)—Rodgers and Hart’s sophisticated musical comedy was purchased for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy when their popularity in stale-whipped-cream operetta was waning, but then M-G-M became nervous, removed the sophistication, and turned the musical comedy into something as bland as operetta but without its energy. This disaster was MacDonald and Eddy’s last film together. Directed by W. S. Van Dyke. With Binnie Barnes, Janis Carter, Mona Maris, and Edward Everett Horton. b & w

 

I Met Him in Paris (1937)—Claudette Colbert escapes her department-store job and her prig of a fiance (Lee Bowman). She picks up Melvyn Douglas and Robert Young in Paris, travels to Switzerland with them, and falls in love with the wrong one. Simpleminded, predictable romantic comedy, with Colbert panicking on skis and getting tossed into snowbanks. (The Alpine scenes were shot in Sun Valley.) Wesley Ruggles directed; Claude Binyon wrote the screenplay, based on a story by Helen Meinardi. With Mona Barrie. Paramount. b & w

 

I Never Sang for My Father (1970)—Bargain-basement dramaturgy is used to surprisingly powerful effect in this account of a middle-aged man’s unresolved relationship with his father. The dramatist, Robert Anderson, who adapted his own play, keeps things on that truthful level where no solutions are really satisfactory, and the director, Gilbert Cates, doesn’t cheat—he accepts the risks of being solidly obvious. And by its decency in not pulling sloppy feelings out of us, the film develops valid emotion. Gene Hackman and Melvyn Douglas perform unsentimentally and intelligently as the son and the self-righteous father. With Estelle Parsons and Dorothy Stickney. Columbia. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

I Remember Mama (1948)—Kathryn Forbes’ novel about her Norwegian family in San Francisco is used as the framework for a mother image of formidable proportions. This image is held to with the serene nostalgia that we reserve for our very best fantasies—Mama (Irene Dunne) is tall and beautiful, wise and omniscient. Except for a few gooey lapses (the worst is a bathetic hospital scene), George Stevens directed with warmth and intelligence; it’s not a bad movie, though it has a too careful look, with meticulous reconstructions of San Francisco streets circa 1905–10. Philip Dorn is Papa, and Barbara Bel Geddes does well as daughter Katrin. As the rakehell Uncle Chris, Oscar Homolka goes in for too many flourishes and loiters too long on his deathbed; Edgar Bergen is the timid undertaker who marries Mama’s sister. The movie seems hemmed in, maybe because DeWitt Bodeen’s script sticks too closely to the stage adaptation by John van Druten. Also with Cedric Hardwicke, Rudy Vallee, Barbara O’Neil, Florence Bates, Peggy McIntyre, June Hedin, and Steve Brown. Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca. R K O. b & w

 

I See a Dark Stranger Originally released in the U.S. as The Adventuress. (1945)—A romantic suspense comedy, with Deborah Kerr as an Irish girl, fed on anti-British folklore by her father. On her 21st birthday she goes off to Dublin, hoping to join the I.R.A., but becomes involved in a different kind of anti-British activity: spying for the Nazis. Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who produced, with Launder also directing, had written Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich and other witty thrillers; this script, which they wrote with Wolfgang Wilhelm, has the same basic ingredients. But without a Hitchcock or a Carol Reed to supply style and terror, the results seem too consciously clever. The musical score and the attitudes are a little arch, a little condescending. It’s pleasant enough, but unexciting; its only spark is from Kerr, who’s fresh and lovely, with full pouty young lips. The hero, Trevor Howard, has nothing to do but follow her around, adoringly; Raymond Huntley plays the Nazi who recruits her. b & w.

 

I Walk the Line (1970)—This John Frankenheimer picture has gone so far in deglam-ourizing everything that it forgets to give you a reason for watching it. Gregory Peck, a weather-beaten, gaunt-faced Tennessee sheriff, married to well-meaning Estelle Parsons, gets tragically involved with a young girl (Tuesday Weld), the daughter of a moonshiner (Ralph Meeker). The dirt-poor people look at each other expressionlessly, hopelessly, and talk in hillbilly dialect, with a pause after every line so you’ll know their lives are arid. This is the kind of rural-elemental movie in which a slobbering bully forces himself on the lovely young heroine and shoots the dog who’s guarding her. The screenplay by Alvin Sargent is based on the novel An Exile, by Madison Jones. Columbia. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

I Was a Male War Bride (1949)—Somebody must have thought it would be funny to put Cary Grant in skirts and a horsehair wig. The whole thing is one of those awful transvestite jokes that never has the grace to go off-color; it all stays at the chortling wholesome-family-picture level. Ann Sheridan plays the WAC lieutenant whom Grant (a French Army captain) marries; the gimmick is that she’s stationed in Occupied Germany (where the film was made) and the only Army regulation under which he can accompany her back to the U.S. is the one concerning the immigration of war brides. The conception requires Sheridan to be bossy and butch (it’s one of her least pleasant performances) and Grant is never so beefy and clumsy as when he’s in drag; he doesn’t play a woman, he threatens to—flirting with the idea and giggling over it. Howard Hawks directed, but his pacing is off and everything seems forced. The screenplay is by Charles Lederer, Leonard Spigelgass, and Hagar Wilde, from a book by Henri Rochard (Grant plays Henri Rochard). There are no subsidiary roles of any consequence; with Ken Tobey, Robert Stevenson, and William Neff. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

I Will, I Will … For Now (1976)—The worst. Combines the most simperingly forced elements of 50s mistaken-identity farces with a mushy soft-core version of the sex-clinic pornos. The hero, who suffers from premature ejaculation, and the heroine, who is frigid, go to a Santa Barbara clinic where “Nothing Is Unnatural” is emblazoned in neon in the patients’ cottages. The message is false: swallowing this movie is an unnatural act for any person of average intelligence. Elliott Gould is fairly thoroughly trashed, but Diane Keaton manages to save face despite what’s going on around her. Norman Panama directed, from a script he and Albert E. Lewin devised. With Madge Sinclair, Robert Alda, and Paul Sorvino. 20th Century-Fox. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Ice (1970)—Made during the Vietnam war, this film by Robert Kramer is set in an indefinite near future, when Vietnam has been superseded by a war in Mexico. The picture is an extension of the late-6os urban-guerrilla attitudes and activities, and it is made in a hazy, semi-documentary style, as if a stoned anthropologist were examining his own tribe and were so indifferent to the filmmaking process that he hadn’t learned how to read a light meter or bothered to work out a continuity. It’s a film about political commitment that is made not only without any commitment to film as an art form but without any enthusiasm for its own political commitment. Yet this gray, grainy, painfully stagnant movie is a revealing account of the anomalies in the urban-guerrilla movement. Though it cost only $12,000 (from the American Film Institute), it has a cast of 250. b & w (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Ice Follies of 1939—For necrophiliacs. This grotesque M-G-M musical died the day it was released. It stars Joan Crawford, with James Stewart and Lew Ayres, and the forgettable score includes such gems as “Loveland in the Wintertime.” The unlucky Reinhold Schunzel directed; produced by Harry Rapf. With Lionel Stander, Lewis Stone, and the International Ice Follies. b & w, with color sequences

 

Iceman (1984)—John Lone is awe-inspiring in the way he stirs our empathy with the hero—the prehistoric man who has been asleep inside glacial ice for 40,000 years. The Iceman is thawed out in a sequence that is comparable in creepiness and fascination to the famous laboratory scene in James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, in which the monster comes to life. But the tone here is altogether different: the water dripping from the icy casket suggests weeping. Uncouth as this Neanderthal may look, he has a full range of feeling in his eyes. He’s unmistakably human, and he’s confused about where he is; he thinks he has been enchanted and that he’s being punished. It’s a strange, elating movie with the Iceman at its emotional center; his mystical fervor takes hold. The director, Fred Schepisi, is working with a weak script, yet he and his two longtime collaborators, the composer Bruce Smeaton and the cinematographer Ian Baker, achieve that special and overwhelming fusion of the arts which great visual moviemaking can give us. With Timothy Hutton, Lindsay Crouse, Josef Sommer, and David Strathairn. Written by Chip Proser and John Drimmer, from Drimmer’s story; a Norman Jewison and Patrick Palmer Production, for Universal. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Iceman Cometh (1973)—Eugene O’Neill’s great, heavy, simplistic, mechanical, beautiful play has been given a straightforward, faithful production in handsome, dark-toned color. A filmed play like this one doesn’t offer the sensual excitement that movies can offer, but you don’t go to it for that; you go to it for O’Neill’s crude, prosaic virtuosity, which is also pure American poetry, and for the kind of cast that rarely gathers for a stage production. The characters are drunken bums and whores who have found sanctuary in Harry Hope’s flophouse saloon; each has a “pipe dream” that sustains him until Hickey, the salesman—the “iceman”—who attempts to free them all by stripping them of their lies and guilt, takes the life out of them. The play is essentially an argument between Larry, an aging anarchist (Robert Ryan), and Hickey (Lee Marvin); Larry speaks for pity and the necessity of illusions, Hickey for the curative power of truth. They’re the two poles of consciousness that O‘Neill himself is split between. Larry, a self-hating alcoholic, is a weak man and a windbag, but Ryan brings so much understanding to Larry’s weakness that the play achieves new dimensions. Ryan becomes O’Neill for us; he has O‘Neill’s famous “tragic handsomeness” and the broken-man jowls, too, and at the end, when Larry is permanently “iced”—that is, stripped of illusion—we can see that this is the author’s fantasy of himself: he alone is above the illusions that the others fall back on. He is tragic, while the others, with their restored illusions, have become comic. Yes, it’s sophomoric to see yourself as the one who is doomed to live without illusions, yet what O’Neill does with this sophomoric conception is masterly. And Ryan (who died shortly after) got right to the boozy, gnarled soul of the play. The film is marred by the central miscasting of Lee Marvin (he’s thick, somehow, and irrelevantly vigorous, and his big monologue doesn’t register at all), but it isn’t destroyed. Though the characters are devised for a thesis and we never lose our awareness of that, they are nevertheless marvellously playable. Fredric March interprets Harry Hope with so much quiet tenderness that when Harry regains his illusions and we see March’s muscles tone up we don’t know whether to smile for the character or the actor. And there are Jeff Bridges as Parritt, Bradford Dillman as Willie (you can almost taste his joy in the role), and Martyn Green, George Voskovec, Sorrell Booke, Moses Gunn, Tom Pedi, and John McLiam as Jimmy Tomorrow. Directed by John Frankenheimer—tactfully but not very probingly. Produced by Ely Landau. (See Reeling.)

