Burl reviews Fallen Leaves! (2023)

 

Ha ha and hello again everybody! I sure am sorry I’ve been such a no-show lately – I’m working on a book, and that always eats into my movie reviewing time and energy! I’ve still been watching plenty of movies though, many of them great candidates for review! There’s a bit of a backlog and I’m not sure I’ll ever get to them, so for now I’ll just review a picture I saw with friends and family the other afternoon at the local arthouse! It was a fine outing, the more so because the movie was the latest Aki Kaurismäki picture, Fallen Leaves!

Ha ha, as a person of mostly Nordic blood, I’ve always enjoyed deadpan Scandinavian movies, and I’ll say right off the hop that this one was a real delight! I used to watch Kaurismäki joints with my pal Pellonpäa, who is so nicknamed because of his undying love for the great bohemian and excellent actor Matti Pellonpäa! Unfortunately Pellonpäa (the real one, not my friend) died a long time ago, so he couldn’t be in Fallen Leaves! But we sure enjoyed him way back when in the Leningrad Cowboy movies and Night on Earth, and best of all in La vie de bohème, in which he played the role he was born for: a bohemian! After all, in real life he had no home – he lived in a car and a big booth at his favourite Helsinki bar, and that’s a pretty boho situation right there!

So there’s no Pellonpäa in Fallen Leaves, but there are some pretty acceptable substitutes! Our story revolves around two lonely, quiet, early-middle aged people in Helsinki! Ha ha, they’re taciturn in the great Finnish tradition, and because this is part of a series of Kaurismäki pictures set amongst the proletariat, they work a series of menial service or industrial jobs from which they keep getting fired or otherwise becoming unemployed!

We meet Ansa, who looks uncannily like my friend Mary and is played by Alma Pöysti, as she toils in a bleak supermarket under the close and creepy gaze of a monstrous security guard! She lives in a lonely apartment and whenever she turns on the radio it plays dire news of the war in Ukraine! And across the city is lank-haired, ghost-moustached Raunio, who drinks a lot, lives in a shipping container with four other dudes, works some kind of compressor-based job while wearing a thick boiler suit, and is played by Martti Suosalo!

These two lonely folkünn first spy one another at a charming karaoke night, where the show is stolen by Raunio’s buddy Huotari! There are some further mutual (or not mutual) sightings, and then finally they go on a date to see a movie: none other than the Jim Jarmusch zombie feature The Dead Don’t Die! Ha ha! This occasions a few funny cinéaste gags in which the movie is compared to a Bresson film and also to Godard’s Bande à part!

But (in a plot mechanism that rings a little false, I must say), the two never get around to telling each other their names, so when Raunio immediately loses Ansa’s phone number he’s unable to find her, and true love must wait! Then when they reconnect it must wait again thanks to Raunio’s devotion to the demon alcohol! And at the last, once the bottom has been reached and rebounded from, and it looks like the two will finally get together, fate intervenes yet again in a slightly unlikely cliché that is depicted in perhaps the laziest, most clichéd and most rote way possible!

But ha ha that’s completely forgivable, because Kaurismäki’s hand is so steady on the wheel that we know it must all be by careful design! The same goes for the cute dog which is introduced in the final act of the film – there’s nothing lazier than tossing in a cute dog to win the hearts of the audience, but here we don’t care because the dog underplays his part in just the same stoic manner as the rest of the cast, and is genuinely charming and hilarious as a result!

There are other on-screen charmers too – ha ha, I thought Huotari, the buddy, was a heck of a fellow, and he reminded me of some real-life people I know! Ansa has a nice friend too! The picture was shot on real celluloid film, so it looks very nice, and, typically of Kaurismäki, thanks to the locations, sets, props and costumes, it seems as though it could be taking place any time between the 1950s and now; although of course there are such modern touches as cell phones, karaoke, and the war in Ukraine, so we know it’s set in the now!

It’s a feel-good sort of movie without any of the laboured heart-tugging that phrase usually bespeaks! It’s slight, but it’s simple in the best ways, and as a date picture you could do much, much, much worse! I say that if you get a chance to see it in a little arthouse cinema like I did, take that chance! I give Fallen Leaves three and a half expired sandwiches, and will try to be a bit better with my movie reviewing in the future! But if I’m slow with it, at least you know why! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Thunderbolt and Lightfoot! (1974)

 

Wacka-doo, snakecharmers, it’s Burl, here to review a picture I’ve long wanted to see but somehow never got around to until now! It’s a Malpaso picture from the 1970s, and you know what that means: Clint! And most of those movies, whether Eastwood directed them or not, have that Malpaso feeling: you watch them and just know that each take is the first or at most the second, and that whether it was directed by Don Siegel, who was Clint’s directing mentor, or James Fargo, whom Clint mentored in turn, or by Clint himself, in each case the same philosophies and work methods were employed! So there’s a sameness to these films, which isn’t unwelcome – in fact it’s comforting! Nevertheless, when you see one that’s clearly operating on its own principals, it’s pretty refreshing, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is just such a film!

Of course we know Eastwood from such pictures as Blood Work and Tarantula, and here he plays a laconic vault cracker-turned-fake-priest known as Thunderbolt, and we meet him at the pulpit just as an angry George Kennedy from Creepshow 2 and Earthquake arrives at the church and tries to shoot him dead! In his frantic escape he hooks up with a young Jeff Bridges, not yet of Starman and King Kong fame, who has just stolen a roadster from a used-car salesman played by none other than Gregory Walcott from Plan 9 from Outer Space! Bridges, of course, is Lightfoot, and soon this pair of sillynames are bombing around picturesque Montana, being buddies and, in their masculine, mid-70s manner, falling in love!

Their first adventure together involves catching a ride from a completely insane driver played by Bill McKinney from Cannonball! Ha ha, this demento keeps a caged badger in the front seat and tears it up on and off the road, and after he’s barrel-rolled the auto it turns out he’s got a trunk full of live bunny rabbits, which he starts blasting at with a shotgun! Soon we get a taste of George Kennedy again, and it turns out that Kennedy is playing Red, an old partner of Thunderbolt’s who believes the craggy longuebönes to have stolen some ill-gotten loot! Red and his confrere Goody, played by Eastwood buddy Geoffrey Lewis, whom we’ll recall from Smile and ‘Salem’s Lot, first do some fisticuffs with and then enter into a foursquare partnership with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in order to once again take out the vault Thunderbolt et al. had robbed the previous time!

