T

Tabu (1931)—Working together, two great directors—Robert Flaherty and the German Expressionist F. W. Murnau—began this South Seas picture; they disagreed and Flaherty split. Murnau was killed in an auto accident before the opening of this marvellous, deeply flawed classic. It has some of the worst scenes that have ever been part of a work of screen art—cavorting natives and a creaking plot and a heroine with plucked eyebrows—and its musical score combines plaintive, moaning choirs, bits of Schubert, and “The Moldau,” but the dancing is superlative and there are extraordinary pictorial effects. Murnau’s mysticism may be alien to the islands, but it does wonders for the movie: the old chieftain of the village becomes as chilly a figure of doom as the emaciated vampire of Murnau’s Nosferatu, and at the end, the ghostly little boat does not seem to be sailing like an ordinary boat … . It is headed for nothing so commonplace as land. Floyd Crosby won the Academy Award for Cinematography. Silent. b & w

 

Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1949)—This big M-G-M musical, set in the early part of the century, began with a not too inspired script idea from Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, and after it went through a series of cast changes and then got assigned to Busby Berkeley to direct, it was a full-scale mess. Kelly and Frank Sinatra are vaudevillians who are also baseball players; Esther Williams, the manager of the baseball team, is in love with Kelly, but Sinatra is in love with her. And there are gangsters trying to get the boys to double-cross her and lose a game. This asinine story just about smothers the good-natured hoofing. Comden and Green and Roger Edens did the songs, but the musical numbers have that flag-waving Irish-American cheeriness which also blighted many Fox musicals made in the same period. With Betty Garrett and Jules Munshin, who work well with Kelly and Sinatra. They all got together—sans Esther Williams—the following year in On the Town. The finale here isn’t by Berkeley; it was co-directed by Kelly and Donen, and served to persuade the studio to let them co-direct On the Town. Script by Harry Tugend and George Wells; with Edward Arnold and Tom Dugan. color

 

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)—The director, Joseph Sargent, doesn’t just make points—he drops weights. The picture is full of noise and squalling and “dirty” words used for giggly shock effects; the one element that keeps it going is the plot, taken from John Godey’s thriller about how a New York subway train is hijacked and the passengers held for ransom. As the Transit Authority Police detective, Walter Matthau, who just coasts through, seems an oasis of sanity. With Robert Shaw and Martin Balsam; screenplay by Peter Stone. United Artists. color (See Reeling.)

 

A Tale of Two Cities (1935)—In this most popular version of the least typical of Dickens’ novels, Ronald Colman is Sydney Carton, who gives up his life so that another man may live. As Madame Defarge, Blanche Yurka dominates the film; a menace in the grand manner, she knits like a house afire and takes the Bastille practically single-handed. The story has been simplified so that it can be told very clearly. It’s a creditable though unadventurous film, handsomely staged in the M-G-M backlot style for classics. It’s not likely that adults will be eager to see it, but if they sit down to watch it for a few minutes with their children, they’ll probably find themselves sitting until the sacrificial end—which isn’t as gooey as they may fear. Jack Conway directed, with Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur working on the Revolution sequences; W. P. Lipscomb and S. N. Behrman wrote the script. The immense cast includes Edna May Oliver as Miss Pross, Elizabeth Allan, Basil Rathbone, Billy Bevan, Reginald Owen, Isabel Jewell, Fritz Leiber, Donald Woods, H. B. Warner, Tully Marshall, Lucille LaVerne, Claude Gillingwater, and Henry B. Walthall. Reputedly there were 17,000 extras used in the mob scenes. Produced by David O. Selznick. b & w

 

Tales of Hoffmann (1951)—This choreographic spectacle, based on the Jacques Offenbach light opera, stars Moira Shearer, Leonide Massine, Robert Helpmann, and Ludmilla Tcherina in the dancing roles, with singers Robert Rounseville and Ann Ayars. Pamela Brown contributes her silent, disconcerting presence; Sir Thomas Beecham conducts (rather phlegmatically); the Sadler’s Wells Chorus fills out the larger dance sequences. After the success of The Red Shoes, the producers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, found themselves in a position to employ first-rank people in all the technical departments and to fulfill their most lavish appetites, and they really laid on a spread. It’s apparent that the decor and color were intended to create moods, but the whole thing seems to be the product of an aberrant, second-rate imagination that confuses decor with art. Moira Shearer is lovely; it’s a long film, though, and it seems structured almost as a series of divertissements. Powell directed.

 

Tales of Manhattan (1942)—This five-episode film was planned by its producers, Boris Morros and S. P. Eagle (Sam Spiegel), as a flamboyant, star-filled, gimmicky package. Ten top screenwriters, including Ben Hecht, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Ferenc Molnar, concocted the script (which resembles a series of O. Henry rejects), and the performers who were hired include Charles Boyer, Henry Fonda, Paul Robeson, Rita Hayworth, Edward G. Robinson, Ginger Rogers, Charles Laughton, Ethel Waters, Roland Young, Thomas Mitchell, James Gleason, Cesar Romero, Gail Patrick, Elsa Lanchester, Victor Francen, Eddie Anderson, Eugene Pallette, George Sanders, Harry Davenport, Christian Rub, and the Hall Johnson Choir. The story is about the jacket of a full-dress suit; as this tailcoat, cursed by its cutter, passes from one owner to the next, it changes the luck of those who handle it. One director, Julien Duvivier, wrestled with the hyperactive, overextended vignettes, bringing the film a gaudy unity, but not a single episode is convincing on any level. The Edward G. Robinson portion has, at least, a little suspense and irony; in competition for the most embarrassing section are the ones with Laughton as a symphony conductor and a heaven-sent miracle featuring Robeson and Waters. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981)—Not for people who are disturbed by four-letter words or sexual acts performed with lewd gusto. Made in English by the Italian director Marco Ferreri, it’s about many of the same themes as an Ingmar Bergman picture but it isn’t stark—it has the matter-of-fact, one-thing-after-another plainness of an Abbott and Costello movie. The script is based on the stories and the spirit of the American poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, a master of rut who writes about the gutbucket pain and elation of being human. The artist-bum hero, who is based in L.A., is played by Ben Gazzara, who gets to cut loose and do things that probably nobody has done onscreen before. Ferreri gets right down inside Bukowski’s s self-mocking lust and self-dramatizing temperament. As the convent-bred prostitute, Cass, “the most beautiful woman in town,” Ornella Muti is as lithe as a cat, and has the soft radiance of the young Hedy Lamarr in the coital scenes of Ecstasy. The early sequences don’t have much impetus and the dialogue is often flatulent, but there’s genuine audacity and risk-taking in this movie. It may not have the energy of great art, but its nakedness has an aesthetic force. With Susan Tyrrell as the gamiest and funniest of the women the hero has bouts with, and Judith Drake. The script, by Ferreri, Sergio Amidei, and Anthony Foutz, is based on Bukowski’s stories in the City Lights book Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

The Talk of the Town (1942)—The combined writing talents of Irwin Shaw and Sidney Buchman resulted in a script about one Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant), a vaguely radical factory worker falsely accused of arson and manslaughter by the management. He breaks jail and is hidden in the home of a vacationing judge (Ronald Colman) by the judge’s softhearted, fuzzy-headed landlady (Jean Arthur), who is convinced of Dilg’s innocence. The judge takes a more dogmatic legalistic view, but is persuaded to relax his scruples. Did the authors think they were writing a Shavian comedy of ideas? The ideas are garbled and silly, but the people are so pleasant that the picture manages to be quite amiable and high-spirited anyway. George Stevens directed. With Glenda Farrell, Edgar Buchanan, Rex Ingram, Emma Dunn, and Charles Dingle. Columbia. b & w

 

The Tall Guy (1989)—Jeff Goldblum as an American actor in London who has spent six years playing stooge to a detestably smug English comic (Rowan Atkinson) and has lost his confidence and most of his sex drive. Then this gangling wreck is cast as the lead in an Andrew Lloyd Webber-style version of The Elephant Man—Elephant! the musical. Directed by Mel Smith, from a script by Richard Curtis, this satire of the life of the theatre has a loose, inventive dottiness. Goldblum’s wild-eyed sloppy good nature sets off Atkinson’s lethal genius at playing an articulate swine, and the whole cast appears to be acting in clover. That includes Emma Thompson, who seems stripped down to pure flakiness, and Geraldine James as a nympho landlady, Hugh Thomas as a diphead doctor, Anna Massey as a gleaming smart agent, Kim Thomson as a curly-haired singer, and the insidious Peter Kelly as the smarmy mountebank who stages Elephant! Mel Smith turns up in several bits; he’s the blobby-faced fellow who looks like a pixie Alfred Hitchcock. A Working Title Production, released by Miramax. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Tampopo (1986)—Written and directed by Juzo Itami, this understated farce has its own brand of dippy enchantment. It’s about noodles, pleasure, and the movies. The title, which is Japanese for “dandelion,” is the name of a 40ish widow (Nobuko Miyamoto) who is trying to make a go of a run-down noodle shop on the outskirts of Tokyo. A courtly truck driver (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who wears a dark-brown cowboy hat straight across his brow, like the righteous hero of a solemn Western, makes it his mission to help her become a real noodle cook. The film crosscuts between the story of Tampopo and her cowboy samurai and the culinary-erotic adventures of a pair of lovers: a gangster (Koji Yakusho) in a white suit and his ready-for-everything cutie (Fukumi Kuroda). These two demonstrate that eating and sex can be the same thing. The movie is constructed like a comic essay, with random frivolous touches, and much of it is shot in hot, bright color that suggests a neon fusion of urban night life and movie madness. The subtexts connect with viewers’ funnybones at different times, and part of the fun of the movie is listening to the sudden eruptions of giggles—it’s as if some kids were running around in the theatre tickling people. In Japanese. (See Hooked.)

 

Target (1985)—Gene Hackman plays a quiet fellow who runs a lumberyard in Dallas; his son (Matt Dillon), who doesn’t get along with the old man, thinks he’s a fud—that he never had the nerve to go anywhere or do anything. It’s not until the boy’s mother (Gayle Hunnicutt) is kidnapped while she’s on a Paris vacation and the father and son are in Europe looking for her that the boy discovers his father is a whirlwind—a tough former C.I.A. agent who had to be relocated in order to protect the family. By that time the picture, which started out as if it were going to be about a father-son relationship, is all spies, shootings, corpses, and stupidly spectacular car chases. (It takes a lot of killing to make the son respect his dad.) The whole idea is pretty bad, and Arthur Penn, who directed, keeps going off key. Many of the scenes, especially Dillon’s and Hunnicutt’s, are so maladroitly staged that you find yourself staring at them blankly. (The son comes across as a callow loudmouth.) With Victoria Fyodo-rova, Josef Sommer, Ilona Grubel, Herbert Berghof, and Guy Boyd (who’s amusing as a crude C.I.A. man). The screenplay, by Howard Berk and Don Petersen, is based on a story by Leonard Stern. Cinematography by Jean Tournier; score by Michael Small. A Zanuck/Brown Production, for CBS; released by Warners. color (See Hooked.)

 

Targets (1968)—Peter Bogdanovich wrote, directed, and appears in this lame melodrama about a clean-cut all-American boy (Tim O’Kelly) who turns sniper. The picture is rather naively made, and one begins to wait for the sniper to hit his targets, because there’s nothing else of interest going on. Boris Karloff, in one of his last screen appearances, plays a veteran horror-film actor. Produced by Roger Corman. Paramount. color

 

The Tarnished Angels (1958)—Rock Hudson said that this movie was not like his others—that he disapproved of it, and that such nasty stories shouldn’t be presented to the American public. The nasty material is William Faulkner’s Pylon, adapted by George Zuckerman. Set in New Orleans in 1931, the movie attempts to re-create Faulkner’s hectic, feverish atmosphere and heroes—the ex—war pilots who will do anything to sustain the thrill of flying. The daredevils are played by Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone as his promiscuous parachutist wife, and Jack Carson as a mechanic; Hudson, pooped as ever, is the heavy-drinking reporter who wants to do a story on the trio. This movie would have been better—in its odd, neo-30s sort of way—if the last quarter hour had been left out. It’s the kind of bad movie that you know is bad—and yet you’re held by the mixture of polished style and quasi-melodramatics achieved by the director, Douglas Sirk. Universal. CinemaScope, b & w

 

Tarnished Lady (1931)—Limp. George Cukor’s first directorial solo, Tallulah Bankhead’s first talkie, and a flop for both. Donald Ogden Stewart shaped the script for Bankhead (from his story “New York Lady”), and it was conceived on the elegant model of her stage successes; she’s a socialite who marries Clive Brook for money and is torn when she falls in love with a Greenwich Village writer (Alexander Kirkland). But the Bankhead of tubercular hollows and soigné sagging posture who had become a stage idol was never to become popular in movies; only the later boisterous, bellowing Bankhead succeeded with the public. And you can see why. As Cukor has said, “She had beautiful bones, but her eyes were not eyes for movies. They looked somehow hooded and dead … . Her smile didn’t illuminate.” With Osgood Perkins and Elizabeth Patterson; about half of the picture was shot in New York City locations. Paramount. b & w

 

Tarzan and His Mate (1934)—Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan in the carefully prepared follow-up to the 1932 hit Tarzan, the Ape Man. It’s cheerful and outrageously preposterous. You are right in the heart of the craziest Africa ever contrived for your entertainment; no wild beast ever misses a cue. Tarzan’s mate has adapted herself to her husband’s mode of living with true Victorian propriety; snug in her tree houses, she has a devoted gorilla for her personal maid. Everything is idyllic, though some old Mayfair friends of hers turn up and make trouble for a while. With Neil Hamilton, Paul Cavanagh, and Forester Harvey. Produced by Bernard Hyman; directed by Cedric Gibbons and Jack Conway, using location footage blended with a studio jungle; written by James K. McGuinness, Howard Emmett Rogers, and Leon Gordon. M-G-M. b & w

 

Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932)—Johnny Weissmuller of the body beautiful—making his movie bow in a loincloth—and pretty, likably coy Maureen O’Sullivan. There is something irresistibly funny about the predicament of a ladylike young lady abducted by a man who has lived like an ape, and who pokes and pummels her with the gestures of an ape. The picture, which is (and always was) great, parodistic fun, doesn’t attempt to be realistic about jungle life; it’s an entertaining romantic adventure—lighthearted and agreeable. W. S. Van Dyke directed this M-G-M film, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ durable kitsch. Weissmuller was by no means the first movie Tarzan, but he was the first Tarzan of the talkies; he played the character in almost a dozen films, and others also got into the act: Buster Crabbe, Herman Brix (later known as Bruce Bennett), Lex Barker, Glenn Morris, Gordon Scott, Jock Mahoney, and Mike Henry. In 1959, M-G-M did a color remake of the first Weissmuller film, starring Denny Miller, and in 1981 another remake—this time with the emphasis on Bo Derek as jane. b & w

 

Taxi Driver (1976)—Robert De Niro is in almost every frame of Martin Scorsese’s feverish, horrifyingly funny movie about a lonely New York cab-driver. De Niro’s inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He’s Travis Bickle, an outsider who can’t find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can’t sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted—whores, pimps, transients—he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from Underground. Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness. From Paul Schrader’s script; with Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Harry Northup, Joe Spinell, Diahnne Abbott, and Scorsese himself. Columbia. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956)—John Patrick’s Pulitzer Prize—winning play, adapted from Vern J. Sneider’s novel, is a whimsical comedy fantasy about the foolishness of the American military bureaucracy’s attempts to impose American ideas on occupied countries—in this case Okinawa. Many people thought the play magical, but this M-G-M version, miserably directed by Daniel Mann, is an almost total mistake. Everybody in it, whether American or Okinawan, seems childish and stupid; the squeals and giggles of the native women are enough to drive one out of the theatre. Marlon Brando starved himself to play the pixie interpreter Sakini, and he looks as if he’s enjoying the stunt—talking with a mad accent, grinning boyishly, bending forward, and doing tricky movements with his legs. He’s harmlessly genial (and he is certainly missed when he’s offscreen), though the fey, roguish role doesn’t allow him to do what he’s great at and it’s possible that he’s less effective in it than a lesser actor might have been. But this whole production is so talky and rhythmless that it’s hard to see how even a specialist in the fey arts could have got the role airborne. As the American captain who tries to turn an Okinawan village into a well-scrubbed Yankee community and then is converted by the natives, Glenn Ford grimaces, twitches galvanically, and stutters foolishly. It’s the kind of role and the kind of performance that make you hate an actor. With Machiko Kyo, Paul Ford, Eddie Albert, and Henry Morgan. The adaptation is by the playwright himself. color

 

Teen Kanya, see Two Daughters

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)—A tacky, lighthearted parody of crime-wave movies—camp for kiddies. As babies, the four turtles were let loose in radioactive muck; they mutated into hip, English-speaking, people-size turtles who live in the dark sewers of New York City and send out for pizza. Their mentor, the wise old rat Splinter, has trained them in the martial arts; they fight the criminal legions led by the Japanese, Darth Vader—like Shredder. Their human friends are the TV newswoman April O’Neil (Judith Hoag) and the daredevil Casey Jones (Elias Koteas). Everything in the movie has a playful, pop familiarity, and the jokey allusions to other movies are easy for young kids to grasp. The four turtles (stunt men in getups devised by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop) are not as individualized as one might hope, but Splinter has an Alice-in-Wonderland creepiness. The director, Steve Barron, is casual with Hoag and Koteas, who blend in gracefully; he can’t do much for the preachy subplot involving a father and son who misunderstand each other. (The flashbacks are the most fun.) The story is based on the comic-book characters devised in 1983 by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman. Golden Harvest, released by New Line. color

 

Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969)—Ideology on horseback. The writer-director Abraham Polonsky has taken a Western story about an Indian, Willie (Robert Blake), who, in 1909, kills another Indian, the father of his girl (Katharine Ross), and grafted onto it enough schematic Marxism and Freudianism and New Left guerrilla Existentialism and late-6os American self-hatred so that every damned line of dialogue becomes “meaningful.” There isn’t a character who doesn’t t make points and represent various political forces, and the sheriff (Robert Redford) is named Coop so that his actions will symbolize the ultimate cowardice and failure of the Gary Cooper hero figures. The woman doctor (Susan Clark) who is superintendent of the reservation is a patronizing-to-Indians liberal—the ultimate villainess. Ashamed of her sexuality (like all liberals), she is given such lines as—to Redford—“I use you the way you use me.” (Most women in the audience will probably think, Lucky you.) The picture is solemnly measured, and its color is desaturated for barren, dusty landscapes. It says that since a black man (the Indian pretense isn’t kept up for long) can’t trust any white man and there can be no reconciliation of the races, he should try to bring everything down. That is the only way he can make the whites know he was here. A strange notion, because there wouldn’t be anybody around to remember him. This picture isn’t likely to be very satisfying except to black kamikazes and white masochists. With Barry Sullivan, John Vernon, and Charles McGraw. Cinematography by Conrad Hall; based on the novel Willie Boy, by Harry Lawton. Universal. (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Tempest ⁽1982)—Taking off from Shakespeare and the idea of a world-famous American architect of Greek ancestry who is having a mid-life crisis, Paul Mazursky tries for a free, airborne mix of comedy, musical, psychodrama, and dream play. The film has a flickering wit and there are charming bits by Susan Sarandon and the talented young Molly Ringwald, but Mazursky doesn’t find an original tone that the audience can respond to, and he has put John Cassavetes—one of the most dour and alienating of actors—at the film’s center. And worse, the picture has delusions of pain-in-the-soul glamour; set mostly in Manhattan and on a Greek island, it’s overblown and luxuriantly elegant. You feel you should ooh and ah the vistas (courtesy of the cinematographer, Don McAlpine). It has the polished pictorial extravagance of stupe classics, such as Albert Lewin’s 1951 Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. (It even has the swank blue skies that Pandora had.) And it’s a sophisticated fantasy in the same mode: the images might be used to advertise a new parfum. This is an absurd movie, but what an artifact! It takes a high degree of civilization to produce something so hollow. With Raul Julia, Gena Rowlands, Vittorio Gassman, Lucianne Buchanan, Sam Robards, Paul Stewart, Jackie Gayle, Tony Holland, Jerry Hardin, and Paul and Betsy Mazursky. From a script by Mazursky and Leon Capetanos; with a modern score by Stomu Yamashta. Columbia. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Ten Cents a Dance (1931)—The hardboiled sentimentality of many early talkie melodramas could be crackling, and even daring, when a good craftsman was in charge, but here the director, Lionel Barrymore, fails to shape the scenes, and the film drags heavily. In the role of a no-nonsense taxi-dancer, Barbara Stanwyck fends off sailors and rough guys and raps out her lines believably; she’s a miraculously natural actress, but without a director she doesn’t show anything like the gifts she demonstrated in this same period in Ladies of Leisure and The Miracle Woman. Here she marries a thieving weakling (Monroe Owsley), and then saves him from prison by borrowing money from a rich (and worthy) gentleman (Ricardo Cortez). When her ungrateful husband turns nasty, she quite sensibly leaves him and goes off to marry the gent. With Sally Blane and Martha Sleeper. Script by Jo Swerling. Columbia. b & w

 

The Ten Commandments (1956)—Charlton Heston is the highly athletic Moses; Anne Baxter is the kittenish princess who loves him; Judith Anderson is the sinister slave who knows the secret of his Jewish birth; Cedric Hardwicke is the likable old Pharaoh; Yul Brynner is the prince who beats Moses to the Egyptian throne; Edward G. Robinson is the traitor to the Jews; Debra Paget is the young slave old Robinson has got his eyes on. Stir them all together, throw in stone tablets, a whopping big Golden Calf, part the Red Sea, and you’ve got Cecil B. De Mille’s epic—3 hours and 38 minutes of it. As old-fashioned hokum, it’s palatable and rather tasty. Also with Yvonne de Carlo, John Derek, John Carradine, Nina Foch, Douglass Dumbrille, Martha Scott, Vincent Price, Henry Wilcoxon, and H. B. Warner. Paramount. color

 

Ten Days That Shook the World, see October

 

Ten from Your Show of Shows (1973)—A sampling of the 160 90-minute weekly shows produced and directed by Max Liebman from 1950 to 1954, starring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, with Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. A few of the skits are classic, and if you saw Caesar when you were young enough, maybe he’ll always be the greatest clown for you. b & w (See Reeling.)

 

Tender Mercies (1983)—This bare-bones “art” movie is about the healing of Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), a legendary country-and-Western singer who has become an alcoholic wreck. The film is said to be honest and about real people, and it affects some viewers very powerfully; audiences are unusually still—almost reverent—as the born-again Mac is baptized at the church of the Vietnam widow (Tess Harper) whose frontier-woman steadfastness has made his redemption possible. The Australian director, Bruce Beresford, making his American debut with this inspirational film, has shot it in bright sunshine out in the middle of nowhere; the widow’s motel—gas station is as isolated as the mansion in Giant. (It’s a mystery how she could ever make a living from it.) Mostly the picture consists of silences; long shots of the bleak, flat land, showing the horizon line (it gives the film integrity); and Duvall’s determination to make you see that he’s keeping his emotions to himself; and Tess Harper staring out of her cornflower-blue headlights. (These two have matching deep-sunk eyes.) The theme song—which Duvall sings in a dry, unmusical voice—is called “It Hurts to Face Reality.” Written by Horton Foote, master of arid realism, the script recalls the alleged Golden Age of Television. With the fine young actress Ellen Barkin, whose few scenes as Mac’s daughter by an earlier marriage are the film’s s high points, and Betty Buckley, who stirs things up a bit as the brassy, country-star earlier wife, and also Wilford Brimley. Produced by Foote and Duvall; Foote won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Duvall won for Best Actor. Universal. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

The 10th Victim La Decima Vittima (1965)—Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress are the stars of this sometimes witty science-fiction extravaganza about licensed killing in the 21st century. Inventive at the start, but it gets out of hand. Directed by Elio Petri. In Italian. color

 

Tenue de soirée, see Ménage

 

Teorema (1969)—Some people profess to find spiritual sustenance in this movie; others break up on lines such as “You came to destroy me” and “I was living in a void,” and they find Pasolini’s platitudes and riddles and the is-this-man-Christ-or-a-devil game intolerably silly. With Terence Stamp and Silvana Mangano. In Italian. color

 

Tequila Sunrise (1988)—You have to be able to enjoy trashy shamelessness to enjoy old Hollywood and to enjoy this picture. Robert Towne, who wrote and directed, is soaked in the perfume of 30s and 40s Hollywood romanticism. This is a lusciously silly movie; it has an amorous shine. The three talented stars are smashing: Mel Gibson is a former drug dealer who longs for a decent, respectable life and is trying to succeed in the irrigation business. Kurt Russell is his friend who’s the head of the narcotics squad in L.A. County. And Michelle Pfeiffer is the woman they both love. The crime plot often seems to be stalled, and by rational standards the stars’ triangular shuffle is flimsy and stupid, but by romantic standards the whole thing is delectable. With Raul Julia, who has a big, likable, rumbling presence as a scoundrel, J. T. Walsh as a quintessential flatfoot, Ann Magnuson, Arliss Howard, Ayre Gross, and, in a bit as a judge, Budd Boetticher. The golden cinematography is by Conrad Hall; the aggressively offensive score is by Dave Grusin. Warners. color (See Movie Love.)