 

The Idiot (1946)—The young Gérard Philipe is an extraordinarily sensitive Prince Myshkin, and Edwige Feuillere, that remarkable mistress of the language of gesture, is a spectacular Nastasya in this emotional, surprisingly effective version of the Dostoevski novel. Directed by Georges Lampin. In French. b & w

 

The Idiot Hakuchi (1951)—Kurosawa made this version of the Dostoevski novel right after Rashomon, using the same two men—Masayuki Mori (the husband in Rashomon) as Prince Myshkin, and Toshiro Mifune (the bandit in Rashomon) as Rogozhin. It’s a long, uneven, fascinating film, with such curiosities as a Nastasya Filipovna (Setsuko Hara) modelled on Maria Casares in Cocteau’s Orpheus. In Japanese. b & w

 

The Idiot Nastasia Filipovna (1958)—The first half of a planned two-part film; the second half was never shot. Yuri Yakovlev’s Prince Myshkin doesn’t make anything like the impression that Gérard Philipe’s Prince did in the 1946 French version, but the film shows the considerable intelligence of the director, Ivan Pyriev, who also did the adaptation. He experimented with a theatrical style, using single sets for long sequences. In Russian. color

 

Idiot’s Delight (1939)—Robert Sherwood’s high reputation as a dramatist was always a little mystifying and never more so than when his windy intellectuality was recorded on film. This allegorical comedy from M-G-M has Clark Gable as a hoofer and Norma Shearer as a fake Russian countess (the roles made famous on Broadway by Lunt and Fontanne). It’s set in an Alpine winter-sports hotel high above a world about to be engulfed in war. The characters include a leftist, a pair of honeymooners, and so forth; and there’s got to be an anti-war message in it somewhere. Gable isn’t bad (he does a deliberately clunky, bedraggled dance to “Puttin’ On the Ritz”), but oh, that Shearer. With Burgess Meredith, Edward Arnold, Charles Coburn, Joseph Schildkraut, Skeets Gallagher, Laura Hope Crews, Pat Paterson, Virginia Grey, Joan Marsh, Bernadene Hayes, and Fritz Feld. Directed by Clarence Brown, who struggles hopelessly trying to give this stagey material some style and impudence. Sherwood did the adaptation himself, providing early scenes to establish that the hoofer and the “countess” had had an affair years before (when they were both in vaudeville), and a new, upbeat ending. b & w

 

The Idolmaker (1980)—A likable first feature by the director Taylor Hackford; it has verve and snap, despite a rickety script and a sloshy finish. Ray Sharkey plays a brash young songwriter from the Bronx who becomes a hype artist. He takes a baby-faced, boozing pillhead (Paul Land) and turns him into a rock idol for teen-agers, and then finds a swarthy, 16-year-old busboy (Peter Gallagher) whose eyes and mouth are impossibly—foolishly—large and saturates the country with publicity, pre-selling the kid as an idol before the public even hears his voice. The picture keeps moving, and the satirical musical numbers are cheerful and impudent. The script by Edward Di Lorenzo was suggested by the life of the rock impresario Bob Marcucci, who promoted Frankie Avalon and Fabian. With Kenneth O’Brien as the corrupt disc jockey, Jimmy Carter as the jiggling blond singer, and Tovah Feldshuh (a dreary, smirky performance). Produced by Gene Kirkwood and Howard W. Koch, Jr.; released by United Artists. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

If … (1969)—At first, and for a considerable stretch, this Lindsay Anderson film appears to be a clinical expose of the horrible organized bedlam inflicted on English boys in the name of a gentleman’s education. The movie is especially fixated on the cruelties that the students perpetrate against each other, with lingering attention to scenes of juvenile sadism and flogging and nasty homoeroticism. Then it turns into an epic on student revolt. You can read the signals all right—the poster of Ché and the student-hero’s forbidden mustache and his playing the “Missa Luba.” But the style of the film is constricted and charged with ambivalent feelings. Can it be meant to be a story of the revolutionary spirit of the young when it’s so full of bile about youth? Anderson devotes most of his energy to the meanness of the students. And it’s really not a rebellion of the young that he shows us but a rebellion of a self-chosen few—three boys (and a girl picked up along the way) who set fire to the school on Speech Day and start sniping at those who flee the fire, including the rest of the young. Their way of destroying the prison is to kill the inmates. The conspirators are cleaning out the whole mess, apparently—killing everybody, because nobody’s fit to live. The last shot is a glamorous and apparently approving closeup of the hero as he fires away, like Robert Taylor aiming at “the Japs” at the end of Bataan. There are so many muddy undercurrents in this film that even the best sequences are often baffling, and the ways in which Anderson tries to illustrate the desire for freedom don’t carry any conviction. With Malcolm McDowell. Written by David Sherwin; cinematography by Miroslav Ondek. b & w and color (See Going Steady.)

 

If I Had a Million (1932)—Perhaps the best of the American all-star episode films of its era. Each brief story has a different comic flavor. The cast includes W. C. Fields, Alison Skipworth, Charles Laughton, Gary Cooper, Mary Boland, Jack Oakie, George Raft, and Wynne Gibson as the prostitute who, given a million dollars, goes to bed alone. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, among others. Paramount. b & w

 

If I Were King (1938)—Lively costume romance. Ronald Colman smiles with mocking charm as the braggart poet François Villon, quick-witted with epigrams and swords. Fortunately, the script is by Preston Sturges. Frances Dee is the frosty great lady whom the poet melts (or thaws, anyway), and Ellen Drew is the warmer number, Huguette, an unkempt wench who hangs around the fellows in the wine cellars. With Basil Rathbone as a sly, wily Louis XI, and a first-rate cast, including Henry Wilcoxon, Bruce Lester, Alma Lloyd, Sidney Toler, Ralph Forbes, Montagu Love, and William Farnum. Frank Lloyd directed this version of Justin McCarthy’s play, first filmed in 1920 staring William Farnum, then in 1926 starring John Barrymore, then in a musical version in 1930 starring Dennis King and Jeanette MacDonald, and again (unsuccessfully this time) in 1955 starring Oreste Kirkop and Kathryn Grayson. Paramount. b & w

 

If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969)—Said to be the first cartoon caption ever made into a full-length movie. Suzanne Pleshette and Mildred Natwick are among the stereotyped American tourists; Ian Mc-Shane is their guide. The director, Mel Stuart, keeps everything moving cheerfully, and there are a few passable one-liners, but you feel as if you’ve seen the picture before—on television. The script is by David Shaw; with Peggy Cass, Marty Ingels, Murray Hamilton, Pamela Britton, Michael Constantine, Sandy Baron, and Norman Fell. A Wolper Production; United Artists. color

 

If You Could Only Cook (1935)—This eminently watchable romantic comedy has a neatly contrived 30s-style opening. An automobile engineer and tycoon (Herbert Marshall) becomes impatient with his board of directors and walks out on them. He goes to the park to cool off and meets a girl (Jean Arthur) who’s perusing the want ads. She thinks that he’s unemployed, too, and proposes that they hire out as cook and butler. There are also some gracefully conceived sequences: the test on the use of garlic that she has to pass at the home of a gourmet (Leo Carrillo), a retired racketeer; the tycoon asking his own butler tricks of the butling trade. There are also some silly melodramatic moments, but the film is remarkably good-natured and fresh. Jean Arthur brings out the best in Marshall—or maybe the director, William Seiter, livened him up. (He smiles—almost broadly—now and then.) With Lionel Stander and cello-voiced Frieda Inescort. The script by Gertrude Purcell and Howard J. Green is based on F. Hugh Herbert’s screen story. Columbia. b & w

 

Ikiru (1952)—The last days of a Japanese Everyman (Takashi Shimura) doomed by cancer, as he explores the ways of confronting death. It’s extremely uneven—there are slick and sentimental passages and some that are impenetrable. But there are also emotional revelations and there’s a superb sequence—almost an epiphany—when the dying man, who has accomplished what he hoped to, sits in a swing in the snow and hums a little song. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. In Japanese. b & w

 

I’ll Be Seeing You (1943)—This Selznick project originated in a radio play (by Charles Martin), and it may have sounded like a good movie idea. But oh, my! Ginger Rogers is the young woman doing a six-year prison stretch for having killed a man in the course of defending her honor. Midway in her sentence, she’s allowed to return home for three weeks to visit her family—an aunt (Spring Byington), an uncle (Tom Tully), and their daughter (Shirley Temple). They are a tactless bunch, so compulsively drawn to the subject of her penal servitude that one imagines that she’d have preferred to remain in the jug. But she meets a shell-shocked sergeant (Joseph Cotten) on furlough from an Army hospital; he is being harassed by the local people’s insistence on talking to him about the war. Having the same problem brings them together, and at the close they return to their separate institutions, planning to reunite forever. Doesn’t it reek of radio drama? On the screen, as directed by William Dieterle from a script by Marion Parsonnet, it’s damned close to intolerable. Released by United Artists. b & w

 

I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955)—This maudlin M-G-M bio-pic, based on Lillian Roth’s book (written with Mike Connolly and Gerold Frank) about how she rose to fame as a singer-actress and then drank her way to shame, has a low-grade, sordid, masochistic appeal. Susan Hayward was close to 40 when she played the part, and her scenes as the teen-age Lillian lack the necessary eagerness and vividness. Hayward deepens her speaking voice, and, though it is said that she did her own singing, the big, low, rather toneless voice doesn’t seem to emanate from her, and when she stands with her chest pushed out and imitates the movements Roth made when she sang, there’s no drive behind what she’s doing—nothing to suggest what made Lillian Roth a headliner. There’s very little left to suggest what made Hayward a star, either; she falls back on tired technique and flaccid, self-pitying nobility. (You have to see her in something like Deadline at Dawn of 1946 to get an idea of how much she’d slipped.) Eddie Albert gives the booby-prize performance; as the Alcoholics Anonymous man who brings about Lillian’s spiritual rebirth, he keeps his square jaw tilted upward—humility lifts his every thought to heaven. Considering the feeble script (by Helen Deutsch and Jay Richard Kennedy) it’s surprising that the director Daniel Mann managed to hold viewers at all, but he doesn’t establish a sense of period or of locale or of the passage of time. The only scenes that have any energy are those with Richard Conte as Lillian’s sadistic husband; the viewer feels a queasy curiosity and dread. There’s a classic pulp ending: the heroine walks forward to the stage for a “This Is Your Life” show, her face bathed in heavenly light. With Jo Van Fleet as Lillian’s monomaniacal stage mother, Ray Danton, Don Taylor, Margo, Virginia Gregg, and Don Barry; the little girl who plays Lillian at 8 is uncannily like both Roth and Hayward. b & w

