Two spitting scenes in 3D and Jack Dawson loses his virginity. A second look indicates a cruel streak in the modern epic.

What’s next? BEN HUR in 3D? How about THE TEN COMMANDMENTS? It’s got all those Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea. And it has that infamous femme fatale Anne Baxter as vampy Nefretri hilariously moaning: “Oh, Moses, Moses, why of all men did I fall in love with a prince of fools?”

Why the need for TITANIC 3D? Did Cameron need the money? Were DiCaprio and Winslet’s agents shrewd enough to consider a re-release pay clause in their contracts? Did Cameron just do it because he could? Regardless of the financial reasons, the money put into TITANIC 3D is on the screen in an impressive way – Cameron has shown that a 3D conversion – TITANIC’s conversion is said to have cost $18 million – done properly, can work.

A recap: TITANIC, released in 1997, was Hollywood’s costliest production ($200 million) and became the top-grossing movie in history at $1.8 billion and it won a record-tying 11 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

What follows is a quick summary of the plot (no spoilers!) with my highly individualistic interpretation. The R.M.S. Titanic was primarily a ship celebrating the division of the classes: Brahmin aristocrats for whom the great ocean liner was built, and the “untouchables” – the men and women who worked on the ship, as well as the Third Class (steerage) passengers. Each had their own part of the ship – but only one man was able to cross over the divide – 19 year old, footloose and fancy free American Jack Hawkins (Leonardo DiCaprio), who, in a game of cards, won two tickets back home on the great ship for him and his buddy Fabrizio.

Aristocrat and old money snob Ruth Bukater (Frances Fisher) has brilliantly manipulated her daughter Rose (Kate Winslet) into accepting a marriage proposal by Caledon Hockley (Billy Zane), an obscenely wealthy young heir to a fortune. Their magic circle includes royalty and vast robber-baron fortunes (diversely called “new money”). Rose is not in love with Cal, but Ruth once again reminds her that they are destitute and in great debt due to her father’s reckless behavior. To save them from a life of social banishment and poverty, Rose must marry Cal.

I recently watched Titanic: The Final Word With James Cameron on the National Geographic Channel. Cameron’s final words – we all know he’s a powerful multi-millionaire – was scripted by Karl Marx!

Rose resents her mapped-out privileged future, hates her mother, and cares not a twit about her dead father’s debts. Her mother can sell matches on a street in New York for all she cares.

So how wealthy is Cal? He bestows on Rose a priceless blue diamond once owned by a king. Callous and cruel but with impeccable manners, Cal represents the society both he and Rose grew up in. Yet, Rose wants no part of high-class society. She longs to take off and go backpacking across Europe. She envies the poor.

Jack saves Rose from her suicide attempt and they begin a shipboard romance-of-the-heart. Jack teaches Rose how to spit into the wind. They practice. Rose becomes good at it.

Imagine meeting someone who wanted to teach you how to poop in your pants. Same difference.

Jack is an artist and shows Rose his nude drawings of Paris women. He is obviously a man who has seen a thing or to. Or has he? Rose certainly is no virgin, since Cal questions why she hasn’t visited his room one night. When Rose asks Jack to draw her only wearing the necklace and unrobes confidently and seductively in front of him, Jack blushes and becomes flustered like he never saw a naked woman before!

Cal has his “aide-de-camp” hunt Rose all over the ship, constantly finding her in Jack’s company. As the film moves towards the iceberg, Cal loses his temper with Rose and slaps her. She spits in his face.

It’s the ultimate humiliation – to be spat on. However, it has evolved and now is a popular, corrupt fetish in pornography. Remember when Thomas Jane spat in Angelina Jolie’s mouth in ORIGINAL SIN (2001)?

Spitting upon another person, especially onto the face, is a universal sign of anger, hatred, disrespect or contempt. It can represent a “symbolical regurgitation” an act of intentional contamination. However, in my work in South America with ayahuascaqueros, the shaman’s spit is often drank as a means of transferring power. However, this is not what director/writer James Cameron had in mind.

Cal is a pompous caricature of a moustache twirling Simon Legree who refuses to let Rose go. She is a jewel in his world and he is not going to let a homeless young man win her.

Jack and Rose’s love for each other is finally consummated in a magnificent car in the ship’s cargo bay. At the culmination of the sex act, Jack starts shivering and Rose holds him gently to her breast. She strokes his hair and asks him if he is all right. Rose says: “You’re shivering”. Clearly, it was his first time.

Wait one second! Jack Dawson was a virgin?

Why in the world did Cameron choose that take? It squashes the dynamic passion of their iconic love story reducing it to whimsical puppy love. Imagine Clark Gable shivering after bedding Scarlett O’Hara!

And from then on it is Rose who takes over the heroic lead. Rose is clearly Cameron’s stand-in. Cameron starts to dismiss Jack and his choices from this point forward prove my point. Cameron emasculates Jack. It is the power of the director to shape a performance. They may have done the love scene ten different ways, but Cameron chose the whimpering one.

Now, let’s blame the sinking on the moon. An ultra-rare alignment of the sun, the full moon, and Earth, may have set the April 14, 1912 tragedy in motion, a new report suggests. R.M.S. Titanic went down on a moonless night, but the iceberg that sank the luxury liner may have been launched in part by a full moon that occurred three and a half months earlier, scientists say. That full moon, on January 4, 1912, may have created unusually strong tides that sent a flotilla of icebergs southward—just in time for Titanic’s maiden voyage, said astronomer Donald Olson of Texas State University-San Marcos.

The love triangle is a fine build-up and Cameron clearly feeds our resentment of the First Class passengers by luxuriating in their arrogant entitlement, knowing many of them will die without their jewelry and priceless possessions.

As the signal for the iceberg is given, TITANIC 3D takes off in a spectacular fashion. Yes, 3D was created for epics like TITANIC not for MY DINNER WITH ANDRE.

Can you applaud a hero who doesn’t save his own life? Why did Jack sacrifice himself so Rose could live? Have we neglected the messianic feature of TITANIC instead seeing it as a tragic love story?
Another complaint on second viewing is the journey of that priceless necklace. As an old lady reliving her experience on the Titanic, heavily-wrinkled Rose (Gloria Stuart) is told that ruthless Cal – who made sure he got on a woman-and-children-first lifeboat – put in an insurance claim on the necklace. We don’t know what happened to Rose’s mother but Rose went on to have a happy life with a husband, children and a devoted granddaughter (Suzy Amis). She kept the necklace in her pocket her whole life!