 

The Terminal Man (1974)—One of those errors-of-science thrillers; it’s an even worse error of moviemaking. Pitifully miscast, George Segal is a man implanted with a computer that’s supposed to regulate his violent temper; it goes haywire and he runs around stabbing people uncontrollably. Mike Hodges, who directed, also is guilty of the adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel. Of all the bad sci-fi movies of the 70s, this one probably has the least charm. With Joan Hackett as a soulful-eyed doctor, Richard Dysart, Jill Clayburgh, Michael C. Gwynne, and Ian Wolfe as a priest. If you close your eyes you can just listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach. Warners. color

 

Terms of Endearment (1983)—Retro-40s virtue piled on the cartoon underpinnings of TV comedy shows. The movie—which spans 30 years—is a Freudian story of role reversals between mother (Shirley MacLaine) and daughter (Debra Winger), told in a slaphappy style. The mother comes across as a parody of an anti-life monster and the daughter as a natural woman—a life force. The two actresses might be playing in two different movies. Adapted (from Larry McMurtry’s novel) and directed by James L. Brooks, this is the kind of bogus picture that gets people to say, “I saw myself in those characters.” Of course they see themselves there; Brooks guides the actors with both his eyes on the audience. The mother is a pixie horror—a a rich skinflint with a blond dye job and pastel frills. She’s a TV-museum piece, like the characters in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” or “Soap”; she’s warped. And so is the pie-eyed lecher who’s her next-door neighbor—a former astronaut, played by Jack Nicholson. But the emotion she feels for him transforms her, and when a tragic illness strikes her family she shows her mettle, and his fundamental decency rises to the surface. This real-life tragedy movie uses cancer like a seal of approval. Cancer gives the movie its message: “Don’t take people for granted; you never know when you’re going to lose them.” At the end, the picture says, “You can go home now—you’ve laughed, you’ve cried.” What’s infuriating about it is its calculated humanity. What makes it tolerable are the performers. Debra Winger is incredibly vivid; Nicholson is alert and polished. And the cast includes John Lithgow, Jeff Daniels, and Troy Bishop and Huckleberry Fox as Tommy and Teddy. Academy Awards: Best Picture; Best Director; Best Screenplay, Adaptation; Best Actress (MacLaine); Best Supporting Actor (Nicholson). Paramount. color

 

La Terra Trema (1947)—Luchino Visconti’s neo-realist tragedy, set among the exploited Sicilian fishermen, is long and full of political cliches, and yet in its solemnity and beauty it achieves a true epic vision. The film is lyrical yet austere, and it’s beautifully proportioned. It may be the best boring movie ever made: although you might have to get up and stretch a few times, you’re not likely to want to leave. Filmed on location in Aci-Trezza, Sicily. Director of photography, G. R. Aldo; camera operator, Gianni Di Venanzo. The assistant directors were Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli. The script is by Visconti. (160 minutes.) In Sicilian dialect. b & w

 

Tess (1979)—Roman Polanski’s version of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is textured and smooth and even, with lateral compositions subtly flowing into each other; the sequences are beautifully structured, and the craftsmanship is hypnotic. But the picture is tame. There’s a visual turmoil in Hardy when he describes the Wessex countryside; Polanski’s tastefully cropped compositions and unvaried pacing make nature proper. For a reader, the shock of the 1891 book is that Tess isn’t simply a woman at the mercy of men, society, and nature; she’s also at the mercy of her own passions. Polanski’s Tess (the lovely young Nastassia Kinski, 17 when she played the role) is strictly a victim of men and social conventions. The film takes a sympathetic, feminist position toward her—in a narrow and demeaning sense. She isn’t a protagonist; she is merely a hapless, frail creature, buffeted by circumstances. And Kinski—a soft, European gamine—isn’t rooted in the earth of England or any other country; she’s a hothouse flower, who manages the West Country sounds in a small, uninflected schoolgirl voice. She’s affecting and sensitive, but she’s in the wrong movie. With fine performances by Leigh Lawson as Alec and by Peter Firth as Angel Clare, and amazingly sharp, clear performances by John Collin as the drunken Durbeyfield, Tony Church as Parson Tringham, and by just about everyone else in the supporting cast. Made in English; shot in France, with cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Des Teufels General, see The Devil’s Gene ral

 

Tex (1982)—An oddly quiet, tepid, soft film about adolescent travail in Oklahoma. Making his debut as a director, Tim Hunter uses setups that are drably simple, and the locations are hazy—the cinematographer (Ric Waite) might be in some personal watery-pastel fog. The movie has no strong images; everything is flattened out. Yet this adaptation of one of the S. E. Hinton novels that became favorites of high-school kids in the 70s has an amiable, unforced good humor that takes the curse off the film’s look and even off its everything-but-the-bloodhounds plot. As the prankish 15-year-old Tex, Matt Dillon radiates a mysteriously effortless charm; Dillon has a gift for expressing submerged shifts of feeling—we may feel that we’re actually seeing Tex’s growth process. The earnest naivete of this movie has its own kind of emotional fairy-tale magic. Too bad that there’s nothing in the very likable Tex to make it linger in the mind—it’s visually so fuzzy that it drifts away like a TV show. As Tex’s older brother, the promising Jim Metzler has been kept too monotonous, and as the heavy, Ben Johnson gives an unrelieved performance. But there’s some lively, smart acting by Meg Tilly as Johnson’s daughter, and some good shading in the acting of Pamela Ludwig as a high-school-age mother and Bill McKinney as the boys’ rodeo-bum father. The author, Susan Hinton, appears in a bit as the typing teacher; the script is by Charlie Haas and the director. Disney. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)—Wartime patriotic musical, featuring the Warners stable—somewhat livelier than most of the other revues of this ilk. The high point is Bette Davis complaining of the lack of civilian males in the song “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.” With Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Dinah Shore, Ida Lupino, Ann Sheridan, Errol Flynn, Hattie McDaniel, Dennis Morgan, Spike Jones and His City Slickers, Eddie Cantor, and many others. David Butler directed, from a not-too-constricting script by Norman Panama, Melvin Frank, and James V. Kern. b & w

 

That Certain Feeling (1955)—Bob Hope’s relaxed skill buoys up this adaptation of the Broadway play King of Hearts, by Jean Kerr and Eleanor Brooke. The lines are light and amusing, though the slim contrivance of a plot is overlabored by the heavy hands of the directing team, Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. It’s Hope’s show: he has some good material and he stays in character as an anxiety-ridden comic-strip artist. Except for one good drunk scene, Eva Marie Saint is a dismayingly flat, uninspired heroine; George Sanders’ role as an obnoxious success is too close to low comedy for his suave, jaded style; Pearl Bailey is a rather dubious deus ex machina. Also with Al Capp. Adapted by the directors and I.A.L. Diamond. Paramount. color

 

That Cold Day in the Park (1969)—It is certainly well directed (by Robert Altman), it’s well written (by Gillian Freeman), and it is beautifully shot (by Laszlo Kovacs). But does anybody want to see a movie about a desperately lonely spinster (Sandy Dennis) who traps a young man (Michael Burns) and walls him up in her home? There may be something in the film medium itself that works against these stories of obsessional incarceration (The Collector also failed): we in the audience are trapped along with the prisoner, and we long to get away. One can admire this film for its craftsmanship; it has a cold brilliance. But that’s all. With Luana Anders, John Garfield, Jr., Suzanne Benton, and Michael Murphy. From a novel by Richard Miles; music by Johnny Mandel; art direction by Leon Ericksen. A Canadian production, filmed in Vancouver. color

 

That Man from Rio L’Homme de Rio (1963)—Philippe de Broca’s immensely successful parody-fantasy on thrillers and adventure films. With Jean-Paul Belmondo, Françoise Dorléac, and Jean Servais. High spirits and bravura and extravagance, but maybe too much of each. In French. color

 

That Night in Rio (1941)—Alice Faye could dance and she had a lush contralto voice (no lover of movie musicals will forget her “This Year’s Kisses” in On the Avenue), but this low-camp musical is one of her co-starring jobs with Don Ameche, the cipher that sings, in a double role. That’s twice nothing. As the wife of a Brazilian baron (Ameche) she is weighed down by huge glassy necklaces and by the other characters’ references to her great beauty; she keeps staring, in misery and embarrassment. The mistaken-identity plot, with the neglected wife falling in love with the nightclub entertainer (also Ameche) hired to impersonate her husband, is just a farce variation on The Prisoner of Zenda. The film, directed by Irving Cummings, for 20th Century-Fox, features the studio’s Brazilian Bombshell, Carmen Miranda—it would be a euphemism to describe her as volatile. She plays the entertainer’s girlfriend, wears fruit on her head, and sings “I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like You Very Much).” The movie was remade 10 years later as the Danny Kaye vehicle On the Riviera; those with really long memories may recall that it was done for the first time back in 1935 as a Maurice Chevalier—Merle Oberon musical called Folies-Bergère. Of the three versions That Night in Rio takes the booby prize. With Maria Montez as Inez, and S. Z. Sakall, J. Carrol Naish, Curt Bois, Leonid Kinskey, Fortunio Bonanova, and Frank Puglia. From a play by Rudolph Lothar and Hans Adler; at least five writers worked on the script. (garish) color

 

That Obscure Object of Desire Cet Obscur Objet du désir (1977)—Luis Buñuel’s style here is peerlessly urbane, but the film is a little monotonous. Fernando Rey plays a rich, worldly French widower of perhaps 50, who loves a young Spanish girl; she alternates between promises and postponement—she teases him, fleeces him, enrages him. She claims to love him but says, “If I gave in, you wouldn’t love me anymore.” In this fifth movie version of La Femme et le pantin, Pierre Louys’ short novel about a femme fatale, the role is played by two actresses—Carole Bouquet, a tall French girl, poker-faced except for a squint of amusement and a foxy, crooked smear of a smile, and Angela Molina, a shorter, more rounded Spanish girl, who’s physically impulsive, and sensual in a traditional heavy-eyed way. This doubling-up stunt doesn’t add any meaning: perhaps there’s less than if there were a single actress who could capture our imaginations. Buñuel sets up the Louys story, then treats it glancingly as a joke to hang other jokes on—and his jokes now don’t have the violence underneath to make connections for us. His style is too serene for his subject. In French. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Themroc (1973)—This anarchistic, deliberately bestial black comedy-fantasy grew out of the post-1968 period in France, when it was fashionable to attack all “structures.” It’s about sex and the family and revolution, and it stars Michel Piccoli as Themroc (pronounced Temroc), a middle-aged factory worker who revolts, goes back to his flat, throws his material goods into the courtyard, and walls himself up in it, along with his pretty young sister (Beatrice Romand), whom he has been lusting after. He lives like an animal (what animal we’ll never know) feasting on pigs—i.e., policemen—roasted on a spit. Soon, others in the block of flats follow suit and join in the orgy. The characters don’t speak in any known language; they grunt and squeal and make “animal” sounds. In its assault on taboos, this work somewhat resembles Makavejev’s WR—Mysteries of the Organism; unlike Godard’s Weekend, it revels in barbarism, cannibalism, and bestiality. The director, Claude Faraldo, is ingenious and talented, though the pacing is often too slow and the thinking suggests a dirtier, French Steelyard Blues. The usually suave Piccoli is surprisingly effective in his caveman, King Kongish role; the result is much funnier than if a normally crude actor had played the part. The cast includes members of the Theatre de la Gare; among them are Miou-Miou and Patrick Dewaere. color

 

Theodora Goes Wild (1936)—Irene Dunne was better in comedy than in her smug, sacrificial roles, and in this movie and The Awful Truth she was at her best. She’s too bright—she’s almost shrill in her brightness—and she does something clever with her teeth that makes one want to slap her, but she has energy, and this comedy about a small-town girl who writes a best-seller and charms a city sophisticate (Melvyn Douglas) has a corny vitality that almost passes for wit. It was a hugely successful popular entertainment. Richard Boleslawski directed, from Sidney Buchman’s screenplay. With Thomas Mitchell and Spring Byington. Columbia. b & w

 

There Was a Crooked Man … (1970)—This example of commercialized black-comedy nihilism seems to have been written by an evil 2-year-old, and it has been directed in the Grand Rapids style of filmmaking. The story plays murderous double-crossing games until any characters with a decent impulse are dead fools or have become crooked. There’s nobody to root for but Kirk Douglas, a red-haired jokester-killer who is sent to a territorial prison in the Arizona desert in the 1880s; he makes a fool of Henry Fonda, the warden, who is changing the prison from a brutalizing place into a decent one, and he makes corpses of his buddies. Written by David Newman and Robert Benton; directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. With Hume Cronyn, Warren Oates, Burgess Meredith, Lee Grant, Alan Hale, Arthur O’Connell, John Randolph, Martin Gabel, Bert Freed, and Gene Evans. Cinematography by Harry Stradling, Jr. Warners. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970)—A would-be scintillating comedy about a girl who can’t decide between a dapper older man and a young hippie—the sort of thing that requires the audience to be enchanted by an elfin kook. Goldie Hawn bats her goldfish eyes, but she seems to have a hook in her mouth; Peter Sellers struggles manfully, trying to find her irresistible. Mechanically directed by Roy Boulting; written by Terence Frisby, from his play. Columbia. color

 

There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954)—Square and garish. Conceived as entertainment for the whole family, this musical is about a family of Irish vaudevillians—the Five Donahues; Ethel Merman and Dan Dailey are the parents, and Donald O’Connor, Mitzi Gaynor, and Johnnie Ray are their progeny. The plot is almost insultingly sentimental; it involves a misunderstanding between O’Connor and the girl he loves—Marilyn Monroe, as a seductive but goodhearted Broadway star. You have to put up with Johnnie Ray, who sings like a rutting cat and then—as if to win our indulgence—announces he is going to be a priest. But there’s good, fast hoofing by Dailey and O’Connor and Mitzi Gaynor, who has a gleeful bounciness; she and O’Connor are wonderful together. And the Irving Berlin songs can carry you through a lot of tedious silliness. The costumes are so grotesquely tasteless, they become enjoyable—Ethel Merman sings the title song in a monstrous white gown that looks as if it’s going to attack her. With Hugh O’Brian. The choreography is by Robert Alton and Jack Cole; the script is by Henry and Phoebe Ephron, from a story by Lamar Trotti. Directed by Walter Lang. 20th Century-Fox. color

 

Therese (1986)—Shot in a diorama in a richly austere visual style—the actors appear against a mottled, opaque backdrop—this Alain Cavalier film is undoubtedly a feat of some sort. (But perhaps it’s no more than an art curiosity.) It concentrates our attention on the bare, masterly images (lighted by Philippe Rousselot) that come out of the darkness, and on tiny sounds and whispered bits of conversation. The script, by Cavalier and his daughter, Camille de Casabianca, is a minimalist version of the story of the young girl who at 15 got permission to enter the Carmelite order; she died of tuberculosis in 1897, at 24, and was canonized and became popular as St. Theresa of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus, and the model of the pure woman. (This is at least the fourth French movie she has inspired.) What Cavalier’s version gives us is the beaming eagerness of a girl (Catherine Mouchet) who seems born to be a nun. She takes completely literally her marriage to Christ, and burns with love for her bridegroom. For Thérèse, carnal passion and spiritual passion seem fused. But Cavalier’s formal, noncommittal style is too measured for you to get any sense that you’re observing life in a convent. He walls off Thérèse’s inner struggle, and since nothing happens to her outwardly, she becomes only an aesthetic or possibly erotic object. And after a while the film’s austerity may begin to seem as repressive as the cloistered life. In French. color (See Hooked.)

 

Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962)—Emmanuèle Riva (of Hiroshima, mon amour) as François Mauriac’s Thérèse, the provincial bourgeois lady who attempts to murder her gross, prosperous husband (Philippe Noiret) for the best and worst of reasons: he is dull. Directed by Georges Franju, and filmed in the cold Bordeaux of marshes and moors; it was shot on Mauriac’s own estate. It’s an oblique yet almost painfully lucid account of the stifled emotions that lead to attempted murder. You see bourgeois comfort and hypocrisy through the eyes of the sensitive intelligent person who registers exactly what it all is—you see through Thérèse the poisoner’s eyes. The film is measured and relentless, and very beautiful in an ascetic way—but when it’s over you’re not likely to say, “Let’s sit through it again.” Riva is an ideal screen actress in the way that Jeanne Moreau and Annie Girardot are ideal: beyond their skills, they’re fascinating just to look at. Riva is perfectly balanced against Noiret (whose performance here was prized and celebrated). Mauriac wrote the dialogue; he, his son Claude, and Franju did the adaptation. Cinematography by Christian Matras; with Edith Scob and Sami Frey. In French. b & w

 

These Three (1936)—A beautifully made early version of the Lillian Hellman play The Children’s Hour, which effectively transposes the lesbian accusation to a heterosexual accusation. (Hellman did the adaptation.) Merle Oberon (in one of her better performances), Joel McCrea, and Miriam Hopkins are the three leads; Bonita Granville is the ghastly, tale-bearing child who claims to have seen sexual carryings-on; and Catherine Doucet is Hopkins’ aunt. William Wyler, who directed, also made the 1962 version (with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn, and Hopkins in the aunt role), which restored the original charge, but These Three is the better movie. Wyler seems more confident and relaxed in this version; he doesn’t hover over things as much. With Alma Kruger, Marcia Mae Jones, Margaret Hamilton, and Walter Brennan. Cinematography by Gregg Toland. A Samuel Goldwyn Production. b & w

 

They All Kissed the Bride (1942)—“You’re a machine—not a woman,” Melvyn Douglas, the bohemian journalist, tells Joan Crawford, the boss-lady with the wrong slant on life. It was the refrain of Hollywood comedies after the Second World War: the heroine has to learn that running things isn’t feminine. Joan, the head of a trucking company, proves she’s fit to be a bride by doing a jitterbug number and getting drunk. It’s grimly unfunny: Crawford, glowering, strides through the role that Carole Lombard’s death saved her from. With Roland Young, Billie Burke, Helen Parrish, and Allen Jenkins; directed by Alexander Hall, from P. J. Wolfson’s script. Columbia. b & w

 

They Drive by Night (1940)—The director, Raoul Walsh, probably had little to do with the film’s schizoid nature. The first half, involving George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, and Alan Hale, is an action-filled, realistic good story about free-lance truck drivers who run fruit and vegetables to the big-city markets. In the second half, Raft, neat, shaved, and respectably at work in an office, is pursued by Ida Lupino, his employer’s wife, but manages to hold out, because he is engaged to Ann Sheridan. Nobody cares anymore whether the oranges and lettuce get to market on time; they’re busy watching Lupino go off her scheming nut in a big courtroom scene (much like the one Bette Davis had played in 1935 in Bordertown). This part is standard movie melodrama and not particularly well done. With Roscoe Karns, George Tobias, Gale Page, and Joyce Compton; from a novel by A. I. Bezzerides. Warners. b & w

 

They Knew What They Wanted (1940)—The Sidney Howard play was highly regarded in 1924, and Hollywood was drawn to this adulterous drama of the San Francisco waitress who agrees to marry Tony Patucci, an Italian grape grower in the Napa Valley, and then, in spite of herself, is seduced by the bridegroom’s hired man. It was filmed in 1928 with Pola Negri and in 1930 with Vilma Banky. In this version, Carole Lombard sucks in her gorgeous cheeks and tries to look as if she’s desperate to escape a life of poverty and drudgery; while Charles Laughton, as the goodhearted Tony, wears overalls and a droopy mustache, waves his arms ebulliently, and laughs with so much Latin gusto that even Anthony Quinn might be stunned. Lombard and Laughton work at their roles seriously, but who wants to see her in dowdy clothes thinking thoughts, and who wants to see him being earthy and simple and wise? (He has some ingenious moments but his “ethnic” acting isn’t remotely Italian-American—at times he might be playing Charlie Chan.) Directed by Garson Kanin, from Robert Ardrey’s adaptation; edited by John Sturges. With William Gargan as the hired hand, Harry Carey as the virtuous Doc, and Frank Fay, in one of the least convincing performances of all time, as a purehearted padre. Everybody involved seems to be working against the grain. The picture, which is permeated with spiritual sentiments of the tackiest variety, is like a fake antique. R K O. b & w

 

They Live by Night (1948)—Nicholas Ray made his debut as a director with this near-hallucinatory, hardboiled, expressionist version of Edward Anderson’s too little known 1937 novel Thieves Like Us. The film—designed as a social tragedy—was ready for release in 1948 (under the title “The Twisted Road”), but R K O apparently thought it lacking in entertainment values and shelved it; released in England, it became a critical and box-office success, and so the studio relented and opened it here, in 1949. A variation of such earlier Bonnie-and-Clyde, on-the-road movies as You Only Live Once, it presents the girl, Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), and her young escaped-convict lover, Bowie (Farley Granger), as doomed innocents, trying to escape the forces pursuing them, looking for a refuge where their baby can be born. Ray’s tense choreographic staging and tightly framed compositions give the film a sensuous, nervous feeling of imminent betrayal. Yet this film-noir stylization, elegant in design terms and emotionally powerful, is also very simplistic; the movie suffers from metaphysical liberalism—social injustice treated as cosmic fatalism. With Jay C. Flippen and Howard Da Silva, as Bowie’s bank-robber friends, Helen Craig, Ian Wolfe, and Marie Bryant. Script by Charles Schnee; produced by John Houseman, under the aegis of Dore Schary. (Robert Altman made another version of Thieves Like Us, in 1974.) b & w

 

They Made Me a Criminal (1939)—The screenwriter must have gone berserk on this one, or maybe it was some higher-up’s idea to cast John Garfield as a New York prizefighter on the lam from a murder charge, who gets a job on a date ranch in Arizona, which is run by a kindly old lady (May Robson) as a work farm for delinquent boys—the Dead End Kids. When the do-gooding old broad is about to be evicted, the redeemed Garfield enters a local prizefight, and is spotted by a New York detective (Claude Rains). To add to the unlikeliness, Busby Berkeley was the director. The melodrama is mawkishly familiar, but there are watchable bits along the way, and it’s tolerable. Barbara Pepper and Ann Sheridan figure in the big-city dirty glitter at the beginning, and on the ranch there’s twisty-mouth Gloria Dickson as the good-woman blonde—she’s an odd one, even by Warners’ 30s standards. James Wong Howe was the cinematographer. The script, credited to Sig Herzig, is a reworking of the 1933 Warners movie The Life of Jimmy Dolan. b & w

 

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)—Horace McCoy’s hardboiled 1930s novel about the Hollywood extras who enter a marathon dance contest is turned into a macabre allegory, with the paranoid, apocalyptic vision of American rottenness that was typical of movies in the Vietnam era. Though the picture staggers under its heavy load of symbolism and is marred by flash-forwards, and even flashbacks triggered by flash-forwards, it’s still striking, with vestiges of the hard sarcasm of 30s lower-depths humor—those acrid sick jokes that make one wince and laugh simultaneously. As the defiantly self-destructive, sharp-tongued Gloria, the girl who is so afraid of being gullible that she can’t live, Jane Fonda gives a startling, strong performance. She shows the true star’s gift of drawing one to her emotionally even when the character she plays is repellent; her Gloria, like Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs, is one of those creations who live on as part of our shared moviegoing experience. The screenwriters, James Poe and Robert E. Thompson, wrote a good role for Gig Young as the promoter-m. c.; he’s a crude barker who, in his pitches on the microphone, cheapens every human emotion, but he’s also sensitive and empathic. He knows how to handle people in crises—partly, one gathers, because he has been among people in ugly messes all his seamy life. The director, Sydney Pollack, isn’t particularly inventive, but he has tight control of the actors. They work well for him, and he keeps the grisly central situation going with energy and drive. The cast includes Michael Sarrazin (his role—that of a man who commits a murder from which he is totally estranged—is the adaptors’ worst failure, and he just looks weak, calf-eyed, and vaguely benumbed), Susannah York, Bonnie Bedelia, Bruce Dern, Red Buttons, Allyn Ann McLerie, and Severn Darden. Cinerama Releasing Corporation. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Thief (1981)—Grandiloquent masochism of the kind an adolescent boy might fantasize. With rain outside and smoke inside, this Chicago-set movie is almost a parody of film noir: it’s the underworld movies of the 40s and 50s made volcanic and abstract and existential. This is the first theatrical feature by the writer-director Michael Mann, and he has designed it like a choo-choo train to the box office. James Caan is the big-time safecracker who wants to take his bundle and retire, marry, have a nice house, and raise a family. But the corrupt System won’t let him. The film is hyper-animated by this conception of existential tragedy: the thief—a loner in pain, the embodiment of a macho mystique—must learn that he’s free only when he doesn’t care about life and has nothing to lose. The film sets up an improbable character in a series of rigged situations and then leaps to universal despairing conclusions. Mann belongs to the pressure-cooker school of filmmaking: Tangerine Dream’s synthesized electronic music pulsates like mad, and the cinematography (by Donald Thorin) is so snazzy it overwhelms the action. (Maybe because of all this high-powered look-at-me filmmaking the picture was a box-office failure.) With Tuesday Weld as the dazed, burnt-out woman whom Caan marries; Willie Nelson, oozing sincerity as Caan’s only friend, who dies; and Robert Prosky and James Belushi. United Artists. color (See Taking It All In).

