Reiher Reviews

Pacifiction (2022)

Tedium in Tahiti

[2/10 · 22 January 2023]

This is a truly boring film. It's long, seemed pointless, had scenes that went on forever to no good purpose, had essentially no characters to speak of, and made little sense. I can enjoy long, leisurely paced films, like "The Traveling Players" or "Satantango," but there has to be a reason to be patient and a payoff for doing so. There is neither here.

At the screening I attended, the director, beforehand, said that the last 45 minutes was really special. That was a bait and switch, since they were just like the rest of the film. If anyone goes into this film expecting anything at all like a thriller, they will be disappointed, and disappointed for a rather long time.

The director, speaking afterwards, said he wanted to avoid cliche. In one respect, he failed miserably. The dialog, I believe, was improvised by the actors, rather than being scripted. As a result, it was banal, repetitive, and pointless. There is no more tedious cliche than weak improvised dialog.

It's common for one reviewing a long film to say something like "there's a good 90 minute film in there." Here, there's a mediocre ten minute travelogue in there. There are some pretty shots of Polynesia, and a good surfing sequence, but you pay a heavy price to get to those, and if you're willing to watch a long, weak film to see some nice shots of Tahiti, you're better off with the 60s version of "Mutiny on the Bounty."

After I got home from the screening, I cleaned my cats' litter boxes. I found that experience both more entertaining and more intellectually stimulating than "Pacifiction."

Jungle Mystery (1932)

Not much of a mystery, or a jungle

[3/10 · 8 September 2016]

Even by the standards of 1930s serials, this one is not too hot. The basic plot is a party of Americans searching East Africa for the heroine's lost brother, who in turn was searching for a legendary buried cache of ivory. A Russian trying to establish an empire in the jungle also wants the ivory, as do an unscrupulous adventuress and a treacherous Greek. There's also a man-ape named Zungu running around, who is officially the Jungle Mystery of the title.

The serial is heavy on stock footage of animals (some not native to Africa), often used in rather foolish ways. Whenever a character sets foot in even a puddle, we get a stock shots of crocodiles sliding into the water. However, almost never is this followed by any actual crocodicular menace to anyone. It's kind of like a punctuation mark, not an actual plot element.

Based on a Talbot Mundy novel, the screenwriters ran out of invention rather quickly, and the serial degenerates into a series of captures of some subset of the heroes by the Russian villain and their escape from him, interspersed with fights with one or another jungle creature, frequently lions or leopards, occasionally a guy in a gorilla suit. When seen one episode a week, this might have passed muster, but viewed close together, the episodes get dull fairly quickly. Zungu the "jungle mystery" is never really treated as an important plot element, and is just used as a mechanism to extract heroes from serials' typical certain dooms.

The character writing is also weak, with muddled motivations and behaviors. The treacherous Greek is at least given unique dialog, but it's also repetitive. He peppers his dialog frequently with phrases like "By the seven seas!" and "Gosh-a-rimini!", which wears on the ear. The poor guy playing Zungu, the titular mystery, unfortunately chose a shriek that sounds like he is suffering from extreme indigestion. He repeats it often. Very often.

The acting is also quite weak. Tom Tyler, the hero, is wooden. Philo McCullough, playing the treacherous George Coutlass, is ridiculous. Cecilia Parker, the heroine, is stuck with particularly foolish lines and actions (such as repeatedly wandering off into the jungle alone, where she is invariably attacked by some animal), and fails to carry them off. Noah Beery Jr. has a rather pointless role as the hero's sidekick. Frank Lackteen, a fourth string character actor who frequently appeared in parts too small to be billed, gives a perfectly adequate performance as the faithful guide, lifting him head and shoulders over the rest of the cast.

Of course, being a 1930s product set in Africa, it's not politically correct. It could be worse, but the black characters are almost all set decoration, and there is no sense that these people who have lived in the jungle for centuries know what they're doing there, much less that they have their own culture worthy of respect.

I don't ordinarily enjoy films based on laughing at their inadequacies, but I made an exception here. There is a certain entertainment value, despite all of the weaknesses I've outlined, some coming from particularly silly moments in the serial. But don't watch it expecting the quality of even one of the lesser Tarzan films.

Too Much Johnson (1938)

Probably for Welles completists only

[6/10 · 9 May 2014]

Long thought lost, "Too Much Johnson" has been found and restored. Never intended as a standalone film, it is rather a collection of three filmed segments meant to introduce acts of a stage play, a farce from the late 19th century. It was never used that way, and Welles did not finish editing it for that purpose. What survives is a very rough cut, including multiple takes of the same shot, no titles (which probably would have been used), and material that seems very likely to be out of order.

The first segment is the longest and the best. It's primarily a farcical chase out of the silent comedy era, featuring an enraged husband chasing his wife's lover (Joseph Cotten) through New York, particularly over rooftops and up and down streets in the market district. This material was essentially stolen footage, filmed without permits on location as time allowed. Some of it is fairly funny, but in the version that survives, it doesn't hold together well. One must admire the grit of Cotten and the other actors, who are doing their own work here up on some rather dodgy rooftops.

The second segment is not very interesting. All important characters have taken a ship to Cuba and the husband is still chasing the lawyer. In this segment, we get shots of Cotten traveling to the plantation of a friend who proves to be dead, shots of the dead friend's servant at the graveside, and shots of the new plantation owner walking around.

The third segment is a slight improvement. It primarily consists of an extended duel between the husband and the plantation owner, who has been mistaken for the lover. The lover seeks to break up the duel. It goes on over cliffs and up and down hills, ending with the furious plantation owner trouncing both the husband and the lover and dumping them in a pond, where they sit bedraggled and hangdog.

