Blog O’ Leaps

SCREAM 2 (1997)

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS – THE SQUEAKUEL (2009)

It’s the nature of entertainment business executives to give the public more of what they’ve liked before. On the surface of things, it makes a good deal of sense, from a business point of view.

Unfortunately, it’s the nature of art, which movies are to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the individual case, (and there’s plenty of variation just in the list above, to veer sharply into the lane of understatement), to tell its story, and then that story is told, and that’s the end of the story.

There was probably a reason, when you think about it, that Dickens never did a Great Expectations 2, or an Oliver Twist sequel entitled Fagin’s Frolics. William Shakespeare somehow avoided the temptation to fudge a sequel involving various bench-warmer relatives of Romeo and Juliet having a similarly star-crossed romance, perhaps with a happy ending this time around. Beethoven’s fifth symphony was pretty hot stuff, but it apparently never occurred to him to re-work a few of the themes, trot out the “da-da-da-DUMMM” bit for another airing, and issue a Symphony 5B. He seemed content to get on with #s 6, 7, 8 and 9 instead.

No matter how compelling the characters, settings, themes or combinations thereof, the rule of thumb in art seems to be, when you’ve nailed it the first time, well, that was your creative adventure in that little world, and now you get on with the next development, wherever the contents of your head happen to take you. You don’t stick around and play with your food. You finish your plateful and move on to the next meal.

The odd thing is, we all get this, at least on a subconscious level. When the tale is told, and it’s a good one, and it’s well-told, as much as we liked it, or revelled in it, we really know it’s over when it’s over. If they produce a sequel, we might buy a ticket, go along and kind of enjoy it, maybe, but it’s generally a kind of pale photocopy of enjoyment. We KNOW the magic was in the first time around. We KNOW they’re playing with their food for our entertainment. That birthday cake tasted great on the first bite, but three pieces in and your stomach starts to perform stunt-flying manoeuvres. The movie business often seems dedicated to proving comprehensively that lightning isn’t the only thing that doesn’t strike twice.

The exceptions to the grinding truism that movie sequels are inferior to the originals are few. Generally those few involve a substantial revision of the original conception, (perhaps, for one obvious example, a tendency to greater comedic orientation than in the original version), and/or better casting, a superior screenplay, and a better (or more suited) craftsman as director.

But generally, they’re a washout.

There’s also an irony, or a fallacy, in the Bizness theory of “giving ’em more of what they already ate”. If you ask the general public what they want, regardless of which pop or mass culture area you’re talking about, they’ll ALWAYS indicate that they want more of something they’ve had before.

And then the Bizness keeps feeding that to them, and the public will go right on saying they want more of it, right up until most members of the public all suddenly realise they’ve mined that particular seam of entertainment dry, at which point someone ends up with a massive turkey on their hands flickering away in empty cinemas, and the public all rushes off to see something novel/new/different which they never told the Bizness people they wanted, because they didn’t KNOW they wanted it, right up until they saw or heard it. (And whatever that is, it will soon enough be strip-mined, sequelled, and imitated to death as well, prior to the next big thing coming along.)

And this is the fallacy of asking the public what they want. Most of the general public don’t have the inclination to indicate they’d like something different, and don’t have the imagination to hazard a guess or express a preference as to what that “something different” might be. Which is absolutely fair enough – it’s not their jobs.

What you might expect, though, is that the showbiz execs who are paid to analyse this kind of information, would know better than to fall for the same three-card trick over and over again. But, quite frankly, if you put enough accountants and brothers-in-law in roles that really demand a creative mind, this is the kind of result you’re probably bound to get.

The pursuit of endless sequels (and needless, ill-conceived remakes – just as poisonous and creatively-challenged a phenomenon) is, necessarily, a determined pursuit of the law of diminishing returns, certainly creatively, generally in terms of quality, and arguably, also financially. The funny thing is, on some level or other, we all know it. The other funny thing is, nobody really does much about it, and this is not like the weather, where you CAN’T.

Anyway, let’s nail some specifics, and talk about some movies in this here movie column.

The brouhaha with the Scream pictures when they first surfaced was about how clever they were, playing with the conventions of the slasher horror movies, turning them on their heads, and underscoring them with knowing humour. I have no doubt that the thoroughly revolting word “savvy” was bandied about at some point.