 

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)—Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in a lavish Arabian Nights spectacle, designed by William Cameron Menzies and directed by Raoul Walsh. It’s slow, dreamy, magically pretty, and enduringly enjoyable. With Anna May Wong, Julanne Johnston, Noble Johnson, Snitz Edwards, Sadakichi Hartmann, and Brandon Hurst. Silent. b & w

 

The Thief of Bagdad (1940)—Magical Arabian Nights adventures, on enormous, spacious sets and in brilliantly clear Maxfield Parrish colors; the screen seems to be made of velvet. Sabu is the boy thief who befriends Ahmed (John Justin), the prince who has been blinded and has had his kingdom usurped by the evil magician, the Grand Vizier Jaffar (Conrad Veidt). Though Justin is a wan embodiment of virtue, Veidt sparkles with villainy; in his dashing black ensembles, he makes superb entrances in the calendar-art vistas that the designer, Vincent Korda, supplied for this essentially cheery Alexander Korda production. Sabu seems most appealing when the wicked Jaffar has turned him into a dog; the dog seems to represent the essence of Sabu, and it even looks like him. Best of all is the deep-rumbling-voiced Rex Ingram as the Djinni of the bottle; this Djinni is not only giant-sized but giant voiced, with a big roaring, threatening laugh and a grin that suggests trouble. (He also has a Southern accent.) Bare except for a loincloth, he has talon fingernails and great quizzical eyebrows, and is bald-headed except for a ponytail. As the heroine, June Duprez—with her soft-lipped pout and sensual, edgy diction—is an unusual enough choice to catch one’s interest. And Miles Malleson does a quirky turn as the Sultan, her toy-loving senile father; Malleson is like a toy himself, and when he becomes enchanted by a mechanical flying horse, he and the machine seem a perfect pair. But as a writer, Malleson, who, along with Lajos Biro, did the script, lacks enchantment; the flashback device at the beginning is unnecessarily complicated, and the dialogue throughout is distressingly flat. This adds to the film’s other problems—the uneven rhythms and the occasional dead spots, the stagey use of the spectacular sets. Yet considering how many directors took turns on this picture (Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, and Tim Whelan are all credited, and Zoltán Korda and William Cameron Menzies, who are credited only as associate producers, also directed, as did Alexander Korda), it’s surprising how well it holds together. The Miklós Rózsa score is intrusive and mood-shattering, but the cinematography by Georges Périnal (with Osmond Borradaile on the outdoor footage, and Robert Krasker as camera operator) and the costumes by Oliver Messel, John Armstrong, and Marcel Vertès have a fairy-tale richness. (This version takes off from the 1924 silent film that starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., as the thief, but it’s very different.) Vincent Korda, Périnal, and the special-effects team all won Academy Awards.

 

The Thief of Paris Le Voleur (1967)—Jean-Paul Belmondo in Louis Malle’s slow-paced, romanticized view of the state of mind of a nihilist thief in late-19th-century France. This thief hates the bourgeoisie, yet is so successful he becomes part of it. Malle shows none of the seaminess of thievery; this is a study of compulsion, and though it’s well shot by Henri Decae, it lacks substance and is tedious. Screenplay by Malle and Jean-Claude Carriere, with dialogue by Daniel Boulanger; based on a novel by Georges Darien. With Genevieve Bujold, Marie Dubois, Charles Denner, Françoise Fabian, Julien Guiomar, Paul Le Person, Marlène Jobert, and Bernadette Lafont. In French. color

 

The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973)—A more cynical version of old Hollywood escapist fantasies about nonchalant gentleman thieves. Now the whole society is seen as crooked (“everybody cheats” on expense accounts, we’re told), and we’re supposed to root for the young, attractive crook who outsmarts all those cheaters. As a swinger jewel thief, Ryan O’Neal turns on the charm; he’s got it, all right, but it’s processed—he’s so assured that he looks spoiled. As his sexy socialite girlfriend, Jacqueline Bisset is so velvety a projection of masculine fantasies that she doesn’t have enough rough edges to be alive. The movie is faintly diverting, but the vacuity becomes oppressive. With Warren Oates as a tenacious insurance investigator; Charles Cioffi; Jill Clayburgh, who supplies some bits of humor as O’Neal’s ex-wife; and Austin Pendleton as a tormented sissy who writes a chess column. Directed by Bud Yorkin, from a script by Walter Hill, who also wrote The Getaway on the same formula. Set in Houston; score by Henry Mancini; adapted from a novel by Terrence Lore Smith. Warners. color (See Reeling.)

 

Thieves (1977)—New York ghetto schoolteacher Marlo Thomas lectures her sellout husband, Charles Grodin, who has lost his wild, free spirit, about the glories of a carefree existence—with full dedication to the underprivileged. The author, Herb Gardner (he also took over the direction from John Berry), specializes in the urban poetry of craziness; the characters don’t talk—they make speeches, every one of them profound. The husband and wife are followed around by mute ghosts of the city—an emblematic ragpicker (Mercedes McCambridge) and a token skid-row bum (Gary Merrill). With Irwin Corey as the wife’s cab-driver father—a 78-year-old leprechaun who chases “tootsies” because tootsies are “hopefulness itself.” There’s not a believable minute. Paramount. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Thieves Like Us (1974)—Robert Altman finds a sure, soft tone in this movie and never loses it. His account of Coca-Cola-swigging young lovers in the 30s is the most quietly poetic of his films; it’s sensuous right from the first pearly-green long shot, and it seems to achieve beauty without artifice. Keith Carradine is Bowie, the boy who escapes from prison with two bank robbers, Chicamaw and T-Dub (John Schuck and Bert Remsen), and Shelley Duvall is Keechie, the girl whose drunken father runs the gas station the convicts hide in. The film is adapted from a neglected 1937 novel by Edward Anderson, which also served as the basis of the Nicholas Ray 1948 picture They Live by Night. Although Calder Willingham gets a screen credit for the script, his script didn’t have the approach Altman wanted, and Altman’s former script girl, Joan Tewkesbury, devised another script, in collaboration with the director, which stays on Edward Anderson’s narrative line and retains much of his dialogue. Made in the vegetating old towns of Mississippi, the movie has the ambiance of a novel, yet it was also the most freely intuitive film Altman had made up to that time. Carradine and Duvall have the easy affinity that they showed in their much smaller roles in McCabe & Mrs. Miller; when Keechie and Bowie fall in love it’s two-sided, equal, and perfect. As the heavy-drinking, half-mad Chicamaw, Schuck—who has a suggestion of bulldog in his face—gives a performance that in some scenes rivals Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; he has a comic, terrifying scene when he’s in a home and insists on playacting a robbery with a couple of small children and then explodes in a murderous rage when the kids lose interest. Louise Fletcher is impressively strong as the kids’ mother—the no-nonsense Mattie. Cinematography by Jean Boffety. United Artists. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Thin Man (1934)—Directed by the whirlwind W. S. Van Dyke, the Dashiell Hammett detective novel took only 16 days to film, and the result was one of the most popular pictures of its era. New audiences aren’t likely to find it as sparkling as the public did then, because new audiences aren’t fed up, as that public was, with what the picture broke away from. It started a new cycle in screen entertainment (as well as a Thin Man series, and later, a TV series and countless TV imitations) by demonstrating that a murder mystery could also be a sophisticated screwball comedy. And it turned several decades of movies upside down by showing a suave man of the world (William Powell) who made love to his own rich, funny, and good-humored wife (Myrna Loy); as Nick and Nora Charles, Powell and Loy startled and delighted the country by their heavy drinking (without remorse) and unconventional diversions. In one scene Nick takes the air-gun his complaisant wife has just given him for Christmas and shoots the baubles off the Christmas tree. (In the 70s Lillian Hellman, who by then had written about her long relationship with Hammett, reported that Nora was based on her.) A married couple, Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, wrote the script; James Wong Howe was the cinematographer. The cast includes the lovely Maureen O’Sullivan (not wildly talented here), the thoroughly depressing Minna Gombell (her nagging voice always hangs in the air), and Cesar Romero, Porter Hall, Harold Huber, Edward Brophy, Nat Pendleton, Edward Ellis (in the title role), and a famous wirehaired terrier, called Asta here. Warning: There’s a lot of plot exposition and by modern standards the storytelling is very leisurely. Produced by Hunt Stromberg, for M-G-M. b & w

 

The Thin Man Goes Home (1945)—This came late in the series but it’s still fairly cheerful. It features William Powell, Myrna Loy, Asta, and Anne Revere, who, carrying a rifle and wearing a felt hat that looks as if it might have been discarded by a janitor, makes a fascinating lunatic. Directed by Richard Thorpe; written by Robert Riskin and Dwight Taylor; cinematography by Karl Freund. With Helen Vinson, Gloria De Haven, Lucile Watson, and Harry Davenport. M-G-M. b & w

 

The Thing Also known as The Thing from Another World. (1951)—Scarily effective sci-fi. It’s a kind of flying-saucer ghost story, set in the cold—in a remote station at the North Pole. The Thing (played by James Arness) is like a more abstract Frankenstein monster. The events surrounding its appearance are wonderfully well staged; they’re so banal and economic and naturalistic they have a kick. Howard Hawks was listed as “presenting” the film, with Christian Nyby listed as director, but chances are that Hawks also had a sizable share in the directing. The amusing, ingenious script, by Charles Lederer (with a possible assist by Ben Hecht), is loosely based on a 1938 story, “Who Goes There?,” by John W. Campbell, Jr. (under the name Don A. Stuart). With Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, Dewey Martin, Eduard Franz, Douglas Spencer, William Self, John Dierkes, and Robert Cornthwaite as Professor Carrington. The bluish looking b & w cinematography is by Russell Harlan; the music is by Dmitri Tiomkin. R K O.

 

The Thing (1982)—This remake of the 1951 version, by the director, John Carpenter, and the special makeup effects wizard, Rob Bottin, was a folie à deux. They went back to the chameleon idea of the original story, so they seem to be trying to outdo the monster from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)—the one who could take any form and, at one horrifying point, erupted from John Hurt’s chest. In its own putting-the-squeeze-on-the-audience terms, Alien was effective. This picture isn’t (except for an early episode with a husky trying to escape the hunters shooting at it from a plane). It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects. A new landmark in gore, it features oozing, jellied messes of blood and entrails and assorted parts of the people and serpents and animals that the mutating Thing devours. And it’s grimly serious. Carpenter seems indifferent to whether we can tell the characters apart; he apparently just wants us to watch the apocalyptic devastation. With Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, David Clennon, Keith David, Tom Waites, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur, and Donald Moffat. The script—the station is now at the South Pole—is by Bill Lancaster; the music is by Ennio Morricone. Universal. color

 

The Thing from Another World, see The Thing (1951)

 

Things Change (1988)—A modernist version of a sentimental fable: David Mamet, who directed and was the co-writer (with Shel Silverstein), gives you the blueprint but not the feeling. The story is essentially a heart-warmer: Sicilian-born Gino (Don Ameche), a dignified old Chicago shoeshine man who gets mixed up with mobsters and is mistaken for a Mafia don, emerges unscathed because of his simple goodness—his humanity. Gino becomes the buddy of a blundering mafioso, Jerry (Joe Mantegna); there’s nothing to look at except Gino and Jerry’s mummified skits, which are directed at a deliberate and unvarying pace. Mamet piles on improbabilities in a matter-of-fact style; flatness of performance seems to be part of the point. This minimalist approach—it suggests a knowingness—takes the fun out of hokum. The result is like a Frank Capra-Damon Runyon comic fairy tale of the 30s in slow motion. With Robert Prosky, Mike Nussbaum, W. H. Macy, and Jonathan Katz. Columbia. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Things to Come (1936)—The most elaborate science-fiction movie ever made in England until 2001. H. G. Wells wrote the tendentious screenplay (based on his book The Shape of Things to Come); the celebrated designer William Cameron Menzies directed, Vincent Korda (with László Moholy-Nagy) worked on the sets, Georges Perinal was the cinematographer, and Arthur Bliss wrote the score. Wells peers ahead through a century of devastation to the cold, abstract architecture of 2055. The whole “scientific” phantasmagoria is posh and modernistic—an amusingly dated view of the future. (It suggests the 20s.) The movie is more handsome than dramatic, with spacious sets and great costumes (they’re like what actors in Greek tragedies wore in avant-garde productions of the 20s), and some wonderful howlers in Raymond Massey’s and Ralph Richardson’s dialogue and acting. With Cedric Hardwicke, John Clements, Ann Todd, Margaretta Scott, and Derrick de Marney. Produced by Alexander Korda. b & w

 

The Third Man (1950)—The most famous collaboration of the director Carol Reed and the screenwriter Graham Greene has the structure of a good suspense thriller and an atmosphere of baroque, macabre decadence. The simple American, Joseph Cotten, arrives in postwar Vienna to meet an old friend, only to be told that the friend has been killed in an accident. In trying to discover the facts, Cotten learns so much about his friend that when he finally finds him alive, he wants him dead. Orson Welles’ portrait of the friend, Harry Lime, is a study of corruption—evil, witty, unreachable. It’s balanced against Trevor Howard’s quietly elegant underplaying of the Army officer who teaches the simple American some of the uglier facts of life. There is an ambiguity about our relation to the Cotten character: he is alone against the forces of the city and, in a final devastating stroke, he is even robbed of the illusion that the girl (Alida Valli) is interested in him, yet his illusions are so commonplace that his disillusion does not strike us deeply. Greene has made him a shallow, ineffectual, well-meaning American. Robert Krasker’s cinematography won the Academy Award. The zither music is by Anton Karas. b & w

 

13 Rue Madeleine (1946)—The producer Louis de Rochemont, known for his work on the “March of Time” series, had a popular success in 1945 with The House on 92nd Street, an anti-Nazi spy picture, based on an actual case and shot in New York locations, in a semi-documentary style. Working with the same director (Henry Hathaway) and the same cinematographer (Norbert Brodine), de Rochemont attempted another anti-Nazi spy picture in the same pseudo-realistic format, but this time the script (by John Monks, Jr., and Sy Bartlett) was listless and hokey, and the film had no tension. Even its star, James Cagney, whips through his scenes, as if he knew that all he could hope for was to pick up the pace. Cast as the noble American, he has just one flashy moment: there’s a shot of him laughing triumphantly at his Nazi torturers as the Allies blow them all to bits. With Walter Abel (it’s true his lines are righteous and earnest but still his readings are inexcusably bland), Annabella, Richard Conte, Frank Latimore, Sam Jaffe, Melville Cooper, Blanche Yurka, Alexander Kirkland, Karl Malden, and a “March of Time” narrator. The title refers to the Gestapo headquarters in Le Havre. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Thirty-Day Princess (1934)—A pleasant, trifling romantic comedy. Sylvia Sidney plays Caterina of Taronia, visiting the United States to get some economic help for her country. Sylvia Sidney also plays Nancy Lane, an American actress hired to impersonate the princess (who has come down with mumps), and to captivate New York’s leading newspaper publisher (Cary Grant), who has taken a strong position against aid to Taronia. Grant, still a leading man in this picture (he didn’t become a full comedy star until about three years later), is handsome and very engaging, and Sidney—in one of her rare lighthearted performances—is such a skillful technician that you can’t distinguish between her technique and her personal charm. (She operates in that area where acting and witchcraft come together.) Marion Gering directed; Preston Sturges, Frank Partos, Sam Hellman, and Edwin Justus Mayer all worked on the inventive, witty script, which was adapted from a Clarence Budington Kelland story. The cast includes Edward Arnold, Vince Barnett, Henry Stephenson, Robert McWade, and Lucien Littlefield. Cinematography by Leon Shamroy. A B. P. Schulberg Production, for Paramount. b & w

 

30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1968)—Not only does Dudley Moore star in this movie—and he really eats up the camera, which holds him in closeup for unconscionably long periods—but he wrote the score and he collaborated on the script with John Wells and the director, Joseph McGrath. Everything in the picture is shaped to show off Moore’s “multiple talents.” He plays a pianist-composer who sells a musical—a puckish little fellow who goes through skit after skit, cavorting like crazy, with lots of wig changes and jokey dreams. Some of the gags aren’t bad, but they don’t further the plot, and McGrath’s direction leaves almost every performer exposed in the desperate attempt to be hilarious. Shot in London and Dublin; with Eddie Foy, Jr., Suzy Kendall, John Bird, Patricia Routledge, Duncan Macrae, and John Wells. Columbia. color

 

The 39 Steps (1935)—At the time, Alfred Hitchcock explained the point of view behind the picture: “I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups. Civilization has become so screening and sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills at first hand. Therefore, to prevent our becoming sluggish and jellified, we have to experience them artificially.” What fun to make a movie in an era when people still needed a bit of a jolt! Even now, Hitchcock’s little jolts are more surprising than most of the shocks engineered to stun modern audiences. This suave, amusing spy melodrama is directed with so sure a touch that the suspense is charged with wit; it’s one of the three or four best things Hitchcock ever did. The lead, Robert Donat, was that rarity among English actors: a performer with both personal warmth and professional skill. The heroine is Madeleine Carroll. Hitchcock paired them off by the mischievous use of a gimmick: a man and a woman who detest each other are handcuffed together; as day wears into night, they fall in love. The movie thus contains an extra—implicit, as it were—element of bathroom-humor suspense. Among Hitchcock’s other pleasing perversities was the casting of Godfrey Tearle, who looked astonishingly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the chief enemy agent. The film also has one of his rare emotionally felt sequences: the brief, chilling scenes between Peggy Ashcroft and John Laurie as a mismated couple joined together by real chains. John Buchan’s novel was adapted by Charles Bennett, Ian Hay, and Alma Reville. b & w

 

This Angry Age, see The Sea Wall

 

This Gun for Hire (1942)—Glossily amusing Paramount version of the Graham Greene spy-intrigue thriller, A Gun for Sale; the film’s sentimentality has a satisfying underlayer of perversity. Alan Ladd is the nervous, gentle, and sensitive gunman without a trace of human kindliness; what heart he has he gives to the care of sad cats, mongrels, and such. Laird Cregar is the sinister stout villain with fussy habits; the proprietor of a nightclub, he hires Veronica Lake to entertain the patrons. This was Veronica Lake’s first big starring role, and she is the most stylized character of all. Her face is so impeccably blank that when she smiles, as she does perhaps twice in the film, hearts can be heard to break—smack—in the theatre. With Robert Preston, Tully Marshall, Marc Lawrence, and Mikhail Rasumny. Directed by Frank Tuttle; adapted by Albert Maltz and W. R. Burnett. b & w

 

This Is Elvis (1981)—A mixture of footage of Presley himself (seen in films, concert clips, TV kinescopes, newsreels, and home movies) and material that Malcolm Leo and Andrew Solt have written and directed, with four actors impersonating Presley at periods of his life that weren’t recorded on film, and with the voice of a fifth actor to impersonate him as a narrator. What the actors dish up is a batch of inanities, generalities, and—arguably—fabrications. It doesn’t add to the powerful images of Presley—it takes away. Almost everything that Leo and Solt have done to the raw footage makes you cringe. But Presley is the star in his life that he never was in his Hollywood movies; he commands the screen. It’s overwhelming to see a life spread out on film—especially the life of someone who peaked a couple of years after finishing high school, when he still had the look of a white-trash schoolboy sheik. Presley showed the strength to peak again when he quit Hollywood, and then just slid. The film is hair-raising because of what Elvis turns into. A David L. Wolper Production, released by Warners. color and b & w (See Taking It All In.)

 

This Is the Army (1943)—The celebrated patriotic stage revue, with music by Irving Berlin, originally performed by enlisted men, was given a story line for the movie, and the cast was padded out with civilian screen actors and other notables. The plot spans two wars and features the curious, near-beer prophetic father-son pairing of George Murphy, as Jerry Jones, a First World War soldier who writes an Army show called “Yip, Yip, Yaphank,” and Ronald Reagan, as Johnny Jones, who writes the Second World War show “This Is the Army.” Having presented these fictitious authors, when it comes time for Irving Berlin to appear (as Irving Berlin) and sing “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” the film has the devil’s own time explaining who he is. It’s a huge 2-hour musical that reeks of uplift, but there are a few funny lines, an impressive soldier chorus, and many tolerable, if wholesome, numbers. This is not the Army of From Here to Eternity. Michael Curtiz directed; with Joe Louis, Kate Smith, George Tobias, Joan Leslie, Charles Butterworth, Gertrude Niesen, Frances Langford, Ruth Donnelly, Dolores Costello, Una Merkel, and from the original cast, the tap-dancer Private James Cross and the singer Sergeant Robert Shanley. Warners. color

 

This Man Must Die Que la bête meure (1969)—Claude Chabrol directed this suspense movie about a father who sets out to avenge the hit-and-run murder of his son, but his technique sags, and the movie is so attenuated and so unhurried that it dies on the screen. When you hear that the father’s quest for the child’s murderer is like looking for a needle in a haystack, you want to giggle, because practically the only other man in the movie is the hit-and-run driver. With Michel Duchaussoy as the father, and Jean Yanne, who gives the picture a breath of life, as the uncouth villain. From Nicholas Blake’s novel The Beast Must Die. In French. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

This Sporting Life (1963)—Lindsay Anderson’s movie about an inarticulate professional rugby player (Richard Harris) and a “bruised” woman (Rachel Roberts) was hailed as the best feature ever made in England—maybe because it suggests all sorts of passion and protest, like a group of demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome” and leaving it to you to fill in your own set of injustices. Like Anderson’s later work, it draws its considerable power from what one can only assume is unconscious and semi-conscious material. The film is heavy with multiple meanings that the director doesn’t sort out, and even the best sequences are often baffling. The rugby games were said to be a “microcosm of a corrupt society,” and you can certainly tell that the movie is meant to be bold and tragic. (It has something of the disturbing brute force of Scorsese’s Raging Bull.) It’s a mixture of the powerful, the inexplicable, and the dislikable, with the hurt in Rachel Roberts’ face lingering in the memory. The cast includes Colin Blakely, Alan Badel, William Hartnell, and Arthur Lowe. The script is by David Storey, based on his novel. The cinematography is by Denys Coop. b & w (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

This Strange Passion, see El

 

This Thing Called Love (1940)—One of those 40s comedies in which the independent-minded heroine has no common sense. Rosalind Russell is the insurance-company executive who insists on a companionate “trial” marriage and a kissless honeymoon, and Melvyn Douglas is her unlucky groom. The picture—it opened at Radio City Music Hall—aimed at nothing more than light hilarity (which it achieves only fitfully), but it was banned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, probably because of Douglas’s energetic scrambling efforts to seduce his wife. This is the sort of bedroom farce in which by the time she’s ready to say yes he’s got poison oak. With Binnie Barnes, Allyn Joslyn, Lee J. Cobb, Gloria Dickson, Don Beddoe, and Gloria Holden. Alexander Hall directed; based on a 1928 play by Edwin Burke, adapted by George Seaton, Ken Englund, and P. J. Wolfson. Columbia. b & w

 

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)—Seeing it is like lying in the sun flicking through fashion magazines and (as used to be said) feeling rich and beautiful beyond your wildest dreams. As the man who has everything but craves danger and turns to crime out of boredom, Steve McQueen is artful and glamorous; there’s a self-awareness in his performance that makes his elegance funny. When he robs a Boston bank and outwits a mercenary woman insurance investigator (Faye Dunaway, in gaudy clothes), he’s a hero for the little romantic, adolescent fascist lurking in most of us. Dunaway is so over-coiffed and overdressed, she’s like a teenybopper playing at being a great lady, but she and McQueen are amusing together. What gives this trash a life, what makes it entertaining is clearly that the director, Norman Jewison, and some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on a silly, shallow script—it’s by Alan R. Trustman—used the chance to have a good time with it. The cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, lets go with a whole bag of tricks, flooding the screen with his delight in beauty, shooting all over the place and sending up the material. The multiple-screen effects at the beginning are by Pablo Ferro; the dazzling editing is by Hal Ashby; the less dazzling music is by Michel Legrand. With Yaphet Kotto, Jack Weston, and Paul Burke. A Mirisch Production, released by United Artists. color (See Going Steady.)

