Reviews

Blithe Spirit is a delightful play which has held up better than some others in the Noel Coward canon, so it isn't surprising that of the four somewhat shortened versions of Coward plays presented on British tv in August 1964 it is the most successful.

The play, which deals with an eccentric medium bringing back the late wife of a now remarried husband,was written during WWII,a period in which US film critic Parker Tyler detected a similar interest in Hollywood movies of the time in fantasies about spirits and the after life.

The scene stealer is Carry On veteran Hattie Jacques,who seems aware she is following in the footsteps of the great Margaret Rutherford from the film version,but invests her Madame Arcati with playful slapstick and some roustabout folderol that seem all her own.

Any man who has occasionally felt the presence of an overly smothering woman nearby to be a nuisance will have to smile at the satisfying conclusion.

The writer of the plot summary has it wrong. It is not the elderly mother but the troubled son,who has returned from Paris ,who has a drug habit (cocaine) in this play , the inclusion of which plot point narrowly escaped censorship for the mid 1920s stage premiere.

The somewhat shortened TV adaptation is a curiosity. It is part of a month of Noel Coward presentations,each introduced with retrospective comments from the playwright, on British tv in August 1964.

The actress who plays the mother,Margaret Johnston ,overacts badly but the other cast members aren't bad. The production values are limited. The best of the four plays shown in this series (all directed by Joan Kemp -Welch) is Blithe Spirit which avoids the heavy handed moralizing that The Vortex exudes today.

Aux Petits Bonheurs (Life's Little Treasures) is one of a number of interesting films made by Michel Deville,who left us in February of 2023,that never got a US release Deville was sometimes drawn to ensemble stories like this one written by his wife which focuses on the first four days of a group of mostly aging wonen and men who share a country house during spring vacation time The four episodes are centered on each of the women ,the most interesting of whom is Helene, played by the striking actress Anemone. In the first episode we share her curiosity as an observer ,arriving alone,at who the other people are and what they are up to The film benefits from Deville,s fluid camera style and nice sense of how to block the different players in a scene,as well as the other performers such as Nicole Garcia ,Hanna Schygulla ,Andre Dusollier and Xavier Beauvois The Canadian video I watched makes the misleading comparison with The Big Chill and The Decline of the American Empire. What those two and others like it such as Return of the Secaucus Seven had that this one lacks is any sense of a politics that the group or some of its members have been involved with It is merely a pleasant and occasionally deeper look at a romantic roundelay among some still open and searching characters.

Monkey Trial follows the standard American Experience format with clips presented in straightforward order and a dozen or more talking heads, but to its credit it presents more of the complications in a story which was somewhat over simplified by the play Inherit The Wind and a subsequent Hollywood adaptation by the heavy handed Stanley Kramer.

Because the Scopes trial of 1925 (not 1920 as a previous reviewer said) was the first such event covered by visual recordings,the use of film clips, even though silent ones,adds something to the presentation.

William Jennings Bryan, as a populist who had legitimate concerns about how Darwinism could be misapplied to justify neglect of the poor by the rich , eugenics ,and militarism rather than peace ,is given a more sympathetic hearing .And two locals, one of whom was a little girl attending the trial ,give some balance to what is sometimes portrayed condescendingly as a bunch of ignorant Tennessee rubes.

This 2003 portrait of Gerard Philipe manages, within its limited 50 minute length, to give a good idea of why he was so beloved by the French ,between the post WWII years and his untimely death in 1959.

Instead of talking heads or that many clips (a number of his famous films are indicated simply by stills or posters ) the documentary uses extensive archival material ,including family home movies and rare sound and image preservation of his theater roles ,which included Corneille ,Kleist , Giraudoux,and a production of Musset staged by his frequent film director Rene Clair.

For readers of this review who are mostly familiar with Philipe from the movies,the most eye opening aspect of this program is about how he helped promote the Theatre Nationale Populaire in collaboration with Jean Vilar-a series of outdoor plays at an Avignon Festival in 1951 that expanded into a touring company all over France and even abroad including several Iron Curtain countries In the latter regard , the actor's increasingly progressive politics as influenced by his wife Anne are touched upon.

Let us leave this writeup not by dwelling on the unkind disdain someone like critic Francois Truffaut felt for Philipe but by just saying he was a remarkable young man.

A Bruddah's Mind, as it is known in English ,is an intriguing look,for American viewers (I saw it at the 2022 North Carolina Latin American Film Festival ) at wayward high school youth that only superficially resembles such stories we are used to seeing here,of juvenile delinquents acting up in class and staging a rebellion against a stifling educational system.

The political context here is instead a bureaucratic Brazilian system where the students (mostly dark skinned ) are mistreated and oppressed by mostly white teachers and administrators. The cause for the rebellion specifically is a student activist who is blamed by his teacher and by the principal ,when it is actually him who's being picked on by other students.

The situation escalates after the victim refuses to leave the premises and the others now rally to his defense.

Much is made ,also interesting for an American viewers ,of the inspiration of the Black Panthers of the 1960s ,whom the student reads about in a book loaned him by one of the few sympathetic and understanding teachers ,a woman.

For first time director Deo Cardoso this is a promising debut.

I watched this film which had been shown on the US cable channel TV 5 as a tribute to the lovely actress Micheline Presle who turned 100 in 2022.

She has a good role as a long time floral shop proprietor in a tight little urban "quartier" where people seem to have known each other for years Tensions develop when a biographer (well played by Francis Huster) uncovers clues about the denunciations people made in the early 1940s that resulted in Jews being sent to death camps.

When he wants to follow up on his leads the current political administration gives him a hard time. And the neighborhood doesn't want to talk about what happened back then.

Will he find an explanation for why someone like the flower lady behaved the way she did? Does the story try to excuse her for it?

The gripping story is from a novel by the acclaimed Pierre Assouline, himself a biographer.

I largely concur with Italian Gerry's previously posted user review except for me the standout sequence in this uneven series of sketches is the last one involving the two rival prostitutes.

It is the only one that takes place at night and DP Mario Bava, later to gain fame as a horror director, shows his penchant for visual texture here more than in the daylight episodes.

There is also a complex character study in the portrait of the two women who are at first irate with each other about competing for clients ,then bond together to help each other escape from rather determined police , finally land up at different parts of a beauty contest (one as a judge the other as a contestant) which puts them in an interesting position.

"Beauty Contest" is the gem that made acquiring the film worthwhile for me.