So the gang is assembled and the plan is made, but first they all have to get jobs to buy the equipment they need to do the heist! Ha ha, we get all sorts of amusing vignettes featuring famous faces like Gary Busey from Silver Bullet, looking young and handsome; Burton Gilliam from Fletch, playing the sort of grinning good old boy he made his stock-in-trade; Dub Taylor from Creature from Black Lake just being Dub; and Luanne Roberts from Simon, King of the Witches as a stark naked housewife! Lightfoot has an encounter with a motorcycle rider who’s handy with a hammer, played by Karen Lamm from Ants!; and before the heist can be pulled off, the fellow monitoring the security alarms must be taken care of by a drag Lightfoot, and the security fellow turns out to be a chubby, girlie magazine-reading individual played by Cliff Emmich, who played another chubby security officer who gets hit on the head later on in Halloween II!

The picture dwells less on the robbery details than most heist pictures do – perhaps because it’s not centrally a heist story but is organized more around buddy themes! Still, there is the unique aspect that the vault is broken into by means of a 20mm cannon, ha ha, and the use of this tool is what earned Thunderbolt his name! And then of course after the heist it all goes pear-shaped, and the tensions within the group are expressed physically (and boy-arr-dee, how great an actor is George Kennedy!), and we come to realize that a line delivered earlier in the picture (“Ate ‘im?”) was a case of Dramatic Foreshadowing!

Now, this is the first picture from Mr. Michael Cimino, who vaulted into the prestige picture business with his follow-up, The Deer Hunter! This one isn’t a prestige picture though – it’s a genre film with a higher-toned style and an almost defiant insistence on theme and subtext! The idea of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as unconsummated lovers is not very subtle (although I’m not sure Clint was cognizant of it, Bridges was, definitely), and what it really is, once you factor in the other couple, Red and Goody, is a study in how well an all-male machine, each component having a few teeth missing from their gears, can operate; and the answer is, ha ha, not very well! I found the movie a splendid entertainment, wonderfully photographed and impeccably cast: an unsung gem of the 70s! I give Thunderbolt and Lightfoot three broken cigars!

Burl reviews Cockfighter! (1974)

 

Buck buck b’kaw, it’s Burl, here to review a movie at which many would cry fowl! Ha ha, you know, old Burl is an animal lover, so I find it hard to get behind a movie that depicts – indeed, has caused – harm to any creature! I actually think Cannibal Holocaust is a pretty effective movie, but that tortoise-killing scene really sours it for me! (To be honest, some of the other gnarly stuff in there does too!) I’ve praised many an old Western film, but when they start tripping horses I spend the rest of the movie thinking about how mean that is! And then comes along a movie whose story, theme, very essence, and even title, involves heavy doses of terrible animal cruelty: Cockfighter!

What to make of it? I’d seen it before but watched it again the other day, because someone I know is writing a book about the movie! Ha ha, I’m raring to read it! And I’ll tell you what, I also met the director of this picture, Monte Hellman, when I stayed at his house in the Hollywood Hills, where he hosted an Air B‘n’B! He was a nice fellow and we chatted quite a bit about movies and such! The third outside factor which might somehow affect how I think about this movie is that once, for moviemaking reasons too complicated to get into, I had to keep a rooster overnight in my apartment! I built a big cage for the thing, put it in my living room, and then of course the bird went off at four-thirty in the morning, cock-a-doodle-dooing away and waking up all the people in my building; and only playing the song “Bali H’ai” from South Pacific could get it to shut up! Ha ha, the incident didn’t endear me to roosters, I’ll say that!

So: Cockfighter! It’s the story of Frank Mansfield, played by Warren Oates from Blue Thunder and Race with the Devil, a down-South fighting-cock trainer who has taken a vow of silence after letting his own foolish words cause him to lose out on a chance to be Cockfighter of the Year! Only once he wins that medal does he plan to speak again, and so far, we gather, it’s been a couple of years since he first clammed up! (Ha ha, we get to witness his pre-vow chattiness in a flashback, and he’s so obnoxious that I was quite happy to have him spend most of the movie with zipped lips!)

Frank travels around with his birds and a gal named Dody, who has only ever heard Frank talk in his sleep, when he blusters and yells and threatens to kick people across the room! Dody is one of a very few performances from Laurie Bird, who was also in Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop and later in Annie Hall, and that’s it! Frank loses yet another bet to his frenemy Jack Burke, played by the great Harry Dean Stanton from Christine and Repo Man, and Jack walks away with Frank’s money, car, camper trailer, and girlfriend! This is where we get a sense of how much Frank values human relationships, in particular with women, which is to say not very much! We also see how he treats his brother (played unexpectedly by matinee idol Troy Donahue, known from Grandview U.S.A. and Deadly Prey) and sister-in-law: Frank arrives at the family home, stays the night, and the next day steals the house (which technically he owns) right out from under them and has it shipped off down the road on a truck!  

But Frank does have at least one true pal in Omar, essayed by Richard B. Shull from Klute and Spring Break! Ha ha, Omar is a mighty appealing character, or at least as appealing as someone who engages in a pointless blood sport can be! Frank hangs out with Omar and with Buford, another affable fellow, here played by James Earl Jones’s dad Robert Earl Jones, whom we may recall from Trading Places! Much of the middle act of the picture involves Frank hanging out with these two, or episodes in which he encounters such characters as a gangly overall-clad goofbuster played by Ed Begley Jr. from Get Crazy, or Steve Railsback from Lifeforce, playing a cocky cockfighter with a loosey-goosey pointin’ finger who likes to give his birds a little bit of digital persuasion!

I’ve not talked much about the cockfights themselves, which are frequent and often bloody! They’re faked to an extent – the sharp spurs are mostly not actually made of metal – but there’s only so much you can fake these things really, and there are times when the cocks are clearly killing each other! It’s pretty grotesque, but also a powerful dramatic device! Through the course of the picture, in spite of or maybe because of Frank’s silence, we move more than we may like into his point of view and the fights become less brutal and alien; but when the object of his silent amours, his fiancée Mary Elizabeth, played by pretty redheaded Patricia Pearcy from Squirm, finally witnesses a cockfight, we see the bloody spectacle from her perspective and are suddenly repulsed anew by it, along with her!