 

Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)—Produced by Ross Hunter, this lavish, oversized musical spoof, set in the 20s, was directed in a desperately with-it style by George Roy Hill, and the players work so hard that one begins to suffer for them and, finally, to feel numb. The picture sank Mary Tyler Moore’s screen career for a decade, and it certainly didn’t help Julie Andrews (though she looks her best in the 20s clothes), James Fox, John Gavin, or a rather weary Beatrice Lillie. As for Carol Channing, who gets shot out of a cannon and, as usual, grins like an albino Louis Armstrong, she projects too big for even this elephantine movie. Screenplay by Richard Morris; cinematography by Russell Metty. Universal. color

 

Those Lips, Those Eyes (1980)—This stage-struck-boy’s -coming-of-age movie has no nerve center. Frank Langella plays a song-and-dance man who is the leading performer of a summer-stock theatre that’s doing a season in Cleveland in 1951 and Thomas Hulce is a local pre-med student who signs on with the theatre as prop boy and loses his innocence. He is also fired with the ambition to become a playwright and, like the screenwriter David Shaber, to grow up to write this maudlin, autobiographical movie. Directed by Michael Pressman, this production is every bit as tacky and enervated as the stage productions of war-horse operettas that it parodies. There are only a few performances that can be watched without squirming: Glynnis O’Connor as a dancer with the company; Joseph Maher as an aging, alcoholic actor; and Kevin McCarthy as a lecherous New York agent who shows up at the theatre. Released by United Artists. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Thousands Cheer (1943)—An army camp puts on a big show, culminating in “United Nations on the March”—a work by Shostakovich that was specially commissioned by M-G-M. Gene Kelly tries hard in this all-star extravaganza, Lena Home sings “Honeysuckle Rose,” and Judy Garland tackles “The Joint Is Really Jumpin’,” but nothing could save it. Maybe José Iturbi put the seal of doom on the venture when he sat down to play boogie-woogie; he hits the notes all right, but his boogie-woogie is (arguably) the most mechanical ever recorded. The dull, dull plot involves Mary Astor, John Boles, and Kathryn Grayson. With Mickey Rooney, June Allyson, Gloria De Haven, Ben Blue, Eleanor Powell, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, and many others, plus the bands of Kay Kyser, Benny Carter, and Bob Crosby. Written by Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins; produced by Joe Pasternak. George Sidney directed. color

 

Three Broadway Girls, see The Greeks Had a Word for Them

 

Three Brothers Tre Fratelli (1981)—Three Italian brothers who have emigrated to the cities go back south to their father’s farm in the Apulia region for their mother’s funeral. The modern-folktale structure is somewhat schematic, but it’s a wonderful film that moves on waves of feeling. Directed by Francesco Rosi, from a script he wrote with Tonino Guerra, it might be said to be an inquiry into the terrorist chaos of the country. That’s the underlayer: it’s about the violence in the cities, the split between the North and the South, the break between the generations. Yet it’s set in the old father’s world, where the cycle of nature is what matters. It’s about ideas, yet it’s saturated with emotion. The old man (Charles Vanel, at 89) has lived his life without ever needing to worry about terrorism, crime, chaos; the sons’ thoughts and fantasies all come out of their anxieties. The father has his place in the larger ritual; when the sons come back, they realize they’ve lost their place. Working with his longtime cinematographer, Pasqualino De Santis, Rosi, who has one of the greatest compositional senses in the history of movies, keeps you in a state of emotional exaltation. A simple image—such as that of the old man just walking—has the kind of resonance that most directors never achieve. Though the actors who play the brothers—Philippe Noiret, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, and Michele Placido—are less than exciting, while you’re watching this film it envelops you. Grateful for its intelligence, you sink into it. You’re led by the camera—something more is always going to be revealed. In Italian. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Three Comrades (1938)—Scott Fitzgerald worked on many films, but this is one of the rare ones that actually retain his spirit. (Winter Carnival is another.) Bits of the dialogue are elegantly romantic, and the atmosphere has his distinctive chivalrous quality. Margaret Sullavan, slender and special, and with her ravishing huskiness, is an ideal Fitzgerald heroine—a perfect Daisy—and she brings her elusive, gallant sexiness to this First World War romance, taken from a Remarque novel. It’s conventional and heavy and false in the M-G-M manner, but with this delicate Fitzgerald feeling rising out of it at times. The movie is still awful; it has a particularly offensive tearjerking score by Franz Waxman. Produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. (Fitzgerald’s letter imploring him not to change the dialogue has been published.) The script is credited to Fitzgerald and Edward A. Paramore. Directed by Frank Borzage. With Robert Taylor, Franchot Tone (who is tight-faced here—he’s probably conscious of how terrible he is), Robert Young, Monty Woolley, Lionel Atwill, Guy Kibbee, Charley Grapewin, and Henry Hull. b & w

 

Three Daring Daughters (1948)—Joe Pasternak had a monstrous gift for producing relentlessly perky films for the whole family; sometimes, the damned things got to you—all those toothy smiles made you smile back. This one, though, can make you feel your jaw is wired shut. It’s a musical that features the full horror of Jeanette MacDonald and Jose Iturbi; Jane Powell and Edward Arnold also traipse around. Fred M. Wilcox directed; a sizable troupe of screenwriters concocted the script about three girls who are upset by the news that their mother is planning to remarry, and decide to take action. Howard Dietz and Sammy Fain came up with “The Dickey Bird Song.” With Larry Adler, Harry Davenport, and a redeemer—Moyna MacGill. M-G-M. color

 

Three Days of the Condor (1975)—The director, Sydney Pollack, doesn’t have a knack for action pulp; he gets some tension going in this expensive spy thriller (and it was a box-office success), but there’s no real fun in it. It may leave you feeling depressed or angry. Robert Redford plays a New York— based researcher for the C.I.A. who accidentally turns up a clue to the existence of a renegade conspiratorial network within the C.I.A. organization and becomes everybody’s target. With a miscast, subdued Faye Dunaway as a photographer who shoots bare, wintry scenes and is meant to be half in love with death. Not a girl to jazz things up. In the film’s high point of flossy artistry, Redford and Dunaway go to bed together, and their coitus is visualized for us in a series of her lonely, ghostly pictures. Also with Max von Sydow, Cliff Robertson, and John Houseman. Cinematography by Owen Roizman; the script by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., and David Rayfiel was adapted from James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor. A Dino De Laurentiis Production, for Paramount. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Three Faces of Eve (1957)—Joanne Woodward’s big one—her Academy Award— winning role as the drab Southern housewife and mother with a splintered personality. The heroine calls herself Eve White when she’s good and Eve Black when she’s bad and sexy, and has yet another personality—that of the upstanding, intelligent woman whom the writer-producer-director, Nunnally Johnson, approves of. Shallow, but the gimmick is appealing, and Woodward’s showmanship is very likable. With Lee J. Cobb and David Wayne, and an introduction by Alistair Cooke. Adapted from a book by two doctors: C. H. Thigpen and H. M. Cleckley. 20th Century-Fox. CinemaScope, b & w

 

Three for the Show (1955)—Betty Grable started singing and dancing in Hollywood musicals in 1930 (when she was 13), and she was thrown into so many dumb, garish pictures, especially during the Second World War when she was known as the number one pin-up girl, that her film career ended before she was 40. This picture was made in her last year in films, and she shows the comedy style of a buoyant veteran. It’s a surprisingly bright musical version of the 1940 Jean Arthur comedy Too Many Husbands, which was derived from Somerset Maugham’s play Home and Beauty. (He wrote it in the winter of 1917—18, while he was recovering from tuberculosis; he did it, he said, to amuse himself and war-weary audiences.) Grable plays a widowed, remarried Broadway star who discovers that her first husband is still alive. With Jack Lemmon, Marge and Gower Champion, Myron McCormick, and Paul Harvey. Directed by H. C. Potter, from the script by Edward Hope and Leonard Stern. Some of the dances (choreographed by Jack Cole) have a charge to them, and the songs include “How Come You Do Me Like You Do” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Columbia. CinemaScope, color

 

Three Fugitives (1989)—A crumbum farce by the French writer-director Francis Veber, working in the U.S. (It’s a remake of his Les Fugitifs.) Nick Nolte plays a veteran armed robber who goes to a bank to open an account and is taken hostage by Martin Short, a terrified twerp of an amateur holdup man. He needs money to keep his 6-year-old daughter (Sarah Rowland Doroff) in a special school—she has been mute since her mother died, two years earlier. That’s the setup: the three are variously chased, and chase each other. Nolte keeps whamming Short on the head, and the tot ignores her devoted father. He’s too small for her. She’s smitten by big, blond, blue-eyed Nolte; queasy pedophiliac overtones hover in the air. Everything in the picture seems designed to humiliate the father, and you can’t tell what’s going on when Short—ostensibly for purposes of disguise—is dressed as a woman and the three form a nuclear family. This salute to macho has cinematography by Haskell Wexler; he lighted something that shouldn’t have seen the light of day. With Kenneth McMillan, James Earl Jones, and Bruce McGill. Touchstone (Disney). color (See Movie Love.)

 

Three in the Attic (1969)—Christopher Jones as Paxton Quigley, the unredeemed, self-centered, carnal frat boy who can’t abandon promiscuity even after he has discovered love (with Yvette Mimieux). The college humor in this youth-oriented sex-exploitation film is unabashedly coarse and frequently funny. There’s too much soft-focus lyricism and leaping about, and the last third is poor, and some of the trying-to-be-bright lines are real thudders, but it has a pleasantly open attitude. Directed by Richard Wilson; the script, by Stephen Yafa, is based on his novel Paxton Quigley’s Had the Course. Filmed on location at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and in Durham. A.I.P. color (See Going Steady.)

 

Three Little Words (1950)—A big M-G-M musical bio of the songwriting team of Bert Kalmar (Fred Astaire) and Harry Ruby (Red Skelton). It’s a rags-to-riches-and-contentment story, with few opportunities for Astaire to dance and with no more drama than the screenwriter (George Wells) can squeeze out of Kalmar’s infatuation with magic and Ruby’s obsessive enthusiasm for baseball. The two men have a childish quarrel and the team breaks up, but their devoted wives (Vera-Ellen and Arlene Dahl) soon put that to rights. The movie is witless and totally uninspired but good-natured, especially during the 14 Kalmar-Ruby songs, which include “Nevertheless,” “I Love You So Much,” “Who’s Sorry Now,” and “Hooray for Captain Spaulding.” With Debbie Reynolds, who plays the boop-a-doop cutie, Helen Kane, and is dubbed by her; Gloria De Haven, who impersonates her mother, Mrs. Carter De Haven; a luscious, red-headed band vocalist, Gale Robbins, as the gold-digger who almost snares Ruby; and Keenan Wynn, Carleton Carpenter, Phil Regan, Paul Harvey, and Harry Shannon. Produced by Jack Cummings, directed by Richard Thorpe, and with dances staged by Hermes Pan. Vera-Ellen’s songs are dubbed by Anita Ellis. color

 

The Three Musketeers (1948)—In grinning, leaping homage to Douglas Fairbanks, Gene Kelly plunges his sword into dozens of extras, vaults onto more horses than there are in a rodeo, swings from assorted drapes and chandeliers, and hops about 17th-century rooftops. His D’Artagnan veers between romance and burlesque, but is always enjoyable. However, the lavish M-G-M production is a heavy, roughhousing mess. As Lady de Winter, Lana Turner sounds like a drive-in waitress exchanging quips with hot-rodders, and, as Richelieu, Vincent Price might be an especially crooked used-car dealer. (The studio didn’t want to offend anyone, so this Richelieu doesn’t wear clerical trappings, and is never addressed by his ecclesiastical title.) Angela Lansbury wears the crown of France as if she’d won it in a milking contest at a county fair, and, as Lady Constance, June Allyson looks like a little girl done up in Mama’s clothes. Kelly’s amorous grapplings don’t seem as strenuous as they actually were: he threw Lana Turner on her bed so hard that she fell off it and broke her elbow. He should have thrown the director, George Sidney, and the costume designer, Walter Plunkett, who swaddled the performers. Among them are Van Heflin, Gig Young, Frank Morgan, Keenan Wynn, John Sutton, Ian Keith, Patricia Medina, Robert Coote, and Reginald Owen. Produced by Pandro S. Berman, from Robert Ardrey’s script. color

 

The Three Musketeers (The Queen’s Diamonds) (1973)—This Richard Lester version was produced in the counterculture period—a time when some of the most talked about films made corruption seem inevitable and hence something you learn to live with; Lester saw corruption as slapstick comedy, and he turned out an absurdist debauch on swashbuckler themes. He keeps his actors—Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlton Heston, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Michael Gothard, and Victor Spinetti—at a distance and scales the characters down to subnormal size. They’re letching, carousing buffoons. Their derring-do isn’t subverted; it’s just cancelled out. Lester’s decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don’t want joke, joke, joke. The second half was shot together with the first but released separately, as The Four Musketeers (The Revenge of Milady). The screenplay, based on Dumas, is by George MacDonald Fraser; the cinematography, by David Watkin, is ravishing (though Lester devalues the images by throwing them together so fast); the production design is by Brian Eatwell; the costumes are by Yvonne Blake de Carretero; the music is by Michel Legrand. Toledo, in Spain, is used for 17th-century Paris. Released by 20th Century-Fox, color

 

Three on a Match (1933)—Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak (who goes through some steamy emotions) are the girls who grew up together and, after several years, meet again in the big city. At lunch one day, they light three cigarettes on one match, and, according to the superstition (which is said to have been invented and publicized by Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king), there’s bad luck ahead. A modest, entertaining little melodrama from Warners, directed by Mervyn LeRoy. With Warren William, Glenda Farrell, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Patricia Ellis, Edward Arnold, Jack La Rue, Grant Mitchell, Clara Blandick, and Allen Jenkins. Written by Lucien Hubbard, Kubec Glasmon, and John Bright. (Remade in 1938, as Broadway Musketeers, with Marie Wilson in the Davis role.) b & w

 

Three Smart Girls (1937)—Deanna Durbin’s debut picture, in which the happy, toothsome 14-year-old soprano conquered audiences and rescued Universal Pictures. And you can see why. This is the definitive “family picture”: three shiny-eyed sisters (Deanna and Barbara Read and Nan Grey) swing into action when they see the tears of their divorced mother (Nella Walker), who has learned that their father (Charles Winninger) is about to marry a gold-digging blonde. There are solid pros in the surrounding cast—Binnie Barnes as the blonde, Alice Brady as her scheming mother, Ray Milland, Mischa Auer, Ernest Cossart, Lucile Watson, and Hobart Cavanaugh—and they do a lot of grinning. The picture is idiotically turned on to wholesome happiness, but it isn’t boring. That master of sentimental engineering, Joe Pasternak, produced; Henry Koster directed. The script is by Adele Comandini, with some assistance from Austin Parker. b & w

 

Three’s a Crowd (1927)—James Agee wrote that Harry Langdon looked “as if he wore diapers under his pants.” This was fine as long as Langdon was doing slapstick, but when he sought pathos the results were horrible—sickly whimsical. He directed himself in this Chaplin imitation. He plays the Odd Fellow, who lives by himself and longs for romance and a happy home. On a stormy winter’s night, The Girl he has loved, who has married another, comes to his shack and has her baby there. On Christmas Eve, just as happiness begins shedding its tender rays, The Girl’s husband arrives and takes her and the child away. Having prepared for the role of Santa Claus, The Odd Fellow is left with torn heartstrings—and a box-office calamity. Silent. First National. b & w

 

Threshold (1981)—This hospital drama about the implanting of an experimental artificial heart in a desperately ill young woman (Mare Winningham) is perhaps too antiseptic and quietly intelligent; it’s underdrama-tized—the dramatic excitement doesn’t start until about an hour and a quarter in, and the end doesn’t seem to take you anywhere. Yet it’s very well written, by James Salter, and though it has a tedious self-conscious side, it develops its own kind of intensity. The cool imagery (the cinematographer is Michel Brault) has a beautiful formality, and the director, Richard Pearce, works well with the cast. Donald Sutherland is somewhat sacramental as the risk-taking surgeon (based on Dr. Denton Cooley, who was the subject of a Life cover story that Salter wrote); Jeff Goldblum provides some comedy in the role of a publicity-hound biologist (and heart inventor) who talks too much, especially on TV. Also with Sharon Acker, Robert Joy, Michael Lerner, John Marley, Allan Nicholls, and a glimpse of Dr. Cooley, who served as technical adviser. (His presence may account for the restraint—and the excess of spirituality—in Sutherland’s performance.) A Canadian production, the film was shot mostly in Toronto but is set in Los Angeles. The score is by Mickey Erbe and Maribeth Solomon. Released by 20 Century-Fox. color

 

The Throne of Blood Kumonosu-jo (1957)—Kurosawa’s version of Macbeth is a virtuoso exercise, as stylized and formalist in its way as Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible movies, though not as ponderous or as inexplicably strange. This is like a demonstration of the uses of violence, decor, pageantry, and costuming, and it’s almost a textbook in the techniques for making a movie move. Besides that, it has the great Isuzu Yamada washing her bloody hands, and West or East, there may never be a more chilling Lady Macbeth. Kurosawa is at his playful best when Birnam Wood advances on the castle, and that’s just it—he loves this sort of effect so much it’s all play. The ending, with Toshiro Mifune’s Macbeth stuck full of arrows, like a porcupine-quill cushion, suggests the wildest Kabuki tradition. (Eisenstein was also fascinated by Kabuki.) The action for its own sake can seem like an orgy of masculine delight in warfare. Its greatness is in Kurosawa’s glorious bad taste; he flings mad, absurd images on the screen. He has the courage to go over the top. Just one effect seems a mistake: when he uses a mechanical device (slowing down the sound) to simulate a witch’s voice. (It’s too obvious a trick.) With Takashi Shimura. In Japanese. b & w

 

Thunder Rock (1944)—Michael Redgrave, perhaps the finest exponent of neurotic tensions in movies of the period, as a young war correspondent who becomes disillusioned and retires to an ivory tower—a lighthouse. He is haunted by immigrants whose ship was lost there a century before, and they talk to him and restore his ideals. Adapted by Jeffrey Dell and Bernard Miles from Robert Ardrey’s play, this ambitious movie is spectacularly handsome (especially the scenes outside the lighthouse); yet the situation is very theatrical—those dead people seem an awfully elaborate contrivance just to re-invigorate the hero. There are some fine, photogenic performers among them, though: Lilli Palmer (who’s very touching), Barbara Mullen, Frederick Valk, and Finlay Currie. And James Mason, who plays a live visitor to the lighthouse, provides a strong, clashing presence; when he and Redgrave speak together, their voices ring out. At one point, Redgrave loses control and smacks him, and Mason says something on the order of “That’s the trouble with Irish whiskey—you don’t know you’ve been drinking until you’re delirious,” and there’s surprising power in the scene. It’s too bad that there isn’t more of Mason and less of those worthy immigrants. Produced and directed by, respectively, John and Roy Boulting; cinematography by Mutz Greenbaum. b & w

 

Thunderball (1965)—Sean Connery as James Bond. The setting is Caribbean; the enemy is Adolfo Celi, the mastermind of SPECTRE, who stoops to using sharks. Terence Young directed. Not bad, but not quite top-grade Bond. A little too much underwater war-ballet. With Claudine Auger and Luciana Paluzzi, and, of course, Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell. The script was written by Richard Maibaum and John Hopkins. United Artists. color

 

Thunderbolt (1929)—This Josef von Sternberg underworld melodrama (which he did just before he went to Germany and made The Blue Angel) was filmed as a silent and released in that form in some places, but sound was added after the film was completed, and it was more generally released as a talkie. George Bancroft is the gang leader known as Thunderbolt; Fay Wray is his gun moll, Ritzy; Richard Arlen is the bank clerk who knew her before she took up with Thunderbolt, and wants to marry her. Bancroft was such a genial, large-spirited actor that he makes Thunderbolt likable even while he’s framing the bank clerk for murder. The two men wind up facing each other in opposite cells on death row. Tully Marshall is very funny as the agitated, sly, vaguely philanthropic warden. The picture is an imitation of von Sternberg’s 1927 hit, Underworld, also starring Bancroft, and it isn’t in the same class, but the first half isn’t bad. After that, the contrivances are threadbare. With Eugenie Besserer as Arlen’s mother, and Fred Kohler as Bad Al. Written by Jules Furthman and Herman J. Mankiewicz. Paramount. b & w

 

The Thundering Sword, see Cartouche

 

Thursday’s Children (1954)—This short film was made by Lindsay Anderson and Guy Brenton at the Royal School for Deaf and Dumb Children in England. It’s a documentary that seems to transcend the documentary form: it becomes a fresh, almost lyric series of visual impressions of intent, observant faces and small bodies in movement. Cinematography by Walter Lassally. b & w

 

THX 1138 (1971)—George Lucas’s first feature—a psychedelic view of the horrors of the 25th century, which turns out to be an abstract version of 1984. The compulsorily drugged characters are shaven-headed, wear white, and are photographed against white; the effect is both gloomy and blinding. Maggie McOmie and anxious-eyed Robert Duvall are the lovers; Donald Pleasence is the nasty, as usual. Some talent but too much “art.” Movie lovers may enjoy ticking off the homages or steals—Cocteau’s Orpheus, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and so on. With Ian Wolfe, Marshall Efron, and Irene Forrest. Screenplay by Lucas and Walter Murch, from Lucas’s story; titles and animation by Hal Barwood; editing by Lucas, with sound montages by Murch; cinematography by Dave Myers and Albert Kihn; music by Lalo Schifrin. An American Zoetrope Production (the executive producer was Francis Ford Coppola) for Warners. color

 

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done (1987)—This powerful and thoughtful documentary has a great subject: the union of Christian fundamentalism and the political right, which was engineered in the 80s by the use of computers, direct mail, and organized phone campaigns. The English producer-writer-director Antony Thomas comes on too strong at first, but he settles down quickly. He knows how to ask piercing questions without being hostile, and how to keep the footage tense and dramatic. And he shows deep-felt empathy with the people drawn into the born-again movement. In the second half, in which he examines the First Baptist Church of Dallas—the “richest and most powerful stronghold” of the religious right—he gets into the subject of how rich Christians keep themselves comfortable in their faith while abandoning the core of Christ’s teachings. The film’s central character is Dr. W. A. Criswell, the dignified white-haired pastor of First Baptist, who preaches the Gospel of Success. The crew was American, headed by the cinematographer Curtis Clark. Co-financed by Britain’s Central Television and by WGBH (the PBS station in Boston). color (See Hooked.)

