The Devil Inside (One Star)

So much for “art.“ Maybe it’s The Devil Inside and its makers who know what audiences really want to see. Cinematography that looks amateurish. Acting that looks like non-acting. A script that seems unwritten. Contortionist acts. Mocko-Shockumentaries. Blood on the walls. Devils in the hospital. Corpses strewn hither and thither. Zombies and demons running amok. And holding it all together: jiggling camerawork, inexplicable mystification and an overpowering sense that your time is being throughly wasted. Now, that’s entertainment!

My Perestroika (Two and a Half Stars)

U.S.A.: Robin Hessman, 2011 

Robin Hessman’s documentary about one of the most momentous political events of the 20^th century — the collapse of the Soviet Union ad the seeming end of the Cold War — makes it look puzzlingly unmomentous, almost mundane. Hessman, an American, who worked in Russia during the ‘90s on their version of “Sesame Street,” focuses on five Russians, including four ex-schoolmates, and follows them from the ‘80s to now: though the traumas and upheavals of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, glasnost, perestroika, and finally the dissolution of the USSR.

The quintet Hessman builds her movie around are Olga Durikova, once the class beauty, now a single mother who works for a billiards company, Ruslan Stupin, a ex-punk rock star (with the group NAIV) who’s now a subway/street musician, Andrei Yevgrafov, a successful entrepreneur who runs a chain of posh western-style men’s wear stores. and two history teachers, the husband and wife Borya and Lyuba Meyerson. Some of them yearn a little for the past (and its security), some are delighted by the change. Almost all of them are too busy to focus much on politics.

 My Perestroikais not memorably shot or edited, but its human material makes it sometimes fascinating. At the end, even with the revelations or intimations (or are knowledge from elsewhere) that the new Russia is corrupt and violent, and might eventually be a threat as the old Russia was, one is amazed by how quiet and, in the end, non-bloody, and how seemingly inevitable, the fall of Communism finally was. (Russian and English, with subtitles)

Who’s Minding the  Store? (Three Stars)

U.S.: Frank Tashlin, 1963 (Three Stars) (Olive)

Jerry Lewis, that’s who. Without Dean. And since this Frank Tashlin-written-and-directed farce — set in a department store that Jerry, as the well-meaning but  accident-prone  Norman Phiffler, systematically demolishes —  dates from Lewis’ biggest commercial (and even artistic) period, the early ’60s, that means we’re going to see plenty of the man the French (or some of the French) call M. Le Crazy, doing his thing: all-out slapstick, spazzy chaos and wild mugging.

Jerry, that is, Norman, tended to be a bit more of a lady-killer when Dean Martin wasn’t around (sometimes even when he was) and in this romantic slapstick marathon, Norman hass won the heart and body of  Barbara Tuttle (Jill St. John),  gorgeous elevator girl at Tuttle’s Department store (this and other plot elements in Store, including Ray Walston in a corporate sneak role, seem to owe something  to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment).

Barbara, unbeknownst to Norman, is the daughter of the store owners, the incompatible  Tuttles: dictator harridan Pheobe (Agnes Moorehead) and milquetoast Tuttle (John McGiver again). So, when he’s hired by Tuttle’s and Pheobe, hip to the romance, tries to prove him an idiot; Norman unoftunately cooperates. (His greatest debaces involves a vacuum cleaner, with a blimp-like bag, that runs Lewisishly amok.)

Jerry Lewis is a matter of taste, of course, though I first developed the taste for him and Dean, as an impressionable kid of ten or so, which is just the right time. Besides he was only a year away from The Nutty Professor when he made this movie, the kind of show that unwittingly puts words like “madcap” and “romp” and “zany”  and “Lady! Lady!” in your head.  Well, what the hell: Vive Le Crazy!

Who’s Got the Action? (Two and a Half Stars)

U/S.: Daniel Mann, 1962 (Olive)

Dean Martin, that’s who. Sans Jerry Lewis.

(As I’m sure you know, “sans” is French for “without.”)  Here, suave smoothie Italiano Dino is playing a hopeless gambling addict married to Lana Turner, who devises a pretty ridiculous but strangely effective sceeme to try to break the racetrack habit, and teams up with Dean’s sometimes amorous co-worker Eddie Albert to pull it off — incurring the confusion of a  fellow bettors (John McGover again) and the wrath of gsngsgter/gambling czar Walter Matthau. (It’s a sort of silly role, but Matthau steals all his scenes again.

Dean could be a bit more romantic when he wasn’t yoked to Jerry (That’s amore), and here he not only has Lana, pitching woo and anti-parimutual activity, but the unusually good cast above. (Paul Ford, Nita Talbot and Jack Albertson are also around.) Jack Rose produced and wrote, from a novel by Alexander Rose. The director is the sometimes more serious Daniel Mann (The Rose Tattoo).

Dean, like Jerry, was at his commerical (and even artistic) zenith in the late ’50s and early 60s, and it really is a shame they never got together again except for that brief hug engineered by Frank Sinatra at Lewis’  March of Dimes telethon. Too fast, too fleeting. Maybe Billy Wilder should have cast them in tandem after Peter Sellers’ heart attack in Kiss Me, Stupid opened up a part. (Jerry couldn’t have mugged more than Ray Walston. Ah, no, wouldn’t have worked.) In any case, when I was ten or so, they made me laugh. Like crazy.

The Spiders (Three Stars)

German: Fritz Lang, 1919-1920 (Kino Classics)

Fritz Lang (M, Metropolis, Die Nibelungen) was a master of horror, crime and adventure, and he combines them all — along with a dark touch of romance and a smidgen of humor– in this epic movie tale of lost treasure, exotic Peruvian climes, a daring adventurer (Carl de Vogt as the almost insanely courageous explorer from San Francisco, Kay Hoog), a band of ruthless criminals who tunnel under Chinatown and make up the international gang  The Spiders, the priceless and elusive Buddha’s Head Diamond, the beauteous sun priestess Naela (Lil Dagover), and one of the more murderous of all femme fatales, the busty but perfidious Lio Sha (Ressel Orla).

This spectacular black and white silent movie was released in two episodes (both in this DVD) — Part One: The Golden Sea (1919) and Part Two: The Diamond Ship (1920) — and it was quite obviously influenced by Louis Feuillade’s French crime serials  Judex, Fantomas and Les Vampires, which are better, but not by much. Serial followers with campier tastes might prefer the jovial, high-spirited nonsense of  American cliff-hangers like The Perils of Pauline, but even considering The Spiders’ lack of humor, it’s easy to see that both Lang and Feuillade are superior artists, and that Lang would grow into an even more important one.

Only Hitler and the Nazis, worse monsters and more evil criminals than The Spiders, could drive out Lang and the other German and Austrian film noir greats to Hollywood, stopping his rise in his own country. But these remnants of high adventure remain. Confusion to The Spiders, and to their Nazi counterparts! (Silent movie with intertitles and music score by Ben Model.)  

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