The picture is exacting in its detail and almost never strikes a false note! It’s clear the cock pits we see are real cock pits, the spectators are real spectators, and of course the roosters are real roosters, fighting and clawing and beaking each other bloody! The cast is just about perfect: ha ha, what a gallery of faces, and in addition to those already named we get folks like Warren Finnerty from The Laughing Policeman, Tom Spratley from Deadly Friend, and even Kermit Echols from Grizzly! But it remains that Mansfield, as ingratiating as he can sometimes be in his silence – slapping his knee in response to a joke, or darting out his hand for a shake to seal the deal or to indicate agreement – and as marvelous as Oates’s performance is, is ultimately a damaged and inhumane guy; and that the sport itself, in spite of occasional bursts of first-person narration trying to explain Frank’s love of it, is indefensible! It’s a wonder that this movie exists, and, cruelty aside (if that’s possible), it’s one of the most perfectly-crafted things Roger Corman, or the 1970s for that matter, ever produced! And that’s saying something on both counts, ha ha! I give Cockfighter three and a half busted beaks!

Burl reviews Oppenheimer! (2023)

 

Bang boom and blast, it’s Burl, with a report on a big summer movie that I’ve only just gotten around to seeing, as opposed to the big summer movies I managed to see but haven’t yet reviewed! (I hope to review them for you soon, but who knows!) This is one of the biggest of the summer pictures, or at least one of the longest, and I’m sure by now you’ve figured out that I mean Oppenheimer!

Ha ha, as a casual WWII buff, I already knew the broad strokes of the story, and was aware that, after spearheading the logistics of the bomb-building and after the war was won and his utility exhausted, Oppenheimer was subsumed by the Red Scare business of the 50s, mostly, it seems, just to get him to shut up, and also for revenge! All of this is told fairly plainly in the film – we jump around a bit in time, as is the norm in a Christopher Nolan picture, but it seemed pretty straightforward biopic material to me!

Oppenheimer is played by the veteran zombiefighter and Irish-man Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later, looking rather gaunt and zombielike himself! Ha ha, with his suit and hat and skeletal physique, he seems a pretty good candidate if they ever want to make the William S. Burroughs story! (Unless Peter Weller wants to do it, ha ha - maybe they could share the role!) We meet the titular atom-juggler as he’s testifying before some kind of panel we don’t yet understand, but we will many times return to this small, unprepossessing room to see more of what we soon understand to be a kangaroo court!

We flash back to Oppenheimer’s time at Cambridge, where he nearly kills first his tutor and then, accidentally, Niels Bohr (played with appeal and a fine Danish accent by Kenneth Branagh from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) by means of a poisoned apple! Then we get into some science madness and relationship wackiness, including a few nude-lady scenes which elicited a gasp from the woman sitting next to me! (Ha ha, is a perfectly tasteful sex scene really so shocking? Have we really sunk so far back into puritanism?) We also get into Oppenheimer’s politics a little bit, which were refreshingly similar to my own! And of course then mustachioed army man Leslie Groves, played sternly by Matt Damon from The Martian, shows up to enlist Oppenheimer into the Manhattan Project, and the race to build the biggest bomb in all the world is on! (Ha ha, but they prefer to call it a "gadget!")

Of course once the Trinity test is successful and the bomb carted off by the army, and Oppenheimer has qualms about the morality of it all, there’s still the third hour left in the picture, which is mainly back to the kangaroo court I mentioned before! We learn that an administrator and would-be Cabinet member called Strauss, played very well by Robert Downey Jr. from Weird Science and Due Date, has orchestrated Oppenheimer’s downfall because one time Oppenheimer was a wisenheimer and Strauss has never forgiven him for it!

We meet many, many characters in the course of all this, most of them played by familiar faces! Oppenheimer’s tart-tongued wife Kitty is played by Emily Blunt from Edge of Tomorrow; his emotionally disturbed girlfriend Jean Tatlock is Florence Pugh from Midsommar; Roger Robb, the bulldog prosecutor in the disciplinary panel scenes is played by gimlet-eyed Jason Clarke from Twilight (the Paul Newman one, not the vampire one); silver fox inventor Vannevar Bush is Matthew Modine from Full Metal Jacket; Strauss’s aide is Alden Ehrenreich from Stoker; a fellow called Borden, whom Strauss uses as ponyboy in his pursuit of Oppenheimer, is David Dastmalchian from the more recent Dune; a miraculous defender of Oppenheimer is played by Rami Malek from No Time to Die; and a presidential aide called Gordon Gray is Tony Goldwyn from Plane!

It’s a long picture, but made up mostly of short, often punchy scenes – ha ha, you can tell there was a very concerted effort to keep things moving to offset the inevitable criticisms that this really is mostly a movie about white guys endlessly talking in rooms! It can be difficult to keep track of who’s who and what their motivations are, but a general understanding is really all that’s required to discern the larger themes and narrative drive at work! And some the major concerns here include power and responsibility, and it seems to me the picture is proposing an inverse to Uncle Ben’s great maxim “With great power comes great responsibility!” Oppenheimer – and Oppenheimer, for that matter – asks whether that responsibility still applies when it turns out one doesn’t have much power after all! The conundrum torments our science bug, and is addressed directly in late-picture scenes featuring a no-nonsense Harry Truman, played by Gary Oldman of Track 29 fame, and, separately, an avuncular Professor Albert Einstein, impersonated here by Tom Conti from Reuben, Reuben!

Nolan provides some poetic visuals that are meant to spring from Oppenheimer’s imagination: here we have raindrops depicting the sort of atomic chain reactions he’s looking for in a bomb, or rather gadget; there, a trick effect dramatizing what might happen if the chain reaction simply didn’t stop! But these sometimes seem shoehorned in as sops to the audience, and, as with the deliberate punchiness of the scenes, the non-stop music attempting to wallpaper over the seams, and the declamatory quality of some of the dialogue, one can here and there see the popular-cinema pulleys, cogs, and wheels hard at work, more so than the director intends!

Still, it’s a real achievement, almost as much as it assumes itself to be, and the sheer volume of craft on display is nearly overwhelming! I’m glad this long, talky, science-minded picture was made and that it’s doing well, and I for one was consistently engaged! (My twelve year-old got pretty antsy after the Trinity test, however, ha ha!) There’s something marvellously old-fashioned about it even beyond its mid-century setting, and I’m going to give Oppenheimer three slatherings of a topical jelly!

