This charming and evocative period piece about Greenwich Village in the 40s is also a subtle cautionary tale for writers against the danger of losing all your work in talk. The delicate and wryly witty screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, perhaps best known for his work with Steven Soderbergh, tells the true story of shy southern New Yorker editor Joseph Mitchell (Stanley Tucci, who also directed) discovering and profiling the legendary Joe Gould (Ian Holm in a career-defining performance). Gould, a homeless bohemian and raging lunatickind of a Mr. Natural before the factprofesses to be writing something called The Oral History of Our Time, but it never quite materializes. The fact that Mitchell himself retreated into silence after writing a second Gould profile in the 60s suggests either that Gould’s dissipation had a snowball effect or that Mitchell became Gould’s doppelganger. Either way, this is a movie to savor, not one to scarf. 104 min. (JR) Read more
Two of the earliest surviving works by F.W. Murnau, one of the giants of 1920s cinema, both presented in beautiful restorations carried out by Enno Patalas, former director of the Munich Film Archive. Journey Into Night (1920) is Murnau’s sixth feature but the earliest to survive; I’ve seen this melodrama only in incomplete form, but even in that condition it prefigures Nosferatu (1922) in many ways. Phantom is more interesting; made the same year as Nosferatu, it’s like an anthology of tropes illustrating the tradition of the German romantic novel. One insanely irrational and beautiful image, of a motorcyclist spinning over the heads of characters in a nightclub, anticipates the complex rendering of mental states in Murnau’s Sunrise. (JR) Read more
The Munich Film Archive’s invaluable restoration of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1923), the first and probably the greatest of all vampire films, which at around 95 minutes is a good ten minutes longer than previous versions. Henrik Galeen scripted this unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the film shows Murnau’s uncanny mixture of expressionism and location shooting at its finest. (JR) Read more
Part of Elvis Presley’s comeuppance for his fame was having to make films like this 1965 musical, in which he chaperones a mobster’s daughter (Shelley Fabares) in Fort Lauderdale. (If only the Colonel had allowed him and Sammy Davis Jr. to costar in The Defiant Ones, history might have been different.) Boris Sagal directed, and the secondary cast includes Paramount standby Harold J. Stone, Gary Crosby, and Jackie Coogan. (JR) Read more