Shouldn’t Rose have given the necklace back to Cal or used it to provide for her mother and redeem her father’s reputation? Hey, how about donating it to the families of those 1,517 who died on the Titanic?

Leonardo DiCaprio was not at any of the premieres for the new 3D version of TITANIC. Why the snub?
The sinking of the ship in 3D is glorious. It is certainly worth the price of a 3D ticket and Cameron has delivered – as he promised at CinemaCon 2011 – to bring a high quality stereoscopic 3D film from a 2D source.

Here in Las Vegas is the most fantastic exhibit, Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition permanently housed at the Luxor Hotel and Casino. I’ve seen it several times and it is brilliant – it’s a journey that begins pleasantly enough until the specter an iceberg looms.

Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition showcases authentic artifacts recovered from two and one-half miles below the surface of the North Atlantic. Unique to the Exhibition at Luxor Hotel & Casino is the crown jewel of artifacts, a 15-ton section of the Titanic’s starboard hull, appropriately called the ‘Big Piece.’ There are more than 20 never-before-seen artifacts. Reproduced are the decks, the famed Grand Staircase, cabins and information about the passengers and crew. This 25,000 square foot exhibition is a stunning, and highly dramatic, exhibition.

Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition commemorated the Centennial of RMS Titanic’s launch and eventual sinking on April 10 with a special candlelit vigil at Luxor Hotel and Casino. A Titanic descendant and 185 Griffith Elementary School students took part in the ceremony dedicated to remembering those who lost their lives on RMS Titanic.

Tickets prices for Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition are $27 for adults, $25 for seniors, $20 for children 14 years of age and younger, and $24 for Nevada residents and Luxor hotel guests. Hours of operation are 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. with last admission at 9 p.m. www.Luxor.com.

I’ve been to Rwanda. I have a strong perspective on the genocide.

My advice: Don’t go to Rwanda. In 2007 I toured Rwanda and trekked up a mountain to be in very close physical contact with the mountain gorillas.

They don’t like white people in Rwanda. I found out why and maybe they have a good reason. They still resent the Europeans for colonizing them (and the Germans for the 1904 genocide of 65,000 members of the Herero tribe and making their women sex slaves).

The Rwandans never asked for colonization. Then again, who did? Situated in the heart of Africa, Rwanda escaped the attention of the 19th-century slave traders, so is one of the few African countries whose people were never sold into slavery.

Scholars place the racial hatred between the Tutsi and Hutu solely on the European colonists. The Tutsis were willing collaborators to the Belgian colonization. The Belgians gave the Tutsis privileged positions in politics, education, and business. The Belgians effectively divided Rwanda’s people into two main groups – the Tutsi and the Hutu majority.

When the extreme unfairness of the Tutsis domination finally erupted, the Hutu killers knew who their Tutsi neighbors were and what possessions they could take. In other cases, they used physical characteristics as a guide — the Tutsi were generally taller by the historical 12-centimeter difference, thinner, and with slimmer noses than the shorter, stockier Hutu. The Tutsi, with their more ‘European’ appearance, had been deemed the ‘master race’.

The “master race”. Sounds familiar.

And Rwandans still resent that white people didn’t help stop the 1994 genocide that slaughtered one million Tutsi in 100 days. I learned all this at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum. Returning home, I read The Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeld and When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by Mahmood Mamdani.

KINYARWANDA brilliantly conveys this unrealistic division of people through weaving six different tales together. The prominent story is of a Tutsi teenager, Jean (Hadidja Zaninka), who slips out at night to go to a party. Leaving the party with a Hutu boy, they pass a group of men surrounding a Tutsi. When Jean returns home she finds her parents have been slaughtered.

With the systematic, state-supported murder of 6 million European Jews by the Nazis during World War II, the world said “Never Again”. So what happened in Rwanda?*

The Machete Season is a shocking and highly descriptive telling of exactly how Hutus – many joyously – killed their Tutsi wives, children, friends and neighbors by swinging machetes.
Every day 60 white folks, the daily limit allowed, come into Rwanda specifically to visit the mountain gorillas. The local people get none of the revenue.

The hostility was obvious. Walking into town, our group was spit at, had rocks thrown at them, and three people were intentionally ran off the road by trucks attempting to hit them. We did not go into town again but stayed at our campsite at Centre Pastoral Notre Dame De Fatima where I attended Mass. Our Kenyan support staff refused to go into town.

We were greeted with shouts of “Here comes the white man.”

A substantial number of women, and even girls, were involved in the slaughter, inflicting extraordinary cruelty on other women, men, and children. Women of every social category took part in the killings. The extent to which women were involved in the killings is unprecedented anywhere in the world. Some women killed with their own hands.

The “low-tech” means by which the killing was carried out — the murderers used machetes or hoes — required the involvement of a large proportion of the Hutu population. Videotapes of the killings show that three or more killers often hacked on a single victim. There were many more killers than victims.

When the genocide ended approximately two million Hutus, participants in the genocide, and the bystanders, with anticipation of Tutsi retaliation, fled from Rwanda. Eventually, over a million returned. How many Hutus were charged with murder in the genocide? In 1998, twenty-two people were executed in public for their role in the massacre.

Rwanda – by the numbers – is a country of killers.

Based on the above, I can say that Alrick Brown’s KINYARWANDA is accurate without being “torture porn”. Could you imagine actually seeing people hacked to death by a meandering, but well organized gang of men, women, and children? Yes, children.

According to the books I read, children assisted their parents in the atrocities.

KINYARWANDA does show a child revealing the location of Tutsis to the killers.

KINYARWANDA focuses on two religious leaders, a priest and a Muslim cleric. Should the Muslim community give refuge to the victimized Tutsis in their mosques? When one Tutsi mentions going to the Hotel Rwanda, we hear that the manager only accepted Tutsis with money!

After reading The Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak I actually thought the director had found killers willing to talk on camera! Brown stages several scenes in a re-education camp where Hutus confess their crimes. These are the most emotionally riveting scenes in the film.