Burl reviews Somewhere in Time! (1980)

 

Tick tock, it’s Burl here with a touch of time travel for you! Ha ha, when you think of late 70s-early 80s time-travel pictures, what comes to mind? The Final Countdown, of course, and also, no doubt, Time After Time! But there was another time-travel extravaganza of the era, in which not a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, not Jack the Ripper, but a simple lovelorn longuebönes is sent hurtling through the temporal rift! Yes, I’m talking about the cult romance picture Somewhere in Time!

The longuebönes is a playwright named Richard Collier, played by Christopher Reeve, whom we all recall from Monsignor! In 1972, when he’s a young scribe celebrating his first success beneath the proscenium, an old lady approaches, gives him a pocket watch, and whispers “Come back to me!” Ha ha, eerie! But horror isn’t where we’re going with this, more’s the pity: we flash forward eight years by which time Collier is well-known and much-produced, and struggling to finish his next play! He decides on a change of scenery and drives to the giant Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, where he soon becomes infatuated with a woman in a portrait: a famed stage actress from yesteryear called Elise McKenna, played by Jane Seymour from Live and Let Die!

Well, ha ha, he figures out this is the very same old lady who approached him eight years before, and, his infatuation rapidly metastasizing into obsession, he attempts to hypnotize himself into the year 1912 so that he can meet the object of his fancy! Eventually this actually works, and sure, why not? He manages to meet and charm Elise despite energetic counterefforts from her moustache-twirling manager Robinson, essayed by Christopher Plummer, whom we know so well from bad-guy roles in Dragnet and The Silent Partner and Dreamscape and so many others! But Robinson, though evidently in the grip of his own Elise obsession, even willing to employ toughs to rough Collier up, is unable to prevent the couple from achieving their romantic and sexual destinies! However, the ill-timed discovery by Collier of an anachronistic coin in his pocket sends the gangling clockhopper hurtling back into 1980, where he becomes so depressed that he locks himself in his room, turns white, and dies!

Now, ha ha, this movie was no hit when it was released, but in the years since it’s attracted a cult of romantically-minded people nearly as obsessed with the movie as its hero is with Elise! That doesn’t make it a good movie, but it suggests that there’s something to it, some core attraction worth considering! Is it in the concept, or the execution of that concept, or both? I think it’s maybe a bit of both: the concept is compelling but not exactly groundbreaking or unique; the execution is competent but not exactly brilliant, and these virtues together add up to something that a certain sort of person is just going to love!

The story is very simple: maybe, it seems to me, too much so! That simplicity is probably one of the secrets of its appeal to those who love the picture so much that they travel to Mackinac Island every year for the big Somewhere in Time celebration! Yes, there really is one! But there are lots of little virtues here that I appreciated – the location is very nice, and the acting is strong, for example! And it’s dandy to see veterans like Teresa Wright from Shadow of a Doubt, who plays Elise’s latter day companion, Miss Robert, and Bill Erwin from Jet Pilot and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, who is the elderly bellboy Arthur!

And I do like a time travel story! This one suggests a looping and rhyming time structure, especially once we realize that the photo which initially entranced Collier is the same one we see being taken in a later scene, and that her smile in the photograph was her genuine reaction to catching sight of him coming into the room, so the smile was indeed and directly meant for Collier, which is what entranced him about the photo and led him to do his time travel in the first place! Phew, ha ha!

There’s something very 1980 about the picture, and it fits in, or at least alongside, the other movies of the era that fascinated me as a youngster by the insights into the adult condition which I believed they provided! (I’ve spoken about this elsewhere regarding pictures like The Last Married Couple in America, Six Weeks and It’s My Turn!) As a time travel picture it slots more into the dreamy, was-it-even-real tradition of Midnight in Paris than it does the nuts and bolts approach of, say, The Terminator, but I say there’s room enough for all of them! I can’t say I’ve ever fallen under this film’s spell, but I’ll acknowledge that the spell is real, and that weaving a spell for anyone regardless of their predispositions, is a genuine achievement, and so I give Somewhere in Time two old suits!

Burl reviews Roadhouse 66! (1984)

 

With a jolly “paarp, paarp” on my motorcar horn, it’s Burl, arriving in town to do you a new review! Ha ha, we all love stranger-in-a-small-town movies, don’t we? It’s a pretty reliable microgenre, and maybe not so micro either, as, once you’ve tossed in Westerns, samurai pictures, and action movies from the 80s, there must be hundreds, nay thousands of these things! It’s a very basic formula, therefore theoretically hard to mess up, but one thing you learn when you watch a lot of movies with a critical eye: anything can be messed up! Ha ha, I wonder if that’s the case with today’s movie, Roadhouse 66!

Ha ha, I’m not going to make a joke about this being the 65^th sequel to Road House, because I expect that hoss’s been rode before! No, it’s the tale of a travelling fauntleroy called Beckman Hallsgood Jr., played by Judge Reinhold from Ruthless People and Gremlins in effete-nerd mode! Beckman is scion to a belly-bustin’ fast-food pork franchise and is driving his T-bird across the desert to scout locations or something, but as he approaches Kingsman, Arizona he’s set upon by the town goons, the result being his flivver disabled by gunfire! Luckily a wandering rockabilly who knows how to fix cars, played by Willem Dafoe from Streets of Fire and The Lighthouse, shows up to play it cool and help out Beckman in exchange for a ride into town! The rockabilly’s name, of course, is Johnny Harte, for how could it be otherwise!

Conveniently enough there are two beautiful sisters living in the town who are single and sell auto parts! Kaaren Lee from The Right Stuff and Remote Control is Jesse, the older sister with the incomprehensible past, and Kate Vernon from Pretty in Pink and Mob Story is Melissa, the younger and more impulsive one! But also in the town are the louts who shot up Beckman’s car: a fearsome triumvirate led by Hoot, a meatbones played by Alan Autry from Brewster’s Millions and House! His minions are a scabie little guy named Dink, played by Kevyn Major Howard from Full Metal Jacket and Alien Nation, and Moss, played by Peter Van Norden from The Best of Times, who looks like if Mike Starr had been removed from the oven twenty minutes early!

The whole middle act is an escalating campaign of harassment from Hoot and his boys directed at Beckman, who’s stuck in town until the ladies can order up a new radiator! Luckily Johnny Harte is around to help him out of trouble, and lucky too that they have a place to sleep in the junkyard owned by old drunken Sam, played by Stephen Elliott from Beverly Hills Cop; and later, of course, they take up with the two sisters: Johnny with Jesse, Beckman with Melissa! And that incomprehensible past of Jesse’s that I mentioned? Well it turns out she used to be married to Hoot, a thoroughgoing jerk with a drywall personality and the physique of Cousin Eddie from Vacation! Who’d have thunk it! But things come to a sticky wicket when Hoot and co. start a vengeance fire that turns fatal for one of the characters!