 

Ticket to Heaven (1981)—A Canadian film on a hot, dramatic subject. On a trip to San Francisco, the hero (Nick Mancuso), a handsome young Toronto schoolteacher, is sucked into a religious cult that worships its Oriental founder. Deprived of sleep, of food, and of any solitude for reflection, he gradually shrinks into a smiling child-zombie panhandler, part of a team selling flowers on the streets. It’s a plausible metamorphosis: his independent spirit is visibly drained away until his greatest excitement is joining with the others in the chant “Bring in the money! Stay awake! Smash out Satan!” As the hero’s friend, a would-be standup comic who organizes a kidnapping plot to rescue him, Saul Rubinek rescues the movie, too, by providing it with some personality. Rubinek has a wry, affectionate manner and bright, brimming eyes that register double-takes. After the kidnapping, when the bullying de-programmer (R. H. Thomson) stalks in and takes over, the dramatic logic collapses, because the director, Ralph L. Thomas, and his co-writer, Anne Cameron, haven’t clarified the steps in the de-programming process (if it is a process, rather than just hit or miss). The picture could have used a better script and more taut direction, but the subject in itself makes it fairly compelling. Based on Josh Freed’s 1978 newspaper series and on his 1980 book Moonwebs. With Meg Foster, Guy Boyd, and Robert Joy. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

A Ticket To Tomahawk (1950)—Written by Mary Loos and directed by Richard Sale, this is a pleasantly offbeat railroad comedy. The train in it may be the only one you’ll ever see that takes its track with it. With Dan Dailey, Anne Baxter, Rory Calhoun, Walter Brennan, Sen Yung, Connie Gilchrist, and, though you might miss her if you’re distracted for a minute, Marilyn Monroe. 20th Century-Fox. color

 

Tiger Shark (1932)—The material of this brisk (80-minute) Howard Hawks melodrama is naive and far from virgin-new, but the movie is freshly and powerfully directed, and the tired plot is filled out by surprisingly exciting footage of tuna fishing in the Pacific. Edward G. Robinson gives a shrewd, energetic performance as the Portuguese captain of a tuna boat; the beautiful, sullen, dark-eyed Zita Johann is his wife, and his best friend (Richard Arlen) is, inevitably, in love with her. Wells Root did the script, from Tuna, by Houston Branch. With Vince Barnett and J. Carrol Naish. Warners. b & w

 

Tight Little Island Also known as Whisky Galore. (1949)—The only amusing famine in movie history is the whiskey famine on the mythical Scottish island of Todday; the wartime ration of whiskey has run out, and the island is devastated by drought. Then a ship bound for the United States with 50,000 cases of Scotch is wrecked on the shore, and the parched islanders take on the sweet task of salvage. Alexander Mackendrick directed this convivial little classic, based on Compton Mackenzie’s novel Whisky Galore, adapted by Mackenzie and Angus MacPhail. With Joan Greenwood, Gordon Jackson, Basil Radford, Catherine Lacey, James Robertson Justice, A. E. Matthews, Jean Cadell, John Gregson, Mackenzie himself, and a contingent of gloomy Scots. Photographed on Barra, the Hebrides. b & w

 

Tightrope (1984)—Clint Eastwood is Homicide Inspector Wes Block, of the New Orleans Police Department, who is investigating a series of murders: young prostitutes are being tortured, raped, and strangled. The gimmick is that Wes is struggling with dark, sexist impulses, and that the killer is his doppelgänger and carries out his sadistic fantasies. The writer-director Richard Tuggle keeps whomping us on the skull with good-evil symbolism, but the movie has no more depth than the usual exploitation film in which pretty girls are knocked off. (Their naked corpses are photographed more tenderly than their live bodies.) And the movie has a queasy (unexplored) aspect: Eastwood’s own 12-year-old daughter, Alison, who looks like him and acts like him, plays Wes’s daughter Amanda, whom the doppelgänger means to rape. There’s no progression in the plot—it’s just one body after another—and the picture just grinds along. Eastwood seems to want to be fiery, but he doesn’t have it in him—there’s no vigor or puritan grandeur in Wes Block’s character. And there’s nothing in the psycho doppelgänger (played by Marco St. John)—he’s just a bogeyman. The movie is like a sombre, pedestrian Halloween. With Geneviève Bujold, Janet MacLachlan, and Jamie Rose; cinematography by Bruce Surtees. A Malpaso Production, for Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)—This monster thing, spawned at M-G-M, was meant to be the life of Jerome Kern. Robert Walker was the actor given the role (unlucky Walker was also miscast as Brahms), and he was surrounded by an all-star troupe that included Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Van Johnson, Dinah Shore, Tony Martin, June Allyson, and Frank Sinatra, who, in perhaps the most ill-conceived sequence in this staggeringly ill-conceived venture, sings “Ol’ Man River” in white tie and white tails. There are 22 songs by Kern, most of them reasonably well performed, but not one performed memorably. Richard Whorf directed; Vincente Minnelli staged some of the sequences. color

 

Time After Time (1979)—Nicholas Meyer, the author of several popular novels (among them The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which he also adapted for the screen), turned director with this tall tale about H. G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) and Jack the Ripper (David Warner). The movie doesn’t fully succeed: McDowell’s shy, flustered Wells doesn’t fit the Wells of our recollections, and the Ripper, with his big, bony hands, is too frighteningly sociopathic to fit into the film’s romantic framework. (His murders are gruesome.) But most of the plotting is ingenious, and soft-faced Mary Steenburgen, as the woman from 20th-century San Francisco who is charmed by the Victorian Wells, makes it all semi-engaging. She’s very sweet in an out-of-it way—a stoned cupcake—and she and McDowell seem to belong together in an enchanted playroom. With Patti D’Arbanville, who’s terrific as a hooker, and Charles Cioffi, Joseph Maher, and Corey Feldman. From a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes; the cinematography is by Paul Lohmann; the production design is by Edward C. Carfagno; the music is by Miklós Rózsa. An Orion Release through Warners. color

 

Time Bandits (1981)—Written by two members of the “Monty Python” group, Michael Palin and the American expatriate Terry Gilliam, who also directed, this surreal adventure fantasy has been conceived as a movie for children and adults. It’s about a little English boy who is hurtled from one era to another by a pack of six dwarfs who have stolen The Supreme Being’s map of the holes in the space-time continuum, and it’s as picaresque as you can get, with Ian Holm as Napoleon, John Cleese as Robin Hood, Sean Connery as Agamemnon, Ralph Richardson as The Supreme Being, who’s too busy to get his three-piece-suit pressed, and David Warner, who’s a great-looking Evil Genius—he wears talons and a Nixon nose out of a David Levine drawing. (The light shining up from hell makes his nostrils red.) All this seems to do something for the 8- to 12-year-old boys in the audience—the ones known to be very high on d & d (Dungeons and Dragons)—that it may not do for adults, who will probably see and hear a lot of jokes without feeling much impulse to laugh. The whimsical rhythms of the vaudeville-skit humor often seem to be the result of mistiming; the interludes with Palin and Shelley Duvall as wonky sweethearts are especially musty—the two of them seem more amused than the audience. Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It’s far from a bad movie, but it doesn’t quite click together, either. The director doesn’t shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas. With David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Jack Purvis, Mike Edmonds, Malcolm Dixon, and Tiny Ross as the bandits; the boy is Craig Warnock, and Peter Vaughan and Katherine Helmond are The Ogre and his wife. Songs by George Harrison. color

 

Time in the Sun Que Viva Mexico (1946)—The only film that Eisenstein directed outside the Soviet Union was never completed. But out of the fabulous footage that he and his cinematographer, Eduard Tisse, shot in Mexico in 1930 and 1931 the film Time in the Sun was edited by his disciples, who attempted to approximate his original plan—from Aztec cults through Conquistadores and peonage to Christian feasts. The footage imposes its vision of the Indian faces and the Mexican landscape; these faces are perhaps too noble and eternal, but they are marvellous to look at. b & w

 

The Time Machine (1960)—Entertaining George Pal sci-fi, loosely derived from the H. G. Wells novel and set at about the time the book was written—1895. The plush Victorian furnishings in the home of the time-travelling scientist (Rod Taylor) are contrasted with the catacombs of the cannibalistic future, where Yvette Mimieux is a dainty morsel on the menu. The machine itself is a beauty, with a red velvet seat and gadgets made of ivory and rock crystal, and the time-travel effects help to make this film one of the best of its kind. However, it deteriorates into comic-strip grotesqueries when the fat, ogreish future race of Morlocks torments the effete, platinum-blond, vacant-eyed race of Eloi. With Alan Young, Sebastian Cabot, and Whit Bissell. M-G-M. color

 

Times Gone By Altri Tempi (1951)—This is a lavish episodic film, based on stories, plays, and sketches by well-known Italian writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Peasants argue about “a matter of property”; would-be lovers go to great pains to achieve a clandestine meeting and then fritter away their time quarrelling; two children who are separated feel the first stirrings of love. There’s a Pirandello one-act play, The Vise, and there’s a witty finale, The Trial of Phryne, in which Vittorio De Sica as an arm-waving lawyer defends Gina Lollobrigida, the amiably loose woman of the town who is charged with murder. It’s florid, with great verve—it’s the only real reason to see the (tolerable but uneven) movie. Alessandro Blasetti directed. In Italian. b & w

 

Tin Men (1987)—Written and directed by Barry Levinson, this movie about aluminum-siding salesmen in Baltimore in 1963 (the year that the state cracked down on their bunco games) is a middle-aged echo of his 1982 film Diner. He’s making essentially the same point—that guys relate better to guys than they do to girls. His basic theme here is the stunted imaginative life of the businessman who hangs out at the racetrack because he can feel good about himself when he’s joking with his business pals. (The men’s get-togethers are a form of consciousness-lowering.) The picture centers on a feud between two strutting tin men—Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito—who work for different outfits, and on Dreyfuss’s trying to score off DeVito by seducing his wife (Barbara Hershey). The salesmen’s scams are entertaining, but their spritzing is too tame, and the action is prolonged with limp, wavering scenes. Levinson wants to be on the humane side of every issue. The best work is done by the supporting players. Dreyfuss’s sales team includes John Mahoney as his partner, and Seymour Cassel, Matt Craven, Richard Port-now, Alan Blumenfeld, and Michael Tucker as the boss. DeVito’s team includes Jackie Gayle as his partner, and Stanley Brock, Bruno Kirby, and J. T. Walsh as the boss. Touchstone (Disney). color (See Hooked.)

 

Tin Pan Alley (1940)—Big, splashy, pin-headed musical in the tasteless 20th Century-Fox style, with Alice Faye (the Fox queen of the 30s, on her way down), Betty Grable (scheduled to become the Fox queen of the 40s), the Nicholas Brothers, Jack Oakie, Billy Gilbert, and that Fox inevitable John Payne. The numerous songs include “Honeysuckle Rose,” “You Say the Sweetest Things,” “The Sheik of Araby,” “On Moonlight Bay,” and “K-K-K-Katy.” Walter Lang directed. b & w

 

Tirez sur le pianiste, see Shoot the Piano Player

 

Titanic (1953)—In 1912, the Titanic, the largest ship in the world, struck an iceberg while on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York and sank. Of the 2,207 people board, only 690 survived. The disaster was one of the most terrifying and fascinating in maritime history, but one wouldn’t guess it from this movie. The scriptwriters (Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen) describe the emotional ups and downs of an unbelievable American fop (Clifton Webb); his estranged wife (Barbara Stanwyck), whom he is trying to win back; and their dreary kids. While the Titanic goes racing along, Webb and Stanwyck argue the respective merits of the Continent and the Middle West as a place to bring up children, until Stanwyck gets so heated about the advantages of the prairie that she informs him that she’s cuckolded him and his son isn’t even his. Unstrung by this information, Webb dashes to the ship’s bar and plays bridge furiously for many hours. It should be funny, but it isn’t even that. In standard variations of Grand Hotel style, the cast includes an unfrocked priest (Richard Basehart), an obtrusive bore (Allyn Joslyn), a rich and salty Western lady (Thelma Ritter), and the doomed master of the ship (Brian Aherne). Jean Negulesco directed; the actual sinking looks like a nautical tragedy on the pond in Central Park. Also with Robert Wagner and Audrey Dalton. Brackett produced, for 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Titicut Follies (1967)—Fred Wiseman’s first documentary, photographed in the state hospital for the criminally insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Crude in technique, but a revealing (and shocking) piece of visual muckraking. It has some unforgettable scenes. b & w

 

To Be or Not to Be (1942)—Some people have great affection for this anti-Nazi comedy-melodrama, with its knockabout seriousness. The stars are Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, bizarrely cast as a famous Polish actress and her actor-husband; the plot involves actors disguising themselves as Nazis in order to foil the Nazis. Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, starts off on the wrong foot and never gets his balance; the performers yowl their lines, and the burlesque of the Nazis, who cower before their superior officers, is more crudely gleeful than funny. With Robert Stack, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges, Felix Bressart, Tom Dugan (as Hitler), Sig Rumann, Maude Eburne, Halliwell Hobbes, and Miles Mander. Produced by Lubitsch and Alexander Korda, for United Artists. Edwin Justus Mayer wrote the script, from a story conceived by Lubitsch and Melchior Lengyel. Cinematography by Rudolph Mate. It was Lombard’s last film; two weeks after completing it, she was killed in a plane crash while on a tour to sell defense bonds. b & w

 

To Be or Not to Be (1983)—This remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 picture about a Polish theatre troupe that outwits Nazi officialdom is a mild farce—benign but not really very funny. The roles once played by Jack Benny and Carole Lombard—the husband and wife who run the theatre and are its stars—are now filled by Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft. With her thick, dark curly hair cut short, pencil-line 30s eyebrows, a broad, lascivious smile, and her body jiggling in silver lame, Bancroft is friendly and sexy, and she seems more at ease in the general silliness than Brooks does. He rushes around in one disguise after another, pretending to be a whole series of Nazis; he never cuts loose. The tall, dazed Christopher Lloyd has a good moment or two, and Charles Durning (as a Nazi colonel) keeps his energy up high enough to give the picture a boost. Others in the cast include Jose Ferrer, Jack Riley, Tim Matheson, George Gaynes, and, in a new subplot, James Haake as a fey homosexual. Directed by Alan Johnson, who doesn’t seize his opportunities to work up a head of steam; the film’s high spot is its opening number—“Sweet Georgia Brown,” sung in Polish. The semi-new script is by Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham. Produced by Mel Brooks, for 20th Century-Fox. color (See State of the Art.)

 

To Catch a Thief (1955)—The later, jaded Hitchcock leans to malice and manner. He gets by with it here, largely because of Cary Grant’s elegance as a retired cat burglar, and the luscious, sunny Riviera scenery, and Grace Kelly—she actually looks alive, and she’s sexier than she is in anything else. The suspense plot (reprised in the 1974 The Return of the Pink Panther) isn’t much; there are few thrills in this romantic comedy-thriller—it’s no more than a pleasant minor diversion, but it does have a zingy air of sophistication. With Jessie Royce Landis, Charles Vanel, John Williams, and Brigitte Auber. The screenplay by John Michael Hayes is based on a novel by David Dodge. Paramount. color

 

To Die in Madrid Mourir à Madrid (1965)—A French-made documentary about the Spanish Civil War, compiled by Frederic Rossif. Fancy, highly emotional, and not as informative as it might be, but some of the footage is very fine. With an English narration. b & w

 

To Die of Love Mourir d’aimer (1970)—This thinly fictionalized version of the Gabrielle Russier case has an unconvincing air of high-minded rectitude. It turns what appeared to be a gleaming social tragicomedy (in Mavis Gallant’s reporting, especially) into one more bathetic, sacrificial love story, set in the French equivalent of our counterculture. As the schoolteacher in love with her teen-age student, Annie Girardot acts like a cross between Greer Garson as a mother superior and Greer Garson as the Maid of Orleans in love. Bruno Pradal brings youthful sensuality to the boy and gives the only halfway decent performance—though he seems to be used as a stand-in for Gerard Philipe. The boy’s parents (who bring charges against the teacher) specialize in cold, malignant looks, while the rest of the adult cast is stereotyped for life-denying callousness or cynicism or impotence. The students are so life-enhancing they look stuffed; love is coming out their ears. Directed by Andre Cayatte, from a script he and Russier’s lawyer concocted. In French. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

To Each His Own (1946)—Illegitimacy tearjerker. This time it’s Olivia de Havilland who gives up her bouncing baby so he’ll have a name. John Lund bats his eyelashes as her dashing aviator lover, and also as the son when, in the inevitable progression of events, she becomes a successful businesswoman (she operates a cosmetics outfit, like Elizabeth Arden’s) and meets up with him (wearing wings like his father before him). As an example of the “woman’s picture” this doesn’t have any of the grubbiness or conviction of the Barbara Stanwyck Stella Dallas, but de Havilland works hard confecting cold cream, and her exertions won her the Academy Award. The atmosphere of lugubrious sensitivity is probably just about what the director, Mitchell Leisen, wanted. (He had a better side that came out in comedy.) With Roland Culver, Phillip Terry, Mary Anderson, and Bill Goodwin. Charles Brackett, who produced this glossy package, also wrote the script, with Jacques Thery. Paramount. b & w

 

To Have and Have Not (1944)—In this picture, Humphrey Bogart, the greatest cynical hero of them all, found himself in Martinique, where a beautiful big cat of a girl named Lauren Bacall slouched across the screen for the first time and managed to make the question “Anybody got a match?” sound like the most insolent and insinuating of demands. Howard Hawks directed this slickly professional, thoroughly enjoyable Second World War melodrama, which was taken from what Warner Brothers advertised as Ernest Hemingway’s novel, with William Faulkner listed as co-writer (with Jules Furthman) of the screenplay—making this the only movie on record with two Nobel Prize-winning authors. Don’t be misled: it’s the Warners mixture as before—sex and politics—but better this time. Asked to explain the genesis of this film, Hawks explained that once when he and Ernest Hemingway were hunting together, he had claimed that he could take Hemingway’s worst story and make a movie of it. Hemingway asked which was his worst, and Hawks said To Have and Have Not. According to Hawks, Hemingway then explained that he had written it in one sitting when he needed money. Hawks made good on his boast, but he and the screenwriters cheated a bit: the movie deals with what may have occurred in the lives of the characters before the novel begins. (Footnote for somebody’s Ph.D. thesis on “Novel into Film”: the novel’s ending was used to polish off John Huston’s film version of Maxwell Anderson’s dreary play Key Largo; the novel’s plot was used for another movie, The Breaking Point, directed by Michael Curtiz, in 1950; and the short story “One Trip Across,” which Hemingway had expanded into To Have and Have Not, was used for an Audie Murphy movie, The Gun Runners, directed by Don Siegel, in 1958. And no doubt the Hawks version altered the Hemingway original in order to combine elements that had made big box office of Curtiz’s Casablanca.) This film belongs to the movie era in which characters were clearly defined, and if a man was perverse, you knew he was a Nazi. The refreshingly, daringly sexy Bacall burst through the conventions of the era. A writer said of her that her “husky, underslung voice, which is ideal for the double-entendre, makes even her simplest remarks sound like jungle mating cries.” Hoagy Carmichael provides the music and accompaniment for Bacall’s facial exercises; the singing voice is that of Andy Williams, and it never sounded sexier than when coming out of her. Lauren Bacall’s debut had, in a sense, been pre-tested: Jules Furthman had worked out that good-bad girl act for Betty Compson in Docks of New York (1928) and perfected it on Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (1930). With Walter Brennan, Dolores Moran, Sheldon Leonard, Marcel Dalio, and Dan Seymour (literally, the heavy). b & w

 

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)—When Gregory Peck got the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as an upstanding widowed lawyer practicing in a small Alabama town in the early 30s, there was a fair amount of derision throughout the country: Peck was better than usual, but in that same virtuously dull way. (There was the suspicion that Peck was being rewarded because the Lincolnesque lawyer shot a rabid dog and defended an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman.) Robert Mulligan directed, from Horton Foote’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize novel, and it’s all terribly conscientious—the clapboard houses, the slatted porch swings on rusty chains, the Chevy phaetons on dusty streets, the high moral sentiments, the specs on Peck’s nose. Mulligan slows the pace down when he wants to suggest the mysteries of childhood or to arouse warm emotions; this works only intermittently. The movie is part eerie Southern gothic and part Hollywood self-congratulation for its enlightened racial attitudes. Brock Peters, who flares his nostrils mightily, is the black man on trial, and Robert Duvall is the brain-damaged Boo Radley, of whom the lawyer’s children (Mary Badham and Philip Alford) are terrified. With John Megna, Ruth White, Rosemary Murphy, James Anderson, Collin Wilcox, William Windom, Alice Ghostley, Crahan Denton, Frank Overton, and Richard Hale. Cinematography by Russell Harlan; music by Elmer Bernstein; art direction by Alexander Gol-itzen and Henry Bumstead. Universal. b & w

 

To Sir with Love (1967)—James Clavell wrote and directed this feebly well-intentioned English movie. It’s Blackboard Jungle reshaped to bring mist to your eyes. This time Sidney Poitier is the teacher—a West Indian—and he inspires and reforms the whole bunch of tough East End teen-agers (and their teachers, too). The film’s awkwardness and naivete seemed to be what made it a box-office favorite. In movies like this one, Poitier’s self-inflicted stereotype of goodness cancels out his acting. Adapted from a novel by E. R. Braithwaite; with Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, and Christian Roberts. Columbia. color

 

The Toast of New Orleans (1950)—Sheer excruciation. Mario Lanza, as a boy from Bayou country, singing the execrable “Be My Love,” and such minor horrors as “The Bayou Lullaby” and “Boom Biddy Boom Boom.” Whoever it was who thought of teaming Lanza with Kathryn Grayson had a streak of malignant humor: when those voices collide and his big chest meets her big bosom, pop culture is at climax. With David Niven, James Mitchell, Rita Moreno, J. Carrol Naish, and J. Clinton Sundberg. Directed by Norman Taurog, from a script by Sy Gomberg and George Wells; with choreography (of sorts) by Eugene Loring. Produced—inevitably—by Joe Pasternak; that man has a lot to answer for. M-G-M. color

 

Tobacco Road (1941)—Erskine Caldwell’s novel turned into a folksy comic strip. The director, John Ford, and the scenarist, Nunnally Johnson, were up against censorship problems; still, that doesn’t account for the broad pointlessness of the rustic humor or the glossy studio lighting of the poor whites cavorting in front of their Georgia shacks. The whole thing seems deranged. Charley Grapewin plays Jeeter Lester as a familiar corn-liquored old scamp, Gene Tierney is a glamourized Ellie May, Marjorie Rambeau is Sister Bessie, and Elizabeth Patterson is Ada. With William Tracy, Dana Andrews, Ward Bond, Zeffie Tilbury, Russell Simpson, Grant Mitchell, and Slim Summerville. Based on Jack Kirkland’s theatre version of the novel; the play—considered hot and sensational—was a huge success. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Today We Live (1933)—William Faulkner wrote a story called “Turn About,” which had to do with the First World War rivalry between the aviators and the men in the torpedo boats; it had no heroine. Adapted to the screen, it became a vehicle for Joan Crawford, and the subject became how she can be freed from her old love so that she can give herself (in marriage) to Gary Cooper. There are some (uninspired) flying scenes, and some tolerable sequences on the high seas; the personal relationships are heavy-handed and rather baffling—maybe because although Crawford is the star, she really doesn’t seem to have a place in the picture. The director, Howard Hawks, must have been confused, too; he gets minimal results from the cast. Cooper and Roscoe Karns aren’t bad, but Robert Young and Franchot Tone use most of their energy trying for clipped British accents. Also with Louise Closser Hale. M-G-M. b & w

 

Together Again (1944)—The title refers to the earlier pairing of Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer in Love Affair and When Tomorrow Comes. This time, she’s a widow, a small-town mayor who doesn’t know that she needs love, and he’s a sculptor from the big city, commissioned to do a commemorative statue of her late husband. During their various misunderstandings, each becomes engaged to a high-school student, and a million laughs ensue, all of them from the people in the picture. With Charles Coburn, Mona Freeman, and Elizabeth Patterson. Directed by Charles Vidor; among the many writers employed were Virginia Van Upp and Herbert Biberman. Columbia. b & w

 

Tom, Dick, and Harry (1941)—Ginger Rogers, a telephone operator, has three suitors: Alan Marshal is the millionaire of her dreams, George Murphy is a car salesman sure to get on in the world, and Burgess Meredith is a happy-go-lucky mechanic somewhat loose in the head. The movie is a series of sketches, as the heroine, trying to choose among them, dreams of her future life with each. (Her final choice leaves the viewer sceptical.) A nice detail: when she imagines marrying the millionaire, she sees newspaper headlines announcing her marriage; just under the large type there is a small heading, in quite insignificant type, reading, “Adolf Hitler Assassinated.” Garson Kanin directed this Cinderella comedy from a script by Paul Jarrico. It’s a little too jaunty and much too comfy in its sterotypical assumptions, but a lot of people enjoyed it. Phil Silvers turns up in a bit. (Remade in 1958 as The Girl Most Likely.) R K O. b & w

 

Tom Jones (1963)—Tony Richardson whizzes through the Henry Fielding novel, but he pauses long enough for a great lewd eating scene. With Albert Finney as the foundling hero, Hugh Griffith, Joyce Redman, Edith Evans, Joan Greenwood, Susannah York, Diane Cilento, David Warner, Wilfrid Lawson, Rachel Kempson, and George Devine. The script is by John Osborne. Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Score. United Artists. color

 

Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)—One of the most preposterous of the many variants on the Enoch Arden theme. A cherub-faced chemist named MacDonald (Orson Welles) gets so badly shot up in the First World War that he prefers to let his wife (Claudette Colbert) think he’s dead; he returns, transformed bewilderingly into a shattered European, to find that she has married the industrialist for whom he’s going to work. Wearing a wig and false whiskers, dragging a gimpy leg, and rolling gutturals around on his tongue, Welles is so transparently Welles that it’s pretty funny that Colbert doesn’t recognize him. That’s the only humor in this pallbearer-paced weeper. With Natalie Wood as the child the poor goof can’t reveal himself to, and George Brent, Lucile Watson, and Richard Long. Directed by Irving Pichel, from Lenore Coffee’s script, based on Gwen Bristow’s novel. R K O. b & w

 

Tonight at 8:30 (1953)—Three of Noel Coward’s light, corrosive social comedies are performed by excellent casts in this production, directed by Anthony Pelissier. The bill includes: The Red Peppers—two vaudeville hams bicker their way through a Saturday night, with Kay Walsh, Ted Ray, Martita Hunt; Ways and Means—at a Côte d’Azur houseparty, a bankrupt couple persuade a burglar to rob the rich American down the hall and split with them, with Valerie Hobson, Nigel Patrick, Jack Warner, Jessie Royce Landis; Fumed Oak—a hag-ridden suburbanite tells off his in-laws, with Stanley Holloway. Too patently “clever” and “ribald” to be taken very seriously, these playlets are nevertheless models of skillful entertainment. color

 

Too Bad She’s Bad Peccato che Sia una Canaglia (1955)—Alberto Moravia’s divertissement on the cops and robbers theme features a prodigious family of thieves—father Vittorio De Sica is a dignified and accomplished pickpocket, his big pussycat daughter Sophia Loren is a happy delinquent who can’t understand people who work for a living, and his two little sons can strip an automobile in 30 seconds flat. As several critics pointed out, this comedy has only one drawback: when the magnificent Sophia sails across the screen, one forgets to read the subtitles. With Marcello Mastroianni. Directed by Alessandro Blasetti. In Italian. b & w

 

Too Hot to Handle (1938)—A busy, forgettable Clark Gable-Myrna Loy screwball melodrama. He’s a daredevil newsreel cameraman who fakes war stories and will do anything for a scoop and she’s a celebrated “aviatrix.” One of his dirty tricks wrecks her reputation, and they carry on a love-hate affair that jumps around from China to the Amazon jungle. The director, Jack Conway, flails about trying for laughs and he settles for facetiousness. The movie looks as if it were made up of odds and ends of scrap footage, and it’s crudely racist, in a casual, dumb-jokey way; in the jungle Gable projects a reel of disaster footage in order to frighten the natives, and he jeers at their response—he refers to them as “jitterbugs” and calls the medicine men “monkeys.” This hero’s cockiness and unscrupulousness seem intended to be likable, but Gable can’t bring it off, though Myrna Loy, who is simply dressed and fairly quiet, manages to be very charming, despite the idiotic things she has to do. With Walter Pidgeon, Leo Carrillo, Walter Connolly (in perhaps his worst performance—as Gable’s expostulating, dyspeptic boss), Marjorie Main (who has a nice, dry way with her few lines), Virginia Weidler, Willie Fung, Johnny Hines, Al Shean, Henry Kolker, Frank Faylen, and a couple of accomplished black actors whose names are not easy to come by. Laurence Stallings and John Lee Mahin wrote the script; Lawrence Weingarten produced, for M-G-M. b & w

 

Too Many Crooks (1958)—Michael Pertwee, who wrote such English comedies as Laughter in Paradise and Your Past Is Showing for the director Mario Zampi, had a good idea here, too. (It bears some relationship to an O. Henry story.) A gang of crooks (George Cole, Sidney James, and company) kidnap the wife (Brenda de Banzie) of a tycoon (Terry-Thomas) and discover they are holding a cold potato. The tycoon, who is having an affair with his secretary, is delighted to be rid of his wife and has no intention of ransoming her. Furious, the wife becomes the mastermind of the gang. Zampi didn’t do the gimmick justice; he directed clumsily, confusing shouted dialogue with wit. Elliot Silverstein handled the same idea (and did worse by it) in the 1967 The Happening; the plot turned up again in the 1986 Ruthless People, with Bette Midler in the Brenda de Banzie role. b & w

 

Too Many Husbands (1940)—In My Favorite Wife and its many variations, the husband with two wives is generally frantic. Here, Jean Arthur, caught between Fred MacMurray and Melvyn Douglas, loves the dilemma. A well-written, light-spirited comedy, adapted by Claude Binyon from Somerset Maugham’s play Home and Beauty. The cast includes Harry Davenport, Melville Cooper, Edgar Buchanan, and Dorothy Peterson. Directed by Wesley Ruggles. (A musical version in 1955 starred Betty Grable and was called Three for the Show; it was one of Grable’s last and best pictures.) Columbia. b & w

 

Tootsie (1982)—Marvellous fun. Dustin Hoffman is both the hero and the target of this satirical farce about actors. He plays Michael Dorsey, a brilliant, “uncompromising” New York actor whom no one wants to hire because he makes things hell for everybody. When Michael’s girlfriend (Teri Garr) goes up for an audition for a role in a soap and is rejected, he makes himself up as a woman, presents himself as “Dorothy Michaels,” and lands the job. And Michael finds himself when he’s Dorothy—not because he has any secret desire to be a woman but because when he’s Dorothy he’s acting. He’s such a dedicated, fanatical actor that he comes fully alive only when he’s playing a role—you can see it in his intense, glittering eyes. Michael is in the guise of Dorothy when he meets his dream girl—Jessica Lange, who’s like a shock absorber to him; she says her lines in such a mild, natural way that it makes perfect sense for him to stop in his tracks and stare at her in wonder. With Bill Murray, Charles Durning, George Gaynes, Geena Davis, Doris Be-lack, Dabney Coleman, and, as Michael’s agent, Sydney Pollack, who also directed. Pollack does some of his best work yet in the opening sequences—a crackling, rapid-fire presentation of the hopes versus the realities of out-of-work actors’ lives. The script is credited to Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, but Don McGuire wrote the first draft, and Elaine May and many others worked on it. Columbia. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Top Gun (1986)—It features MTV motivation: I pose, therefore I am. The strapping Kelly McGillis is an astrophysicist employed to teach the elite fighter pilots in training at San Diego’s Miramar Naval Air Station; she sidles into rooms and slouches, so she won’t overpower her co-star, the relatively diminutive Tom Cruise, who is supposed to be the most daring of her students. When McGillis is offscreen, the movie is a shiny homoerotic commercial: the pilots strut around the locker room, towels hanging precariously from their waists. It’s as if masculinity had been redefined as how a young man looks with his clothes half off, and as if narcissism is what being a warrior is all about. In between the bare-chested maneuvers, there’s footage of ugly snub-nosed jets taking off, whooshing around in the sky, and landing while the soundtrack calls up Armageddon and the Second Coming—though what we’re seeing is training exercises. What is the movie selling? It’s just selling, because that’s what the producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director, Tony (Make It Glow) Scott, know how to do. Selling is what they think moviemaking is about. The result is a new “art” form: the self-referential commercial. With Val Kilmer, Anthony Edwards, Tom Skerritt, Meg Ryan, Rick Rossovich, and Tim Robbins. The script is credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., though the producers acknowledge that other writers were involved. Paramount. color (See Hooked.)

 

Topaz (1969)—Hitchcock’s 51st feature is a larger, slower, duller version of the spy thrillers he made in the 30s. Apparently he expects us to identify with the waxwork Cuban rightists who are spying for the U.S.; he expects us to accept the creaking late-late-show romances, and the Arrow-collar-shaving-cream-ad hero (Frederick Stafford), and all the people who look like cutouts and behave like drab, enervated versions of spies in his earlier films. Per-Axel Arosenius, Michel Piccoli, and Philippe Noiret have a few moments, and Roscoe Lee Browne perks things up briefly, but most of the other performers waste away in their roles. With John Vernon, John Forsythe, Dany Robin, Karin Dor, Claude Jade, and Michel Subor. From a Leon Uris novel, adapted by Samuel Taylor. Universal. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Topaze (1933)—John Barrymore is completely charming as the shabby, unworldly science teacher who is bounced from his academic environment and lands in the business world of delightful depravity; handed his first martini, he gulps the olive with the liquid. The film was made in the period when teachers were considered virtuous recluses and the academic world was called the ivory tower. At the time—which really wasn’t so long ago—the attitudes in this gentle comedy were thought very modern and sly and cynical. Produced by David O. Selznick, it’s an elegantly designed picture; it was directed by Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast in his too leisurely, “continental” style—everything is a little too slow. With Myrna Loy as the sophisticated woman who is attracted by the teacher’s innocence. Adapted from Marcel Pagnol’s play by Benn W. Levy and (though uncredited) Ben Hecht. There have been several other screen versions; Louis Jouvet, Fernandel, and Peter Sellers have all played the teacher. Music by Max Steiner. R K O. b & w

 

Topkapi (1964)—Comic grand larceny in Eric Ambler terrain—Istanbul. The gang in this Jules Dassin thriller includes Peter Ustinov, Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, Robert Morley, and Akim Tamiroff, and they all work too hard at being merry, lovable scoundrels. Music by Manos Hadjidakis. United Artists. color

 

El Topo (1971)—A spaghetti Western in the style of Luis Bunuel, and tinsel all the way. The writer-director-star, Alexandro Jodorowsky, plays with symbols and ideas and enigmas so promiscuously that the confusion may be mistaken for depth. He has some feeling for pace and for sadistic comedy, but the principal appeal of the movie is as a violent fantasy—head comics. Cinematography by Rafael Corkidi; produced by Roberto Viskin. In Spanish. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Topper (1937)—Much fun; a sophisticated fantasy, with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as a high-stepping married couple, George and Marion Kirby. Killed in an automobile accident, they return as elegant, ectoplasmic pranksters and drive banker Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) to happy distraction. Norman Z. McLeod directed this adaptation of a Thorne Smith novel; the picture was such a hit that it led to a series of movies and then to a TV series, but don’t judge this one by what followed. This is the one to see, and for those who don’t know why Constance Bennett was a big movie star, her provocative, teasing Marion Kirby should provide the answer. With Billie Burke, Alan Mowbray, Hedda Hopper, Arthur Lake as a bellboy, and Eugene Pallette as a house detective. A Hal Roach Production; released by M-G-M. b & w

 

Topper Returns (1941)—The third in the vaporish series doesn’t have the style or wit of the first two; it’s a standard mystery with spooky trimmings, mostly set in an old mansion, with hands in the dark, sliding panels, and trap doors. Constance Bennett is gone, and the heroine is Joan Blondell; she’s a blessing, as always, but she doesn’t have much help from the plot. Stabbed to death, she reappears as a facetious phantom who expects Topper (Roland Young again, looking tired) to find her killer. Roy Del Ruth directed. The cast includes Billie Burke (still Mrs. Topper), Carole Landis, Eddie Anderson (as an all-too-easily-scared chauffeur), and bulldog-jawed Donald MacBride, as a choleric policeman. Produced by Hal Roach; released by United Artists. b & w

 

Topper Takes a Trip (1939)—A sequel to Topper, but this time Cary Grant has vanished altogether (except in the introductory footage lifted from the first film). Constance Bennett, as Marion Kirby, and Roland Young, as Topper, are still around, however, and the film, though talky and overextended, is generally bright. Topper goes to Paris for a divorce, and Marion follows him; the action takes place mostly in a Riviera hotel. As before, Norman Z. McLeod is the director, and Billie Burke and Alan Mowbray are on hand. Also with Verree Teasdale, Franklin Pangborn, Alex D’Arcy, and the dog known as Asta in the Thin Man pictures, who turns up here as Mr. Atlas. A Hal Roach Production; released by United Artists. b & w

 

Torch Song (1953)—The viewer is asked to admire Joan Crawford’s legs and her acting, which consists of pushing her mouth into positions meant to suggest suffering. The first is easy; the second impossible. In this misbegotten melodrama with some musical numbers, she finally settles for a blind musician (Michael Wilding). Which, all things considered, is a remarkably sensible decision. With Gig Young, Marjorie Rambeau, and Eugene Loring. Directed by Charles Walters. M-G-M. color

 

Torment Hets (1944)—Alf Sjöberg directed this famous study of adolescent despair and mean-spirited, authoritarian education. It was written by the 25-year-old Ingmar Bergman, who worked on it as Sjöberg’s assistant. Stig Jarrel plays the sadist schoolmaster; the student and the shopgirl whom he victimizes are played by Alf Kjellin and Mai Zetterling (who also became directors). Gunnar Björnstrand and others of Bergman’s troupe may be glimpsed in small roles, looking very young. In Swedish. b & w

 

Torn Curtain (1966)—Sloppy, clumsy Hitchcock thriller with Paul Newman as an American nuclear scientist who says he’s defecting, and Julie Andrews as the girl who tags along—pure heart, piping voice, and all. With Lila Kedrova, Tamara Toumanova, and Ludwig Donath. Brian Moore is credited with the original screenplay, but probably his friends don’t mention it. Universal. color

 

Torrid Zone (1940)—Steamy hot and very funny. This tropical comedy-adventure, set in a Warners mockup of a plantation in Honduras, has James Cagney, Ann Sheridan, and Pat O’Brien shouting double-entendres at breakneck speed. Sheridan is sultry and rowdy as a vagrant nightclub entertainer wandering through the jungle nightclub circuit and taking the natives’ minds off banana picking. O’Brien plays the tough plantation manager, and Cagney, with a mustache, is the breezy, belligerent foreman who deals with a crisis a minute, including George Tobias as a revolutionary, Andy Devine as a hopelessly incompetent No. 1 Boy, and cucumber-cool Helen Vinson, always a troublemaker. The picture borders on satirical farce; the target is the typical Hollywood treatment of South American bandits and tropical passions. William Keighley directed, from a script by Richard Macaulay and Jerry Wald; cinematography by James Wong Howe. b & w

 

Tortilla Flat (1942)—A good-natured and engaging minor novel by Steinbeck, turned into a good-natured and engaging (though corny and quaint and picturesque) film at M-G-M. Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, John Qualen, Sheldon Leonard, Akim Tamiroff, and Allen Jenkins are among the wine-drinking paisanos of a studio version of a shantytown section of Monterey, California. Jenkins doesn’t even try to pass, but the others make a stab at acting ignorant and talking in a folk rhythm—they sound like Broadway wiseguys out of Damon Runyon. Tracy is meant to be a scrounger loafer who leads the others astray. An unusually animated Hedy Lamarr plays a hot-tempered Portuguese girl (in pigtails) who works in a cannery and keeps a goat. The only performer who really gets into his role is Frank Morgan, bearded, as a saintly old beggar who talks to the stray dogs he takes into his chicken-coop home. Morgan is very effective, but the moviemakers know it and they milk it; he is rewarded by a vision of St. Francis of Assisi. By the time that Tracy pleads for a miracle to save the injured Garfield’s life and is overheard by a silver-haired padre (Henry O’Neill), the picture’s charm has become cloying. Victor Fleming directed. With Donald Meek and Connie Gilchrist. The script is by John Lee Mahin and Benjamin Glazer; Sam Zimbalist produced. It says something about M-G-M’s attitude toward paisanos that it was made in sepia.

 

Touch and Go (1986)—It has a terribly virtuous idea: it’s about the chance meeting of a tough 11-year-old “ethnic” boy (Ajay Naidu), who’s economically handicapped, and the career-centered all-star forward (Michael Keaton) of a Chicago hockey team, and how they change each other’s lives. But the director, Robert Mandel, who finished the film in 1984 (after his first, Independence Day, and before his third, F/X), takes the drivelling story and informs it with honesty and sensibility. Keaton gives a grown-up-male performance of a kind you don’t often see. As Bobby Barbato, a local boy from the South Side, he’s in fighting trim, and he’s quick and impudent in conversation. High up in his expensive lakefront apartment, he watches the VCR, studying replays of his moves. He’s a real pro, and Keaton, who got in shape for the role, is on top of it. Blessedly, the movie isn’t preachy about Bobby’s single life. But when he meets the kid’s mother in the person of the volatile Maria Conchita Alonso, Keaton shows us the deepening of Bobby’s feelings. And Alonso has the uninhibited sexiness of the young Sophia Loren. She brings a happy sizzle to the role of the openhearted single mother who’s so eager for experience that she walks tilted forward, almost at a run. The picture is stuck with crude plot turns, but Keaton and Alonso have a lovely, spinning rapport. With Max Wright, Maria Tucci, and Lara Jill Miller; the handsome cinematography is by Richard H. Kline. Screenplay by Alan Ormsby and Bob Sand and Harry Colomby. Tri-Star. color (See Hooked.)

 

Touch of Evil (1958)—As the madam of a Mexican bordello, Marlene Dietrich (done up in her Gypsy makeup from Golden Earrings of 1947), greets the grotesquely oversized, padded, false-nosed Orson Welles with a glorious understatement—“You’re a mess, honey. You’ve been eating too much candy.” When the final bullet punctures him and he is floating in the water like a dead whale, she eulogizes—“What can you say about anybody? He was some kind of a man … .” That may be one of the worst lines ever written or a parody of bad writing—the funeral scene in Death of a Salesman. Welles’ first American production in a decade, this marvellously garish thriller has something, but not very much, to do with drugs and police corruption in a border town. What it really has to do with is love of the film medium, and if Welles can’t resist the candy of shadows and angles and baroque decor, he turns it into stronger fare than most directors’ solemn meat and potatoes. It’s a terrific entertainment. The cast, assembled as perversely as in a nightmare, includes Charlton Heston, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Joseph Cotten, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mercedes McCambridge, Janet Leigh, Dennis Weaver, Valentin De Vargas, Joanna Moore, Harry Shannon, and Ray Collins. Cinematography by Russell Metty; filmed at Universal Studios and partly on location at Venice, California. The script, credited to Welles, is supposed to be a free adaptation of Whit Masterson’s novel Badge of Evil. When the picture opened in 1958 it was 93 minutes long and some scenes were said to have been added that were directed by Harry Keller; in 1976 a version was released that runs 108 minutes and is said to represent Welles’ original intentions. Universal. b & w

 

A Touch of Larceny (1960)—Few people appear to have seen or even heard of this pleasantly adult Anglo-American comedy; it’s a little too thin to be memorable, but it’s surprisingly light and debonair. James Mason gives one of his best comic performances as the naval commander, weary of his desk job at the British Admiralty, who makes it appear that he has gone over to the Russians, in order to sue the papers for libel. The best scene is one of the quietest: Mason, who has carefully shipwrecked himself on an uninhabited island, sees a passing vessel; he sips champagne while murmuring, “Help, help!” With George Sanders, Robert Flemyng, Harry Andrews, Duncan Lamont, and Vera Miles, who acts in an aloof, low-keyed manner which is apparently meant to be highly suggestive—she’s not totally objectionable. Guy Hamilton directed; the script by Roger MacDougall, Peter Winterton, Hamilton, and the producer, Ivan Foxwell, is based on Andrew Garve’s novel The Megstone Plot. b & w

 

Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)—Norman Mailer directed and did the adaptation of his murder-mystery novel. The setting is Provincetown in November, and we’re meant to feel the wintry corruption that has seeped into the town—it involves five or six killings. The writer hero (Ryan O’Neal) is ravaged from hard living with a rich wife and three years in the pen for dealing drugs, but he can tell his tough old father (Lawrence Tierney) that in those three years no man used him for a punk. His having remained anally inviolate is the proof of his manhood. Women victimize him, though—at least, the dirty-sex, Pia Zadora blondes (like Debra Sandlund) do. He has a love-hate bond to them. He needs to escape to a true-love earth-mother brunette (Isabella Rossellini). This is paltry stuff; it has an eerie, dated quality, like a copy of Playboy left out in the sun for 15 years. The women are subhuman, and most of the actors look stranded—lost and undirected. Yet the tawdriness of Mailer’s self-exposure and self-glorification has a low-level fascination. After a while, the movie turns into a burlesque of itself. It’s thin—thinner than pulp, lacking the shock and suggestiveness of pulp. Mailer isn’t enough of a moviemaker to draw us in on a primitive level: we’re not caught up in the hero’s fear that he may be a murderer, and so we’re outside the movie from first to last. What Mailer provides is an intellectual’s idea of a pulp thriller. You stare at it knowing it’s hopeless yet not really wanting to leave. With Wings Hauser and John Bedford Lloyd (who gives the best performance). Cinematography by John Bailey. Cannon Films. color (See Hooked.)

 

Tout va bien (1972)—Not as deadly in its pedagogical tone as other Jean-Luc Godard-Jean-Pierre Gorin films of the period. There’s some relaxation and humor in this story of a workers’ takeover of a sausage factory, but the way Jane Fonda, as an American journalist, and Yves Montand, as her French filmmaker-husband, are radicalized by the situation seems mechanical and naive. In French. color

 

Tovarich (1937)—The 30s stage play about a penniless Russian prince and his grand-duchess wife who are happy to get jobs as servants in a Paris household. It’s the sort of vehicle that comes to life in the theatre, because of the opportunities it affords dazzling technicians, but in the movie version, although Charles Boyer has a devilish cuckoo quality and Claudette Colbert is very charming, the whole thing seems rather attenuated. It’s pleasant, but there’s no energy in it, and the director, Anatole Litvak, who had demonstrated a highly developed visual style when he worked with Boyer only the year before (in Mayerling), seems paralyzed by the stagey material. With Basil Rathbone, Isabel Jeans, Anita Louise, Morris Carnovsky, Melville Cooper, Montagu Love, and Fritz Feld. From the play by Jacques Deval, adapted for the American stage by Robert E. Sherwood; the screenplay is by Casey Robinson. (Another version was made in France, in 1935.) Warners. b & w

 

The Towering Inferno (1974)—Disaster blockbuster, with each scene of someone horribly in flames presented as a feat for the audience’s delectation. The picture practically stops for us to say, “Yummy, that’s a good one!” These incendiary deaths and the falls from high up in the 138-floor tallest skyscraper in the world are the film’s only feats. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen mutter heroic sentiments, and Faye Dunaway manages to look goddessy-beautiful through it all, wandering through the chaos in puce see-through chiffon. John Guillermin directed and Irwin Allen produced. Stirling Silliphant wrote the series of bloopers that make up the script, which is based on two books—Richard Martin Stern’s The Tower and Thomas M. Scortia’s The Glass Inferno—that were sold to Hollywood studios. The plots were so similar that the two studios—20th Century-Fox and Warners—got together and jointly financed this one expensive (and highly profitable) movie. The picture asks us to believe that the tallest building in the world—a golden glass tower that’s a miracle of flimsiness, as it turns out—would have been set down in San Francisco, of all places. With William Holden, Susan Blakely, Robert Vaughn, Jennifer Jones, Fred Astaire, Robert Wagner, O. J. Simpson (he gets to rescue a pussycat), and Richard Chamberlain as a rat-fink electrical contractor—can you imagine him negotiating with the electricians’ local? Cinematography by Fred Koenekamp. (160 minutes.) color (See Reeling.)