According to the books I read, the Catholic clergy quickly fled the country in anticipation of the massacre. Brown does not mention this. Instead he focuses on the Mufti of Rwanda, the highest Muslim leader in the country, who issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims from participating in the killing of the Tutsi. As the country became a slaughterhouse, the film recounts how the Imams opened the doors of the mosques to give refuge to the Tutsi and those Hutu who refused to participate in the killing.

The DVD, which is available on May 15th, comes with special features, cast and crew commentary, the Making of Kinyarwanda, a featurette, galleries, the shooting script and more.

http://www.kinyarwandamovie.com/

* As Mahmood Mamdani points out, “Unlike the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide was not carried out from a distance, in remote concentration camps beyond national borders, in industrial killing camps operated by agents who often did no more than drop Zyklon B crystals into gas chambers from above. The Rwandan genocide was executed with the slash of machetes rather than the drop of crystals, with all the gruesome detail of a street murder rather than the bureaucratic efficiency of a mass extermination.”

Mamdani continues: “The technology of the holocaust allowed a few to kill many, but the machete had to be wielded by a single pair of hands. It required not one but many hacks of a machete to kill even one person. With a machete, killing was hard work and that is why there were often several killers for every single victim. Whereas Nazis made every attempt to separate victims from perpetrators, the Rwandan genocide was very much an intimate affair. It was carried out by hundreds of thousands, perhaps even more, and witnessed by millions.”

They sell their bodies but never their souls.

It’s not lucrative nor is it accompanied with benefits and a retirement package.

The harsh reality is substantially less PRETTY WOMAN and more MONSTER.

A world away from HBO’s cameras at the Bunny Ranch and far removed from the Hollywood high-priced call girls caught with A-listers are women, some just young girls, who provide carnal services in exchange for a meager existence.

In Thailand, Bangladesh, and Mexico, women of different cultures and religions under the banner of “whore” share their tribulations sans the morality issue and without prejudicial judgments by filmmaker Michael Glawogger. Since prostitutes are generally regarded as mendacious, we must abandon all doubt and take what they say as gospel.

Three Thai females punch in at a time clock, proceed to what appears to be a salon to have hair and make-up done, and then sit in a glass encased area of a modern well designed “hotel styled” lobby as men peer into The Fishbowl. Young Bangladeshi teenaged girls run amok in childish horseplay through the concrete corridors of a tenement of one-roomed quarters while the squabble of women young and old pulling on prospective clients reverberates loudly. Along the pot-holed streets of “The Zone,” cars pass slowly eyeing the meretriciously dressed Mexican women standing in front of doorways of their dilapidated rooms furnished with a mattress and images of Holy Death.

The Thai girls seemingly have a better life than the others. We view them shopping, eating, at home, and out meeting with “bar boys.” There are other options, places, and careers to pursue. In Bangladesh, a young girl is inspected, bought, and told the rules of servitude. Children are born here to follow the same path and if enough money is saved, eventually, they can have girls working for them when time puts the old out of commission. Within these harrowed halls exists a form of kinship and motherly love even among the face of contempt and competition. The Mexican Zone is a fenced in outlaw town from a Robert Rodriguez film. There is drunkenness and drug use, rampant profanity, and the most lewd commentary. One woman tells of the numerous cities and brothels in which she worked. Another boasts to the point of exulting about her skills and tricks of the trade. However, there is a general sense that this is the end of the road.

One Bangladeshi girl appears to have already born the weight of the world. She would like to know why women suffer so much and why must they endure this path. She refuses laughter because it brings about tears. One of the Mexican women supports the statement and we learn that outward laughter is indeed an inward cry. The little girl in Bangladesh theorizes, “Maybe there is no path at all.”

In Mexico, the images of Holy Death are on the walls, on dressers, and even tattooed. The women pray for a Holy Death. As one woman stated, “…If she doesn’t take your life you have to do it yourself.”

Although this film is about the female, we learn much about the males. There is only one constant for the males regardless of culture. Whether it is Bhat, Taka, or Peso, they all haggle. Their views and actions differ.

At The Fishbowl, the women wear a number and are discussed by the manager and the prospective clients. He assures a good body, good service, none will disappoint and all is inclusive. Once a decision is made, the manager rattles off the girls’ numbers, then the girls and clients greet one another politely in Thai fashion, pay by credit card or cash at the cashier and into an elevator they go.

There is a reverence toward women by the men in Thailand. Questioning their reasons for patronizing such an establishment, one guy wished to buy himself a little happiness and is certain that none compare to his life partner, his wife. Another wanted a departure from the reality of the day. (In my opinion (not FIR’s) only the Americans present seemed to emit a “creep factor.” One who spoke Thai commented that the girl looked fifteen (but what the hell, right? Creep!) Given the favorable conversion rate, I guess these guys were on a sybaritic holiday.

In Bangladesh, some males have a relationship with the women, visiting them for a nominal fee several times a day or week. A barber who goes twice a day explained that if such a place did not exist men would rape women and farm animals. In The Zone, the males were the vilest and could display as much machismo as they had pesos to do so.

The beautifully shot production is accompanied by a hauntingly appropriate soundtrack. This film leaves one with a disturbing realization of the suffering and the plight of women. The unsettling images of a drunken prostitute bare-assed in The Zone, a young girl for sale among crowds of passing men staring into oblivion with the look of mental trauma etched into her face, a cowboy telling a girl to “just smile,” linger. This is not a film that is forgotten once the lights go back on.

Many years ago, Dean Martin said, “It’s Sinatra’s World. We only live in it.” I feel the same about Andre Gregory. I don’t know him, yet he appears in my life with disturbing regularity. It’s possible Andre Gregory lives nearby, for whenever I walk on Broadway, there he is. How do I know what Andre Gregory looks like? I saw him at the movies, in MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. Now he seems to be everywhere I go. Once I was sitting in a café, minding my own business and reading the Sunday Times. Suddenly, I felt I was in a movie. Then I realized the movie was MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. It turned out Andre Gregory was sitting behind me, telling some people the same stories that are in the film. After that I went to a church basement with a woman I was dating to see a play by A.R. Gurney called The Middle Ages. The story concerned the difficult relationship of a son with his father. Andre Gregory played the father. He sang the dialogue like Pavarotti, he screamed, he danced across the stage. He made strange gestures that I found irritating. I wanted to leave. My girlfriend made me stay. At the end of the play, when the father is dying of cancer, Mr. Gregory sang the dialogue with a soft tremor, and grasped the air. I cried. It was the most moving evening of theatre I’ve ever experienced.