I don’t know about all that. The first Scream had some in-movie winking at the format and formula of horror movies, with the characters describing the “rules” as the bodies fell. This didn’t diminish the scares, (it was used well on occasion to build chills), but if it delivered so much as a laugh, I wasn’t in the room at the time. Actually, the banging on in the dialogue about the “rules” got kind of tiresome to me.

The laughs came from some unexpected slapstick involving the killer, and a few bits of sly commentary in the movie-making itself, rather than the dialogue per se. However what made the movie work as well as it did, along with Wes Craven’s technical facility in manipulating you through a horror movie, was the excellent capturing of atmosphere and place in the small college town, and some endearingly eccentric performances that allowed you to care about the characters.

It’s Drew Barrymore’s small but telling role near the start that sets up the whole picture. The various Cox-Arquettes and Arquette-Coxes did their jobs too. No matter how clever the horror movie is, it’s harder to get really sucked in if you don’t care about the characters. You “bought” the college atmosphere too. These kids have lives, hopes, dreams etc. And some lunatic is killing them.

The undertow of wry self-commentary was important in giving Scream its own peculiar life, but it was a long way from being the whole deal.

As Scream 2 demonstrated pretty well. The Courteney Cox performance is a little more of a caricature, the David Arquette one simultaneously more stock-comedy and manic, there’s no Drew Barrymore, and Neve Campbell’s lead character is given less to demonstrate why we should care about her.

So we run through more rope-a-dope with the audience expectations, more jack-in-the-box set-ups, more horror “rules”, more fitful “commentary” that doesn’t really comment on anything.

The skill demonstrated in running the ropes of the horror movie genre delivers some good solid scares, and it is mostly an entertaining movie, but there’s no real core to it at all. It probably would have skated by, but where Scream 1 delivered an ending that was something of a wet-end, and lacking for brains in the logic department, the many climaxes of Scream 2 are (a) completely ludicrous on any level, (b) a series of car-crashes in execution. And those climaxes just keep-a-comin’.

Ten years later, the abattoir artistes behind Saw IV dispensed with the “knowing self-analysis of horror movies” stuff and just built that right into the movie, rather than telling us all about it so we knew how clever they were. That wasn’t such a bad idea, probably. They also dispensed completely with humour. That was more of a mixed blessing.

For those who don’t know, the Saw saga (and odds are there must some web-galoot out there who calls it a saga) concerns a serial killer type guy called Jigsaw who was active in the first couple of pictures, got crook and kind of roped in an assistant or two after that.

At the beginning of Saw IV, he’s very crook – to the extent that he’s dead. However his trademark killings are still going on, which means there’s still some assistant out there doing his work. There’s cops coming at him from one end, the FBI from another, and all concerned are trying to nail down who the active Jigsaw is, who just might be one of the people involved in the investigation.

So it’s a whodunnit, along with a horror picture once over heavy on the surgical levels of guts and gore, plus the killer’s trademark gimmick, of conceiving bizarre torturous traps in which the victim or victims’ fate/s are often in their own hands, kind of.

The peculiar backwards morality behind the Jigsaw killings is kind of an interesting point of distinction with this movie, right until they morality us to death with it. There’s just far too much background/origin information on why the original Jigsaw became what he became, until it becomes like a particularly psycherligical Law and Order: SVU episode gone horribly wrong. It also successfully diminishes the Freddy Krueger of this particular franchise from being a kind of supernatural figure into being an old tired man who went bananas. Quite a bargain heading in that direction, then.

And for all that the movie has technical facility – not so much editing as footage chopped up like highly energetic coleslaw, and some “Say, how did them movie folks DO that?” shot transitions – it sometimes handles routine exposition like lumpy gravy, is riddled with incredibly poorly incorporated flashback material, and the build to the ending struck me as incoherent to world and Olympic levels – I literally couldn’t tell if one of the parallel expositions being shown was a flashback or a “contemporary” sequence, and once I had worked it out, I still didn’t know why it was there.

Saw IV can’t even sustain its own logic. It pimps on this regularly, whenever it suits. It has some effectively grisly moments, and some clever gimmicks, right alongside idiotic gore flinging that comes across like a gross-out routine that two 12 year olds might have come up with. It’s not exactly an actors’ showcase type of film, but alongside the performances that get the job done, there’s a few that clunk like a loose nut in a power mower. Any thought of characters an audience member might actually get involved with was apparently dispensed with prior to the soup course at the first luncheon meeting concerning the picture. The result is that it’s not really that scary. Hard to be scared on behalf of characters you can’t care about. I think I may have mentioned that before. Can’t say after this one I’m desperately HANGING to see Saw V.