 

Toys in the Attic (1963)—This Freudian Southern gothic is well done for what it is—one of those hyped-up unflinching movies in which a family that is “living a lie” suddenly finds its glass house crashing down. (“You never really loved me … . It was Jed, your own father, you really wanted … . Go on, say it.”) The main characters in James Poe’s adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play are an incestuous trio of two sisters (Geraldine Page and Wendy Hiller) and a dependent, weakling brother (Dean Martin, pitiably miscast). Page shows considerable brio, as she makes her transitions from fluttering Dixie charm to granitic cruelty; Hiller has the trembling-lip role. There’s no shortage of dramaturgy, such as a crucial overheard conversation. And Martin has to perceive the psychological truth of Page’s attachment to him, and walk out a man. Whatever made anyone think there’d be an audience for this? George Roy Hill directed. With Yvette Mimieux and Gene Tierney. United Artists. b & w

 

T. R. Baskin (1971)—Baroque in its stupidity. Candice Bergen, looking like a million dollars, as an alienated, friendless typist in Chicago. The movie feminizes alienation by turning it into whimsey. Herbert Ross directed, from a script by Peter Hyams, who also produced. With Peter Boyle, James Caan, and Marcia Rodd. Paramount. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Trade Winds (1939)—Hedy Lamarr was the rage in Hollywood the year this was made, and she had also just married Joan Bennett’s ex-husband. So Bennett, in a witchy, prankish mood, turned from blonde into sultry brunette, à la Lamarr—and had no trouble at all outacting her. This picture is made from glamour and jokes and scraps of old melodrama, and the trashy mixture is pretty lively, with Bennett on a ship, trying to escape a charge of murder, Fredric March as the detective whose job it is to take her back, and Ann Sothern on hand as a cynical, wisecracking blonde. The script was written by Dorothy Parker, Alan Campbell, and Frank R. Adams, and they supplied Sothern with some real zingers. Audiences liked her so much that there was a spin-off—she went on to star in the Maisie series. With Ralph Bellamy, Thomas Mitchell, and Sidney Blackmer. Directed by Tay Garnett, who seems to give it spurts of energy—he dozes in between; the cinematography is by Rudolph Mate. Produced by Walter Wanger; United Artists. b & w

 

Trading Places (1983)—Dan Aykroyd plays a snooty young blueblood who runs a Philadelphia brokerage house and Eddie Murphy plays a con man-beggar who disguises himself as a blind, legless Vietnam veteran. The two don’t exactly trade places; they’re traded, by a pair of heartless, rich old brothers (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche) who have made a heredity-versus-environment bet—something we’ve been spared in movies of the past few decades. John Landis directed this comedy in a mock-30s formal style; it’s eerily arch and static. But the picture has its big, chugging structure working for it; the whole apparatus picks up speed toward the end and comes to a rousing, slapstick finish, with the younger guys rich and the old skinflints punished. And the audience appears to enjoy the premeditated obviousness. With Denholm Elliott, who deserves better than his role as a butler; Jamie Lee Curtis, who deserves better than her role as a prostitute named Ophelia; and Paul Gleason and Kristin Holby. From a script by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod. Paramount. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Traffic (1971)—This time Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot is a car designer on his maundering way to an international automobile exposition in Amsterdam. As a comic figure, Tati had a nice spare bouyancy in Jour de fête and was poignantly quick and eccentric in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, but here his whimsical bumbling seems precious and fatuous. And as the director, he keeps the actors at a distance—an oddly depersonalizing technique for a movie that is commenting on modern depersonalization. Still, the color and design are pretty, and Tati’s style is in his purest form—evocative and bittersweet—in the sequence where two garage mechanics simulate walking on the moon. Released by Columbia; in English. (See Reeling.)

 

La Tragedia di un Uomo Ridicolo, see Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man

 

Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man La Tragedia di un Uomo Ridicolo (1981)—Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie about a left-wing terrorist kidnapping in Parma centers on the father (Ugo Tognazzi) who is required to give up everything he has worked for—a big cheese factory, a villa, and a yacht—to recover a son, who he suspects may be in on the plot. Tognazzi does his robust-life-force and peasant-cunning number. He does have more energy than anything else in the movie, but it’s the hollow kind of actor’s energy you want to get away from. The movie is logy—complex yet undramatic; there’s no urgency, no tension, and you sense that you’re not going to find out what’s going on, that it’s all metaphorical. Bertolucci’s vision is grayed-out here; there’s no feeling of discovery in the acting, no zest in the editing—it’s like an old man’s movie. Screenplay by Bertolucci. With Anouk Aimee, Laura Morante, Victor Cavallo, and Riki Tognazzi; cinematography by Carlo Di Palma. In Italian. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1935)—Made in pale picture-postcard colors (blue hills and green trees), this folk Western about the feud of the Tollivers and the Falins is awfully pokey and loaded with fake mythmaking, yet it has lovely, affecting qualities—some attributable to Henry Hathaway’s direction; more to Sylvia Sidney’s and Henry Fonda’s youth and talent; and some to Fuzzy Knight’s singing of “Twilight on the Trail.” Fred MacMurray plays the young mining engineer who comes into the Kentucky backwoods community and falls in love with Sylvia Sidney (so does the entire audience). The producer, Walter Wanger, provided a big cast, including Fred Stone, Beulah Bondi, Nigel Bruce, Alan Baxter, Robert Barrat, Spanky McFarland, and Richard Carle, for this first three-color-process outdoor movie. The screenplay by Grover Jones, Horace McCoy, and Harvey Thew was based on a novel by John Fox, Jr. Paramount.

 

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926)—Harry Langdon’s first full-length comedy. Not quite the picture that his second, The Strong Man, is, but the restrained slapstick is charming. In this one, he enters a footrace across the continent and gets caught in a chain gang and a cyclone before winning. Harry Edwards directed, with Frank Capra on the script. With Joan Crawford. Silent. b & w

 

Transatlantic Tunnel (1935)—Though actually a remake of a much better German sci-fi adventure film, this melodramatic English production, directed by Maurice Elvey, has some memorable and gripping sequences once it gets under way—which takes a while. The title tells the story: it’s about trying to drive a tunnel under the Atlantic, with all the floods and eruptions imaginable. Iron-jawed Richard Dix, one of the most appealing early screen stars, is the lead, with Madge Evans opposite him. b & w

 

Trapeze (1956)—Trapeze work is so graceful, so scary, and so marvellously photogenic that it has always been a source of regret that circus movies generally slight the high flyers and dwell on the seamy side (the sad-faced-clown-loves-the-beautiful-bareback-rider-who- loves-the-strong-man sort of thing). The script of Trapeze doesn’t have much distinction; the characters aren’t likely to be called deep, and their fates seem to be determined by theatrical convenience, but one is, nevertheless, caught up in the excitement. There’s vitality in Carol Reed’s direction, and an exuberant sweep in Robert Krasker’s camera work. Burt Lancaster and Gina Lollobrigida function as stars—they’re magnetic. And Tony Curtis shows the beginnings of acting skill (the later Sweet Smell of Success showed how much he could learn). While the film is going on, you’re too absorbed to consider how banal the story is; after it’s over, you’ve had too good a time to care. Filmed in large part at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. United Artists. CinemaScope, color

 

Trash (1970)—Absurdist porno-comedy about an impotent junkie (Joe Dallesandro) who drags himself around while various women try to arouse him. His sort-of-wife is played by a goofy female impersonator, Holly Woodlawn, whose intensity amidst the general dejection is crazily—and entertainingly—incongruous. The wife’s highest aspiration is to get on welfare, and to accomplish this she pretends to be pregnant, but the welfare investigator (Michael Sklar) wants the fabulous-40s shoes that the wife found in a garbage can, and she refuses to give them up. The picture is steeped in a sense of grotesque parody, though most of the time it’s as enervated and limp as its hero. The knocked-out couple do their put-on of marriage, and we are invited to laugh at their outcast status and their meaningless lives and to feel sorry for them. This Andy Warhol production was directed by Paul Morrissey, who lingers over needles going into flesh and puts a nimbus around the messiest head of hair. With Jane Forth, as the indolent housewife in the modern apartment that the hero tries to burglarize. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Travels with My Aunt (1972)—Maggie Smith gives a desperate, flustered performance as the disreputable Augusta, a woman in her 70s who induces her stuffy nephew (Alec McCowen) to accompany her on her travels. Whatever private joke Graham Greene was working out in the novel, the message here is “Live, live, live!” But the movie itself has no real zing; it seems to run down before it gets started, and just about everyone in it looks miscast. With Lou Gossett, Jr., Cindy Williams, Robert Stephens, and Robert Flemyng. Directed by George Cukor; written by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler; cinematography by Douglas Slocombe. M-G-M. color (See Reeling.)

 

La Traversée de Paris, see Four Bags Full

 

Travolti da un Insolito Destino nell’Azzuro Mare d’Agosto, see Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August

Tre Fratelli, see Three Brothers

 

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)—One of the strongest of all American movies. Three Americans stranded in Mexico dig for gold and strike it rich—and the writer-director, John Huston, “looks on,” as he says, and “lets them stew in their own juice.” Bogart is the paranoid tough guy, Fred C. Dobbs; Walter Huston is the toothless, shrewd old prospector; Tim Holt is a blunt, honest young man. With Alfonso Bedoya as a primitive bandit who makes one appreciate civilization, Robert Blake as a Mexican boy, and Bruce Bennett, and the director himself as the victim of Bogart’s cadging. From the B. Traven novel; Ted McCord was the cinematographer; Max Steiner wrote the terrible score. The first section (about 20 minutes), set in Tampico, with Bogart getting a haircut and fighting Barton MacLane in a bar, is so sure and lucid it’s as good as anything John Huston ever did—maybe even better than The Maltese Falcon. But there he sustained the hard, economic style; here, he doesn’t. And an episode involving the reading of a letter written by Bruce Bennett’s wife is so false and virtuous that it’s hard to believe that it’s in the same movie as those scenes in Tampico. The picture is emotionally memorable, though—it has a powerful cumulative effect; when it’s over you know you’ve seen something. (It was a box-office failure in 1948; apparently audiences resented Bogart’s departure from the immensely popular Casablanca stereotype.) Warners. b & w

 

The Trial (1962)—Orson Welles’ theatricality and bravado would seem to be especially unsuited to the matter-of-fact comic horror of the Kafka novel, but he manages some striking effects that aren’t at all jarring. This little-seen film has effective passages; it’s more than an honorable try, though the hollow sound (that is, of the English-language version) is sometimes off-putting. With Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Akim Tamiroff, Fernand Ledoux, Elsa Martinelli, Jess Hahn, Suzanne Flon, Madeleine Robinson, Michel Lonsdale, and Welles. Cinematography by Edmond Richard; the pin-screen animation of the prologue is by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Made in Europe. A French-Italian production. b & w

 

The Trial of Billy Jack (1974)—A maudlin sequel to the 1971 Billy Jack which for 2 hours and 50 minutes expands on the most melodramatic elements of the earlier film. Once again, Delores Taylor, who made both pictures with her husband, Tom Laughlin (he plays Billy Jack), is the founder of the Southwestern interracial Freedom School, built on Indian land, which is being harassed by crooked and bigoted townspeople. This time, the Laughlins give the director’s credit to their 19-year-old-son Frank, and from the look of this film he may actually have done it, though more likely he assisted his father. An orgy of victimization, the movie tosses together My Lai, Wounded Knee, Kent State, and battered children. The half-breed Billy Jack is also involved in Carlos Castaneda spin-offs; he turns red and blue, walks among serpents, is attacked by bats, and listens to doggerel wisdom supplied by Indian maiden guides. This big Pentecostal tub-thumping show brings together the worst of mass culture and the worst of the counterculture. Released by Warners. color (See Reeling.)

 

Trial of Joan of Arc Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962)—Terse, spare, and oddly perfunctory. Robert Bresson’s hour-long precis of the trial is based on the historical records but it’s directed as unemotionally as if Joan were a philosophy student taking an oral examination for which she’s overprepared. (She rattles off her answers.) The actors are not merely nonprofessionals, they’re also non-actors—this is by Bresson’s choice. Unexplained: why Bresson sticks to the trial testimony but then introduces melodramatic behind-the-scenes material. (Also unexplained: What’s the dog for?) With Florence Carrez; cinematography by L.-H. Burel. In French. b & w

 

Trick Baby (1973)—Mel Stewart as a black con artist who enjoys shearing the sheep, and Kiel Martin as his partner, the Trick Baby—the child of a black whore and her white trick. He can pass for white but chooses to be black. (Both blacks and whites should be able to enjoy the joke when a rich white woman, taking him for white, is astounded by his sexual prowess.) But, for the racial-switch-hitter premise of the picture to be effective, he needs to have some recognizable “soul,” which we in the audience can perceive, even if the whites in the movie are blind to it, and Kiel Martin, with his dimply, spoiled-baby face, doesn’t have it. Shot in Philadelphia, the film strikes some fresh sparks; Mel Stewart gives his role the black equivalent of old-world grace, and the first half is entertaining. Then, disappointingly, he’s killed, and the picture shifts from comedy to melodrama. The director, Larry Yust, has a good feel for street life, but he’s weak in his handling of the actresses, both black and white, who are unnecessarily degraded. From the novel by Iceberg Slim—Robert Beck, the black pimp turned writer. Universal. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Trip (1967)—Exploitation, late 60s style. Roger Corman takes his hero, Peter Fonda (playing a TV-commercials director who lives in Los Angeles), on an extended LSD trip, during which he is reborn. (He may not look any different to you.) Fonda’s hallucinations provide Corman with the chance to imitate several styles of filmmaking, and to introduce what appear to be brief clips from his own horror movies. With Dennis Hopper, Susan Strasberg, and Bruce Dern. Written by Jack Nicholson. A.I.P. color

 

The Trip to Bountiful (1985)—Geraldine Page gives a controlled, all-out performance as Carrie Watts, an old-age pensioner who wears seat-sprung housedresses and lives in a tiny apartment in Houston with her sad, defeated son and his shrill wife, who keeps picking on her. The movie—a weeper—is about Carrie’s longing to escape and return to Bountiful, the Gulf Coast town where she grew up; she runs away, gets on a bus headed in the right direction, and lives out her dream. Directed by Peter Masterson, from Horton Foote’s adaptation of his 1953 teleplay (Lillian Gish starred in it on TV and Broadway), it’s a “spiritual” picture—a tribute to the decency of the common people who endure by doing the best they can, and it has the glow that movies get when they’re about the need to have compassion. The camera is meant to be the mirror of Carrie’s soul, but we look in that mirror for so long that finally all we see is Geraldine Page acting. Foote can’t make poetry out of material as laundered and denatured as what he comes up with here. The movie is intended to be a hymn, but all he and Masterson can do is give some of the characters a limp, anesthetized grace. With John Heard as the son, Carlin Glynn as the daughter-in-law, Rebecca De Mornay as a soldier’s young wife, and Richard Bradford as a Texas sheriff. Cinematography by Fred Murphy. Academy Award for Best Actress (Page). Released by Island Pictures. color (See Hooked.)

 

Triple Echo (1972)—Grim (but absurd) pastoral tragedy—isolated Wiltshire farm in the 40s, ailing dog, lonely woman (Glenda Jackson), and an AWOL soldier (Brian Deacon). He becomes her lover and she protects him by dressing him as a woman and passing him off as her sister. The gimmick is he begins to dig it. Unfortunately the movie is not played for comedy; it’s lugubriously stark, except for Oliver Reed (gross, yet funny) as a no-neck bullying brute of a sergeant, who takes a fancy to sister. The soldier idiotically agrees to be Reed’s date for the Christmas ball at the barracks, and when Reed tries to deflower him, the tragedy winds up fast. Sister-soldier has used a shotgun to put the old dog out of its misery, so when he has been exposed and is being horribly beaten, the woman uses the shotgun on him. Everyone is put out of his misery but the audience. It’s a very weird picture; spiky-thin Glenda Jackson, who speaks as if she were biting on a bullet, is so masculine here that she gives it an extra dimension of sexual ambiguity. (When you see the shy soldier in frilly clothes and padded breasts, you wonder whom he’s imitating.) Michael Apted directed; from an H. E. Bates novel, adapted by Robin Chapman. Cinematography by John Coquillon. color (See Reeling.)

 

Trog (1970)—Joan Crawford plays Stella Dallas with an ape instead of a baby girl. Some actors will do anything to be in movies: she probably would have played the ape. An English horror film, directed by Freddie Francis, from a script by Aben Kandel. With Michael Gough and Bernard Kay. Released by Warners. color

 

The Trojan Women (1971)—The Euripides play is the greatest lament for the loss of freedom ever written; it is not just the first but the one great anti-war play, and, despite the makeshift style of the film, the material catches you by the throat, and by the most legitimate of all means—its simplicity and its intensity. Katharine Hepburn, always forthright, starts as a fine, tough Hecuba, plainspoken and direct; she’s splendid when she’s angry. (Later, she comes to seem pitiful and mummified.) A false nose gives Genevieve Bujold’s mad seeress Cassandra a classical look, and the actress plays with a bursting conviction; though the performance doesn’t fully come off, she makes a stunning try. As Andromache—as anything—Vanessa Redgrave never does the expected. Her Andromache is being freshly thought out as you watch—a dazed, pale-golden matron, unflirtatious, free from guile. A tiny half-sob gurgles from her throat. Redgrave gives the finest performance in the film, and the director, Michael Cacoyannis, demonstrates his love of the material and his right to film it, in casting her as Andromache, and not in the obvious role for her—Helen. Because it is Irene Papas as a demonic Helen of Troy who lifts the movie out of the women’s-college virtuous cultural ambiance that plagues stage productions. Helen is introduced prowling behind the slats of the stockade that protects her, and all you see are her brown-black eyes, as fiercely alive as a wolf’s. While the other women mourn their dead, Helen uses all her animal cunning to survive. This is a cast that one could never hope to see on the stage. Released by Cinerama. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Trollflöjten, see The Magic Flute

 

Tropic of Cancer (1970)—A trivial but entertaining sex comedy derived from the Henry Miller novel about expatriates in Paris. This series of vignettes and fantasies, with bits of Miller’s language rolling out, may be closer to Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Teas than to its source, but at least it isn’t fusty. It makes you laugh. With Rip Torn, and Ellen Burstyn, James Callahan, David Bauer, Magali Noel, and Ginette Leclerc. There’s a glimpse of Henry Miller standing in front of a church. Directed by Joseph Strick; written by Strick and Betty Botley. (The story is updated.) Released by Paramount. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Trouble in Mind (1985)—Written and directed by the gifted high-flyer Alan Rudolph at his most art-conscious, this is a reworking of what he did much better in Choose Me. The mixed-up lovers have been replaced by mixed-up gangsters, and what was comic and lyrical is now fatalistic. He’s got the film-noir bug, and the picture is a pile of poetic mush set in some doom-laden, vaguely universal city of the past and/or the future. (It was shot mostly in Seattle.) As Hawk, Kris Kristofferson is supposed to be the gallant Bogart hero living in an evil semi-fascist era. Joe Morton is a bitter, ironic crook called Solo who recites verses; Keith Carradine is a greedy young hood named Coop, who appears in a series of ever more gross and gooey pompadours—punk-fop styles, with matching cosmetic jobs and earrings; and the actor known as Divine plays Hilly Blue, an epicene gangster who’s made up to look like a plump plucked chicken. Geneviève Bujold is Hawk’s old flame Wanda, who runs the cafe where the gangsters plan their heists, and Lori Singer is Georgia, the country girl whom Coop brings into this moody stew. Rudolph probably aimed to create a glamorous, funky trance-world, but his control fails him; the scenes often start with a shimmer that makes you feel hopeful, but they become stagnant, and you have no way of knowing how to interpret the flossy hipster-philosopher babble that the characters speak. With John Considine (who’s rather funny), Antonia Dauphin, George Kirby, and, in a bit, Allan Nicholls. The lushly beautiful cinematography is by Toyomichi Kurita; the score is by Mark Isham, with songs performed by Marianne Faithfull. color (See Hooked.)

 

Trouble in Paradise (1932)—Perhaps the most shimmering of the romantic comedy collaborations of the director Ernst Lubitsch and the writer Samson Raphaelson, this film is a make-believe world of the 30s preserved intact. Herbert Marshall is so adept at the silky tricks written into his lines that he creates a hushed atmosphere. He plays a career jewel thief and, as his partner, Miriam Hopkins, quick and darting, always has her feelers out, along with her kittenish claws. These two are accomplished seducers, and in this movie witty seduction is indistinguishable from love itself. Kay Francis is the wealthy widow whose face takes on a yearning expression once she sees Marshall; desire makes her warm and languid. The movie is full of suave maneuvers and magical switcheroos; in its light-as-a-feather way, it’s perfection. With Charles Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig, Leonid Kinskey, Luis Alberni, Nella Walker, and Tyler Brooke as the singing Venetian garbageman. Remotely based on a Hungarian play by Aladar Laszlo. Paramount. b & w

 

The Truck Le Camion (1977)—Marguerite Duras’s control of film technique here suggests that she has become a master. But there’s a joker in her mastery: though her moods and cadences and her rhythmic phrasing, with its emotional undertow, might seem ideally suited to the medium, they don’t fulfill moviegoers’ expectations. There are only two people in this film: Duras herself and Gérard Depardieu, and they sit at a round table in a room in her home, and never leave it. Serene, half-smiling, she reads aloud the script of a film in which Depardieu would act the role of a truck driver who picks up a woman hitchhiker. The film alternates between sequences in the room and sequences of a rolling truck, seen always at a distance. Each time Duras cuts from the room to the truck, we’re drawn into the hypnotic flow of the road imagery—we half-dream our way into a “real” movie—and each time she pulls us back into the room we feel an emotional wrench, a rude awakening. Duras makes us aware of our mechanisms of response, and it’s tonic and funny to feel the tensions she provokes. Her picture has been thought out with such supple discrimination between the values of sound and image that you could almost say it’s perfectly made—an ornery, glimmering achievement. Cinematography by Bruno Nuytten. In French. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

True Believer (1989)—A nifty thriller—fast and tense—about a Manhattan lawyer (James Woods) who was a hero of the counterculture but is now defending drug dealers and getting paid in cash. When he’s goaded by his new law associate (Robert Downey, Jr.) into taking on a murder case, his eyes widen at the bare possibility that the man he’s defending might be innocent. The movie makes us share the lawyer’s energy and charge as he investigates the crime. He doesn’t want to sleep: he lives off the excitement of having a cause. It’s a pick-me-up of a movie. Nothing great, nothing terribly distinctive, but the aliveness of the texture can quicken your senses and keep you fascinated. Directed by Joseph Ruben (Dreamspace, The Stepfather), from a script by Wesley Strick. With Yuji Okumoto, Margaret Colin, Kurtwood Smith, Tom Bower, Luis Guzman, and Miguel Fernandes. The cinematography, by John W. Lindley, has a tabloid harshness, and the editing, by George Bowers, doesn’t let you feel you’re ahead of the story. (The interiors were shot in San Francisco and Oakland.) Columbia. color (See Movie Love.)

 

True Confession (1937)—It rarely turns up, though it’s one of the most affable of Carole Lombard’s screwball comedies. She plays an extravagant, compulsive liar—a young wife whose confession to a murder fools even her prim lawyer-husband (Fred MacMurray). John Barrymore, who had brought out Lombard’s slapstick talent in Twentieth Century, plays an eccentric, tippling criminologist and swipes the picture; “She’ll fry,” he chuckles to himself during her trial. The characters of the husband and wife are too simplified and their comic turns too forced, but the general giddiness and Barrymore keep the picture going. The director, Wesley Ruggles, was one of the original Keystone Cops; Claude Binyon adapted the play by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr; cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff. With Una Merkel, Edgar Kennedy, Lynne Overman, Porter Hall, and Fritz Feld. Paramount. b & w

 

True Confessions (1981)—The idea is to take the lovable Irish brothers of 30s movies—the cop and the priest—and turn them inside out. Robert Duvall plays an L.A. police detective who finds evidence linking his brother (Robert De Niro), a monsignor who is chancellor of the Los Angeles archdiocese, to corrupt business deals and, indirectly, to the murder of a hooker. Repelled by the hypocrisy, the detective brings his brother down. But the movie is in a stupor; everything is internalized. Duvall is locked in, and De Niro is in his chameleon trance—he seems flaccid, preoccupied. The director, Ulu Grosbard, dulls out the material, and the writers—John Gregory Dunne, who wrote the 1977 novel that the film is based on, and his wife, Joan Didion, who collaborated with him on the script—carry their hardboiled detective fiction to a virtually abstract level. You have to put up a struggle to get anything out of this picture. What we need to know—what the movie is supposed to be about—is what the brothers are mulling over on their silent, troubled walks alone and together (and still alone). With Kenneth McMillan, who gives the only performance with any juice in it, and Charles Durning, Ed Flanders, Burgess Meredith, Cyril Cusack, Rose Gregorio, Jeanette Nolan, and Louisa Moritz. Produced by Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, for United Artists. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

True Heart Susie (1919)—A lovely, simple pastoral romance—one of the most charming of all D. W. Griffith films. Close to perfection, on a small scale. Lillian Gish is Susie, Robert Harron is William, and Clarine Seymour is Bettina, William’s pleasure-loving bride, who sneaks out to a party and can’t get back into her house. Scott Fitzgerald must have seen this film before he wrote “Babylon Revisited.” Silent. b & w

 

True Stories (1986)—This first feature directed by David Byrne, of Talking Heads, is laid out like a musical-comedy documentary about a town, except that the town—Virgil, Texas—is imaginary. Byrne, the narrator and observer, introduces us to the townspeople, who are about to take part in the pageantry of the Texas Sesquicentennial with their own “Celebration of Specialness.” Byrne is looking for a true mythic image of America; Virgil is Our Town, it’s Anytown, U.S.A., and the movie is about banality and eccentricity and consumerism—it’s about the manners and mores of the shopping mall, where fashion shows are staged and miming contests are held to see who is best at lip-synching to records. In his polite, formal, and slightly ghostly matter-of-fact way, Byrne is trying for something large scale: a postmodern Nashville. Byrne sets up the material for satirical sequences, yet he doesn’t give it a subversive spin. His unacknowledged satire is like a souffle that was never meant to rise. But, working with the crack cinematographer Ed Lachman, Byrne shows a respect for pared-down plainness, and after a rather shaky opening the characters themselves begin to engage us—especially John Goodman as the big, friendly bachelor with a “Wife Wanted” sign on his lawn, who gets to sing the film’s anthem, “People Like Us.” Jo Harvey Allen is terrific as a crackpot liar, and Tito Larriva’s high-speed dancing has a comic dazzle. Singing “Papa Legba,” Roebuck (Pops) Staples has a juicy richness about him; when he’s onscreen a viewer can be completely happy. Also with Swoosie Kurtz, Spalding Gray, Annie McEnroe, and Alix Elias. The nine songs by Byrne are conceived as rock or country, Tex-Mex or gospel, depending on which character sings them. The Heads provide the instrumental work, and can be heard now and then on the words; it’s their voices that the lip-synchers weave and sway to. The script is by Byrne, Beth Henley, and Stephen Tobolowsky. An Edward R. Pressman Production, released by Warners. color (See Hooked.)