Now Mr. Gregory is in my apartment, captured within the digital interstices of a Blu-Ray from Criterion entitled VANYA ON 42nd STREET. Vanya is the protagonist of a Chekhov play, Uncle Vanya, which is being performed by a group of actors directed by Mr. Gregory; actually rehearsing is closer to what is going on, in the dilapidated shell of the New Amsterdam theatre on 42nd Street. The film was produced in 1994, roughly five years before the transformation of 42nd Street into a theme park. The New Amsterdam Theatre, originally built by Florenz Ziegfeld around 1900, was the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, long before it was renovated by Disney. There is nothing Disney-like in the wreck of a building seen in Louis Malle’s film, with gilded gargoyles eaten away by mice, and a stage that can not be stepped upon, for leaks have rotted away the wood. A gigantic net is strung overhead, as pieces of the ceiling are continually falling, making soft, rumbling sounds, comforting yet frightful, like the echoes in certain dreams.

VANYA ON 42nd STREET might be described as a documentary turned inside out, with the filmmakers – director Louis Malle & cinematographer Declan Quinn – improvising visually upon the verbal improvisation of the actors based on a text by Chekhov translated into contemporary English by David Mamet. The story concerns a family of artists who work at cross purposes, involving unrequited love and unpaid bills. Although the play is set in a foreign country and in a different century, it’s about the daily grind of things we all deal with, yet with language that somehow transforms, opening up spaces and places one usually doesn’t explore.

I can see why Mr. Malle was attracted to this material, for the actors, guided by Mr. Gregory, experiment with the words of Chekhov in a similar fashion to how the be-boppers led by Charlie Parker took the chords of popular songs and created a rhythmic, emotionally stimulating art form. The focus here, in terms of the interpretation of Chekhov’s text, is not only rhythmic, but also character based. Each sentence not only has the multiple layers Chekhov put there, but also new levels of meaning due to the three year process of rehearsal the actors have gone through.

Mr. Malle’s direction adds another dimension to this experiment, which is based on the practical essence of words spoken in a particular place. While the text has many sublime passages describing the natural world of cherry orchards and forests which are quickly slipping away, the camera focuses on the ravaged beauty of the New Amsterdam theatre, which one can see crumbling before one’s eyes as Chekhov’s words echo through the silent shell of Flo Ziegfeld’s desecrated dream world. This isn’t just a documentation of a performance, but a living document that changes as we watch and become emotionally connected, both to the incidents in the play and the human beings sitting, reciting and interacting in the New Amsterdam theatre, while the camera moves around them and with them, finding a piece of decaying plaster or ravaged gilding that somehow connects with the words that are being spoken.

I could talk about Julianne Moore’s red hair, the warmth of her complexion and how it blends with the wall behind her, gold going to gray and mottled with white streaks, as she talks about love and duty, freedom and responsibility. This isn’t so much a recitation or a performance as an evocation, magical and somewhat frightening, as the quotidian of grit in this decaying showplace becomes transformed through the voice of the actors and the composition of the camera. Ah, so then maybe the film is Disney-like after all, the Disney of PINOCCHIO, when the wooden puppet becomes flesh and blood, when the everyday is revealed as dreamtime or perhaps the dream we think we experience is really the everyday. That is an underlying theme in Chekhov, and it is in Disney’s best work as well.

Of course in Disney, there is singing. There is singing in VANYA ON 42ND STREET as well, especially Brooke Smith in her closing monologue, the rhythm and timber of which is pure beauty because it is so explicit and simple. That, I think, is the influence of Andre Gregory. Simple and yet something beyond what a human being is supposed to be. Song and yet simple breath. No wonder Susan Sontag, as Ms. Smith relates in the interview extra on the disc, showered her with such extravagant praise at the end of an earlier rehearsal at the Victory Theatre across 42nd Street. (Ms. Smith was a little nonplused, as she didn’t know who Susan Sontag was.) I could talk about Wallace Shawn, who seems to be almost sleeping and smiling with inner delight, then suddenly erupts into passionate confession and murderous intent. I should talk about the whole ensemble, the whole film, which should be in your collection if you care about cinema, and about life.

With VANYA ON 42ND STREET, Louis Malle has come full circle. His first feature, THE SILENT WORLD (1956), a documentary made in collaboration with Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was filmed under the sea. His final feature, VANYA ON 42ND STREET, is an exploration of another subterranean world, that of a decaying 42nd Street showplace and a group of actors who are trying to come to terms with a text from yet another vanished world, that of Czarist Russia. While the story of Uncle Vanya is concerned with the tragedy of experience, Louis Malle’s camera observes this heartbreaking ritual with the open-eyed innocence of a joyful child.

The transfer is perfection, as is the film itself. VANYA ON 42ND STREET is Highly Recommended.

I had never seen this one, and am not sure I’d even heard of it. But Wellman is a director who just keeps growing in my estimation as the years go by, and his pre-code films, as well as late triumphs such as this surprising western, show up in the studios’ archive releases.

Released theatrically (1951) exactly one hundred years after the time the story allegedly takes place, and put into production, I would assume, partially because of the success of Howard Hawks’ RED RIVER a few years earlier, this is an utterly captivating subject. Instead of Hawks’ herd of cattle, we’re substituting almost a hundred and fifty women who’ve volunteered to make a brutal trek across two thousand miles of American wilderness to marry a hundred lonely male settlers in California.

It’s a tale in great part devoid of Western cliché-pitfalls, conceived and directed with hard-edged directness by tougher-than-leather Wellman, and I hope it’s based as much on fact as possible, because I was riveted to its sense of period and detail.

There’s this Japanese cowboy (Henry Nakamura) who signs on for the trip, and though he serves as comic relief (Robert Taylor as the trek’s guide is constantly asking him what he just said), he still manages to give a subtle, humanistic performance. Strongly reminiscent of Walter Brennan’s role in RED RIVER (he even tells Taylor, as Brennan told John Wayne, that Taylor has done wrong), Makamura serves as a balancing voice that the intransigent wagon train leader reluctantly listens to. I liked him a lot and easily tolerated the plot convention that he served, since it was inventively re-woven by Schnee’s screenplay.

