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Daily Archives: September 26, 2013

Marked Woman (1937)

Posted on September 26, 2013 | 2 comments

Marked Woman
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Written by Robert Rossen and Abem Finkel
1937/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing

[box] Mary Dwight Strauber: I’ll get you, even if I have to crawl back from the grave to do it![/box]

Bette Davis is a sometime thing for me. This wasn’t one of those times.

Mary Dwight (Davis) is a “hostess” at a nightclub/clip joint owned by ruthless gangster Johnny Vanning (Eduardo Cianelli). She has been keeping her occupation from her sweet kid sister Betty. One night Mary is entertaining a man who gives Johnny a bad check to cover his gambling losses. The man ends up dead and Mary is a material witness. Mary first agrees to help Assistant DA David Graham (Humphrey Bogart), then succumbs to intimidation and perjures herself to help Johnny. Betty is so upset with Mary’s revelation that she quits school and starts attending Johnny’s “parties”. When things go wrong for Betty, Mary confronts Johnny head on. With Isabel Jewell as one of the good-time girls.

This movie has one of those muckraking, overearnest scripts that don’t do the actors any favors. That said, Humphrey Bogart manages to maintain his dignity while Bette Davis comes off more strident than tough. Davis’s performance took the movie with it as she is on screen virtually the entire time. Cianelli, as always, made a truly scary villain, though.

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Posted in Movie Reviews

Lone Star (1996)

Posted on September 26, 2013 | 2 comments

Lone Star
Directed by John Sayles
Written by John Sayles
1996/USA
Columbia Pictures Corporation/Castle Rock Entertainment/Rio Dulce
First viewing
#1279 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die (combined list – 2013 ver.)
IMDb users say 7.5/10; I say 8.0/10

[box] Otis Payne: It’s not like there’s a line between the good people and the bad people. It is not like you’re one or the other.[/box]

I enjoyed this haunting story about a man coming to terms with his past as he investigates a decades old murder near the Rio Grande.

Nobody in Rio County, Texas has a bad word to say about the late Buddy Deems (Matthew McConanaughey) (“what a real Texan ought to be”) or his wife (“a saint”). Buddy’s son Sam (Chris Cooper) is not so sure. When Sam returns to Rio County after a divorce, he is elected sheriff but few think he can fill Buddy’s shoes.

As the film begins, two Army surveyors find a human skull, sheriff’s badge, and Masonic ring on an old firing range. Later they find a .45 caliber bullet. Sam becomes convinced that these are remnants of the body of corrupt, vicious ex-sheriff Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) who disappeared before his father became sheriff. Wade was the prototypical redneck bully, particularly targeting blacks and Mexican-Americans. Sam sets out to prove that Buddy murdered Wade. His investigation takes him to Mexico and San Antonio. The true story is told during the course of the film in a series of flashbacks.

In the meantime, Sam is also pursuing his now-widowed high school sweetheart Pilar (Elizabeth Peña). Pilar has a complicated relationship with her mother Mercedes who owns a local cafe. We also follow the story of Otis, who own a saloon catering to African-Americans on the nearby Army base. Otis’s son, a colonel, has just been appointed commander of the base but has been estranged from his father for years. Otis’s grandson feels domineered by his spit-and-polish father and longs for a connection with his grandfather.

All these threads are resolved in unexpected ways.

On one level this is a mystery in a Western setting but on a deeper level it is about the pernicious effects of secrets and about inter-generational, interracial and intercultural relations on the Texas-Mexico border. John Sayles’s Oscar-nominated screenplay cuts deep into the hearts of his characters. The acting is superb. I have always been a fan of Chris Cooper and he is outstanding here. This one snuck by my radar when it was out in theaters and I was very glad to catch up with it.