 

Illicit Interlude, see Summer Interlude

 

I’m All Right, Jack (1960)—This isn’t one of those gentle English comedies with glancing bits of social spoofery; it’s a cynical and raucous slapstick farce—the one really funny film satire of the labor-management conflicts. Its view of the philosophy of the citizens of the welfare state is summed up in the title, derived from the English armed-forces catch phrase: “——you, I’m all right, Jack.” The big businessmen are the villains in the plot, but the film also shows the trade unionists as smug and self-centered, and though the satire of union practices is much more affectionate, it is so accurately aimed—and we are so unused to it—that it comes off much the better. As the shop steward, Peter Sellers is avid to protect the workers’ rights—he’s earnest, he’s monstrously self-serious. He wears a little Hitler mustache—that mustache was always an oddly lower-middle-class adornment on Hitler—and while this shop steward is certainly lower middle class in his habits, he’s a fanatical proletarian in theory, and he speaks in a jargon that derives from political pamphlets. The movie parodies this beady-eyed little stuffed shirt and the featherbedding practices of his union. The cast includes Terry-Thomas as an Army officer turned personnel manager; Ian Carmichael as an innocent from Oxford who wants to become a business executive; Dennis Price and Richard Attenborough as capitalist tricksters; and Margaret Rutherford, Miles Malleson, Irene Handl, Marne Maitland, Liz Fraser, Raymond Huntley, and Malcolm Muggeridge—as himself, of course. Produced and directed by Roy and John Boulting; from the novel by Alan Hackney, adapted by John Boulting, Frank Harvey, and Hackney. b & w (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

I’m No Angel (1933)—Mae West as a lion tamer, Cary Grant as a society lion, lots of adenoidal innuendo, and some good honky-tonk songs (“That Dallas Man,” et al.). Arguably West’s best film, certainly one of her funniest. When she isn’t wiggling in her corsets and driving men wild she’s sashaying around and camping it up for her plump black maids (Gertrude Howard, Libby Taylor). With Edward Arnold, Gregory Ratoff, Kent Taylor, Ralf Harolde, Gertrude Michael, Nat Pendleton, Dennis O’Keefe, Irving Pichel, and Dorothy Peterson. Directed by Wesley Ruggles; the story, screenplay, and dialogue are by Mae West, with continuity by Harlan Thompson. Paramount. b & w

 

Images (1972)—Robert Altman’s modern variant of the Caligari ploy—the world as seen through a mad person’s eyes. A classy schizo (Susannah York) duplicates herself, confuses the living with the dead, and can’t tell her husband (René Auberjonois) from her lovers (Marcel Bozzufi, Hugh Millais). Her madness seems to be a matter of tinkling wind chimes, slivers of glass, windows, lenses, mirrors—“images.” To be effective, the movie needs to draw us in to identify with her hallucinations, but the cold shine of the surfaces doesn’t do it. The imagery itself fails to stir the imagination, though the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond, shot some unusual landscapes, inhumanly clear and visible at a great distance, and there are some ravishing pastoral scenes. It’s a hollow puzzle movie despite the seductive editing rhythms and the many inventive moments. From a screenplay by Altman, with improvisations; in this ornamental setting, with so much care given to twirling glassy baubles, the occasional flat improvised lines are like peanut shells stuck in jewelry. Susannah York is the author of “In Search of Unicorns,” the stupefyingly high-flown story for children, which the heroine narrates. With Cathryn Harrison. Made in Ireland. Columbia. color (See Reeling.)

 

Imitation of Life (1934)—Classic, compulsively watchable rags-to-riches-and-heartbreak weeper, from a novel by Fannie Hurst. Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers are the white and black women who go into business together, and Rochelle Hudson and Fredi Washington are their daughters. Ross Hunter produced a remake in 1959 which pulled out all the stops; in both versions you want to laugh at yourself for choking up, but, at least, the original is simpler and the sobs aren’t torn out of your throat. With Warren William, Ned Sparks, Alan Hale, Franklin Pangborn, Noel Francis, Hazel Washington, Madame Sul-Te-Wan (the black actress who worked with D. W. Griffith), Hattie McDaniel, Henry Armetta, and Henry Kolker. Directed by John Stahl. Universal. b & w

 

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952)—Oscar Wilde’s deliriously convoluted, perfect comedy—the most preposterous work of art ever written. Wit cascades through the play in a natural flow. Considered too effete for general consumption, it was never filmed until this production, directed by Anthony Asquith, who also did the adaptation and left the play alone as much as possible. The film is stagey, but highly enjoyable; Wilde’s multiple-entendres about love and money are delivered in the required high, dry style by an extraordinary cast. Michael Redgrave is Jack Worthing; Edith Evans is triumphantly larger than life as Lady Bracknell; Joan Greenwood is the Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax; Michael Denison is Algernon Moncrieff; Dorothy Tutin is a wonderful, twittering Cecily Cardew; Margaret Rutherford, her great jaw wobbling with emotion, is Miss Prism; and Miles Malleson is Reverend Chasuble. People who have seen this movie have been known to giggle with pleasure years later as they recall the timbre and phrasing that Edith Evans gives to such lines as “Prism! Where is that baby?” color

 

In a Lonely Place (1950)—Humphrey Bogart, as a cynical, tired Hollywood screenwriter named Dixon Steele, in an atmospheric but disappointingly hollow murder melodrama directed by Nicholas Ray. In talking to a hat-check girl, Steele discovers that she has read the book he is supposed to adapt to the screen; not wanting the bother of reading it himself, he invites her to his place so he can grill her about it. When the girl is murdered, the police think he did it. Steele is in love with Gloria Grahame (who lives in the same complex of courtyard apartments), but he’s under so much pressure because of the police that he almost strangles her in a jealous rage. That makes her queasily fearful, and he knows he’s lost her. Ray doesn’t seem to have an adequate budget or enough ideas to play with; he keeps the thing going and uses the courtyard setting for a special L.A. feeling, but the dialogue is no more than functional, and there’s not much of a supporting cast—Frank Lovejoy, Carl Benton Reid, Jeff Donnell, Art Smith, Robert Warwick, Steven Geray, and Hadda Brooks as the singer in the nightclub sequence. (Some people have interpreted the film’s murky undertones in terms of the breakup of Ray’s marriage to Gloria Grahame; they split when the picture was finished.) From a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, adapted by Edmund H. North and Andrew Solt; cinematography by Burnett Guffey; music by George Antheil. Columbia. b&w

 

In Caliente (1935)—Mediocre but tolerable foolishness—an inexpensive, makeshift musical from First National with one memorable number: sultry Wini Shaw singing “The Lady in Red.” The plot is some nonsense about a dancer (Dolores Del Rio) falling in love with a critic who gave her a bad review. The cast includes Pat O’Brien, Glenda Farrell, Leo Carrillo, Phil Regan, Judy Canova, Luis Alberni, Herman Bing, and Edward Everett Horton; Lloyd Bacon directed, from a screenplay by Jerry Wald and Julius Epstein, based on a story by a couple of other fellows. There is an appalling song called “Muchacha.” b & w

 

In Like Flint (1967)—This sequel to Our Man Flint (1966) has just one memorable bit. Told that the President (Andrew Duggan) has been kidnapped and is being impersonated by an actor, agent Flint (James Coburn) cries out, “An actor the President of the United States!” Directed by Gordon Douglas, from a script by Hal Fimberg. With Lee J. Cobb and Anna Lee. 20th Century-Fox. CinemaScope, color

 

In Name Only (1939)—Slinky Kay Francis is the cold-hearted wife in name only. All she wants of her husband, Cary Grant, is his wealth and social position, while he is so desperate for a divorce in order to marry the companionable Carole Lombard, a young widow with a small daughter, that he becomes ill and almost dies of pneumonia. This is one of the rare movies in which the robust Grant actually has sickbed scenes. John Cromwell directed this “mature” (Dodsworth influenced) view of marital incompatibility, which emphasizes the wife’s shrewdness in manipulating her in-laws. It’s a solemn, soapy picture, but with unusually good performances. With Charles Coburn as Grant’s father, and Helen Vinson, Peggy Ann Garner, Katharine Alexander, Alan Baxter, Maurice Moscovitch, and Nella Walker. Adapted by Richard Sherman, from Bessie Breuer’s novel Memory of Love. R K O. b & w

 

In Old Chicago (1938)—Alice Brady has a few miraculous scenes as Mrs. O‘Leary, whose cow kicks over a lamp and starts the big blaze. The remainder of the film, which features Don Ameche as her goody-boy son and Tyrone Power as her shrewd, black-sheep scamp, is on a different level altogether. It’s a mediocre, though jolly, quasi-historical melodrama involving brawls, riots, capricious temperaments, police squads, café ladies, gaudy saloons, and Alice Faye smiling that great open smile of hers that makes it possible to forgive her acting and to bask in her mellow-voiced numbers. (Ameche is so fatuous here he’s almost likable.) Henry King directed, from the screenplay by Lamar Trotti and Sonya Levien, based on Niven Busch’s We the O’Learys; the more immediate inspiration for the film was the box-office success of M-G-M’s 1936 San Francisco. With Gene Reynolds, Phyllis Brooks, Tom Brown, Andy Devine, Sidney Blackmer, Brian Donlevy, Berton Churchill, and Paul Hurst. b & w

 

In the Heat of the Night (1967)—A comedy-thriller with Sidney Poitier as a quick-witted police officer from the North and Rod Steiger as a blundering Southern chief of police. Fast and enjoyable, with Poitier’s color used for comedy. He’s like a black Sherlock Holmes in a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon of reversals. For once it’s funny (instead of embarrassing) that he’s superior to everybody else. In the final joke, Steiger plays redcap to him. With Lee Grant, Warren Oates, Beah Richards, Scott Wilson, Peter Masterson, Matt Clark, Peter Whitney, James Patterson, and Larry Gates. The cinematography by Haskell Wexler has an exciting, alive quality, and the good Quincy Jones score includes a title song sung by Ray Charles. Directed by Norman Jewison, from a script by Stirling Silliphant based on a novel by John Ball. Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor (Steiger), Screenplay, and Editing (Hal Ashby). United Artists. color (See Going Steady.)