Taylor, as Buck Wyatt, is a serious, focused trail boss who tolerates no breach of the rules by the small group of male horsemen he has hired – rule # 2 being no messing around with the women – and he has no compunction whatsoever about shooting them if they transgress. The sudden moments of violence, including both death by Taylor and death by natural causes, are shocking in the brittleness of their depiction. The story is attributed to Frank Capra, and you just know he wouldn’t have indulged in such unmitigated instances of man’s or nature’s brutality in the way Wellman does.

Denise Darcel, a failed Hollywood attempt at importing a foreign female star to trigger the box-office success of such predecessors as Garbo and Dietrich, is nonetheless excellent here. She is never false in her emotional choices, and I was drawn to her plight, to her romantic inclinations, and to her anger and resentments.

Scott Eyman, on the commentary track, calls WESTWARD THE WOMEN a feminist western. It is certainly about women. They outnumber the male actors by maybe ten to one, are given more fleshed-out characterizations than those of the male actors. At 118 minutes, the film has an epic stature, focusing on the multitude of details involved with the women’s encounters with the elements, as well as countless close-ups of the ladies as they endure difficulties and enjoy precious few delights.

After Darcel, the standout female performance is from humongous, 6′ 2″, 230 pound Hope Emerson, who we fondly remember as the sadistic prison guard in CAGED (1950), and as ‘Mother’ in the Peter Gunn TV series (1958). (IMDB informs us that she was also the voice of Elsie the Cow in a series of Bordens commercials.) She’s charming here, depicted as sort of an Eastern mariner, spouting sea-faring rhetoric. And while she helps keep the wagon train together, you can’t help but wonder how the bewildered soul who gets her as his mail-order bride at journey’s end is going to react. Serious and pro-active, but willing to smile, she reminds me of a female Finlay Currie.

Casting is crucial to a film’s success, and in this case must have involved a particularly lengthy and elaborate process. The results are wondrously successful, and the many fine female leads and supporting roles keep the narrative emotionally believable, and allow us to be empathetic. I give Wellman great credit for choosing such a cast. I don’t think he was ever known as a ‘woman’s director’ – quite the contrary, he was a jack of all genres, possibly not a wise assignation for a Hollywood career – but I couldn’t imagine another director doing better with the task at hand.

Eyman points out the harshness of the cinematography, and the paucity of glamour makeup used on the cast. These were clearly deliberate choices meant to reinforce the challenging nature of the environment.

He also claims that the Indian raid 40 or so minutes into the film is one of its few capitulations to genre conventions, and about that I have to disagree. Once the Indians arrive, contemplate the circle of wagons, and decide it’s in their best interest to withdraw and attack another day, I felt I was watching a conscious avoidance of cliché. And when, much later on, they finally do attack (and Eyman does concede that this sequence bypasses Hollywood convention), we the viewers are with Taylor a few miles away hearing the war whoops, and by the time he gets back they’ve already done their dirty work and skedaddled.

There are so few jarring slip-ups in the film’s plot elements, so few moments where the director goes for an obvious laugh or a false maudlin heart-pull, that you can’t resist being drawn into the veracity of the adventure.

This is a highly worthwhile film to view or own, and it probably could be effectively remade today, though perhaps the size of the cast would be prohibitive. But it surely would find an audience, seeing as women-driven films are as few and far between as ever.

BULLY for WEINSTEIN!!!

After the MPAA gave director Lee Hirsch’s documentary an “R” rating – which precludes anyone under 17 from seeing it unless accompanied by an adult, The Weinstein Company took the bull by the horns, releasing it as UNRATED.

The end result: a VERY GOOD MOVE for a VERY GOOD MOVIE!!

Now kids of all ages can freely enter their local cinemas and sit through 98 minutes of this visual and verbal diatribe about real life children terrorizing other children at school, on school buses, and at play. And everyone can relate to it, because it has nothing to do with race, religion or economic status.

The Bad News: It’s not perfect, production-wise. Its low budget shows, via often indistinct speech and hazy scenes. Besides, there’s not one nanosec of comic relief in its running time.

The Good News: It won’t matter, because this stellar, startling tell-all is a film everyone should see – parents included. (Matter of fact, it should be mandatory.)

Plot: As you learn up front, over 13 million American kids will be bullied this year…and this is the story of just five of them — from Iowa and Oklahoma, down to Mississippi and Georgia.

Just as a warning, it’s not a pretty story, because two committed suicide:

Kirk, 11, and Tyler, 17. We only see them via photographs and past film footage, but their memories are kept very much alive by their families and friends. (As Ty’s dad said, “We’re nobodies, but if he were a politician’s son, there’d be a law tomorrow.”)

The other three are captured on film in unrehearsed, real life experiences showing them being outrageously bullied and tormented by their classmates and neighbors — along with scenes of their sadness and utter disbelief as to why they’re being picked on with such violence and cruelty.

You might think it’s unbelievable– but you’ll learn early on that the horror of bullying is only too real. Though vivid examples shown include regularly being strangled, stabbed, beaten and shoved, the psychological damage and mental anguish can be just as severe…if not more so.

Obviously, bullying can take many forms–and two of the 5 students shown, both female, have slightly different problems. One, Ja’Meya, 14, took her mother’s revolver on the bus and threatened to shoot her tormentors. (She was jailed for months.) The other, Kelby, 16, an admitted lesbian, was, along with her family, ostracized by just about everyone.

What makes matters worse is realizing that those in authority — parents and, especially, teachers and school officials, hardly deal with the problem. As seen, some are utterly indifferent. And what’s really bizarre is that one absolutely appalling assistant principal, when respectfully confronted (for the umpteenth time) about bullying on the bus by the parents of the much-abused Alex, 12, replied with gross insouciance: “I’ve been on some of those buses –they’re good as gold.” Then added: “I’m sorry about this; we will take care of it.”

You know she won’t.

Bottom Line: Along with my strong recommendation, my hopes that after seeing this film, it would serve as an ideal “Bully Pulpit” (a phrase coined by Teddy Roosevelt) and motivate people to work toward changing this horrendous situation.