It’s hard to see how they could have screwed up on the 21st Century Batman sequel, right up until you see the picture. And by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, and you’re determined to, make sure you pack a lunch. Or two.

The first Christian Bale one was an ok action/adventure movie, with a certain smell of obsession, danger and the odd question of principle, to help flesh things out. Adding in THE franchise villain of Batman’s world to the mix in the sequel shouldn’t have hurt, exactly.

So where did they go wrong, to cut to the chase. Well, it’s two and a half hours long, to start with. Roughly one hour of that comes down to Batman and the Joker demonstrating their duelling psychological obsessions (directly opposed and yet somewhat strangely similar, and interdependent in a way) – and that’s the whole guts of the picture, and apparently nobody in charge realised it.

The other 90 minutes is a loud exploding series of hiccoughs and explosions, with some vaguely desperate attempts to claim contemporary significance by comparing what the Joker does with terrorism. To say this is in poor, or no, taste might be fair comment. But what cripples the picture is that it has nothing to do with the core of what the movie is so obviously about – the Batman/Joker dynamic.

And you can also throw in that Christian Bale mostly decided to deep-asthma-breathe his dialogue in standard cartoon superhero fashion, rather than acting like he did in the first picture, that there are only about 97 climaxes too many, that the Joker as portrayed in this movie is a complete unreliable, unpredictable maniac, who can also pinpoint plan a highly complex scheme that would be beyond the resources or planning abilities of the greatest military minds in history, that the long-term Batman comic book villain Two Face is introduced and blown off in one picture for no reason, and that even at the movies with full multi-track sound, in between the explosions, the musical score farting away, and the mysterious clanking noises that all big movies have up the back of the mix somewhere for no apparent reason, I couldn’t hear some of the dialogue at all. I think they won an Oscar for making me not hear the dialogue.

Heath Ledger is pretty good. It’s a valid interpretation of the Joker character, and different from anyone else’s. As far as the make-up goes, I could have come up with the same given about ten minutes, a bag of flour, and the continuity girl’s lipstick.

The answer to the conundrum of making a great Batman/Joker picture is pretty simple. Instead of just happily tearing off bits and pieces of ideas from the comics concerned and turning them into a theme park, they just have to read Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke or Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and convert them as faithfully as possible into movies. But of course the ever-delightful mantra of “This is Hollywood and we change everything here” will doubtless prevail. Maybe they can make the next Batman picture three and a half hours long and have 243 climaxes. Think I might sit that one out.

A Night at the Museum 2 – err, has anyone previously ever made a “lo-concept” picture? This one’s pretty simple to explain. In fact, arguably the previous sentence was two words too long. Ben Stiller – currently heading for a Dan Aykroyd-like longevity record of not actually being funny while repeatedly appearing in comedy movies – plays the guy who is night guard at a museum where all the exhibits come to life at night, including dinosaur skeletons, and famous people from history and stuff like that there. The basic result – and level of ambition – is a cross between Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Toy Story, only a great deal dumber and more incoherent than either.

This may be the first movie with attention deficit disorder. It can’t remember what it’s trying to be from second to second, much less sequence to sequence, and keeps throwing in irrelevant spot gags like one of the more irritatingly patchy Family Guy episodes. Incidentally, that’s an approach that works a lot better in a half-hour series than a 104 minute movie. Everyone except the people who made this movie probably knows that already, of course.

What makes this a great deal worse is that the movie wants you to take it seriously (when it remembers) and actually care whether Ben Stiller’s team of good guys beats the bad guy team involving Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible and Napoleon. It’s not only centred on a premise that’s fairly stupid but it can’t even retain any consistency on what the premise is. The “to thine own self be true” subtext it can barely be bothered paying lip service to. The intermittent thud of rah-rah USA-boosting is nauseating in this context, not to mention coming off as shallow enough that toddlers could swim in it unsupervised.