 

In the Year of the Pig (1969)—Emile de Antonio assembled news footage and interviews from many sources for this overview of the background and issues of the Vietnam war. There are some almost forgotten faces, like Emperor Bao Dai’s and Madame Nhu’s, and some American speeches we might like to forget. The film makes sense out of what was going on, even if this sense isn’t the only sense to be made of it. De Antonio is overly fond of schoolboy tricks—loaded, crude bits of satire. But in the main line of the narrative he plays a highly sophisticated game: he presents the American leaders and American policy as Hanoi might see them, and he’s done it out of our own mouths. (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

In Which We Serve (1942)—During the Second World War, Noel Coward and David Lean co-directed this skillful, discreetly realistic film about the courage and sacrifice of the British Navy, specifically the men on a destroyer. Coward himself plays the ship’s commander; he also wrote and scored the movie and produced it. Coward’s ability to package emotions and to break the audience’s heart without relaxing his upper lip is more perplexing here than elsewhere. The restraint of his proud patriotism may seem a much worse con than rampant jingoism, but he’a a wizard at this English game. The cast includes Celia Johnson, John Mills, Kay Walsh, Michael Wilding, and Richard Attenborough. b & w

 

Les Inconnus dans la maison, see Strangers in the House

 

The Incredible Sarah (1976)—An aberration. The staccato, wrenchingly modern Glenda Jackson plays the lyrical, incandescent Sarah Bernhardt. Written by Ruth Wolff and directed by Richard Fleischer, this picture is in the stupefying tradition of Song of Norway. With Daniel Massey as Sardou and Yvonne Mitchell as Mam’selle. Produced by Helen M. Strauss, for Reader’s Digest. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)—B-budget science-fiction and simple stuff, but with more consistency and logic than usual, and with some rather amusing trick photography. And after all these years of the hero escaping every kind of disaster and atomic monster, it’s fun to have him wind up as a twinkle in God’s eye. With Grant Williams. Directed by Jack Arnold, from a script by Richard Matheson. Universal. b & w

 

The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981)—An amiable, sloppy, light satirical fantasy starring Lily Tomlin as Pat, a sweetly loony happy housewife in a pretty-poison dream world. The film is an idyll of consumerism. Everything in the suburban development where Pat lives with her advertising-man husband (Charles Grodin) and their two children has a muted artificiality; the style is Necco Deco—a sort of plastic lyricism. The whole family is a little benumbed—like the people in TV commercials, who don’t react to anything that doesn’t roll on or come in an aerosol can or make the floor shine. Then Pat starts to shrink (because of exposure to the chemicals in the products that the family delights in). Directed by Joel Schumacher, from a script by Jane Wagner (which retains only a few incidents from the Richard Matheson novel that was the basis of the 1957 sci-fi film The Incredible Shrinking Man), the picture loses much of its stylized originality when it sets up a good-guys-versus-bad-guys conflict in order to give us a rooting interest in the outcome. But even when it turns into a gimcrack farce it’s offhand and likable. Pat, imprisoned in a hamster’s cage, finds a friend in a zonked lab technician (Mark Blankfield), and she becomes the beloved of a gorilla named Sidney (played by Rick Baker). It should be a great movie for kids; it’s full of toys. With Ned Beatty, Henry Gibson, Elizabeth Wilson, and John Glover. Universal. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Indagine su un Cittadino al di sopra di Ogni Sospetto, see Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

 

Independence Day (1983)—A fine, quiet movie about the small-town youth of a woman artist whose desperation takes the form of affectations and pretensions. Kathleen Quinlan plays the part with a delicate fierceness—this heroine challenges herself to become what she’s almost sure she could be. The script is by the novelist Alice Hoffman, who has shaped the story around the risk-taking heroine and her boyfriend’s sister (Dianne Wiest), a battered wife, clammy with fear, who revenges herself on her husband in the grand manner. It’s a funny thing about Wiest’s performance—you keep expecting it to turn into something trite, but pretty soon you’re forced to admit you’ve never seen anything like it. Wiest has hold of an original character and plays her to the scary hilt. Directing his first movie, Robert Mandel keeps the whole cast interacting satisfyingly. With David Keith as the boyfriend, Josef Sommer, Frances Sternhagen, Cliff DeYoung, Richard Farnsworth, Brooke Alderson, and Bert Remsen. Designed by Stewart Campbell; cinematography by Charles Rosher; music by Charles Bernstein. Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)—This mediocre third film in the Indiana Jones trilogy—a reprise of the first, Raiders of the Lost Ark—is a mixture of cliff-hanger and anti-Nazi thriller and religious spectacle. It’s enjoyable, but familiar, and the action lacks the exhilarating, leaping precision that the director, Steven Spielberg, is famous for. The only real spin is in the slapstick teamwork of Harrison Ford as the archeologist-adventurer Indy and Sean Connery as Indy’s father, a medievalist who’s too engrossed in his studies to pay much attention to his daredevil son’s triumphs. The Ford-Connery clowning can distract you from the doldrums of punches and chases and plot explication (this time the Nazis are after the Holy Grail, which, in this account, confers everlasting life). With River Phoenix playing Indy as a boy, Alison Doody, Denholm Elliott, John Rhys-Davies, and Julian Glover. The screenplay, by Jeffrey Boam, is based on a story devised by the producer George Lucas and Menno Meyjes. Paramount. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)—In this follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg creates an atmosphere of happy disbelief: the more breathtaking and exhilarating the stunts are, the funnier they are. Nobody has ever fused thrills and laughter in quite the way that he does here. Momentum has often been the true—even if not fully acknowledged—subject of movies. Here it’s not merely acknowledged, it’s gloried in. The picture has an exuberant, hurtling-along spirit. Spielberg starts off at full charge in the opening sequence and just keeps going, yet he seems relaxed, and he doesn’t push things to frighten us. The movie relates to Americans’ love of getting in the car and taking off—it’s a breeze. Harrison Ford is the archeologist-adventurer hero; Ke Huy Quan plays his child sidekick Short Round; and Kate Capshaw is the gold-digger heroine. The plot involves them with an odious boy maharajah and with Mola Ram (an anagram for Malomar), the high priest of a cult of Kali worshippers who come right out of the 1939 adventure comedy Gunga Din. This is one of the most sheerly pleasurable physical comedies ever made. A Lucasfilm Production, from a story idea by George Lucas, and a script by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. The score by John Williams is too heavy for the tone of the film, and it’s too loud. With Amrish Puri as Mola Ram, and Dan Aykroyd in a half-second joke. Paramount. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Indiscreet (1958)—Rather tired. One of those would-be fluffy comedies written by Norman Krasna. Cary Grant, an American diplomat abroad, pretends to be married so that Ingrid Bergman, an actress with whom he’s having an affair, won’t get matrimonial ambitions. Of course, he’s found out, and the wheels grind on to a happy ending. Stanley Donen directed; Cecil Parker and Phyllis Calvert round out the cast of people who are a little overage for the childish pranks. Released by Warners. color

 

Indiscretion of an American Wife (1954)—The clashing temperaments of the producer, David Selznick; the director, Vittorio De Sica; and the stars, Jennifer Jones (at the time Mrs. Selznick) and Montgomery Clift, resulted in a very odd (and commercially unsuccessful) love drama, which was shot between many a midnight and dawn at Rome’s railway station. De Sica had wanted to film a small-scale Cesare Zavattini story about a love affair that doesn’t work out, but agreed to set it in the then new $35 million colossal railway station to satisfy Selznick’s desire for grandeur. The film is remarkable chiefly for the way De Sica used Clift: something weak-willed—almost oozingly soft—came through in his performance, and it is impossible to tell how much of this was intended by the actor or the director. It is unlike Clift’s work in any other movie. With Richard Beymer and Gino Cervi. Truman Capote worked on the dialogue. b & w

 

The Informer (1935)—Victor McLaglen in his Academy Award–winning role as Gypo Nolan, the Dublin drunkard who turns stool pigeon and betrays his friend (Wallace Ford) to the police for the reward. The period is 1922, during the Sinn Fein rebellion. This John Ford film, taken from Liam O‘Flaherty’s fine novel, is perhaps too pure and diagrammatic for modern tastes—Gypo’s frenetic, desperate squandering of the reward money, his spasms of fury, of pleasure, of terror, are more clarified than we require now. But if the scenarist, Dudley Nichols, and the director clinched their points, they also had the discipline to keep the work all of a piece—naïve yet powerful. (They also won Academy Awards.) It is part of Hollywood legend that Ford got McLaglen boozed up so that he was bewildered and couldn’t do his usual brand of acting—and it’s probably true. With Preston Foster, Heather Angel, Una O’Connor, Margot Grahame, Joe Sawyer, and J. M. Kerrigan. The score is by Max Steiner. (Remade, with a black cast, as Up Tight in 1968 by Jules Dassin.) R K O. b & w

 

Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd, see The Flight of the Eagle

 

Inherit the Wind (1960)—In 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, a young high-school biology teacher named John T. Scopes instructed his class in Darwin’s theory of evolution in order to test a state law forbidding the teaching of anything that “denies the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible.” At his trial—the famous Monkey Trial—the great orator William Jennings Bryan, a Bible-thumping fundamentalist who had three times been a candidate for the U.S. Presidency, served as prosecutor; the famous criminal lawyer and agnostic, Clarence Darrow, represented the defense; H. L. Mencken reported the case. This semi-fictionalized version of the events was adapted from the Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, and produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, for United Artists release. Padded and heavily made up, Fredric March does an embarrassingly hollow imitation of the portly Bryan. Spencer Tracy, whose girth made him the more likely candidate for the role, is cast instead as the lean Darrow, and he plays the part in his patented wise, humane, meant-to-be-irresistible manner. Scopes (Dick York) is portrayed as a man torn between his principles and his love for the local preacher’s daughter (Donna Anderson). The movie presents the fundamentalists as foolish bigots, then turns around and tries to make peace with them by coming out against Mencken’s satirical outlook (which is equated with cynicism). This Mencken (Gene Kelly) is a brash, hollow, lip-curling villain and Bryan and Darrow join forces to denounce him—“Where will your loneliness lead you? No one will come to your funeral!” The case itself had so many dramatic elements that the movie can’t help holding our attention, but it’s a very crude piece of work, totally lacking in subtlety; what is meant to be a courtroom drama of ideas comes out as a caricature of a drama of ideas, and, maddeningly, while watching we can’t be sure what is based on historical fact and what is invention. With Florence Eldridge, Harry Morgan, and Norman Fell. b & w

