Movies I Watched in March, Part 2

Better late than... oh, what the hell. Here's the rest of the March recap....


Like I’ve said before, Edward G. Robinson is my all-time favorite actor. The man had an amazing career, stretching from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, and though he’s mostly remembered for playing gangsters, his range was stunning, including everything from sea captains to scientists, Wisconsin farmers to post-apocalyptic senior citizens. But, alas, that doesn’t mean every movie he made was great – which brings us to “The Man with Two Faces.” This 1934 movie does has an intriguing premise: actress Jessica Welles is under the creepy, possibly hypnotic spell of her weasel husband, Vance, and it’s up to her talented actor brother, David, to free her. He accomplishes this by creating another identity, which he uses to trap (and eventually murder) the husband. It also has an impressive cast: Besides Robinson in (of course), the dual role, you’ve got Mary Astor as the sister, Louis Calhern (a year after “Duck Soup”) as the husband, plus Mae Clarke, Ricardo Cortez and a selection of vintage character actors. But for some reason, the whole thing never quite adds up to the level of entertainment it should be. Maybe the story (based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woollcott) is both too complicated and too slow. Or maybe it’s the fact that the censors insisted Robinson be punished for his crime, even though the movie spends its entire running time making the case that Vance deserves to die for the good of humanity. Whatever the reason, I barely remembered what the hell happened a few minutes after switching off the TV. Worth a look for Robinson completists (like yours truly), but he has better movies on his resume. Much better.

Thanks to the godsend that is Turner Classic Movies, I’m able to make a surprisingly deep dive into the career of actor Joe E. Brown, a guy who was hugely popular back in the 1930s but is barely remembered today, except maybe for his supporting (but still very funny) performance in Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot.” There he plays a somewhat befuddled old man, but back in the early 1930s, Brown was an energetic, imaginative comic force of nature, bringing a real sense of lunacy to his movies. This one, which was released back in 1932, is one of his most entertaining. Brown plays Calvin Jones, a gen-you-wine cowboy who stumbles into New York City with a wad of cash, which attracts some shifty producers who con him into investing in their flop of a play.  Jones refuses to give up, though, and buys the play himself, bringing it to the stage despite the efforts of the con men and a group of gangsters. “The Tenderfoot” starts out wild and stays at that level for the entire film. When Jones arrives in a New York eatery, he greats a group of “cowboys” at the counter only to discover they are a group of, ahem, “pansy” actors in a nearby show. (It’s the sort of gag you’d only see in an old movie, thankfully.) Then he bounces back and forth between getting suckered by the con men and turning the tables, taking time in the middle to woo their good-at-heart secretary, played by a young Ginger Rogers. By the end, he has the entire cast of the (modern-set) play in Shakespeare garb, and he’s running down the streets of (fake) Manhattan, firing his six guns to bring the badguys to justice. Plus, as a bonus, the cowboy hat he wears features multiple swastikas on its band, prominently displayed. (It was only 1932, and the ancient symbol hadn’t been completely co-opted by the Nazi party just yet.)

I loved the 2014 movie “Nightcrawler,” which starred Jake Gyllenhaal and was written and directed by Dan Gilroy, so I was looking forward to their followup, the Netflix movie “Velvet Buzzsaw,” which promised to apply that same dark sense of humor to the Los Angeles art world. Well, I’m sure you can guess where this is going. Despite some interesting ideas, a strong cast and a few memorable visuals, “Velvet Buzzsaw” is a big disappointment, delivering the same tired ideas about modern art (It’s all about money! Artists are assholes! Agents are bigger assholes!) wrapped up in a tale of some sort of supernatural mumbo jumbo involving an unknown artists who used blood (egads!) in his paintings. It’s the sort of movie that thinks it’s much edgier than it really is, and all the CGI, which is well done for the most part, feels corny and gimmicky. By the end of the movie, where one character’s tattoo (which exists because, you know, she used to be so “punk rock”) starts moving and drawing blood, I was desperately wishing I was watching “Art School Confidential” instead. Now there’s a dark, smart comedy about modern art – and it also co-stars John Malkovich!