Performances, like everything else in here, vary wildly. Owen Wilson is annoying as usual. Stiller is virtually a straight male lead. Christopher Guest is wasted, given very little to do as Ivan the Terrible. However the guy who plays Napoleon is given plenty, and just isn’t funny at all. Amy Adams is cute and fun as Amelia Earhart, but the role’s not funny and the dialogue tends to be wearing. Robin Williams gets the job done as Teddy Roosevelt, but that’s not a funny role either.

Steve Coogan IS good as a tiny little Roman Emperor, it’s difficult to work out what Ricky Gervais’s character was meant to be, other than Ricky Gervais. (This may well have been a design flaw at script level, like most of the rest of the movie.)

But there’s one guy in A Night at the Museum 2 who may well enter the annals, if not top the all-time listings, for a wig-flipping performance in a doggedly unnecessary movie – Hank Azaria, as the evil Egyptian pharaoh with a rather foppishly theatrical manner, and a Boris Karloff-imitation voice that just won’t quit. He’s just fantastic. He would have committed grand larceny of the entire movie, had there been one there to steal.

Otherwise, suffice it to say that about three-quarters of the way through I suddenly realised that I couldn’t even work out what kind of audience they THOUGHT they were aiming at when they made this picture – general, adult, or exclusively kids. Still couldn’t tell you on that one. Oh, and by the way, the special effects are tremendous. And, as usual, what an undetectable difference that truly does make in entertainment when the rest of the picture is one big vacuum cleaner spill.

And finally we come to Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel, in which the entire concentration of inspiration and telling wit involved in the enterprise was plainly expended on the title. I’m going to waste very little time on this one. It’s a kids’ entertainment. It’s proficient enough at what it is, I guess. I would have thought Betty Thomas has demonstrated sufficient talent as a director that Hollywood might be able to find her something to do a little more, err, essential than this, but she gets the job done, and neatly, and (and this could be a lesson to virtually every other film covered here), in good time as well. The “Our heroes go through trials and tribulations, but when things are darkest, they prevail” plot-line has hairs on it that are older than most of our grandparents, but no-one went to the cinemas expecting King Lear, or even King Leonardo and His Short Subjects. By contemporary standards, it was a little short of leavening gags to keep adults awake.

(There was just one that I liked. A harried MC type, hosting the big climactic talent show remarks that there’s a lot of acts on, and we have to get through them in a hurry “because the heating goes off at ten”. I laughed solo in the cinema at that one.)

I mean, it was pap, and the music was fairly grisly. But then most of the actual chart music of right now, other than the voices being at normal speed and the concept of “booty” being mentioned rather more frequently, is pretty much identical to the oeuvre of the Chipmunks and the Chipettes. And just about every movie I mentioned elsewhere here is pap, only this one more or less did what it set out to do, and completed the task in under 90 minutes. My nine-year-old niece thought it was just peachy. I didn’t have to keep asking her, in a whiny voice, “Is it over? Can we go yet?” I guess that’s a win-win. I just couldn’t recommend it that strongly to anyone over nine years of age.

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Official ratings on the LeapsterMovie “Ours is one better”, out-of-eleven MPHOAH scale:

Scream 2 - 6.5 out of 11 MPHOAH (docked 0.5 for multiple idiotic endings)

A Night at the Museum 2 – 5.5 out of 11 (would have been about 3.5 without Hank Azaria and the effects)

Alvin and the Chipmunks – The Squeakuel – 5.5 out of 11

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A Brief Guide To Unfathomable Liquor Licensing Reforms

If there was a sustained outbreak of people smashing their thumbs with hammers as part of ill-conceived home DIY endeavours, what would be your idea of an appropriate solution? Slapping a massive new licensing fee on all hardware stores? Cutting off every third person’s hands so there was no risk of them hammering their thumbs anymore? Banning the use of hammers on all odd-numbered days to cut down on the incidence of self-inflicted hammercide? I’m tending to assume, unless you’re a complete thundering loon, that those options would not be considered rational solutions by anyone.

On a level which is not by any means a million miles away from this kind of logic, the gazebos in charge of liquor licensing in Victoria have attacked the much-trumpeted problems of drunken and drugged young fatheads loose on the streets, kerbs and dance floors of Melbourne Town, committing random acts of violence against strangers, each other, and probably, given the level of brain-activity concerned, themselves by accident. (And, forced to make a choice, I’d like to see rather more of the latter, and rather less of any of the alternatives.)