 

The Truth About Women (1957)—This English comedy was directed by Muriel Box, who also wrote it, with Sydney Box; it wobbles in both departments. You may long to sit back and look at many of your favorite actors and actresses, sumptuously costumed by Cecil Beaton, as they act out a series of anecdotes about ladies and love, but the picture is deadly. With Julie Harris, Diane Cilento, Mai Zetterling, Eva Gabor, Catherine Boyl, Jackie Lane, Elina Labourdette, and Ambrosine Philpotts (as the mother in Room at the Top she delivered a remark that she is peculiarly fitted to deliver: “Where do some of these people get their names?”), and Laurence Harvey, Christopher Lee, Roland Culver, Marius Goring, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Michael Denison, Derek Farr, Griffith Jones, and the irreplaceable Ernest Thesiger. It’s amazing that with all those talented people nothing happens on the screen. Cinematography by Otto Heller. color

 

Tudor Rose, see Nine Days a Queen

 

Tunes of Glory (1960)—An English film starring Alec Guinness and John Mills as two colonels in a peacetime Scottish regiment who are out to destroy each other. There are times when the two virtuoso performances are completely overpowered by the clumsy staging, but the acting and the unusual theme help to compensate for the muddy exposition and mediocre film techniques. It’s an ugly-looking movie, though. Ronald Neame directed, from James Kennaway’s script, based on his own novel. With Susannah York, Kay Walsh, Dennis Price, Gordon Jackson, Duncan Macrae, and John Fraser. color

 

The Turning Point (1977)—This is a 40s women’s picture (like Old Acquaintance, in which a noble Bette Davis and a catty Miriam Hopkins played scrapping lifelong friends) transferred to a backstage-ballet milieu, with Anne Bancroft as a gallant, aging ballerina and Shirley MacLaine as her friend and rival, who quit to raise a family. The script is by Arthur Laurents, who writes sodden expository dialogue in which these two are forever revealing truths to each other. We get a glimpse of something great in the movie—Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing—and these two harpies out of the soaps block the view. In his screen acting debut, Baryshnikov plays a Russian dancer with whom MacLaine’s young aspiring-ballerina daughter (Leslie Browne) falls in love; this swoony romance helped to make the film a box-office hit. Herbert Ross directed, unexcitingly; there’s no visual sweep, no lift. The effort here is to domesticate ballet—to remove the taint of European decadence; most of the characters are so heartland ordinary that they disinfect one’s imagination. With Tom Skerritt, Alexandra Danilova, Anthony Zerbe, Martha Scott, Lisa Lucas, Phillip Saunders, James Mitchell, Marshall Thompson, Daniel Le-vans, Starr Danias, and Suzanne Farrell, Peter Martins, Antoinette Sibley, Marcia Haydee, Richard Cragun, Lucette Aldous, Martine Van Hamel, and other dancers. Nora Kaye was the executive producer; Robert Surtees was the cinematographer. 20th Century-Fox. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Turtle Diary (1986)—Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley play the two Londoners who separately develop the fantasy of liberating the three giant turtles from the Aquarium at the London Zoo and taking them back to the sea. John Irvin directed this low-key, fastidious version of the 1975 Russell Hoban novel (a counterculture fable), from a script by Harold Pinter. It’s like a Brief Encounter between turtles; the two strangers come out of their shells a bit, but not with each other. Jackson and Kingsley give their lines an especially tight-lipped, staccato reading; these two are so private and tense and minimalist that it’s amusing to see how they vary their performances enough to keep going. They manage to give the middle of the movie—the weekend drive to the coast with the turtles—a balmy comic spirit of adventure. But the picture verges on the deliberately quaint, and the story has been given the same maudlin orchestration as in the novel; it’s full of sad and lonely people reaching out. The awful artfulness of this stuff! With Michael Gambon, Jeroen Krabbe, Harriet Walter, Richard Johnson, Rosemary Leach, Eleanor Bron, and Pinter, in a bit in a bookstore. Cinematography by Peter Hannan. Released by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. color (See Hooked.)

 

Tutto a Posto e Niente in Ordine, see All Screwed Up

 

Twelfth Night (1956)—The Russians sometimes bring an epic sweep to Shakespeare’s tragedies, but the comedies don’t fare too well. This attempt, in color, to capture the charm and delight of Shakespeare’s Illyria gets heavily frolicsome, and the whole crew of dukes, clowns, and countesses who are entangled in his folly of mistaken sex and identity look a little overweight. The picture isn’t terrible, just very literal-minded. Klara Luchko plays Viola-Cesario; Yakov Fried directed. In Russian.

 

Twelve Angry Men (1957)—This ingenious melodrama set in a jury room generates more suspense than most thrillers; the battle begins with the jury 11 to 1, and the spectator is keyed to watch for those points in the heat and frustration of argument when each juror will begin to seek the truth. Both Reginald Rose’s script (a reworking of his teleplay) and Sidney Lumet’s direction are so sure-fire that the movie has the crackle of a hit; it was, however, a commercial failure. The social psychology of the film is attuned to the educated audience. The hero, Henry Fonda, the 1 against the 11, is its hero—a liberal, fair-minded architect. And the victim is its dream victim: he is a slum product who never had a chance; he’s a member of some unspecified minority; and to clinch the case, his father didn’t love him. The 11 are a cunningly selected cross-section of humanity. With Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, E. G. Marshall, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam, Jack Klugman, Robert Webber, George Voskovec, Edward Binns, John Fiedler, and Joseph Sweeney. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. United Artists. b & w

 

The Twelve Chairs (1970)—Mel Brooks, who wrote and directed this comedy-fable, has given himself only a small role at the beginning, and the picture never quite recovers from the loss of him. The plot, which is about three men hunting for a fortune stuffed into one of 12 chairs, is set in prerevolutionary Russia. This gives Brooks an opportunity to show his affection for the innocent nuttiness of earlier periods—such as burlesque and the mad Russian accents of early radio—but, gifted as he is, he still doesn’t go beyond gag comedy. The exteriors, which were shot in Yugoslavia, have a sprightly, picturesque Grandma Moses atmosphere; the whole enterprise is a little forlorn, though. Not bad, really—just so-so. The three leads are Ron Moody, who has a great moment toward the end clutching a piece of chair; Dom DeLuise; and Frank Langella, who comes across as supercilious in the witlessly written role of the handsome juvenile. Based on the same Ilf and Petrov novel as the 1945 Fred Allen picture It’s in the Bag. Produced by Michael Hertzberg. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Twentieth Century (1934)—A first-rate hardboiled farce about theatrical personalities. John Barrymore was a great farceur, and his performance as the egomaniac producer Oscar Jaffe is a roaring caricature of theatrical drive and temperament. It was Carole Lombard’s performance as Jaffe’s protegée, Lily Garland (nee Mildred Plotka), who has become a movie star, that established her as a comedienne. Lombard’s talents here are not of the highest, but her spirits are, and in her skin-tight satins she incarnates the giddy glamour of 30s comedy. Most of the action takes place on the crack train of the title—the Twentieth Century, going from Chicago to New York—which represented the latest thing in speed and luxury. The script, by Hecht and MacArthur from their play (which was a reworking of Bruce Millholland’s play Napoleon of Broadway), is freely, carelessly irreverent, with affectionate, corny ethnic humor and wisecracks about religion. Howard Hawks directed in a fast, entertaining style—punching up the lines; it’s the style he later perfected in His Girl Friday (from Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page). With Ralph Forbes, and a batch of character actors whose faces were once as familiar to audiences as the faces with great names: Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Charles Levison, Etienne Girardot, Edgar Kennedy, Edward Gargan, and Herman Bing. (The material was recycled in the 1978 Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century.) Columbia. b & w

 

20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1933)—Spencer Tracy as a wise-guy hood, and Bette Davis as his vulnerable, sweet-tough moll. This Warners mixture of social reform, comedy, and sentimentality was very loosely based on a book by Warden Lewis E. Lawes; the plot creaks, but the director, Michael Curtiz, keeps things moving. The cast includes Lyle Talbot, Louis Calhern, Arthur Byron, and Warren Hymer as Hype. b & w

 

Twice in a Lifetime (1985)—This miracle of psychobanality presents the basic story of a long-married middle-aged man (Gene Hackman, as a Seattle steelworker) who experiences a renewal of vitality when he has an affair with a younger woman (Ann-Margret), but the story is now so dressed up in the language of self-help books that the man is a life-affirming force—and not only for himself but also for his wife of 30 years (Ellen Burstyn), whom he leaves. The movie could be every errant husband’s self-justifying fantasy. (And the way Burstyn overacts, a man would have to be a saint to have stayed with her so long.) Directed by Bud Yorkin, from a script by Colin Welland, the picture is like a sermon on the therapeutic value of adultery, divorce, and remarriage, given by a minister who learned all he knows from watching TV. As Hackman’s intensely angry daughter, Amy Madigan brings a spark of fierceness to her performance, and a comic flair. Also with Brian Dennehy, Ally Sheedy, Stephen Lang, and Darrell Larson. Bud Yorkin Productions. color (See Hooked.)

 

Twilight Zone—The Movie (1983)—Four young directors—John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and the Australian George Miller (who made The Road Warrior)—pay homage to the Rod Serling TV series “Twilight Zone.” It’s disappointing that they didn’t attempt to engineer more modern and artful macabre games than the ones on the old shows; what they’ve given us is an overproduced remake, but with some redeeming elements. The prologue, written and directed by John Landis, and featuring Dan Aykroyd as a hitchhiker and Albert Brooks as a driver, is a beauty, but the happy rush of fright we get from it has to sustain us for a long stretch, because the first two episodes are embarrassments. The first (by Landis) is a painfully blunt sermon on the evils of racism and prejudice, starring Vic Morrow, who, along with two Vietnamese-American children, was killed in a helicopter accident during the filming; it’s like an unconscious parody of the old shows, and its straightness is a deadweight on the viewer’s head. The second, a lump of ironclad whimsey directed by Spielberg, is about how a group of people in a home for the aged have their minds magically refreshed; it’s coy and twinkling, with gloppy rich music—it’s horribly slick. The third, directed by Joe Dante, is a risky attempt at using a style derived from animated cartoons for an insidious, expressionist effect; it has an insane atmosphere—it’s eccentric and unsettling, with startling good things in it. (Among them is the alert, graceful Kathleen Quinlan as a strong-willed schoolteacher.) The subject—how horrible life might be if a 10-year-old boy (Jeremy Licht) could run everything just as he liked, on the basis of what he has learned from TV—may be too fertile for the half-hour form. There are also too many different kinds of spookiness and parody buzzing around in the material. For those people in the audience whose childhood included a TV set that was always going, this half hour may reawaken all sorts of childhood feelings. But even for them it’s probably better when they think it over than when they’re watching it. The fourth episode, directed by Miller, from a script by Richard Matheson, is the best reason to see the movie; it’s a classic shocker of the short form. Almost all the action takes place in the confines of an airliner during a storm, where a passenger, played by John Lithgow, is seated, squirming and thrashing about, sick with fear. The whole episode is about this one passenger’s freaking out. Miller builds the kind of immediacy and intensity that the high points of Jaws had. The images rush at you; they’re fast and energizing. And Lithgow does something that’s tough for an actor to do: he shows fear without parodying it and yet makes it horrifyingly funny. With his white face all scrunched up, and anxiety burning out his brain, he takes us with him every step of the way, from simple fear to dementia to stupor. This episode is a comic orgy of terror. Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977)—A suspense melodrama, set in 1981, about a U.S. Air Force general (Burt Lancaster) who, because of his anti-Vietnam war attitudes, is framed on a murder charge and sent to prison. He breaks out, takes control of a nuclear-missile site, and threatens to send out nine missiles and start a nuclear war if the President (Charles Durning) and the Joint Chiefs don’t make public disclosure of the secret goals of the war. The action built up in the first hour has some urgency, but when the director, Robert Aldrich, gets to the serious message part—when the President and his advisers discuss the general’s demands—it falls apart, and drags on and on. The screenplay by Ronald M. Cohen and Edward Huebsch is a mixture of tacky cynicism and political naïveté—it suggests an overextended episode of a TV series, and the attempts at wit are pathetically gross. With Paul Winfield, Richard Widmark, Burt Young, Melvyn Douglas, Roscoe Lee Browne, Joseph Cotten, William Marshall, and Richard Jaeckel. Released by Allied Artists. color

 

Two Cents Worth of Hope Due Soldi di Speranza (1952)—Love laughs in the face of disaster in Renato Castellani’s neo-realist account of the abysmally poor on the slopes of Vesuvius. The hero comes back from army service to a series of frustrations—his sisters are hungry, his mother is a thieving busybody, he can’t hold a job, and his overenthusiastic tigress of a girl causes no end of trouble. He works as a chauffeur and as a sexton, he sells lemonade, he sells his blood. When he marries his girl they have literally nothing but 2⊄ worth of hope, yet it seems more than enough to live on . Castellani, who wrote the script with Titina de Filippo, is said to have been told the story by Vincenzo Mu-solino, who plays the hero, and most of the roles are played by nonprofessionals from the lice-ridden area that the movie was shot in. Surprisingly it has a picaresque charm—the lives here have gone past tragedy into black comedy. Some of the episodes, including one set in a shabby Naples movie theatre, have a believable everyday craziness about them. With Maria Fiore as the tigress. In Italian. b & w

 

Two Daughters Teen Kanya (1961)—Originally the film had three stories and was called Three Daughters. Satyajit Ray at his most splendid in two short-story films based on works by Rabindranath Tagore. The first, “The Postmaster”—a story of betrayal—is a pure and simple small masterpiece; the second, “The Conclusion,” has some memorable scenes, beauty, and wit but also has some defects of rhythm, so it is merely wonderful—and a little wearying. In Bengali. b & w

 

Two English Girls Les Deux Anglaises et le continent (1972)—François Truffaut tries for gaiety and gentleness and charm in this adaptation of the only other novel by Henri-Pierre Roche, the author of Jules and Jim, but everything is muffled, almost repressed. The story is about the messed-up lives of two English sisters who love the same man—a Frenchman (Jean-Pierre Leaud, badly miscast). The picture is uncomfortable and, when it’s over, unresolved yet emotionally affecting. A bewilderingly sad movie. With Kika Markham as Anne, the emerging independent bohemian, and Stacey Tendeter as Muriel, the rigidly—exhaustingly—high-principled virgin, and Philippe Leotard and Sylvia Marriott. Script by Truffaut and Jean Gruault; cinematography by Nestor Almendros; music by Georges Delerue (who appears as the Frenchman’s business agent). In French. color (See Reeling.)

 

Two for the Road (1967)—Other films by the director, Stanley Donen, are not so edgy. It’s the self-consciously witty English scriptwriter, Frederic Raphael, who set his brittle stamp on this story of a husband and wife—Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn—seen on European trips at different periods of their lives, not consecutively but shifting back and forth. The intention is to show a modern marriage in which ideal people, in love, and successful, are still not happy. Yet there’s always a swimming pool for the characters to take their pratfalls in. Raphael is too much in love with old-movie comedy romances: he puts in tedious running jokes, such as the wife’s forever turning up with the passport the husband loses. And at the same time the film is trying for a bitter comment on modern marital ennui, of the La Notte variety. The facile, comic bits set off audience expectations that are then betrayed, and the clever, bitter stuff just seems sour. Still, at times Hepburn is surpassingly beautiful—particularly at the end, when she’s meant to be roughly the age she actually is, and her hard, lacquered mini-face is set off by a shining-disk gown. As the husband, Finney seems surly and beefy and rather infantile—which makes Hepburn look all the more gallant and poignant when the wife tries to make the best of things. The caricatures of Americans, played by William Daniels and Eleanor Bron, which would be embarrassingly overdone at 50 yards, are in closeup. With Jacqueline Bisset, Claude Dauphin, and Nadia Gray. Cinematography by Christopher Challis. 20th Century-Fox. color

 

The Two Jakes (1990)—Directed by and starring Jack Nicholson, this sequel to Chinatown (1974) begins absorbingly, with hard-edged dialogue and muffled echoes of the earlier film. Nicholson’s Jake Gittes, the private detective specializing in divorce, takes on a client, Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel), a budding real-estate developer, and finds himself caught up in a murder case that somehow involves Katherine Mulwray, the daughter of Evelyn Mulwray, the Faye Dunaway character he loved in Chinatown. But when we’ve got the setup clear in our heads and expect the movie to rouse itself, to develop a present tense and get going, it remains airless and murky. It proceeds phlegmatically, bringing in more and more characters and complications, and losing us. We don’t get the film-noir thrill of mystery and resolution. By the time the plot comes together (more or less), we’re benumbed. As the director, Nicholson doesn’t give the characters any snap and he doesn’t build the scenes; it’s as if he were scratching his head each time the camera got turned on. As Gittes he wears a bitter half-smile and gives a groggy performance. It’s a spiritless movie, dark and mannered. There are good people in the cast—Meg Tilly, Madeleine Stowe, Ruben Blades, Frederic Forrest, Eli Wallach, David Keith, Joe Mantell, Richard Farnsworth—but they’re emotionally distanced from us, and they don’t seem to matter. The script (though not the narration) is mostly by Robert Towne; the cinematography is by Vilmos Zsigmond. Paramount. color

 

Two Men and a Wardrobe Dwaj Ludzie z Szafa (1958)—Roman Polanski’s 15-minute fable about nonconformity, made when he was still a student at the Lodz film school. At the start two men emerge from the sea with a wardrobe. It’s a huge wardrobe; it won’t fit in anywhere, and the men won’t relinquish it. They try to do the ordinary things that men do in a city—eat, travel about, find lodgings—and they are mistreated, kicked, and beaten. They carry their wardrobe back into the sea. This is the sort of screen comedy Kafka might have written. The feeling is both fantastic and logical, and the film is rounded—it’s complete, in a classic way. b & w

 

Two People (1973)—Peter Fonda and Lindsay Wagner are lovers who meet in Marrakesh and take the train to Casablanca. He’s an American who deserted in Vietnam and has finally decided to go home and serve his prison sentence; she’s a successful model. The picture is meant to be a sensitive modern romance and the director, Robert Wise, tries to simulate spontaneity and improvisation and a documentary surface. But it’s all dead smooth—impersonal, inexpressive, and without interest, except for the handsome travelogue footage of Morocco shot by Henri Decae. Though Fonda’s acting is well-controlled here, he doesn’t have a core of tension; something in him is still asleep and perhaps always will be—he’s the Richard Carlson or David Manners of the 70s. With Estelle Parsons, Frances Sternhagen, Geoffrey Horne, and Alan Fudge. From a painstaking, lethally bland script by Richard De Roy. Universal. color (See Reeling.)

 

Two Rode Together (1961)—A disorienting cynical, tragicomic Western by John Ford, in which the hero, played by James Stewart, is a mercenary sheriff. This sheriff and an Army officer (Richard Widmark) go off to rescue some white captives of the Comanches; the captives, it turns out, might be better off left where they are. From a script by Frank Nugent, based on Will Cook’s novel Comanche Captives, this reworking of some of the themes of The Searchers doesn’t engage the audience. With Shirley Jones, Linda Cristal, Anna Lee, Andy Devine, Jeanette Nolan, Woody Strode, and Ted Knight. Columbia. color

 

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—Stanley Kubrick’s slow, precise yet dreamy sci-fi epic. The ponderous, blurry appeal of the picture may be in its mystical vision of a graceful world of space, controlled by superior, godlike minds, where the hero (Keir Dullea) is reborn as an angelic baby. It says that man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise; something better (i.e., non-human) is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. Kubrick’s story line—which accounts for evolution by an extraterrestrial intelligence—is probably the most gloriously redundant plot of all time. The sulky, peevish voice of Hal, the computer—the only amusing character, he suggests a rejected homosexual lover—was supplied by Douglas Rain; the soft-spoken cast includes Gary Lockwood, Margaret Tyzack, and Leonard Rossiter. The script is by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke; the chief cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, with additional work by John Alcott. M-G-M. color

 

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962)—The producer, John Houseman; the director, Vincente Minnelli; the screenwriter, Charles Schnee; the composer, David Raksin; and the star, Kirk Douglas, had all worked together 10 years before on The Bad and the Beautiful, a flashy hit movie about Hollywood moviemaking. This time they give us an oversophisticated, overheated view of Hollywood has-beens gathered in Rome, trying to make a comeback. Gnashing his teeth and twitching, Kirk Douglas plays a self-destructive former star who cracked up and was institutionalized for three years; Cyd Charisse (spangled by Pierre Balmain) is his nymphomaniac ex-wife; Edward G. Robinson is the cynical famous director he used to work with—now the director is down on his luck, too. All the characters are seen at a time of extreme strain and extravagant disorder. They drive maniacally and do mean things to each other; they also take part in orgies designed to outdo La Dolce Vita. And at one point they run excerpts from The Bad and the Beautiful, which is discussed as a model of creative moviemaking; the scenes show Lana Turner having hysterics and her performance is described—with awe—as an example of great screen acting. Hysteria is predominant in Two Weeks, and it takes a peculiarly pictorial form—the stylized compositions, the sumptuous gorgeousness, the decorator delights run away with the movie. The dialogue has its own foolish swank: on a beach where, presumably, people speak the truth, the young “fresh” heroine (Daliah Lavi) asks Douglas what he was like when he was a star. “Lonely,” he answers. “So famous and alone?” she queries. He replies, “Everybody’s alone. Actors more so.” And she asks, “Why would anyone want to be an actor?” Douglas responds with a straight face, “That’s a good question. To hide from the world. What’s the audience doing there but hiding … trading their problems for mine on the screen.” And how do we know that this girl is really as sweet and sympathetic as she looks? When Douglas kisses her, she touches the scar on his face, thus demonstrating that it is the hurt man rather than the famous man that she cares about. In the circumstances, Douglas and Robinson do surprisingly good work. With George Hamilton as a sulky new star, and Claire Trevor, James Gregory, Rosanna Schiaffino, Erich von Stroheim, Jr., George Macready, and Leslie Uggams as a chanteuse. The picture was an almost total box-office failure. Adapted from the novel by Irwin Shaw. Cinematography by Milton Krasner. M-G-M. CinemaScope, color

 

Two Women La Ciociara (1960)—There isn’t much conviction in this movie. It’s a commercial, warmed-over Vittorio De Sica-Cesare Zavattini collaboration, but probably more people went to see it than ever went to see their finest films—Shoeshine, Miracle in Milan, or Umberto D.—or even their most famous one, The Bicycle Thief. The chief attraction here is Sophia Loren, deglamourized, playing an Anna Magnani role—a woman in wartime who can’t save herself or her daughter from rape. There’s nothing to mark the picture as a work by De Sica, except perhaps that this man so gifted at calling up great performances from nonprofessionals has worked his magic and almost made Loren appear to be a great professional. The film scholar Mira Liehm has suggested that “the film became what Bicycle Thief might have become if Cary Grant had played the role of the unemployed Roman worker.” The Nazis, the Russians, and the Moors all seem to be planted for the sake of the plot; Loren’s lusty affair with Raf Vallone is coy; the intellectual played by Jean-Paul Belmondo is a tired conception; and the daughter (Eleanora Brown) is written to be pale and standard. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia. Academy Award for Best Actress (Loren). In Italian. b & w