Meanwhile I know you’re asking “Ha ha, what about this roadhouse we’ve been promised by the title!” Well some of the action, including a fight between the two heroes and the gang, does take place there, but it’s not as central to the plot as you might assume! Erica Yohn, who was Madame Ruby in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Selma in Amazon Women on the Moon, is the roadhouse proprietor, Thelma, who observes the goings-on with wry detachment, but is there for our heroes when needed! And the roadhouse itself is a pretty bland place, free of any atmosphere or style!

The climax of the picture, once we finally get there, is one of the least exciting car races ever filmed! It starts out promisingly when Hoot sticks a scorpion in Beckman’s car, but from there it’s mostly a series of static shots of cars rolling by at moderate speeds! Ha ha, at least that gives us a good look at the nice autos – a T-bird, a Chevy, a wonderful ’66 Mustang! I won’t tell you how it ends up, but we never really find out what happens to Hoot – who, after all, is an arsonist and a murderer as well as being a scorpion-dropping jerk!

I’ll wrap it all up by saying this: Roadhouse 66 is a pretty unmemorable and unexciting small-town meller, but if you like Dafoe and Reinhold and always wondered what it would be like if they teamed up, you may wring some enjoyment from it! But I myself had never wondered that, so I didn’t get a whole lot from the picture! I liked the cars though, and the small desert-town location! I’m going to give Roadhouse 66 one new radiator!

Burl reviews Twister! (1996)

 

From within the whirling winds of the Hollywood Midwest, it’s Burl, with a review of some big-budget 1990s weather spectacle! Ha ha, the second half of the 1990s saw the rise once again of the large-scale disaster movie: we had the lava duello of Dante’s Peak and Volcano; meteor-vs.meteor with Armageddon and Deep Impact; alien blast-vasions in Independence Day and Mars Attacks; and various randos like Daylight, Titanic, Godzilla and Firestorm! But among the earliest in this cycle was the tornado drama Twister, the summertime success of which helped kick off the late-90s disaster-spasm!

Ha ha, I remember reviewing this one back in my semi-professional movie reviewing days, and I didn’t care much for it, declaring it, rather harshly perhaps, "flatulence from the sky!" But whether it’s a softening of my heart, or of my head, or the stench of nostalgia, or wistfulness for the days when Bill Paxton was alive and could headline big movies, my attitude toward this twistravaganza has improved somewhat! I still think there’s too much bickering in it and an overly healthy dose of silliness, and that it irresponsibly encouraged the goofy sport of tornado-chasing; but I must admit that on a recent re-viewing of this windy action-drama, I more or less enjoyed it!

Paxton, whom we recall from Aliens and Weird Science and so many others, plays Bill, who does a little weird science of his own by sniffing dirt and looking at the sky to see when the tornados are going to appear! He’s a former tornado chaser, legendary for his recklessness, who rejoins his old gang, temporarily he thinks, in order to have divorce papers signed by ex-wife Jo, who’s played by Helen Hunt from Next of Kin (which Paxton was also in, actually)! Bill has in tow his fiancée Melissa, a straight arrow played by Jami Gertz from Mischief and The Lost Boys, who is initially interested in the tornado gang but, after a few close calls, is happy to walk away and let Bill have both his twisters and his old wife back!

That’s the human drama part of the movie, and too much screen time is spent on it if you ask ol’ Burl! And then there’s the antics of the tornado gang, which is to say the crew of pseudo-scientists who drive the highways and byways in their motley of vehicles in pursuit of supercells, and pine for the days when Bill was their wild and fearless leader! This group includes Phillip Seymour Hoffman from Jack Goes Boating and Mission Impossible III in the role of Dusty, the most comedic scientist; Alan Ruck from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as Rabbit, the crew's putative wise man; Sean Whalen from The People Under the Stairs as Allan; Scott Thomson from Parasite and Police Academy as Preacher; Wendle Josepher from Intolerable Cruelty as Haynes; famous director Todd Field as Beltzer; and Joey Slotnick from Plane as Joey! Ha ha!

But this rabble are unconvincing not just as scientists but as genuine human people, and their interest in, essentially, air is about all there is to them, and makes them only as substantial as that passion would suggest! A scene in which the whole gang stops off unannounced at the home of Aunt Meg, played in granny-artist mode by Lois Smith from Black Widow and The French Dispatch, and proceed to eat her entire supply of steak, is meant to be endearing and humanizing but it comes off more as just a bunch of insensitive louts mooching off an old lady, no matter how affable Aunt Meg is about it nor how much it’s implied that this has happened many times before and Meg must be used to it by now! Ha ha!

And then there are the rival scientists, who drive in shiny black trucks, have all the latest equipment, and are led by windbag showboater Jonas, played by Cary Elwes from The Princess Bride! Of course the ragtag heroes disdain them, in this Universal Pictures-Warner Bros. co-production, for accepting corporate sponsorship to fund their activities, though the script doesn’t bother detailing which corporation would want to sponsor tornado chasers, nor why! At least there’s some nuance in the presentation: Jonas is a bad guy, but not so bad that the heroes don’t try in earnest to dissuade him from blundering into an F5! But he’s still the bad guy after all, and for his sins he reaps the whirlwind! Or rather, ha ha, the whirlwind reaps him!

So it all comes down to the tornadoes, doesn’t it, and these scenes are pulled off with, if not realism, all the techno-aplomb the mid-90s could offer! The trick effects are still impressive today, and the number and length of the tornado scenes stop just short of the point where they’d become repetitive and boring! The filmmakers take care to vary the types of debris thrown at the heroes: trucks, exploding trucks, farm equipment, exploding farm equipment, cows; and there’s a good nighttime scene at which a drive-in movie screening of Psycho and The Shining is interrupted by one of the larger twisters! Still, as thrilling as these scenes often are, and as awesome as the tornadoes shown here can be, it still falls short of the one seen in The Wizard of Oz, and that was just a big black sock wasn’t it!