Unlike some kneejerk ‘fight the power’ types, I don’t think this whole scenario is a beat-up, incidentally. I don’t think there’s any shortage of this kind of violence, and I don’t think there’s been a time where it’s been any worse, on a general basis. Basically, I’d be struggling to think of any time since I was of an age to legally consume alcohol and be out amongst those doing same, where people here handled being drunk any worse. I don’t think the ‘party’-type drugs are doing them any favours either.

However, it’s how the State Government’s liquor licensing pharaohs are going about their business that’s bunching my lingerie at the moment.

The operators of the well-known loveable live music rat-hole The Tote have just been forced to close its doors and put all staff members on the bread-line, and probably a fair few musos who had regular-ish gigs there as well. This, according to co-licensee Bruce Milne, was specifically due to massive hikes in the licensing costs, due to being assessed as a high-risk venue, according to the liquor licensing nabobs. (There were other factors, but enforced increased costs due to liquor licensing requirements are the common thread running through all of these.)

The problem here is that according to local police quoted on the issue, and virtually all those who have regularly attended live music events at The Tote, dating back to when that was the music venue name and the pub was still officially known as the Ivanhoe Hotel (when dinosaurs ruled Collingwood), the only high-risk involved was of getting drunk, playing pool or the jukebox and having your ears sand-blasted by some live music. It’s not like the Tote was any sort of volcanic hotbed of violence. A lot of the people who went there knew each other. It was a good-times type venue. You’d have more chance of getting into a fight standing on any street corner in the CBD of Melbourne any night of the week. And probably, realistically, at the footy too, not that they’ll be conducting a major liquor licensing hike at sporting events that will put them out of business.

In a judgement which smacks of hasty “knees-bent running about” type thinking, from middle-management nobs who want to be seen to be making decisions to justify their pay-cheques, but aren’t really equipped for thinking about decisions, the Tote was ruled high-risk because it was in a high-risk area.

This is a tremendous nonsense. According to the papers, the whole CBD of Melbourne is a high-risk area these days. By that kind of logic, every licensed venue in Melbourne, from the kerbside cafes that serve the odd beer to the old buffers’ “establishment” clubs to the Windsor Hotel, and beyond, should all have to pay skyscraping licensing fees. They’re all in a “high-risk area”.

What would be obvious to anyone who wasn’t using their skull as a suppository is that the nature and track record of the individual business would have to have some input in whether a particular venue or other liquor-selling operation was truly high-risk, and thus deserving of higher licensing fees. Otherwise the laws are a nonsense. Otherwise, the stated aim of all this general pissfarting around – to achieve a safer Melbourne, via appropriate controls on liquor sales (and I’m only guessing that that’s what they’re trying to achieve, because the current approach will obviously do absolutely nothing to achieve that aim) becomes a statement without any rational foundation.

In the case of The Tote, the wrong people were victimised. The list of those so victimised would include Bruce and James Milne, all the staff, all people who have looked at The Tote as an oasis for scruffy, disreputable loud live rock music for decades, the bands, the live music industry, anyone in Melbourne into what, for want of a more agreeable term and for the sake of brevity, we’ll call ‘alternative’ music.

A virtual non-risk venue was called high-risk, and licensing fees in line with being ‘high-risk’ were levied, forcing the licensees to realise they couldn’t afford to operate the pub with that sort of financial albatross around their necks. (I won’t say “make a profit” because I have my doubts as to what sort of “profit” they were making even under the previous licensing and security costs regime.) The venue was forced to close, specifically due to this situation. If the liquor licensing schmedleys think this made one person on the streets of Melbourne safer on an average night (or any night), they’re absolute turnips. If they DON’T think that, why has this situation been allowed to occur on their watch?

The message that a lot of people aren’t getting is that, as bad as the unnecessary loss of The Tote is, it’s probably the finer edge of a wedge as large as the Rialto building.

The other week I dropped by a small grog shop, Swords, in the South Melbourne Market. The friendly and helpful Joe who runs the joint asked me to sign a petition – something I normally do about as often as I transform stale rye bread into gold with a wave of my magical pinkie finger. I signed this one, however.

