How Had I Never Seen... "Girlfriends"?

by Cláudio Alves

This month, the Criterion Channel added Claudia Weill's 1978 debut feature Girlfriends to their roster. Since last year, the film has been part of the collection, but it's now available for streaming. Coincidentally, I've also recently purchased the European edition of the Blu-Ray. Taking this into account, as well as the fact that I've been hearing and reading wonderful things about this flick for ages, it seems like a good time to finally watch Girlfriends and share my first impressions with you, dear readers…

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Monty @ 100: “The Misfits” and the Specter of Death

by Cláudio Alves

The late-career of Montgomery Clift was laden with tragedy, shaped by the doom that was happening both behind and in front of the camera. While nothing can compare to the cataclysm that was the shooting of Raintree County, The Misfits is another film of Clift that's haunted and haunting. The Angel of Death looms over the picture which unwittingly became the last screen appearances of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe before their untimely ends. Clift would hold on for a few more years, surviving his co-stars.

However, as legend has it, the movie was showing on TV the night the actor died. His secretary, Lorenzo James, asked the actor if he wanted to watch it to which he answered: "Absolutely not!". Those were the last words he ever spoke to anyone, enshrining the movie in even more cursed memory. It's a pity these morbid curiosities define the legacy of The Misfits. In many regards, it's one of Clift's best and most fascinating pictures…

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Retro Quickie: Cinderella Liberty (1973)

File Under: I have had this Netflix disc out for so long and it really has to be returned to unclog my queue. -Nathaniel

You got a terrific knack for being nice and a prick all at the same time.

Have any of you ever seen Cinderella Liberty? Back when we were doing our 1973 celebration, I rented it since it was the sole Best Actress nomination I hadn't seen from that year. Marsha Mason plays a prostitute with a heart of... well, not gold exactly. But she's got one. She's raising Doug, her biracial teenager (Kirk Calloway nominated for Best Newcomer at the Golden Globes) on her own but she's doing a pretty shit job of it. Enter: James Caan, fresh off the double whammy star-making years of Brian's Song (1971) and The Godfather (1972), as a sailor named John Baggs Jr. who hooks up with her. In actuality it's Baggs' story and Maggie is missing for good stretches of the movie. Seemingly on a whim, this goodhearted sailor decides to stick around and decides to fall in love with her. That's the one thing that's most clear and most enigmatic about the movie. 

I found it a fascinating watch primarily because, though Mason is just fine as a moody blowsy hooker who can't manage her life towards something better, it was Caan's masculine reserve and softly shaded performance that drew me in...

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Eli Wallach (1915-2014)

The great character actor Eli Wallach didn't quite make it to his centennial, dying at 98½ but at least he lived long enough to get an Honorary Oscar a few years back. The Academy honored him for "a lifetime's worth of indelible screen characters" even though they'd never nominated him.

I'm sure AMPAS didn't mean to include "Mr Freeze" on the Batman TV series as one of those characters but that's the one that's indelible for me. Is that wrong? When I was a child that show was always on through the magic of syndication. But Mr. Freeze was recast frequently (curiously enough two other Oscar favorites also played the chilly bad guy: three time nominee Otto Preminger and Oscar winner George Sanders). They rarely showed episodes in order so the memories of the faces get all jumbled up. 

He made a lot of career noise with his onscreen debut in Baby Doll (1956) for which he was Golden Globe nominated. But several fine characters and classics would follow like The Magnificent Seven, The Misfits, How the West Was Won, The Moon Spinners, The Good the Bad and the Ugly and The Godfather Pt. III.

What do you remember most about this actor?

Tennessee 100: Baby Doll

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, with a last-minute postscript to Tennessee Williams Week.

Sweaty, conflicted sexuality? Check. A seedy, decaying southern setting? Check. Characters who alternate wildly between decadent hedonism and harrowing descents into madness? Yes, we're in pure Tennessee Williams country with Elia Kazan's Baby Doll, starring Carroll Baker as the titular 19-year-old minx. She's married to Archie Lee Meighan (Karl Malden), the hot-tempered owner of a local cotton gin, and together they live in a rural mansion called Tiger Tail that, like their respective families, has seen better days.

This creaky house, considered haunted by the locals, plays a role similar to that of the cramped tenement in Kazan's adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. It helps define the film visually with its labyrinthine corridors, piled high with the detritus of the past, and it's the perfect setting for the psychosexual slapstick antics of Baby Doll and her would-be seducer, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach). Vacarro—a Sicilian interloper who's new to the area—suspects Archie Lee of burning down his cotton gin, and he's willing to resort to some hanky-panky in order to secure proof.

So begins an absurd, twisted battle of the wills, in which the line between economic and sexual success gets blurred to the point of invisibility. Read the full post.

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