Trivia: It was given its “R” rating solely because of 6 swear words (ones we hear regularly onscreen and on TV)–which wasn’t to everyone’s liking, considering the importance of the film’s social relevance. So how to change it? It took a high school junior, Katy Butler (who’d been bullied herself) to launch a petition, which ultimately amassed over 400,000 signatures. The result: a massive swelling of support for the Weinsteins from a host of Bold-Faced Names, including Meryl Streep, her daughter Mamie Gummer, Johnny Depp, Ellen DeGeneres, Kelly Ripa and Anderson Cooper, Tommy Hilfiger, Justin Bieber –and a host of others, too numerous to mention. As Ms. Butler said, “As someone who lived through bullying day in and day out in school, including having my finger broken by bullies, this film is too important to silence with an ‘R’ rating. Everyone should have a chance to see “Bully.”

Now they will.

ADDENDUM: Just in! As of Thursday, April 6th, BULLY has now been given a PG-13 rating by the MPAA, after the Weinstein Co. resubmitted a new version, cutting half of the six “f-k” words used in the film. In actuality, though only a one-time use of the F-word is allowed for that edict, the organization relented.

The three times it was left in -during a crucial scene on the school bus when Alex was bullied — brought relief to director Lee Hirsch, who’d railed against the initial MPAA ruling. “I feel completely vindicated with this resolution. While I retain my belief that PG-13 has always been the appropriate rating for this film, as reinforced by Canada’s rating of a PG, we have today scored a victory from the MPAA.”

Since many theaters won’t show UNRATED films, this most welcome change will prove a boon for BULLY. Now, it’ll be available to everyone.

My mother’s high school art teacher was a Titanic survivor. He told her his recollections of that terrible disaster, and remained in contact with her until his death decades later. So, I grew up in a household fascinated by all things Titanic, including the many film adaptations. The best film version, hands down was the British J. Arthur Rank 1958 production A NIGHT TO REMEMBER.

To honor the 100th anniversary of the sinking (April 15, 1912) Criterion has released a stunning Blu-Ray of A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. The film never looked this good, alive with incredible detail, with crisp perfect audio. The film has some amazing sound edits and uses of jarring off camera sound effects – such as the massive, bellowing groans the 46,300 ton ship made as it sunk below the surface of the North Atlantic!

On the filmmaking side, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER is one of the most nearly perfect films ever! As each shot progresses, so does the story. No unnecessary sup-plots (the film has sub-plots, but they are important). There is nothing supercilious about A NIGHT TO REMEMBER. This Criterion Blu-Ray includes a documentary about the making of the film, complete with home-movie footage of the production, Titanic survivors visiting the set, and scenes of a snowstorm disrupting the outdoor set. A rare Swedish documentary about the Titanic from the 1960′s can be also found on this release.

An unheralded extra here is the replacement of a scene censored from American release prints. After the ship sinks, Second Officer Lightoller (played with restraint and humility by Kenneth More) tries to balance men on an overturned lifeboat. A man swims up yelling “save the child,” and hands Lightoller an infant wrapped in a blanket. The American edit abruptly cuts from here to a shot of Lightoller and the men balancing the boat. But now we see the hidden continuation of the shot, where Lightoller checks for breathing and a pulse within the motionless blanket, then shakes his head “no”, and lets the bundle gently sink into the ocean.

It’s the best film from director Roy Ward Baker, who later went to Hammer studios to helm the thrilling QUARTERMASS AND THE PIT as well as some of the studio’s later sexy vampire movies and DOCTOR JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE.

Many film-goers compare James Cameron’s 1997 Oscar winning TITANIC in unkindly ways to this film. Many go on line and call the more recent film ‘a “puke-fest” Certainly A NIGHT TO REMEMBER is the better film, but the Cameron-DiCaprio-Winslet extravaganza has plenty of merit, and was made with great respect for the story.

Here is my quick run down of Titanic Films through cinema history.

SAVED FROM THE TITANIC (1912), a presumed lost nine minute film made a month after the Titanic sinking, which stars Dorothy Gibson, who was an actual Titanic survivor. In the film, Ms. Gibson even wears the same dress she wore when she boarded Titanic’s first lifeboat.

ATLANTIC (1929) An early British talkie partially based on the Titanic disaster, directed by German expressionistic director E. A. Dupont. Its obvious use of miniatures is sub-par for 1929 movie special effects. Madeleine Carroll and sometimes Hitchcock villain Donald Calthrop star.

CAVALCADE (1933) This epic about historic British events affecting a wealthy family during the first part of the 20th Century features a well-staged scene aboard the Titanic. A good, not great adaptation of a Noel Coward play, CAVALCADE strangely won a Best Picture Oscar, beating out that year’s KING KONG, DINNER AT EIGHT and 42nd STREET.

S.O.S TITANIC (1943) Yes, the Nazis made a Titanic movie! This German production, made during Hitler’s rule, has some impressive special effects (Some of the shots from this film were used in A NIGHT TO REMEMBER) But the film-makers foul it up by keeping a pro-German/anti-British slant, which distorts many Titanic facts. As the ship is sinking, Titanic’s Captain Smith actually says “See if you can find any German people on board. They’ll know how to save the ship.” And during the Titanic inquest after the sinking, the disaster is blamed on capitalism. I’m not making this up.

TITANIC (1953) This first serious filming of the disaster is passable at best. Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck are rich folks aboard the doomed liner.

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1958) Get the Blu-Ray. Well worth the price!

TITANIC (Made for TV, 1996) To cash in on the anticipation of James Cameron’s monstrously budgeted film, this just-add-water, inaccurate version stars Catherine Zeta-Jones and Peter Gallagher. The worst part of the film involves Tim Curry as a serial rapist running amok on the ship as it sinks. An earlier Titanic TV-Movie made in 1978 starring David Warner (who was in the James Cameron film) is the much better TV-Movie bet.

TITANIC (1997) One of the most famous films ever made. The film holds your interest throughout its three-hour running time. Leonardo Di Caprio is a very likeable fictionalized “stowaway” who wins the heart of super-rich Kate Winslet on board the liner. Because the relationship between DiCaprio and Winslet works so well here, I find that TITANIC works better on the small screen than on the large screen. The film’s final shot, where the camera creeps along the sunken ship to discover Titanic ghosts, is a carbon copy of a scene from the 1960 Japanese film, I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR, where the camera prowls a sunken Japanese ship and comes upon the victims.