The physics displayed here are about as authentic as they are in Oz (a film much alluded-to in this production), and the great goal of Bill's team - to release their science instrument named Dorothy into a tornado so as to discover its characteristics and therefore be better able, somehow, to predict them - seems both unrealistic and a bit underwhelming! Meanwhile the dialogue is unspeakable, most of the characters are annoying, and the drama is flaccid! But the effects sequences remain marvellous and the atmosphere of Midwestern heavy weather is nicely achieved! There’s a summeriness to the movie that I like, too, so in the final puff I’ll give Twister one and a half handfuls of dirt!

Burl reviews Twilight of the Ice Nymphs! (1997)

 

With a cry of boodle-doo, it’s Burl, here to review arthouse! Ha ha, yes, it’s time to talk about another movie from that billet-doux of film directors, Guy Maddin! You’ll recall how much I enjoyed his mountain picture Careful, and now here’s a movie universally recognized as the very worst feature film he ever made, a star-studded superattraction entitled Twilight of the Ice Nymphs!

Now, ha ha, I say “star-studded,” but it’s all relative, isn’t it! In this case it means there are a few recognizable stars salted into the cast here – in fact, some actors I like very much! And of course, whether or not this being his worst movie (assuming that’s true) makes it a bad movie also hinges on a comparative relativity, since I do tend to like not just his movies, but also the old semi-silents that inspire him: movies like, oh let’s say, Eternal Love!

Anyway, the story here, liberally borrowed from a Knut Hamsen novel called Pan, has a newly-released political prisoner returning to his homeland, a country of perpetual sunlight called Mandragora! The prisoner, Peter Glahn, is played by an uncredited Nigel Whitmey, who later turned up in Saving Private Ryan; on the boat ride home, he meets a strangely gorgeous lady called Juliana, played by Pascale Bussières from When Night Is Falling and August 32^nd on Earth, who teases him silly! On arrival at the family ostrich farm, Peter is reunited with his spinster sister Amelia, played by none other than Shelley Duvall from The Shining and McCabe and Mrs. Miller! Amelia longs for the embrace of a local mesmerist and science doctor, Dr. Solti, played in high comic fashion and with a proto-Christoph Waltz accent by R.H. Thomson from Who Loves the Sun; she is also involved in a bitter feud with the farm’s hired man, Cain Ball, essayed by a grizzly-looking Frank Gorshin from Invasion of the Saucer Men and 12 Monkeys, a long mile from his days as Best Dressed Man of 1978!

Wandering amidst all this, through the extravagantly artificial forests of Mandragora, is Zephyr, a fish-widow played by an especially ethereal Alice Krige, an actor who's a great favourite of mine from movies like Ghost Story and that Star Trek picture where she plays a robot queen! Peter becomes involved with her, but then rediscovers Juliana, who turns out to be the ward of, and perhaps lover of, the limping Solti! Solti's gone gimpy because a statue of Venus he’s recently unearthed has fallen on and crushed his leg, and this statue will claim more victims before the story is through! So Peter and Juliana start an affair, which makes Zephyr jealous; while Peter himself becomes increasingly jealous of Juliana’s involvement with Solti, and Amelia, the smoke-dried stick, pines desperately for the mesmerist! At home the stakes rise in her feud with Cain Ball, and soon the melodrama – and it is melodrama: the Hammer Films-style musical score never lets up for a moment – includes assault, insanity, immolation, self-mutilation by shotgun, a nail pounded into a head, and a semi-mystical death-by-crushing!

Narratively it’s a lot like Careful in many ways: we have, for example, a scene in which the tragic final events are precipitated by the hero wrecking a female relation’s romance with a local nobleman! Here the difference is that the romance never would have happened anyway, so the import of the hero's act is greatly diminished! So, too, is the sense of place: Careful, as artificial as it is, has a few crowd scenes and a little town, and so seems to be happening in a world inhabited by other people; Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, on the other hand, is really just a half-dozen crazy characters wandering around a too-often scantily-dressed fake forest!

 

 

Ice Nymphs is a bigger-budgeted movie than Careful, but it seems the money went to the actors and the 35mm photography, and therefore the art department budget suffered; and, ha ha, now and again it shows! The acting can be a bit over the top occasionally, but this always seems deliberate, a calculated facet of the Reinhardt/Dieterle Midsummer Night’s Dream effect Maddin is shooting for! (No Joe E. Ross in evidence though, ha ha!) But the Shakespeare work it recalls most is The Tempest, and when Peter gets so outraged that he commands the trees of the forest to bend to his will and help him vanquish his enemy, and the trees actually sort of respond, the sense of an island powered by glitter and magic comes to a full boil!

I’ll have to agree that, of the ones I’ve seen, which is most of them, this is Maddin’s worst picture! However there’s lots of wonderful stuff here: for example, dialogue that's as rich and purple as a fine blood pudding, and filled with quotable gems! And one must admit there’s really nothing else out there that looks like it, and that’s very much a point in the movie's favour! And, too, it has ostriches, ha ha, plenty of ostriches, and those guys are mighty charming if you don't have to stand too close to them, or downwind! Shelley Duvall turns in a really fine and completely heartbreaking performance, easily selling the idea of someone driven mad by loneliness, heartache, and disappointment! It’s an underwhelming movie in many ways, but it’s also very much worth seeing, and I urge you to do so if the opportunity arises! I give Twilight of the Ice Nymphs two and a half night bogs!

Burl reviews Aftersun! (2022)

Merhaba my friends, it’s Burl here to review fun in the sun! Well, sort of fun, anyway, ha ha! It’s one of the newer movies out there, and while it takes place in a sunny Mediterranean resort locale, if a rather downmarket one, and while nothing overly traumatic happens, and while the word “sun” is even in the title, it would be a stretch to call this a fun-in-the-sun picture now that I think about it! But, ha ha, you can decide! The movie in question is a Scottish picture called Aftersun!

It’s all set in a period with which I’m quite familiar: the late 1990s! It’s a reminiscence story, mostly though not entirely from the perspective of 11 year-old Sophie, who has come to a Turkish resort on holiday with her father, Calum! (And yes, his name is Calum, but unlike the fine film A Lawless Street, with its protagonist Calem Ware, they don’t feel the need to repeat the name over and over again!) Calum is a loving father and a reasonably friendly guy; but still, there’s something a little off with him, and this impression is visually represented in the first half of the picture by the unexplained, and completely unsigned, plaster cast he wears on his right arm!