 

The Inheritor L’Héritier (1973)—There’s so much going on in this talky thriller—flashbacks and crosscutting, plus gadgetry and split-second cityscapes—that you’re never allowed any peace. It’s a traffic jam of a movie. The director, Philippe Labro, has flash and expertise, but the story (centering on Jean-Paul Belmondo as the inheritor of steel factories and a weekly newsmagazine) is just a glamour fantasy, synthesized from the Bond pictures and the Costa-Gavras political melodramas. It’s more exhausting than entertaining. With Carla Gravina, Jean Rochefort, and Charles Denner. Cinematography by Jean Penzer. In French. color

 

Innerspace (1987)—With Dennis Quaid as a germ-size Navy test pilot floating around inside the bloodstream of a fretful hypochondriac supermarket clerk, played by Martin Short, this sci-fi buddy-buddy comedy sounds stupid-crazy-funky, and at its best that’s what it is. But mostly it gets by on being good-natured enough for you to accept its being clumsy and padded and only borderline entertaining. The director, Joe Dante, made his reputation by the subversion of cuddly themes. Here, working from a script by Jeffrey Boam (and Chip Proser) that’s a synthesis of the 1966 Fantastic Voyage and the 1984 All of Me, he seems to be slogging through pages of plot, dutifully trying to set up the mechanics for the gags to pay off. And a lot of the time he’s setting up the emotional apparatus to give the movie “heart.” Luckily, Quaid comes through even though it’s an almost totally encapsulated performance; he may be the only actor who can be infectiously free and breezy while scrunched up inside a pod. The blitheness of Meg Ryan, who’s the heroine, gives the picture a lift. And Short has a drunken dance scene in which he’s like an insect in convulsive ecstasy. With a large cast that includes Robert Picardo, Wendy Schaal, and Ken Tobey. A Steven Spielberg Production, for Warners. color (See Hooked.)

 

The Innocent L’Innocente (1976)—For its first half, this Visconti film, based on the 1892 D’Annunzio novel, is a steamy comedy of manners that seems an almost perfect preparation for a tragicomedy of jealousy, and Visconti’s work is masterly in its expressive turn-of-the-century decor, and in its control. Tullio (Giancarlo Giannini), an aristocratic liberal, has become sexually indifferent to his innocent, round-cheeked, country-mousy wife (Laura Antonelli), and has turned to a liaison with an ardent, glittering countess (Jennifer O‘Neill). But when this gentle wife becomes interested in another man, he falls passionately in love with her. In the second half, the picture runs out of steam and turns into a ponderous melodrama. Giannini is far from ideally cast, but he seems acceptable until he remembers to act; toward the end he’s all over the place acting. Antonelli gives the picture some amusing sexual suspense. At first, she’s like a placid ingenue, except that she has furtive yearnings—naughty thoughts. When she’s finally nude, in bed, and aroused, she heaves and writhes so prodigiously she’s like a storm-tossed sea. It’s the kind of passion you learn in a circus: she’s a horizontal belly dancer. Visconti had finished shooting this film when he died in 1976, but he did not complete the editing, and perhaps the maundering second half is partly the fault of others. With Marie Dubois as the Princess, Marc Porel as the novelist, Rina Morelli as Tullio’s mother, Claude Mann as the Prince, and Massimo Girotti and Didier Haudepin. From a script by Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Enrico Medioli, and Visconti; cinematography by Pasqualino De Santis; art direction by Mario Garbuglai; costumes by Piero Tosi. In Italian. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Innocent Bystanders (1973)—Misleading title; it’s a labyrinthine spy thriller and a revolting example of the constant use of brutality (plus a dash of sexual sadism) to rouse the audience from the apathy brought on by the familiarity of the material. The massively built Stanley Baker is impressive as the tired British secret agent, but he can’t save this picture; it’s just one noisy beating after another. The major resource of the director, Peter Collinson, appears to be loud karate chops. The members of the M.P.A.A. Rating Board who gave it a PG must have grown calluses on their brains. With Geraldine Chaplin, Dana Andrews, Vladek Sheybal, and Donald Pleasence, who is probably as weary of playing an icy bastard as the audience is weary of watching him. Screenplay by James Mitchell, based on the novel by James Munro. color

 

L’Innocente, see The Innocent

 

The Innocents (1961)—Directed by Jack Clayton and photographed by Freddie Francis (in CinemaScope, in black and white), this version of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is one of the most elegantly beautiful ghost movies ever made. It features a scary, intense performance by Deborah Kerr, as the governess who sees demonic spectres and forces one of her two charges—the little boy Miles (Martin Stephens)—to confront them. Both Kerr and Michael Redgrave, as the gentleman who hires her, have just the right note of suppressed hysteria in their voices. The settings—the house, the park, the lake—are magnificent, and the script by William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Mortimer offers the pleasures of literacy. The filmmakers concentrate on the virtuoso possibilities in the material, and the beauty of the images raises our terror to a higher plane than the simple fears of most ghost stories. There are great sequences (like one in a schoolroom) that work on the viewer’s imagination and remain teasingly ambiguous. With Pamela Franklin, Megs Jenkins, Peter Wyngarde, and Clytie Jessop. Music by Georges Auric. Released in the U.S. by 20th Century-Fox. (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

Inserts (1976)—The script, by the young writer-director John Byrum, is a long one-act play, reminiscent of Michael McClure’s The Beard. The action takes place on one set, which represents a house in Hollywood around 1930, where The Boy Wonder (Richard Dreyfuss), a once-famous director whose genius burned out, now shoots stag movies. The picture should be more fun than it is; the plot devices don’t add up to much, and Byrum likes his own worst lines so much that they’re repeated. He falls back on absurdism by necessity. With Jessica Harper, Bob Hoskins, and, as the stag-movie star, Veronica Cartwright, who flings herself into her role in the dissolute, romantic manner of Jeanne Eagels. She’s a grown-up talent in a kid’s show. Produced by Davina Belling and Clive Parsons. United Artists. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Inside Daisy Clover (1966)—Natalie Wood plays the heroine, a teen-age singing movie star (fill in Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin, et al.), in Robert Mulligan’s film, based on Gavin Lambert’s adaptation of his own novel. The people who make Daisy a star seem to have some terrible secret that we’re never let in on; the movie is full of lurking evil that seems unrelated to anything. It’s an inside-Hollywood movie with a gothic atmosphere. It’s short on characters, detail, activity, dialogue, even music; it’s so determined to be stylish and knowing that, rather than risk banality, it eliminates almost everything. What’s left are sinister, funereal pauses and a few ghoulish people, such as the head of the studio (Christopher Plummer, whose performance mightn’t be so maddening if it were just speeded up). Even the showy recording-room sequence, with the heroine breaking down while post-synching a song with her image on a large screen, doesn’t work right—it’s too showy. The film seems to be working against itself—cynical yet sentimental, it rarely achieves a satisfying emotional tone. Natalie Wood’s way of acting teen-age is to be like a brassy Tom Sawyer. As the young star’s no-good, vaguely homosexual husband (one of the most cryptic roles ever written), Robert Redford gives the only fresh performance. With Ruth Gordon as Daisy’s mother, and Katharine Bard, Roddy McDowall, and Harold Gould. Produced by Alan J. Pakula; choreography by Herbert Ross; art direction by Robert Clatworthy; music and songs by André Previn, with lyrics by Dory Previn. Warners. color

 

Interiors (1978)—The people in this serious Woody Allen film are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. It’s a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past (such as Craig’s Wife), and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however, the eroticism of Bergman. Interiors looks like a masterpiece and has a super-banal metaphysical theme (death versus life). The problem for the family in the film is the towering figure of the disciplined, manipulative, inner-directed mother (Geraldine Page). She is such a perfectionist that she cannot enjoy anything, and the standards of taste and achievement that she imposes on her three daughters (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, and Kristin Griffith) tie them in such knots that they all consider themselves failures. (Alvy Singer, the role Woody Allen played in Annie Hall, was just such a compulsive, judgmental spoilsport, and Allen’s original title for that film was Anhedonia—the lack of the capacity for experiencing pleasure.) The mother’s impoverished conception of good taste is sustained in the style of the film. It’s a handbook of art-film mannerisms; it’s so austere and studied that it might have been directed by that icy mother herself—from the grave. Woody Allen’s idea of artistic achievement (for himself, at least) may always be something death-ridden, spare, perfectly structured—something that talks of the higher things. People who watch this movie are almost inevitably going to ask themselves, How can Woody Allen present in a measured, lugubriously straight manner the same sorts of tinny anxiety discourse that he generally parodies? With E. G. Marshall, Maureen Stapleton, Richard Jordan, and Sam Waterston. Cinematography by Gordon Willis. United Artists. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Intermezzo: A Love Story (1939)—David O. Selznick, who arranged this début for Ingrid Bergman in English-speaking films, wasn’t going to take any chances; it’s a remake of a picture she’d already had a hit with in Sweden, in 1936. Selznick even retained the same slurpy “haunting” theme music. Leslie Howard is the wan and renowned violin virtuoso, afflicted with the boredom of fame and of domestic bliss with his beloved, understanding wife (Edna Best). He falls in love with Bergman, his daughter’s piano teacher. Handsome and eager, she’s a brilliant young pianist who becomes his accompanist. On a tour of the concert halls of Europe, the two combine business with passion, though at last the finer overtones of conscience separate them. The crisis occurs in a picturesque Mediterranean village—Selznick saw to it that the romantic upheavals of such artistic people got the smartest settings—and there are snacks of Brahms, Liszt, and Grieg to fill out the plump cultural tone. The film’s only real claim on anyone’s attention is Bergman, whose natural look (full eyebrows, and even a shine on her nose) seemed revolutionary at the time. The first director, William Wyler, was replaced by Gregory Ratoff, and the first cinematographer, Harry Stradling, was replaced by Gregg Toland. With John Halliday, Cecil Kellaway, Enid Bennett, Ann Todd, and Douglas Scott. The script by George O’Neil was based on the Swedish script by Gösta Stevens and Gustaf Molander; the virtuoso violin work was dubbed by Toscha Seidel, the piano work by Norma Drury. (This drippy thing was remade again in 1968 with Oskar Werner, and in 1980 it was loosely adapted for the film Honeysuckle Rose.) b & w

