Wonderful Films You May Not Know
I Know Where I’m Going (1945) A pragmatic, independent, middle class Englishwoman travels to the Hebrides to marry a wealthy, much older industrialist. Successive days of terrible weather keep Joan away from the fictitious island on which her fiancé lives. Exploring, she encounters Torquil MacNeil, a local Naval officer whose leave was to be spent there. Despite the heroine’s stubborn assumption that she knows what she wants, they connect. Still, she tries to get away, unwittingly putting herself in great danger. A gentle, adult love story with a super ending.Wendy Hiller (the original film Eliza Doolittle) and Roger Livesey.
Arch of Triumph 1984 A British television film based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Directed by Waris Hussein. A find. Paris 1939. Having been tortured in a concentration camp for helping Jews escape, Ravic (Anthony Hopkins), an Austrian (listen to the accent) somehow made it to Paris (with a large facial scar). He has no passport, no papers, lives in a hotel with other refugees, and earns occasional money by illegally practicing surgery at a local hospital with a nonpartisan doctor grateful for his skill.
Ravic has two friends, Russian émigré, nightclub doorman Boris (Frank Finley), and a brothel owner, who also escaped. Otherwise, he keeps to himself. One night, he sees a distraught woman on a bridge about to commit suicide. Joan Madou (Lesley-Ann Down – best I’ve seen her) is exhausted and near hysterical. He buys the stranger a drink and takes her to his room with nothing but altruistic intentions. Ravic gets Joan a job (she’s a chanteuse) and eventually, reticently, lets her into his life.
Police finding him complicates things but not as much as his unfinished business with Gestapo Chief Haake (Donald Pleasance) who suddenly turns up in the city. Powerful and gritty. Ravic’s a wonderful character. All the acting is superior, especially Hopkins’. Unfortunately, the print is very dark. Rent on Amazon Prime.
The Ten Year Lunch 1987 Produced and Directed by Aviva Slesin. Terrific! If you have any interest at all, watch this one. Narrated by Heywood Hale Broun whose father, Heywood Broun, was a member; with talking heads Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, Mark Connelly and Margolo Gilmore, who calls these her “laughing years.” (Only working women were allowed.) Marvelous quotes, period cartoons, photos and film footage.
At the top of the decade after WWI, Alexander Wolcott, who became the drama critic of The New York Times, boasted of his war escapades with such pomposity, friends grew weary. Press agent Murdoch Pemberton lured Wolcott to a table peopled by his young peers intending a full out roast. It backfired. Everyone had a great time with daily lunches following. Some of those who became illustrious were Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Harpo Marx, Harold Ross (Founder of The New Yorker), and Marc Connelly who said, “We all admired each other, shared an irreverent view of life and an appreciation of malice.”
Many in the group segued from the Times or Vanity Fair to Life (then a humor magazine) and/or The New Yorker. (Afterwards, there was a partial migration to Hollywood.) When challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence, Parker retorted “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” Benchley failed a Harvard Law exam about fishing rights by answering from the point of view of the fish. The film follows members at and outside the iconic hotel over ten years of personal and social change. Fun! YouTube or OpenCulture.com (free).
Bee Season 2005 An adaptation of the novel by Myla Goldberg. Directed by Scott McGehee/David Siegel. Saul Naumann (Richard Gere) is a Religious Studies professor at UC Berkeley who struggles to get closer to God. To the best of his abilities, he immerses himself in tikkunolam or “repairing the world” and “reuniting its shards.” Wife Miriam (Juliette Binoche) converted when they married. Son Aaron (Max Minghella) is being raised in a faith to which he doesn’t relate. It’s young daughter Eliza (Flora Cross – terrific), who has natural Kabbalistic talent, something the family discovers as she wins spelling bees by actually seeing the words form.
Saul’s preoccupation becomes obsession. With training, Eliza goes somewhere he can’t. Saul neglects both Miriam, who retreats into a secret life created by childhood trauma, and Aaron who’s searching for faith in his own fashion. The family unravels, and then…Excellent. Rent on Amazon Prime.