Apparently liquor licensing, in its slightly short of infinite wisdom, has designated this tiny cubicle of a grog shop as a “high-risk” operation, complete with matching licence fees/security demands etc, because it sells liquor after 8pm. We’re talking about a miniscule little box of a shop in a fruit market that sells a small selection of wine and boutique beers to the kinds of yuppies, bored young well-heeled mummies, and harmless shambling loner types like Unca Leapster that you’re likely to find wandering around the South Melbourne Market, for Odin’s sake.

Forget selling crateloads of CUB product at retail beer-barn prices, and I can’t even think whether or not they sell spirits. It’s a boutique wine and beer outlet. The nearest thing they get to unfettered lawless liquor-driven excess is that the moustache-bearing nice guy in charge of the operation gives you a mixed six-pack discount for beer whether or not you realise that there is a mixed six-pack discount. It’s not exactly Tombstone, Arizona in there.

As the manager guy rightly pointed out to me, the only real beneficiary of stores like his, and others in the same chain, or of a similar kind, being forced out of existence by insane and mis-applied licensing fees, will be the liquor mega-stores and drive-thru chains, who can afford to soak up licence-fee hikes (although I bet some of them won’t be delighted by them either – I doubt every suburban Joe or Jolene running a local franchise of a big-name chain liquor outlet can afford these kinds of fee hikes and security costs either) and will pick up the business from the smaller retailers that go under.

(Of course, we’ll end up with less choice of retailers, and less access to choice of product, and those making small-batch beers will have less access to customers, making their operations less viable, but I have a feeling that liquor licensing is a fair few decades away from addressing that as a problem, or even recognising it as one.)

There are any number of ‘worst parts’ to the current liquor licensing approach in this state, but a couple of them stand out like Fido’s scrotal area. Number One is, the designation of what’s “high risk” is demonstrably being applied completely indiscriminately, and unique businesses with strong appeal to a particular market are being effectively forced out of business, when there is absolutely no need for this to occur.

Number Two is, and this is the heartbreaker, and the bit that makes all this so irredeemably idiotic, forcing liquor sellers like The Tote and specialist liquor retailers out of business achieves absolutely NOTHING towards making Melbourne a safer place to live in terms of alcohol-fuelled violence, which is the whole aim/panic behind liquor licensing’s current actions. Even considering the notion, for five seconds, over whether closing The Tote or a tiny licensed grocer like Swords at the South Melbourne market, could make the average person in Melbourne less at risk of being donged on the scone by a hormone-charged, booze-soaked ninny of a nightclub escapee out on the streets filled with rage because he’s (a) a plonker, and (b) couldn’t pick up on the night in question, would tell anyone given to rational thought that the whole idea is insane.

The main problem is, quite frankly, young idiots who are far too full of themselves (not to mention drugs and alcohol), driven more or less insane by head-splitting crap tinker-toy dance music over the length of an evening while they’re trying to pick up, attending people-factory type huge nightclub/pub style venues, getting maggotted, and being comprehensively unable to handle it and still act in a manner vaguely resembling a human being.

Fixing the problem is not as easy as identifying it, incidentally. Cutting down operating hours doesn’t remove the problem. It’s a logic akin to cutting down the number of people hammering their own thumbs in DIY accidents by limited the use of hammers to odd-numbered days. If people want to go out and get obliterated and then inflict themselves on the innocent citizenry, and this is acknowledged as being a problem, you have to do the non-populist, non-rabble-rousing, long-term, hard-yards solution, which is analysing why young idiots feel like that and act like that, and then going about the business of trying to effectively educate (and penalise, probably) them, so you eradicate the cause at the root of the problem, as best you could achieve this.

Anything else is a band-aid solution, at best.

Closing joints like The Tote, similar music venues, small specialist liquor outlets etc, isn’t even a band-aid solution. That’s like trying to help your cut finger to heal by sticking it in hot fat, rather than putting a band-aid on it. There’s no benefit to this course of action whatsoever. The people concerned with liquor licensing in Victoria should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Because they apparently don’t have that level of thought or imagination working for them, my alternative is that they should be publicly shamed into feeling thoroughly ashamed of themselves. And then they can pull the finger out, leave the weirdo/small/specialist/harmless venues and liquor retailers alone, and go about actually addressing the problem, like they were meant to in the first place. Idiots.

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THE MAN WITH A CLOAK (1951)

Determinedly oddball little picture set in a New York City of a previous century, when, going by what you see on screen, the entire population apparently consisted of the dozen or so principal cast members, and exactly one policeman. Manages to mix in a little French history, a fitfully persistent theme about idealism v. life-tarnished cynicism, and a murder mystery format that ultimately fails to contain either a murder or any great deal of mystery.