My mother’s friend, Titanic survivor Marshall Drew remained in contact with our family until his death in 1986, often sending us Christmas and Easter Cards. Here is his recollection of the disaster printed in various venues:

“I am always annoyed at artists’ depictions of the sinking of ‘Titanic’. I’ve never seen one that came anywhere near the truth. There might have been the slightest ocean swell but it was dead calm. Stars there may have been, but the blackness of the night was so intense one could not see anything like a horizon. As row by row of the porthole lights of the ‘Titanic’ sank into the sea this was about all one could see. When the ‘Titanic’ upended to sink, all was blacked out until the tons of machinery crashed to the bow. This sounded like an explosion, which of course it was not. As this happened hundreds of people were thrown into the sea. It isn’t likely I shall ever forget the screams of those people as they perished in the water said to be 28 degrees.”

Whenever I see James Whale’s brilliantly funny and smart horror classic THE INVISIBLE MAN, I pay attention to that final shot in the film where the unseen title character materializes on the hospital bed, just as life leaves him. First you see a skull resting on the pillow, then it’s covered in veins, then it becomes a person – a young looking Claude Rains. Rains is perfectly groomed and shaved after months of being invisible, not able to see himself in a mirror. It’s an early example of cinema’s “the cool factor”. Whale must have known he was starting a great film career for Rains, so he made sure Claude was all prettied up! Up until that point, audiences only heard that signature semi-hoarse British voice brilliantly carry the film. 1933 audiences seeing THE INVISIBLE MAN on it’s first run discovered an exciting new film talent.

Rains was already forty-four when Whale cast him in his debut film. (In 1920, Rains starred in BUILD THY HOUSE, an obscure and now lost British silent film) Fans often wondered – where did Rains come from, what did he do before he caused all that havoc while invisible? Author David J. Skal, a horror film historian noted for such works as Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen has teamed up with Rains’ only child, Jessica, to come up with An Actor’s Voice – Claude Rains, a tasty 290-page biography. Skal and Rains organized volumes of unpublished notes and rare voice recordings of Mr. Rains.

Skal presents this previously unwritten history of Rains’ early life as something of a male version of MY FAIR LADY. William Claude Rains started his career as a teenaged stagehand in England, hampered by a Cockney drawl and a lisp (classmates mocked the youth by calling him “Willy Wains”) Two major occurrences molded that drawl into the velvety voice that made such lines as “I am shocked, shocked, that there is gambling here!” immortal.

It’s that voice, with those old English Theatre barnstorming deliveries that help carry THE INVISIBLE MAN. Could you imagine Brando or Stallone deliver lines like: “Even da moon’s frightened duv me. Duh ho worle’s frighen to debt!” It’s that same barnstorming that made 1937′s THEY WON’T FORGET jump off the screen. My only negative with this book is that it brushes past this and other notable Claude Rains films too quickly. In THEY WON’T FORGET, Rains is Andy Griffin, a backwoods Southern District Attorney whose only occasional duties were scaring the law into the town drunk. Now he’s the prosecution in the trial of the century! When Griffin addresses the courtroom, it’s THE INVISBLE MAN’S insane Jack Griffin let loose again – manic- yelling-gesturing. But Rains’ can be beautifully understated as well. Skal points out the scene in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON where Rains (as a crooked senior US Senator) confronts young idealist Junior Senator James Stewart:

“You see things as black and white. A man as angel or devil. That’s the young idealist in you. And that isn’t how the world is run, Jeff. Not Government or Politics…. Thirty years ago, I had those ideals. I was you.” It’s a very real scene, a dark scene in an otherwise feel good movie.

The crème of Hollywood directors often used Rains to grace their films – Mervyn LeRoy, Michael Curtiz, Alfred Hitchcock, William Dieterle. Skal reprints Rains’ critical reviews to all of his films, including his last film, the overblown THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. Critic Stanley Kaufmann’s review read “There are two exceptions to the generally bad acting here. Rains, as the sick old Herod who slaughters the innocents. The other is Max von Sydow.” Good reading!

It’s Christmas in England, 1944, the penultimate year of the Second World War. Young Tolly (Alex Etel) Oldknow’s father is missing in action. While his mum goes off in search of news, Tolly is sent to the ancestral manse, Green Knowe, currently presided over by his grandmother, Mrs. Oldknow (Maggie Smith). The family has been estranged for years, but sharing anguish and hope over the missing soldier, granddame and grandson quickly bond. Assisted by Mrs. Oldknow’s trusted servants Mrs. Tweedle (Pauline Colliins) and Boggis (Timothy Spall), they make the best of an anxious and war-ravaged holiday season.

In the meantime, Tolly explores the big pile of a house. Walking from one room to the next, he finds himself stepping, quite literally, in and out of scenes from two centuries earlier. He becomes friends with the ghosts of his ancestor, the blind child Susan Oldknow (Eliza Bennett) and her freed slave companion Jacob (Kwayedza Kureya). When Tolly is with them, he is drawn into the day to day turmoil of their lives; when he steps back into the twentieth century, his grandmother regales him with the family legends that have been passed down through the years. Through this juxtaposition, Tolly comes to understand the connection between the past and the present, and to accept the continued relationship between the living and the dead.

When Roy Frumkes asked me to watch this movie and review it for FIR, he said something like, “This does not look like it will be too strong for you,” as he handed me the DVD.

I have been, I am afraid, a wimpy movie watcher for time immemorial, having walked out of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK the second the snakes appeared, spent AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON underneath the velvet folding seat at the movie palace, and thrown up into a garbage can directly upon leaving a screening of ALIENS. Roy was right, despite the fact that this movie is about ghosts and wartime, it’s very mild (it is kind of sad, but I don’t mind crying; it’s terror I can’t handle).

So here’s my dilemma: how can I make this sound attractive to most viewers, who have much more stomach than do I? What should I say: contains mostly friendly ghosts who are not intimidating, Maggie Smith at her least imperious, not-harrowing wartime images of ration coupons being exchanged?