 

Internal Affairs (1989)—Bad fun. This sophisticated variant of the L.A. cops-and-coke-and-art-world thrillers has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused. (You may find yourself breaking into a grin when you recommend it to friends.) The subtext is ingeniously nasty: it’s a dirty, sexy twist on the Iago-Othello relationship. The Iago is a prosperous veteran cop, played by Richard Gere, who’s being investigated by two officers from the Police Department’s internal-affairs division: a righteous, ramrod-straight Latino (Andy Garcia) with a beautiful blond wife, and his sane, honest partner (Laurie Metcalf). Gere slithers through the picture very dexterously. He torments the stiff-backed Othello (Garcia), boasting of his adulterous conquest of the blond wife (Nancy Travis), and manipulates him into a jealous rage. Garcia gives a one-note, glaring-eyed performance: except for his key, violent explosions (which are terrific), he’s so rigid he’s barely human. As Garcia’s partner, a lesbian who doesn’t try to ingratiate herself with anybody, Metcalf gives a strong, contained performance. Directed by Mike Figgis, whose previous feature was the 1988 Stormy Monday. The smart script is by Henry Bean. Paramount. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Intimate Lighting Intimn Osvtlen (1965)—A satirical folk comedy about a young cellist with the Prague symphony who takes his big-city girlfriend with him when he goes to visit a friend from his days at the Conservatoire. The musician from Prague is to be the soloist at a concert of the small-town orchestra that the friend now conducts. The director, Ivan Passer, is witty in tiny, match-flare-size details; he shows us lives that have become a negotiation of small irritants. Day-to-day living in the town is like a prolonged silent-movie comedy. (How can a man’s drunken friend help him get through double doors after he’s got his head stuck?) The people are frustrated in petty ways and they’re so fidgety that it’s no wonder they make a botch of the music; everything in their lives is the opposite of the music they try to play. You find yourself doing small double-takes as you watch this movie. It builds to a freeze-frame closing gag that’s so funny and so completely dotty that you’re not likely to forget it. Cinematography by J. Ondek and J. Strecha; written by V. Šašek, J. Papousek, and Passer. In Czech. b & w

 

Intimni Osvetleni, see Intimate Lighting

 

Intolerance (1916)—D. W. Griffith’s epic celebration of the potentialities of the film medium—perhaps the greatest movie ever made and the greatest folly in movie history. It is charged with visionary excitement about the power of movies to combine music, dance, narrative, drama, painting, and photography—to do alone what all the other arts together had done. In this extravaganza one can see the source of most of the major traditions of the screen—the methods of Eisenstein and von Stroheim, the Germans and the Scandinavians, and, when it’s bad, De Mille. It combines extraordinary lyric passages, realism, and psychological details with nonsense, vulgarity, and painful sentimentality. Four stories set in different historical periods are told by crosscutting, and they reach simultaneous climaxes. The cast includes Lillian Gish in the linking device; Mae Marsh and Robert Harron in the modern story, “The Mother and the Law”; Bessie Love in the Biblical story, “The Nazarene”; Margery Wilson and Eugene Pallette in “The Medieval Story,” which includes the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of the Huguenots in 1572; Constance Talmadge, Elmo Lincoln, Seena Owen, Alfred Paget, and Tully Marshall in “The Fall of Babylon.” Cinematography by Billy Bitzer and Karl Brown; Griffith’s assistants included W. S. Van Dyke, Tod Browning, and von Stroheim. Silent. The prints were originally dyed in several hues, and crews of girls added extra color frame by frame; the projectionists were also instructed to throw beams of red and blue light to intensify the effects.

 

Intruder in the Dust (1949)—Lucas Beauchamp, the “stubborn and insufferable” hero of William Faulkner’s novel, is a black man who enrages the white people in his corner of Mississippi by his refusal to play nigger for them. The director, Clarence Brown, shot this movie in Faulkner’s home town—Oxford, Mississippi—with the inhabitants in bit parts and in the crowd scenes. “All in all, I think it is a good movie,” Faulkner said at the premiere, and it is a good movie—straightforward, tense, and assured. (It is perhaps Brown’s finest picture.) As in the novel, inflexible Lucas (Juano Hernández), who refuses to accept condescension or patronage, is conceived as a focus of white ambivalence. The other major character is Chick (Claude Jarman, Jr.), a white boy who has made the stupid mistake of offering Lucas money as payment for hospitality and is humiliated by Lucas’s stony refusal. When Lucas is arrested for murder and the townspeople get their chance to turn him into a nigger, Chick finds his opportunity to discharge his debt—by saving Lucas’s life. At the very end, a false note is struck by Chick’s uncle (David Brian): “It will be all right, as long as some of us are willing to fight—even one of us,” and the ultimate cliché, “Lucas wasn’t in trouble; we were in trouble.” It’s the movie that gets in trouble. But Juano Hernández’s Lucas has the intensity and humor to transcend these Northern liberal platitudes. We can see that, as Faulkner put it, Lucas is “now tyrant over the whole county’s white conscience.” Two character actors perform with great skill: Porter Hall as the murdered man’s father and Elizabeth Patterson as the little old lady who believes in doing what’s right. Also with Will Geer and Charles Kemper. The screenplay is by Ben Maddow, with some tinkering by Faulkner (who also helped scout locations); cinematography by Robert Surtees. M-G-M. b & w (See Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

 

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)—A B-picture classic. This plain and inexpensive piece of science fiction employs few of the resources of the cinema (to put it mildly), but it has an idea that confirms everyone’s suspicions. People are being turned into vegetables—and who can tell the difference? Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter, who try to cling to their animality and individuality, seem inexplicably backward to the rest of the townspeople. Some of the best lines of dialogue are voice-overs—the chatter of the dehumanized. Directed by Don Siegel, for Allied Artists. With Carolyn Jones, Larry Gates, and Sam Peckinpah (who worked on the script) in a few bits. Based on a Collier’s serial by Jack Finney; the adaptation is credited to Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks. b & w

 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)—Undiluted pleasure and excitement. The scriptwriter, W. D. (Rick) Richter, supplies some funny lines, and the director, Phil Kaufman, provides such confident professionalism that you sit back in the assurance that every spooky nuance you’re catching is just what was intended. This set of variations on the low-budget classic of 1956 has its own macabre originality. Set in San Francisco. With Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, Donald Sutherland, Art Hindle, Lelia Goldoni, Leonard Nimoy, Kevin McCarthy, Don Siegel, and Robert Duvall, in an uncredited bit. Music by Denny Zeitlin; cinematography by Michael Chapman. United Artists. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion Indagine su un Cittadino al di sopra di Ogni Sospetto (1970)—Elio Petri’s indirect way of telling a story—which gradually takes the form of a paranoid fantasy—makes the viewer apprehensive. His purpose is ostensibly political, but sometimes he becomes so sophisticated and nasty and perverse that you don’t trust his purposes. Here, starting with Kafka’s cryptic “He is a servant of the law and eludes judgment,” he sets out to demonstrate that those in authority are above the law they are supposed to serve. He chooses for his demonstration the megalomaniac chief of Rome’s homicide squad (Gian Maria Volonte), who believes he has a license to kill, and has just been promoted to a new post, in which he is to deal with political dissidents. The queasy, tense atmosphere derives not from the horror of the proposition itself but from the kinkiness of the details, such as Ennio Morricone’s jangly music when the cop slits the throat of his mistress (Florinda Bolkan). The film is extremely dislikable. Petri is a highly skilled director but he doesn’t use suspense pleasurably; he doesn’t resolve the tensions, and so you’re left in a rather foul mood. In Italian. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Invisible Man (1933)—James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, made this handsomely tricked-up version of H. G. Wells’ fantasy, from a well-written adaptation by R. C. Sherriff (and Philip Wylie, though he’s not credited); the dialogue is unusually important, since the star (Claude Rains) is disembodied during most of the movie and has to do all his acting with his voice. Rains plays a scientist who experiments with a drug that, while making him invisible, also turns him into a megalomaniac murderer. A little poky but impressively well done, with witty special effects (by John P. Fulton) and traces of the Whale humor that enlivened his Old Dark House and The Bride of Frankenstein. With blond, bosomy Gloria Stuart—a fleshy heroine for a fleshless hero—and Dudley Digges, Una O’Connor, William Harrigan, Henry Travers, and E. E. Clive. Universal. b & w

 

The Invisible Man Returns (1940)—Vincent Price and Cedric Hardwicke star in Universal’s attempt to repeat the success of James Whale’s 1933 picture; Hardwicke is a murderer who contrives that the blame for his crime be put on his victim’s brother, and Price is the brother, who escapes from the death cell by means of a chemical that makes him invisible. John P. Fulton is once again in charge of special effects, but this time the director is Joe May, working from a script by Curt Siodmak and Lester Cole. Though the film has its bright moments, and some weird ones, too, the first freshness is gone. Even the effects seem repetitive. With Nan Grey as Price’s relentlessly devoted fiancée, and Cecil Kellaway, John Sutton, and Alan Napier. b & w

 

Invitation to Happiness (1939)—Irene Dunne as a mournful heiress, and Fred MacMurray as a heavyweight boxer whom she marries. They have a nasty little snob of a child, and their marriage seems to be a groan from the start—an uninspired and very long groan. Wesley Ruggles directed, from Claude Binyon’s screenplay. With Charles Ruggles. Paramount. b & w

 