We get more and more clues that something is off with Calum, mostly from little scenes for which Sophie is not present, or events of which she is unaware! Calum expectorates unexpectedly on a mirror, or sobs naked in the room, or walks into the sea, or just sometimes has a funny look in his eye! Occasionally the musical score will play some worrying strings just to underline the problem, whatever it is! And when he peevishly refuses to karaoke an R.E.M. song with Sophie, you really start to wonder!

The problem, it seems, is that Calum is depressive, and that he’s not able or willing to medicate himself! Through clever filmmaking and right proper acting we get the notion that for Sophie this vacation is an opportunity to have fun with her dad and with some of the other guests, and even to kiss a boy; while for Calum it's a last hurrah, a solemn goodbye dressed in jolly holiday clothes! He worries for his daughter; exhorts her, as parents of pre-adolescents will, to talk to him about anything that may trouble her as she goes through puberty and teendom; but we don’t get the sense that he plans to be there for it himself!

All of this is interspersed with quick shots of strobing club action and little flashes of the adult Sophie! Ha ha, in the present day she has become a parent herself, and perhaps this is why she’s looking back over this Greek father-daughter holiday: scanning it for clues not just to her father’s inner life, but her own, and perhaps her child’s! She’s watching all the video she took during that time, possibly wincing at her childishness, maybe lamenting her lost innocence! It’s hard to tell, but, as with Calum, a lot of room is left for the viewer to fill in the blanks!

The movie features one of those moments I cherish in cinema: where you don’t know the end is coming, but then there’s a shot in which you realize this would be the perfect note on which to end the film, and then indeed the film does end in that instant! I remember having that feeling at the end of Irma Vep, and there are other examples too I’m sure! Ha ha, The Conversation comes to mind also, and there’s a movie I should watch again! But Aftersun, well, it was a fine film too, and its subtle emotional ratcheting worked on me in just the way I imagine it’s supposed to, and thus the ending did too! If you think you might relate to anything in here – father-child relationships; the mysteries of adults from a child’s perspective; loss of innocence; the lapping tide of depression; budget Mediterranean resort life – then by all means seek it out! I give Aftersun three motorcycle video games and a sound tubthumping!

Burl reviews Cold Pursuit! (2019)

 

By krim-kram and by the flurries of winters past, it’s Burl, here to review yet another picture featuring an aging Liam Neeson carrying vengeance in his heart! He’s done this oh so many times before – look at movies like Next of Kin and Darkman and Taken 2, and there you’ll see that old familiar figure of Liam Neeson with vengeance reliably lodged in his heart! And the picture under discussion today is more of the same, and it’s called Cold Pursuit!

This is not just a vengeance picture but also belongs to that subset of movies which are remakes of movies made a year or two earlier by the same European director who made the original, and usually the remake is the filmmaker’s entrée into Hollywood studio picturemaking! Think of The Vanishing, (and, ha ha, then forget it – the remake, anyway), or Funny Games! Cold Pursuit is a remake of the Danish-Norwegian comedeo-vengeance film In Order of Disappearance, which I’m pretty sure I’ve seen! And like all these remakes, bar, I think, none, the original is the better one!

Old Liam plays Nels, which seems like, but isn’t, an anagram for “Liam!” Nels is a solid citizen in a little Colorado mountain town: he’s the man who keeps the roads clear with his big shed full of plowing equipment, and for this he’s being recognized as Local Man of the Year, for which his wife, Laura Dern from Blue Velvet, is proud! But then we see how their son, played by Neeson’s real-life son I believe, has, through his airport baggage job and the shabby offices of a disreputable pal, become mixed up with a drugs gang, and thanks to a misunderstanding, is kidnapped and given a fatal overdose by the gang!

Neeson and Dern each react to this in their own way: Dern takes off for parts unknown and is never seen again, while Neeson becomes vengeance-crazed, turning to his retired-gangster brother, played by William Forsythe from Smokey Bites the Dust and Extreme Prejudice, for information and advice! The tone turns blackly comic as Neeson kills his way up the Denver crime hierarchy, and with each new notch on the belt comes an intertitle memorializing the dead party and listing his gangster nickname! Ha ha, this is a bit on the cutesy side – I recall it working better in the original, where the humour was allowed to be as dry as it needed to be and the little titles didn’t stand out as much as they do in this more studio-tooled, focus-grouped remake!

The nicknames are another running gag, with a puzzled Neeson quizzing his brother about them! But, like the obituary intertitles, this aspect seems nothing more than ornamentation added later to purfle the border of an otherwise ordinary crime thriller! Ha ha, but there are a few details which seem a bit more organically integrated, like the rival gang of Indigenous mobsters! And there’s a subplot involving the son of the main bad guy, a boy-faced mob boss called The Viking, who lacks any evident Viking qualities beyond a general ruthlessness; this subplot has a mild wackiness to it, and lends the picture a bit of dualism which, for the movie’s running time at least, serves as an acceptable substitute for complexity!

The revenge part works well enough, familiar as it is, though I was disappointed that Nels didn’t use his snowplow more! It figures into the last act a little bit, but not enough to make this picture anything more than a mildly eccentric and otherwise unmemorable crime picture, more notable for casting a shadow over the original foreign iteration than for any qualities of its own! Neeson does this stuff with an appealing stolidity, but he could pull that off in his sleep, and in several scenes seems to be doing so here! I say stick with the original version, or maybe Fargo, which did snowbound crime eccentricity better than any other picture I can think of; but I’ll give Cold Pursuit two Fruity Pebbles anyway!

Burl reviews The Banshees of Inisherin! (2022)

 

With a touch o’ the shamrock, it’s Burl, here to tell of a tale from the Emerald Isle, or at least with one of the associated islets! Much like The Secret of Roan Inish, the action in today’s picture takes place exclusively on a small island off the coast of Ireland at some time in the earlier part of the 20^th century, although in this case, while the title promises some Irish myth, ha ha, there’s nothing supernatural to be found in the picture itself! The movie is called The Banshees of Inisherin!

In fact it takes place at a very specific time: the spring of 1923; so, now that we’re in a new year we can say it takes place a hundred years ago, back when life was different! Although not that different, because on this picturesque fisherfolks’ paradise there is no shortage of anachronistic lines of dialogue and behaviours! Ha ha! Anyway, the story is so: Pádraic Súilleabháin, an amiable want-wit played by Colin Farrell, whom we recall from his role as the vampire in the newer Fright Night, has a routine: call ‘pon his pal Colm Doherty at two o’ the clock of an afternoon, then proceed to the public house for ales and inane conversation! Except on this day, Colm doesn’t answer his door, and reveals later that he’s simply decided not to like Pádraic any more!