Dean Spanley 2009 Based on Allan Sharp’s adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella My Talks with Dean Spanley. Directed by Toa Fraser. Original fantasy delivered by excellent actors. Edwardian England. Despite separate households and adulthood, Henslowe Fisk (Colin Firth) lives somewhat under the thumb of his difficult father, Horatio Fisk (Peter O’Toole), whom he dutifully visits once a week.
One day, in hopes of diversion, Junior takes his father to a lecture about transmigration of souls by Swami Nala Prash (Art Malik). There they meet local clergyman Dean Spanley (Sam Neill), clearly a believer. Henslowe is intrigued. He secures an apparently mind altering liquor the clergyman craves, and with promised help from his open minded friend Wrather (Bryan Brown), Henslowe gives a small dinner party at Horatio’s home in hopes of letting the genie out of the literal bottle. What ensues is unexpected and marvelous. A very different take on the theme. Rent on Amazon Prime.
White Lies 2016. Based on Medicine Woman, a novel by Whale Rider writer Witi Ihimaera. Directed by Dana Rotberg. An intense drama about identity; secrets, acceptance, expectation. On a trip to the city, rural Medicine woman Paraiti (Whirimako Black) is approached by Maraea (Rachel House), the servant of beautiful, wealthy Rebecca (Antonia Prebble), who desperately needs an abortion before her husband returns. The incipient baby is not Rebecca’s deep secret however, the one that could destroy her life. Despite objection by Marea, Paraiti deals with both problems in the old ways. Fascinating and unnerving. Rent on Amazon Prime.
Maudie 2017 A biographical drama about outsider artist Maude Lewis. Directed by Aisling Walsh. 1930s. Maud Downey (cinematic treasure Sally Hawkins) lives in Nova Scotia with her aunt and brother. She has crippling arthritis, equally crippling shyness and carries the grief of having lost a child seeded in rape. Told her brother has inherited and sold her family house out from under her, she answers an ad for a cleaning lady placed by gruff fish peddler Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke – first rate). Maud agrees to room and board, but the shack is so tiny, the two have to share a bed.
Everett is monosyllabic and demanding. With no recourse, Maud makes the best of everything. To cheer up the shack, she begins painting shelves, then walls with flowers, birds, animals. The art is untrained and charming. When every surface is covered, she uses pieces of discarded wood and paper. One of Everett’s customers from New York buys a painting. Word gets out. The couple marry, her health degenerates. They never move from the shack.
In real life, Lewis had a very small house, at 10 ft × 12 ft. Walsh wanted to be accurate in creating a replica, but the structure had to be enlarged to accommodate a film crew. Hawkins, a hobbyist painter, tried to duplicate Maud’s style. Poignant and oddly uplifting. Rent on Amazon Prime.
Be Natural -The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché 2019 Documentary about the first, largely unknown woman filmmaker. Directed by Pamela Green. A revelation. Chilean born, Paris raised Alice Guy was present at first showings of newly invented moving pictures by the Lumiere Brothers. Then a secretary at Gaumont, she was allowed to make films as long as she didn’t neglect the mail (a diary entry). Hers are among the first narrative short features ever made. Alice used close-ups, hand-tinted color, special effects, and synchronized sound. She produced, directed and wrote. Success promoted her out of the office and into a studio.
Newly married to Herbert Blaché, Alice moved to the United States. After an unsuccessful venture in Queens she founded Solax Studios in Ft. Lee, New Jersey, where all the pre-Hollywood studios began. When the Depression took it down, she found work at other companies. There’s footage of the period, archival excerpts of interviews with the elderly Alice and later her progeny, segments of her highly sophisticated films with stories relevant today.
A wide variety of talking heads from the film business, 98% of whom had never heard of her, make this effort valuable and riveting. (Filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock refer to her work as inspirational in their memoirs.) There are vast misattributions in written histories even today. This endeavors to correct. How she managed to make her way in the business (and out), professional opinions upon viewing the work, and a view to her well earned legacy compel. Rent on Amazon Prime.
Top photo: Bigstock