So it was never intended to be a complete film, and even what there is does not represent a coherent, careful assembly of what was shot. However, there are certainly elements that suggest that Welles had pretty good understanding of directing for the camera before he ever got to Hollywood. He makes clever use of camera angles, clearly planned some interesting intercutting, and has elaborate shots with important elements in both the foreground and background.

Welles obviously gave thought to expressing plot cinematically, as in an extended sequence in which the husband runs around knocking hats off the heads of passers-by to match their faces against a torn photo showing only the forehead and hair of the lover. He use a variety of angles, including high overhead shots and reaction closeups from the victims, to build this sequence. Neither this sequence nor most of the others was fully edited, so it's not easy to tell how Welles really envisioned it, but it is clear that he had a pretty elaborate plan for how it would play on screen.

In summary, this is not a film one sees for the entertainment experience, but rather because one has a deep interest in Orson Welles and wants to get a sense of what his own raw talent was like before he got to Hollywood, carefully studied film, and worked with experienced film professionals.

Tell 'Em Nothing (1926)

A typical Charlie Chase short

[7/10 · 25 March 2010]

Charlie is playing his usual character here, the middle-class husband who gets in trouble with his wife. In this case, he's a divorce lawyer who innocently gets dragged into another couple's scheme to obtain a divorce by producing photos of the wife in a compromising situation with "another man" - Charlie, of course. Spouses show up unexpectedly at the least convenient moment, doors slam, women are hidden under beds, the wrong person is always listening when anything compromising is said, and general hilarity ensues. It's quite implausible, but also very amusing. The quality of the gags and direction is pretty strong, and Chase gives his typically funny performance.

Haldane of the Secret Service (1923)

Of interest only to Houdini fans

[2/10 · 12 January 2007]

Much weaker than the more widely seen Houdini movie "The Man From Beyond." In this one, Houdini is a Secret Service agent on the trail of international counterfeiters. Houdini has a star's intensity on the screen, but the story is confused and badly told, and horribly melodramatic. The one escape sequence is reasonably good, but otherwise Houdini mostly delivers dialog or engages in unconvincing fisticuffs with bunches of extras, neither of which show him off to advantage. The film has a rather unpleasant "yellow peril" theme and thuggish Caucasian actors done up in "Chinese" makeup, which is somewhat offset by a heroic Chinese actor in a secondary role.

Rarely screened, not available on video, and thus not easy to see.

Flight to Fury (1964)

Very minor thriller

[3/10 · 20 November 2006]

A plane goes down in the jungle carrying several people who want to lay hands on some stolen diamonds that the pilot is carrying. The opening thirty minutes or so are very dull, but it improves slightly after that. Nicholson isn't bad in a major supporting role, but his writing on the film is weak. (According to director Monte Hellman, who co-wrote the story, Nicholson wrote the script on the three week cruise from San Francisco to Manila, sitting in the ship's lounge and incorporating the conversations he had with anyone who passed by into the script. It plays like that's true, with some fairly random and not very interesting dialog early in the film.) Dewey Martin makes a dull hero. The jungle locations aren't bad.

This film was made back-to-back with "Back Door To Hell," a somewhat better WWII film that also features Nicholson in a supporting role. Hellman was busy at nights editing "Back Door To Hell" at the same time that he was shooting "Flight to Fury."

Greed (1924)

The reconstructed version of "Greed"

[28 October 1999]

As others have noted, "Greed" was originally much longer, and no existing known prints preserve the lost footage. As also noted, the shooting script survived, as did more than 600 stills taken of various scenes for publicity purposes. Turner Classic Movies, which currently owns the rights, has done a "reconstruction of the continuity" that uses the existing footage, the stills, the title text from the script, and other materials to show what was lost. The stills are used creatively, with cuts, pans, irises, etc. (All attempting to match what was in the script.) Around 95% of the shooting script is represented in this reconstruction.

The result is excellent, perhaps the closest we'll ever get to what von Stroheim intended. The lost material greatly enriches the film and deepens the characters. See it, if you get a chance. They added the tinting wherever von Stroheim wanted it, too.

It's not officially a restoration, since they did nothing to improve the quality of the existing footage, and added no new footage (didn't have any). Also, it was only done on video, so you might as well see it on TV, if you can. Looks a bit fuzzy projected on the big screen.

China Gate (1957)

Ludicrous war drama set in early days of Vietnam War

[3/10 · 8 September 1998]

Everything that's wrong about Sam Fuller pictures pops up here, with little of what's right being present. The script is full of silly lines, and the two leads are several miles out of their depth. Nat King Cole is the best thing in the picture, giving a sensitive and believable performance in a supporting role. Not bad enough to be entertaining on that basis, just fairly stupid.

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

Hilarious sex comedy far ahead of its time

[9/10 · 8 September 1998]

Maybe not Preston Sturges best film, but incredibly funny. The most amazing thing about the film is how it ever got past the censors of the day. Sturges the director is in good form here, but Sturges the writer is the one who really excels on this film. His ability to quickly and deftly create comic characters suitable for his large stock company (most of whom show up here) is unmatched. Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert play their roles perfectly, with Rudy Vallee and Mary Astor strong in support. A really delightful film.

Within Our Gates (1920)

Only of historical and sociological interest

[8 September 1998]

Primitively filmed, with a fractured and meandering plot. Micheaux gives little evidence here of having much directorial ability. It's hard to imagine anyone actually enjoying watching it.

Of historical and sociological interest as an early black-made film, but compares poorly to professional-quality films of that era from the US and elsewhere. Of some value because it presumably shows how educated blacks of that era looked at themselves.