Invitation to the Dance (1956)—This picture bollixed the career of Gene Kelly, who directed and choreographed it, and probably broke his heart as well: practically nobody saw it. The film consists of three ballets, with some pantomime and also some animated-cartoon work. “Circus,” set to Jacques Ibert music, features Igor Youskevitch as a high-wire artist, Claire Sombert as a bareback rider in love with him, and Kelly as a clown in love with her; “Ring Around the Rosy,” about a bracelet that goes through various hands, has an André Previn score, and the dancers include Youskevitch, Tamara Toumanova, Tommy Rall, and Kelly; “Sinbad the Sailor” features Carol Haney as Scheherazade and Kelly as Sinbad. The film was beset by difficulties. It had to be made in England because that’s where M-G-M had frozen funds, and, with interruptions for Kelly to do other jobs, the work spread over three years. He was further hampered by front-office directives—for example, the second ballet was danced to a score that the M-G-M brass didn’t like, so Previn had to write a new score to the already filmed dancing. Then the studio put the film on the shelf for another year. There should be an ironic kicker: the picture should be a neglected marvel. But it isn’t. Kelly’s choreography had always seemed weakest when he became balletic; this picture is set right in his area of least originality. Produced by Arthur Freed. color

 

The Ipcress File (1965)—Michael Caine as a myopic spy, in Sidney J. Furie’s overwrought (and rather silly) version of a Len Deighton novel. This film was a big box-office hit; Caine must have been the chief reason. With Nigel Green. color

 

Iphigenia (1977)—There’s fervor and dedication in Michael Cacoyannis’s version of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis; what’s missing is the excitement of a new interpretation. And was there a little too much Arthur Miller in Euripides? (The arguments have an ideological ring.) But Costa Kazakos’s robust, irresolute Agamemnon is very fine, and if Irene Papas’s performance as Clytemnestra is overscaled, her Clytemnestra certainly makes you believe in the vengeance she will take on Agamemnon. The role suffers from a topical flaw; Clytemnestra’s female rage sounds too much like what we heard in the 70s. She has become a precursor, and less of a character. There’s also a problem of style: the film is all rocks and scrub brush and Clytemnestra swelling with wrath and Menelaus (Costa Carras) expostulating. Performed this way, Iphigenia is like a wildlife film about rhinoceroses—everybody’s snorting at each other. With Tatiana Papamoskou as the young heroine. In Greek. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Irene (1940)—This pre-camp version of the musical comedy (by James H. Montgomery, with music and lyrics by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy) tries to be innocuously charming, and the effort is all too evident. The English director Herbert Wilcox and his star, Anna Neagle (who later became his wife), made a series of costume pictures (Peg of Old Drury, Victoria the Great, Nurse Edith Cavell, etc.), and a series of musicals (Irene; Sunny; No, No, Nanette) based on sweet, safe, dated shows. This one surrounded its star with Ray Milland, Roland Young, May Robson, Arthur Treacher, Billie Burke, and Alan Marshal, and it was the biggest hit R K O had that year, but it dismally lacks vivacity, and when Anna Neagle sings “Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown,” she is not the pretty young comedienne of one’s musical-comedy dreams. The screenplay is by Alice Duer Miller. b & w and color

 

Irma la Douce (1963)—Abominable, inexplicably popular sex farce, adapted from a stage musical comedy, but with the score omitted. Billy Wilder, the producer-director, and his co-scenarist, I.A.L. Diamond, hit us over the head with the old rotten jest that prostitution is a petit-bourgeois way of life like any other. Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon, vivid and gifted comics, wrestle painfully with the gross dialogue. Sample: MacLaine, showing Lemmon her attic apartment, explains that it once belonged to an artist who cut off his ear. “Oh,” says Lemmon. “Was his name van Gogh?” “No,” says MacLaine, “Schwartz.” With Lou Jacobi and Herschel Bernardi. United Artists. color

 

Ironweed (1987)—The director, Hector Babenco, treats William Kennedy’s Albany novel, set in 1938, as a joyless classic; the movie has no momentum—the running time (144 minutes) is like a death sentence. As Francis Phelan, the alcoholic hobo hero who is torn by guilt over the family he deserted 22 years ago and sees the phantoms of men he has done violence to, Jack Nicholson seems to be in a slow-motion dream. He drops his voice down so heroically low he even has to talk slowly. And Meryl Streep, who is Francis’s hobo crony Helen, forces her voice down deep, too. The only moments of reprieve from all the sombre artistry come when Streep sings “He’s Me Pal” in the all-out, sentimental-Irish manner of a balladeer of a decade or two earlier; it’s a spectacular re-creation of the old technique for “selling a song.” Tom Waits, Hy Anzell, and Margaret Whitton provide brief changes of mood and emotion. Also with Carroll Baker, Fred Gwynne, Diane Venora, Michael O’Keefe, Laura Esterman, Priscilla Smith, and Black-Eyed Susan. The screenplay is by Kennedy. Released by Tri-Star. color (See Hooked.)

 

Is There Sex After Death? (1971)—Porno-spoof with the usual sex scenes and the usual sex jokes. And the usual fatigue factor, because the gags in films of this type are repetitive and interchangeable. However, this one has some funnier-than-usual skits involving Buck Henry, Jim Moran, and Marshall Efron. At times it’s like a college revue gone wild, and partly because of its photographic quality and the use of pastels you don’t get that depressed, crummy feeling that usually settles in with the first shots of a porny picture. Written, directed, and produced by Jeanne and Alan Abel. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Isabel (1968)—The setting is the Gaspé coast of Canada. Genevieve Bujold with her hair cropped is a sensitive young girl haunted by the mysterious violent deaths in her family. It turns out that she is probably the daughter of her mother’s brother, and in the omens-of-doom dramaturgy of the Canadian writer-director Paul Almond, this is sufficient excuse for her to “give herself” to a man who resembles her brother. Not a movie for the tough-minded. With Mark Strange, who also wrote the songs. color

 

Ishtar (1987)—Written and directed by Elaine May, this must have started out to be a casual, tacky Road to comedy about two aging nonentities—singer-songwriters (Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman) who can only be booked into faraway night spots. Dreaming of show-business success, they arrive in the Middle East and get caught up in revolutionary politics they don’t know a thing about. Though determinedly inconsequential, the picture was made on authentic locations and in a glamorous romantic style; it gets stalled in exposition and in the sand of the Sahara. It isn’t dislikable, but it has no comic energy. May’s directing is limp, passive; she doesn’t do the obvious, but sometimes she doesn’t do anything else, either. And when Beatty and Hoffman play small-timers it’s a reverse conceit, a form of affectation. Besides, they don’t have the kind of sketch-humor savvy to goof off gracefully. They do have a great desert scene with a troupe of unusually handsome, well-groomed vultures. And there are performers who bring some charge with them: Jack Weston, as the team’s two-bit hustling agent; Rose Arrick, in a tiny role as Hoffman’s mother. And, as the C.I.A. villain, Charles Grodin manages to be fairly amusing because of his bland, whiny lack of charge. With Isabelle Adjani, whose pure, childlike face peeps out of the dark Moroccan clothes she’s swathed in; she seems hidden in the picture. Also with Tess Harper, Carol Kane, Aharon Ipalé, and Herb Gardner. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro. Columbia. color (See Hooked.)

 

The Island (1961)—A ponderously simple Japanese film by Kaneto Shindo that aims at universality by stripping away all the particularities—which are considered to be the nonessentials of civilization and personality. The result is something so barren that those who acclaim it as a masterpiece seem to be asserting proof of virtue. It’s about a family living on an island without fresh water: the family members’ life is a succession of trips to the mainland for water, which they then carry by shoulder yoke up steep paths to pour over their crops. The film is made without dialogue, and this silence of the characters has been widely commended as the perfect use of silence—the demonstration that the family gives all its energy to the effort to stay alive and has no need for idle talk. We are supposed to regard this preverbal existence and the silent struggle with elemental forces as more basic, more “true to nature,” and hence greater than our talky superficial lives. (If the members of this island family—so sure of their relationships to each other and to the earth and water and plants that they have nothing to say—ever figure out how to get a pipeline in from the mainland, they’ll be liberated from that primal struggle with the elements and soon they’ll be on their path to conversation and what—in Kaneto Shindo’s view—is probably sophistication, corruption, and decadence.) Though we are spared the kind of uplifting film conversation that filmmakers with this approach usually provide (the lean, true words of real people), the images are saturated with a musical score of prodigious monotony. The Island was made on a small budget, and its pictorial qualities have been highly praised. It’s pictorial, all right. b & w

 

Islands in the Stream (1977)—The implacable stodginess of this Franklin J. Schaffner version of Hemingway’s posthumous novel is stupefying yet impressive. It’s fascinating to see Hemingway’s themes placed in this huge glass jar for our inspection. George C. Scott gives a scrupulous performance as the fisherman-artist hero living in the Bahamas at the outbreak of the Second World War, who is visited by his three sons from two broken marriages, and then by his first wife (Claire Bloom). By being respectful and dedicated, and incompetent at action, Schaffner and his scenarist, Denne Bart Petitclerc, bring out the worst in Hemingway—his mystique. Scott’s features are totally unlike Hemingway’s, but with a crew cut, a grizzled gray-white beard, neatly clipped, the chestiness, and the familiar Hemingway shirts and shorts and bush jackets, Scott suggests Hemingway as he looked on the Time cover in 1954, when he won the Nobel Prize—reflective, slightly withdrawn. Scott’s artist-hero, a titan with slate-blue eyes, a crumbled nose, and a booze-busted, I’ve-been-through-hell voice, is terribly grand. Everyone else in the movie is a child compared with him. With Julius Harris, David Hemmings, Gilbert Roland, Hart Bochner, Brad Savage, and Michael-James Wixted as the middle boy, Davy. Paramount. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Isle of the Dead (1945)—Val Lewton produced, but except for a few touches, it’s a mess—something about demons on a plague-ridden Greek island, involving premature burial and evil possession of the resurrected body. Boris Karloff and Katherine Emery are the leads; she comes out of her crypt and starts stabbing people with a trident. With Ellen Drew, Alan Napier, and Jason Robards, Sr., in a surprisingly poor performance. Mark Robson directed. R K O. b & w

 