Joseph Cotten busts plenty of acting chops playing some sort of alcohol-sodden roué, who is part amateur detective, part stony-broke bum, part rather voluble ‘man of mystery’ type, and kind of a freelance good Samaritan, although one who appears to be constantly on the make. At the behest of an innocent French girl (Leslie Caron, who is so saintly, it becomes somewhat nauseating), Cotten investigates the strange case of a rich old buzzard of a former French general who is tucked up in his mansion, surrounded by a couple of servants and his kinda-sorta mistress/carer (Barbara Stanwyck) all of whom seen keen on the old boy popping off sooner rather than later. Everyone in the picture is after his money, for one reason or another, and maybe Cotten is too, as far as we know.

As the Leonard Maltin guide says quite rightly, we don’t find out the true identity of Cotten’s character until the last shot of the picture. What it doesn’t say is that when we have found out, we still don’t know why that guy is involved in this story, or what relevance his identity has to any part of the story. In short, they may as well have revealed at the end that it was Cardinal Richelieu, or Lou Costello, or Trigger the Wonder Horse as they guy they actually chose, although the choice the writers made WAS kind of a cool one.

But the picture’s got atmosphere, holds the attention, squeezes a little suspense, and, apart from Cotten’s turn as the cloak-wearing chappie of the title, Barbara Stanwyck does some screen-holding underplaying in a performance that manages to convey a considerable downstairs conflagration lurking somewhere under the petticoat-region (this kind of thing is something of a Stanwyck standby), and Jim Backus affably steals scene after scene (that was his standby) as a garrulous publican.

Having sat through the entire movie and watched it reasonably intently, I can honestly say that from a storytelling point of view, I’d still be struggling to detect what the point of the exercise was. My assumption would be that to the director *, if not the various hands credited with story and screenplay as well, the motivations of the various featured characters – and in particular the comparisons between youthful idealism, aged cynicism, and various shades of morality, avarice, and jaded pragmatism in between – were of considerably more interest than meeting any generic expectations of a typical crime-based movie. I guess you have to give them points for headstrength, in the unlikely but appealing circumstance that being headstrong had a noun-form version.

Beyond that, as mood pieces go, it establishes a mood. It also holds the attention, if in a hazy and somewhat indescribable way. And that’s about the works. However, if you like to see something a bit different among your vintage Hollywood job lot, this might just about fit the bill, or at least kill 81 minutes in relatively painless fashion.

(7 out of 11 on this site’s trademark MPHOAH scale)

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* I’d never previously heard of The Man With a Cloak director Fletcher Markle. From a quickie look-around on imdb.com, it seems that most of his work was done for television, and most of that on shows no-one has seen for decades. His most striking career entry is that apparently he was an uncredited screenwriter on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. Who knew?

** I can’t even work out the title, much less the rest of the picture. Why is he ‘the’ man with ‘a’ cloak? Think about this for a second. If you were asked to describe some guy you’d seen in a bar or wherever, presuming this is all happening in an alternate universe where they still wore cloaks, you might say “Oh, you mean the man with the cloak!” or you possibly might admit that you’d seen a man with a cloak. I can’t think of any conversational circumstance where a person would describe someone else as “The man with a cloak”. Even “A man with THE cloak” I can kind of imagine coming up in conversation, if THE cloak had magical powers, or was worth $20,000, or was a key piece of evidence in a murder investigation or something. But not “The man with a cloak”. Who would say that in that fashion, other than something entering the very early rounds of their first serious bout with the English language?

There’s nothing in the picture to explain this quirk of expression in the title either. But then there’s nothing in the picture to explain why the Joseph Cotten character turns out to be who he does either. There are some solid clues as to who he is. I think I picked just about every last one of them up as well. There’s just absolutely no reason to connect them all and arrive at his true identity, because that identity has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It’s like they put together a locked-room mystery set in some isolated chalet in the 17th Century, featuring a range of suspects like the cook, the maid, the butler, the cheating husband, the vengeful wife, and then at the very end, the murderer is revealed to be the Green Goblin from the Spider-Man comics, who hasn’t turned up anywhere in the rest of the picture.

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