Brendan Gleeson, familiar from Cruise-capades like Edge of Tomorrow and Mission Impossible II, plays Colm, and he’s a much sharper tack than his ex-pal Pádraic, and as cultured as a person can get on a provincial island in the 1920s! So when he explains that he’s given up the friendship because he feels his creative life being stolen from him an hour of pointless chit-chat at a time, one can sympathize and understand! But the extremity of the edict, not to mention the later consequences, make Colm seem a bit crazy! Couldn’t he have simply laid down some ground rules that limit the time he spends with Pádraic rather than cutting it off entirely? The all-or-nothing gambit is in keeping with the Irish character, I suppose, and I guess that’s the point!

Other characters are as confused about it as poor dopey Pádraic! The latter lives with his sister Siobhán, played by Kerry Condon, and she’s a no-nonsense type who advocates to Colm on her brother’s behalf, but can’t really contradict his assertion that Pádraic is a time-wasting nonsense-talker! A twitchy village idiot called Dominic, played in a showy performance by Barry Keoghan from Dunkirk, wonders sarcastically at Colm’s maturity! (“What is he, twelve?” is one of the many lines that seem more 21^st century than of the Joycean era they’re meant to evoke!) And an old witchy lady played by Shelia Flitton, who I believe played a similar role in The Northman, watches the goings on with a knowing cackle!

 

Things start to get a little gruesome once a fed-up Colm, a devoted fiddler, threatens to cut off his fingers if Padráic keeps up with his botheration! Ha ha, I guess he settles on his fingers because cutting off his nose would be too obvious! And not to spoil anything, but yes, in the parlance of Joe Bob Briggs, fingers do roll! A lovable mini-donkey ambles through the margins of the story, and it’s this creature who precipitates the film’s final act! Things get pretty dark, but the finale may leave you pondering!

There’s lots to recommend this picture: the acting and the photography, for instance, are both top-notch, and the script is often very funny! The themes, while somewhat obvious (the Irish Civil War, a battle between former friends, is going on in the background over on the mainland), are interesting – it’s as an exploration of friendship and its liminalities that the picture is most compelling, rather than as a political allegory! And it’s always worthwhile to see what’s happening on these crazy Anglo-Saxon islets – ha ha, think about The Wicker Man, or Doomwatch, or I Know Where I’m Going, or Island of Terror, or Nothing But the Night! Kooky places, those islands, and Inishiren fits right in with them! I give The Banshees of Inisherin two and a half finger splotches!

Burl reviews Call Northside 777! (1948)

 

Ring ring, it’s Burl, here with newspaper drama! Yes, ol’ Burl is a big fan of the newspaper genre – I really like All the President’s Men of course, and His Girl Friday, and Ace in the Hole, and I even found lots to like about The Paper – not least, ha ha, that it was a newspaper movie! And I’ve just watched one I’d never seen before, a little joint called Call Northside 777!

The title refers to a wee classified ad discovered in the paper by newshound P.J. McNeal! McNeal is played by James Stewart, well known from Thunder Bay and Rear Window, and, following up the ad, he discovers an old floor scrubber named Tillie Wiecek in despair because her son Frank has been in jail these last eleven years for killing a cop! Of course she claims he didn’t do it, and hopes her ad, and the $5000 in reward money she’s spent the past decade on her hands and knees earning, will help bring forth a witness who can clear Frank’s name!

McNeal is initially dismissive, not willing to give a cop killer the time of day! But as he digs into the case, and once he goes to the jail to meet Frank, who’s played very well by Richard Conte from Ocean’s Eleven and is an incredibly sympathetic character, he starts to think, hey, maybe this fella Frank is innocent after all! The great Lee J. Cobb from Gorilla At Large is McNeal’s editor, and, as the story starts to catch the public attention, he encourages his reporter to follow it up!

McNeal does so, occasionally going home to visit his wife, played by Helen Walker from Nightmare Alley and The Big Combo, where they sleep in separate beds as per bizarre Code rules and she makes him sandwiches when he has insomnia worrying about the Wiecek case! I guess he couldn’t make his own sandwich for some reason! McNeal gets on the trail of a witness called Wanda Skutnik, who proves to be just as unpleasant as her name, and he often returns to the Statesville prison, where an unbelievably accommodating warden accedes to his every request! Wiecek is at first justifiably angry about the negative attention the publicity is giving his wife and son, and demands that McNeal lay off! But this reporter is too dogged for that!

E.G. Marshall from Creepshow appears as the kindly (or as kindly as Marshall can manage) man whom Wiecek’s wife marries while he’s in prison so that their son can live a more normal life; and here’s where the movie really shines: in laying out the terrible difficulty of having a husband and father supposed by everyone to be a cop killer! You really feel for these Wieceks, and want Frank to get out of gaol and that post-haste, ha ha! But this movie is an occasionally long 112 minutes, so before that happens there’s plenty of time to watch all the details of how a polygraph test is administered, for example!

Because that’s the other thing: the movie is a gallery of all-new police techniques, like polygraph machines and forgery detection and photo enlargement processes, and a fantastic sort of proto-fax machine that whirls around like a lathe and sends pictures across the wire – but, ha ha, you have to develop them on the receiving end before you can see them! But they really wanted to keep it real for this movie, so when it comes to the lie detector scene, they got the guy who invented the gosh darn machine to play the fellow administering the test, and they take care to depict every intricacy! And McNeal, the newsman, is all the while asking the sort of questions any layman would, and getting detailed explanations of the technologies!

So there’s occasionally the feeling of watching an educational film or a sponsored documentary, but the olde-tyme tech aspect is really interesting, to me anyway! And, as I say, you get really caught up in the family’s situation, so by the time the boy is running toward his freed father, shouting “Daddy! That’s my daddy!” you may shed a happy tear! I don’t think I’m giving anything away to reveal that Wiecek is in fact proved innocent, but another thing about the conclusion, foregone as it may be, is that it doesn’t really follow up the hints of conspiracy and cover-up that are teased in the first half! I suppose we’re meant to take the railroad job done on Wiecek as just one of those things, and the subsequent cover-up as just what any sensible authority figure would do after committing a horrible blunder! Ha ha, some of the sensibilities are a little out of date, I guess, and this fealty toward authority is among them! But the movie has lots to recommend it, and Stewart is always good, so I give Call Northside 777 three linotype slugs!