We were a little disappointed by Saturday Night Live this weekend when Neil Patrick Harris hosted. Not because he wasn't hilarious-he was!-but because they did too much Doogie and not enough Barney, Mr. Harris' slimy, yet weirdly charming womanizer on HIMYM. Over the last few years, this Friends-ish pal comedy has gained a healthy following, but it hasn't yet become the breakout we think it should be. So tune in tonight for a new episode; for better or for worse, Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt and Kim Kardashian guest star. [CBS, 8:30pm]

Tuesday: The Dreamers

If you find yourself in the mood for something outrageously decadent--perhaps maddeningly so--The Dreamers is the mid-week movie for you.

Monday: How I Met Your Mother

We were a little disappointed by Saturday Night Live this weekend when Neil Patrick Harris hosted. Not because he wasn't hilarious-he was!-but because they did too much Doogie and not enough Barney, Mr. Harris' slimy, yet weirdly charming womanizer on HIMYM. Over the last few years, this Friends-ish pal comedy has gained a healthy following, but it hasn't yet become the breakout we think it should be. So tune in tonight for a new episode; for better or for worse, Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt and Kim Kardashian guest star. [CBS, 8:30pm]

Tuesday: The Dreamers

If you find yourself in the mood for something outrageously decadent--perhaps maddeningly so--The Dreamers is the mid-week movie for you. Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 drama features a then-unknown Eva Green as a stunning, elusive Frenchwoman in a bizarrely close relationship with her brother Theo (Louis Garrel), who draws a young American student (Michael Pitt) into her strange world of movies, ideas and French stuff. Paris '68 is the backdrop, and much of the film follows the young stars wandering in and out rambling rooms half-dressed. [IFC, 12am]

Wednesday: The Apartment

Even though The Apartment is a Christmas movie (in the sense that the plot involves an office holiday party and the time of year is New York in December), you can watch it any time of year. Shirley MacLaine is the hotel operator at a big insurance company; Jack Lemmon is the push-over who loves her; and Fred MacMurray is the married man driving her insane. Billy Wilder won the 1960 Best Picture Oscar for The Apartment-if ever a film deserved it, it's this one. [TCM, 8pm]

Thursday: Tool Academy

We actually watched the first episode of this show, the latest in Vh1's stable of makeover programming, and liked it, mostly for one reason: after years of watching women claw each other to shreds on reality tv, and generally expose themselves as the mean, mindless jerks they are, now we get to see men do it! On Tool Academy, a group of guys enrolled by their girlfriends for being bad partners are forced to confront the realities of their relationships, and their many emotional shortcomings, through various tasks and therapy sessions. Some can handle, others can't; tantrums ensue. One things for sure: these guys all belong there. [Vh1, 11am]

Friday: Friday Night Lights

Like HIMYM, Friday Night Lights is a show that should be as big as Doctor Who is in Britain. (That's big!) And this, it's third season (which aired on DirecTV last fall) is going to make or break this show for good. If you aren't into sports, get over it. FNL isn't really about football. It has the best parental characters since The OC. The teen cast is ridiculously beautiful. You will laugh, you will cry. Just watch it. You'll only be sorry you didn't earlier. [NBC, 9pm]

Curiously, Letters, like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, is essentially a foreign-language film with English subtitles, but neither film is technically eligible to receive an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, which leaves them in a kind of no-man’s land as far as Oscars are concerned. But this kind of quandary is appropriate for a year in which there is likely to be no consensus on Best Picture, now that Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls seems to have fallen by the critical wayside.

Friends and foes of Mr. Eastwood—and both are legion—may differ on the artistic quality of his massive diptych on a ferocious bloodbath that took place on a tiny volcanic island in the Pacific more than 60 years ago. But no one can deny the sheer size and scope of the effort and achievement. The film opened earlier this year in Japan and was reportedly well-received—as well it should be for its sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese officers and men trapped, in effect, on the desolate island of Iwo Jima. This humanization of a one-time bitter enemy by an American filmmaker is not entirely unprecedented. Richard Fleischer’s 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora! comes immediately to mind for its dramatization of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor from both the Japanese and American points of view, with a little revisionist history thrown in the mix. The once-demonized Germans in World War I were morally rehabilitated in Oscar-winning fashion by Lewis Milestone’s 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from German writer Erich Maria Remarque’s international best-seller, which won acclaim for its pacifist viewpoint on a war regarded with revulsion in both Europe and America in retrospect for its perceived uselessness and futility. Similarly, Jean Renoir’s sympathetic treatment of German officers and enlisted men—who were despised two decades before in France—in The Grand Illusion (1937) manifested itself as a pathetic plea for European brotherhood on the eve of World War II.