It Happened One Night (1934)—No one has ever fully explained what gives this basically slight romantic comedy its particular—and enormous—charm. It’s no more than the story of a runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) and a fired newspaperman (Clark Gable) who meet on a long-distance night bus and fall in love. Yet the film (which neither of its stars wanted to appear in) caught on with the public and made audiences happy in a way that only a few films in each era do; in the mid-30s, the Colbert and the Gable of this film became Americans’ idealized view of themselves—breezy, likable, sexy, gallant, and maybe just a little harebrained. (It was the Annie Hall of its day—before the invention of anxiety.) It has a special American Depression-era on-the-road humor and an open, episodic form, with oddball mashers and crooks turning up. There’s a classic singing sequence (the passengers on the bus join together for “The Man on the Flying Trapeze”) and a classic demonstration of hitchhikers’ techniques for stopping cars—Gable’s thumb versus Colbert’s legs. The two stars interact with easy, on-the-button timing; Gable has a gift for seeming virile even at his most foolish, and when things go wrong Colbert manages to look starry-eyed and blankly depressed at the same time. Frank Capra directed, from Robert Riskin’s script, based on Samuel Hopkins Adams’ short story “Night Bus.” With Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, Ward Bond, Arthur Hoyt, and as the jilted bridegroom, Jameson Thomas. Five Academy Awards: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Script. (Remade in 1956 as You Can’t Run Away from It.) Columbia. b & w

 

It Should Happen to You (1954)—Judy Holliday in a pleasantly erratic satirical comedy; the targets—advertising, TV, and urban gullibility—are rather easily pinked, but the scenarist, Garson Kanin, and the director, George Cukor, don’t loiter over them for long. (Still, the film runs down.) The heroine, who yearns for celebrity, takes her life savings and places her name—Gladys Glover—in giant letters across a billboard in Columbus Circle. Before long, she is as inescapably in the public eye as one of the Gabors. She also tosses about in romantic indecision: Should she give her heart to an honest documentary filmmaker (Jack Lemmon, in his Hollywood début) and say farewell to the big time, or should she surrender herself to the sudsy embraces of a soap manufacturer (Peter Lawford)? With Connie Gilchrist, Melville Cooper, and Michael O’Shea, who is particularly funny as a seedy entrepreneur. There are also appearances by Constance Bennett, Ilka Chase, and Wendy Barrie as themselves. Columbia. b & w

 

It Started with Eve (1941)—Deanna Durbin as a waif who gets involved with the family of a saintly old millionaire (Charles Laughton). He plays Cupid and schemes to have his grandson marry her. And you need the stomach of a saint to sit through it. Joe Pasternak produced, Henry Koster directed, and Norman Krasna was one of the writers. (Durbin does only some incidental singing.) Universal. b & w

 

The Italian Straw Hat Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (1927)—René Clair took the Eugene Labiche and Marc Michel play that Bergson used to illustrate his theory of comedy and turned it into a model of visual wit. This silent satire on middle-class pretension is so expertly timed and so elegantly directed that farce becomes ballet. With Albert Préjean as the bridegroom. Designed by Lazare Meer-son. b & w

 

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—Frank Capra’s most relentless lump-in-the-throat movie. The hero (James Stewart) is a self-sacrificial good man who runs a small-town building-and-loan association that is threatened by the local ogre, the wickedly selfish Lionel Barrymore. Thinking he has no resources left, the hero is on the brink of suicide when he is given a vision of what life would be like for his family and his town if he had never been born. Donna Reed plays his wife, Gloria Grahame is the town “fast” girl, and the excruciatingly familiar cast includes Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers, Beulah Bondi, Ward Bond, H. B. Warner, and Samuel S. Hinds. In its own slurpy, bittersweet way, the picture is well done. But it’s fairly humorless, and, what with all the hero’s virtuous suffering, it didn’t catch on with the public. Capra takes a serious tone here though there’s no basis for the seriousness; this is doggerel trying to pass as art. It’s not just that it didn’t match the post–Second World War mood—it might have seemed patronizing even in the post–First World War period. This picture developed a considerable—if bewildering—reputation, based largely on television viewing, about three decades later. (Marlo Thomas played the suffering protagonist in the 1977 TV-movie remake, It Happened One Christmas.) R K O. b & w

 

It’s a Wonderful World (1939)—The title presses the point, and so does the lunatic comedy-mystery. In the role of a tough-minded, devil-may-care poet, Claudette Colbert is forced to strain for laughs; the gag-filled script, by Ben Hecht and Herman J. Mankiewicz involves her with crooks, cops, amateur actors, and Boy Scouts, and requires her to knock a man out. James Stewart plays opposite her as a detective. With Guy Kibbee, who gets whacked a lot; Ernest Truex, who is almost electrocuted; and Nat Pendleton and Edgar Kennedy. Directed by W. S. Van Dyke. It’s fast-paced but far from memorable. M-G-M. b & w

 

It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)—The title is a misnomer. Comden and Green’s tart follow-up to On the Town, and directed by the same team (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen), is like a delayed hangover. The three buddies are now Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd; at war’s end they swear eternal friendship and promise to meet in ten years. At their reunion, they discover that they hate each other and themselves, and go looking for the hopes they abandoned. The film’s mixture of parody, cynicism, and song and dance is perhaps a little sour; though the numbers are exhilarating and the movie is really much more fun than the wildly overrated On the Town, it doesn’t sell exuberance in that big, toothy way, and it was a box-office failure. As the sickened advertising man, Dan Dailey has the best routine in the film—a Chaplinesque, drunken satire of “advertising-wise” jargon. (To a great extent this is Dailey’s movie.) Dolores Gray’s role (as a TV star) is too broadly written, but her smooth, glib style is refreshingly brassy and she has a dazzling number—“Thanks a lot but no thanks”; Cyd Charisse is beautiful and benumbed until she unhinges her legs in the Stillman’s Gym number. Produced by Arthur Freed, for M-G-M. CinemaScope, color

 

It’s Love I’m After (1937)—A light farce in which Leslie Howard and Bette Davis play a shallow, vanity-ridden matinee idol and his hot-tempered leading lady, and relish every hammy, slapstick minute of it. They are surrounded by the millionaires (George Barbier), valets and butlers (Eric Blore, E. E. Clive), and silly heiresses (Olivia de Havilland) who were at one time as much of a convention in American comedy as the fops of Restoration theatre. Casey Robinson’s script (from a story written for the screen by Maurice Hanline) is musty and Archie Mayo’s direction is sluggish, but the movie is pleasantly bad. It begins with a burlesque of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliet and proceeds like a somewhat deranged Taming of the Shrew. With Bonita Granville, Patric Knowles, and Spring Byington. Warners. b & w

 

Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II Ivan Grosny (1944–46)—Eisenstein’s two-part extravaganza on the evils of tyranny is obviously a magnificent work and it imposes its style on the viewer, yet it’s so lacking in human dimensions that you may stare at it in a kind of outrage. True, every frame in it looks great—it’s a brilliant collection of stills—but as a movie, it’s static, grandiose, and frequently ludicrous, with elaborately angled, overcomposed photography, and overwrought, eyeball-rolling performers slipping in and out of the walls, dragging their shadows behind them. The city of Alma Ata was rebuilt full scale in Central Asia with lumber imported from Siberia, and millions of rubles worth of sets, beards, and brocades went into it—it’s a heavy dose of decor. In Part I, released in 1945, Ivan is crowned, and then because of the opposition of the boyars (or nobles) who, among their evil deeds, poison his wife, he is forced to abdicate. Part II, which Eisenstein called The Boyars’ Plot, was his last film. Made in 1945-46, censured by the Central Committee and suppressed, it was not released until five years after Stalin’s death (the director, still in disgrace, had died in 1948). In Part II the boyars strike again. Ivan has been restored to power with the help of “the people,” but, under the leadership of Ivan’s ratty old aunt Efrosinia, who hopes to put her (crazy? homosexual? both?) son on the throne, the boyars plot to assassinate Ivan. He outwits them and destroys their power in a big, bloody purge. All this may suggest a libretto. The movie is operatic—and opera without singers is a peculiar form. Something momentous seems about to be imparted to us in each great frozen composition; it’s almost as if the aria were about to begin. (In one of the most satisfying moments in Part I there is a song.) Overpowering in style, the movie resembles a gigantic Expressionist mural. The figures are like giant spiders and rodents: as in science fiction, some horrible mutation seems to have taken place. The conflict in Ivan is between the good man dedicated to the welfare of his people and the power-mad despot (and, given when it was made, it’s easy to see a parallel to Stalin). Oddly, the makeup that Nikolai Cherkassov uses as Ivan seems to be based on Conrad Veidt’s makeup in Paul Leni’s 1924 film Waxworks, in which Ivan was used simply as a horror figure (the decor and camera work also recall Waxworks). And as James Agee pointed out, Eisenstein gave Cherkassov “a chin and cranium which becomes ever more pointed, like John Barrymore as Mr. Hyde.” In some ways the film is close to the horror genre. It’s as mysterious to the American eye and mind as Kabuki, to which it is often compared. Music by Prokofiev; cinematography by Edward Tisse, assisted by Andrei Mosk-vin on Part II. In Russian. b & w, with one long sequence in Part II in rich, experimental color

 

Ivanhoe (1952)—What a ruckus! Everybody in 12th-century England is fighting everybody else—lunging at one another with long lances while on horseback, or throwing rocks off the parapets of keeps, or raising and lowering drawbridges over moats and plunging shouting, screaming men into the water below. In between, barbecue pits are made ready for human roasts and stakes are erected for the purpose of burning beautiful young women. The Normans, who have pledged their allegiance to Prince John (Guy Rolfe), are at war with the Saxons, who are committed to Richard the Lion-Hearted (Norman Wooland), and the Saxon hero Wilfred of Ivanhoe (Robert Taylor) is trying to raise the ransom money to free Richard from his foreign captors. Ivanhoe is also attentive to the fair Rowena (Joan Fontaine) and to the dark, sensitive Jewish outcast Rebecca (Elizabeth Taylor). Elizabeth Taylor, just turned 20, is so eerily beautiful that Fontaine, ordinarily a great beauty in her own right, seems pallid and smarmy. The big clash between Ivanhoe and the villain (George Sanders) is unaccountably brutal—they go at each other with axes and heavy spiked balls attached to chains. No one could say this wasn’t a rousing movie. It’s also romantic, big, commercial, and slick, in the M-G-M grand manner. Produced by Pandro S. Berman, directed by Richard Thorpe, and made in England, it was shot by Freddie Young (who was later to do Lawrence of Arabia). With Emlyn Williams, Finlay Currie, Felix Aylmer, Basil Sydney, Robert Douglas, Harold Warrender, Sebastian Cabot, and Valentine Dyall. Screenplay by Noel Langley, from the Walter Scott novel; art direction by Alfred Junge; score by Miklós Rózsa. color