Well, I will say that my husband, Mark, whose favorite movie is one I will never sit through–PULP FICTION–also liked FROM TIME TO TIME. And one of the things we both agreed about was that it has a really smart pace. The outline of the story is revealed in a few clear strokes: a lone boy perches uneasily on his suitcase at a misty country train station. After a few minutes, a stolid middle-aged man approaches from the distance. A few, laconic lines of dialogue are exchanged, and we understand everything we need to about the time, the place, and the boy’s circumstances. When Tolly arrives at Green Knowe, he and his grandmother shake hands, and he asks, “Shall I call you granny or Mrs. Oldknow?” and we know that their relationship is strained. And then Tolly takes in the portrait festooned walls of the great hall and asks her, “Who are all these pictures of?”

She replies, “They are your family,” to which he answers “But they’re all dead, aren’t they? I thought your family had to be alive.”

A central theme is quickly and quietly revealed. There’s a beauty in the simplicity and clarity of the set up.

The art direction is quite lovely, everything you expect of a great and gently decaying house and grounds, and a nice atmospheric contrast to the scenes set during the manor’s Regency heyday. Maggie Smith is fine, not at all tart, domineering, and mischievous, as I usually expect her to be, but very warm, wise, and mischievous. The really dramatic events in this film take place in the past, and Dominic West, playing the handsome and evil servant Caxton who is at the heart of the conflict, provides a welcome frisson of fear, even for me.

I enjoyed this movie, but I do have to agree with some of the opinions I encountered while researching it online. The whole ghost/time travel thing is kind of confusing. Is Tolly really traveling back in time, or are the ghosts stalking the present? And why is it that some of the characters from the past can see him, although he is invisible to others? And once the drama in the past heats up, the present becomes more of an opportunity for exposition about the past than an occasion to amplify the World War II story.

I don’t think that this film ever had theatrical release in the United States, as I could not find any local or national newspaper reviews of it, but I know why there is interest in releasing the DVD right now. Actor-turned-writer/producer/director Julian Fellowes won an Oscar for the screenplay for GOSFORD PARK in 2001, but he is best known for creating and writing the currently hot television series DOWNTON ABBEY. While this occupies similar territory to FROM TIME TO TIME (the great house the family is attached to is, in this case, Downton Abbey, rather than Green Knowe), and uses some of the same actors, it begins a few decades earlier, when the British Empire was still a force to be reckoned with and a phalanx of servants bustled through the halls, rather than just a few loyal retainers. And, the event that sets the story in motion is the sinking of the Titanic, rather than the imminent end of World War II.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is such a perfect match of subject and director, not to mention style and sensibility, that after basking in the film’s delicate afterglow, it’s easy to place George Cukor among the greatest directors of the American Cinema. All one need do is glance at the technical credits to realize this film was made by people at the top of their form, with such legends as cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, John Box, who was responsible for designing LAWRENCE OF ARABIA and DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, and costume designer Anthony Powell, whose innumerable Tonys and Oscars could fill a small warehouse. The irony is that Mr. Cukor’s most perfectly crafted Hollywood film was created after Hollywood, or at least MGM, as a studio and a style, had ceased to exist, so that the film’s form and subject merge into a perfect reflection – that is, 109 minutes of expressive color and sublime camera movements to delineate not a slice of life, but rather a state of being.

Based on a novel by Graham Greene, the film presents Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen), a somewhat straight-laced bank clerk, who meets his elderly, eccentric Aunt Agatha (Maggie Smith) for the first time at his mother’s funeral. Aunt Agatha quickly disrupts Henry’s well-ordered existence by first hijacking his mother’s ashes and then him, managing to talk Henry into traveling with her to Europe, and then into a life of joyful crime as she attempts to rescue her lover, Mr. Visconti (Robert Stephens) from pirates. In the process, Aunt Agatha relives her youth, and Henry discovers what it is to actually live, from one moment to the next, without preconceptions.

In the many scenes that recount Aunt Agatha’s youthful indiscretions, Mr. Cukor is able to create a vivid, not to mention phantasmagorical, reconstruction of turn of the century Paris, with gilded ceilings, mirrored halls, velvet walls and dazzling chandeliers, the camera swirling among exquisitely costumed performers. Yet this Belle Epoch is no idealized fantasy world, for Aunt Agatha is a woman with no illusions, except perhaps her steadfast insistence on refusing to grow up.

Instead of Marcel Proust’s madeleines poised to reveal a vision of the past, Mr. Cukor uses the craft as well as the example of the classical Hollywood film. In particular, he references the luxurious, high key production style of MGM, where he was a contract director starting in the 1930′s, directing such classics as CAMILLE (with Greta Garbo’s greatest performance), THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (which rejuvenated Katharine Hepburn’s career), and GASLIGHT (bringing Ingrid Bergman an Oscar).

Mr. Cukor obtained extraordinary performances from four generations of Hollywood actresses by celebrating the visual and physical manifestations of both the dreamer and the dream. In other words, Mr. Cukor’s primary focus as a force for his cinematic imagination was the human form, through which he articulated an universe of subtle emotion transformed into light and shadow. Though often dismissed as a “woman’s director,” Mr. Cukor continually expanded both the breadth and expanse of American filmmaking through his formal innovations, such as his impressionistic use of CinemaScope and color to reflect the subjective experiences of his characters in A STAR IS BORN, as well as adapting the techniques of Italian neo-realism by shooting in working class households and on the streets of New York for THE MARRYING KIND.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a film that takes its time, slowly accumulating details, like a leisurely afternoon spent on a Mediterranean beach where one discovers for the first time how the colors of the ocean form a dance with the ever-changing light, and that by simply breathing in and out, one can perceive the most delightful aromas, no matter how briny. Because of this, TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is a moving reverie rich in association through the marvelous mediation of Maggie Smith’s performance as Aunt Agatha, intermingling Mr. Cukor’s own expressive visual journey through forty years of filmmaking with that of the characters from Graham Greene’s novel.

One might even say that TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is George Cukor’s version, or perhaps an anticipation, of Jean-Luc Godard’s free-form exploration of both film history and his own life, HISTORIE(S) DU CINEMA. In TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT, one not only sees the history of cinema compressed into a vision saturated with red, gold and orange, extending one’s eye into infinity that bridges the development of sound film from DINNER AT EIGHT to MY FAIR LADY, but thanks to Mr. Cukor’s direction of Ms. Smith and Mr. McCowell, one also is given a model for living.

By the way, did I mention that this film is a comedy?

Highly Recommended. Rating: Film: ***** Transfer: ****