By contrast, Mr. Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima arrives at a time when neither pacifism nor international brotherhood figures very prominently on the nation’s agenda. We have long since overcome our most virulent prejudices unleashed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but 9/11 has opened up a new can of worms with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic extremists in general. At the very least, however, Letters may help modify our thinking about our present enemies as a monolithic mass of malevolence, as we were once conditioned to think of the Japanese people as a whole.

The story told by Mr. Eastwood and his collaborators—both living and dead—consists of a very gradual mutual understanding of Japanese and Americans that neither was as lacking in humanity as each side’s wartime propaganda preached. Two of the characters who come most vividly to life in the film are aristocrats who know America firsthand from having visited there long before international travel became as commonplace as it is today. Ken Watanabe’s General Kuribayashi has been to America on a very friendly military mission, and Tsuyoshi Ihara’s Baron Nishi had won an equestrian event at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and still carries a picture of himself on his winning mount. Quixotically, he makes his entrance at Iwo Jima on another horse, a relic of his onetime membership in the military cavalry—its horses now replaced by colder and more technologically advanced tanks. The ex-cavalry man joins the baron in lamenting the loss of their animal companions and soulmates. The baron’s horse is later killed in an air raid on the island, and he mourns the beast’s demise.

The common soldiers are represented by Kazunari Ninomiya’s Saigo, a baker in civilian life, with a wife and child left behind. It is Saigo who declares that the island is not worth defending, echoing many other voices of dissent among the troops. Curiously, there are no battle scenes as copious and furious in Letters from Iwo Jima as there are in Flags of Our Fathers, but the characters are more effectively depicted and differentiated in Letters than they are in Flags, and the tone is much less cynical with the losers of the battle in Letters than it is with the winners of the battle in Flags. But isn’t this always the case with winners and losers, from The Iliad to Letters from Iwo Jima—one of the better movies of this maddeningly overcrowded holiday season?

The Anti-Casablanca

Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, from a screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon, turns out to be, sadly, a failed attempt to pay homage to Hollywood romances of World War II and its aftermath, most notably Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, (1948), with an infusion of political ex-post-facto sophistication. The point of the tortured narrative of The Good German seems to be that there was no such thing as a “good” German during the Nazi era, but it is the silly and chilly plot-twist ending that makes The Good German less of an homage to Casablanca than its coldly anti-romantic antithesis. And let’s not talk about the idealism of the Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid characters; their likes do not appear in The Good German.

I have long championed Mr. Soderbergh for his canny survival skill in the New Hollywood, with his shrewd alternations between art and commerce. In this context, The Good German bombs as both art and commerce in its puzzling inept­ness. After almost 60 years, it is of course impossible for Mr. Soderbergh to cavort in the bombed-out ruins of Berlin as Billy Wilder did at the time on location in A Foreign Affair, one of the few Wilder movies I didn’t like because of its brutalization of Jean Arthur so as to enhance Marlene Dietrich. Ms. Dietrich has been invoked recently to demean Cate Blanchett’s Lena Brandt, a fatally tentative attempt to replicate the Dietrich character’s amoral-temptress persona.

With black-and-white, fake-looking backgrounds and badly synchronized process shots, Mr. Soderbergh finds himself becalmed on the kind of Hollywood backlot on which Curtiz fashioned his fantasy world of Casablanca. George Clooney may be the closest replica we have of a ’40s leading-man hero—certainly not as distinctive as Bogie in Casablanca, but just as certainly more talented than John Lund in A Foreign Affair. The only problem is that Mr. Clooney’s character, foreign correspondent Jake Geismer, is repeatedly beaten up like no romantic lead should ever be. Tobey Maguire’s callow Tully, Geismer’s terminally corrupt personal driver, delivers one of the beatings to Geismer when the latter tries to prevent Lena, Geismer’s old girlfriend, from running off to the Russian zone of Berlin with Tully for one of his scams. Tully is later found dead on a riverbank, and when Geismer tries to investigate, he is beaten up a few more times for his efforts.

Eventually, as the Potsdam Conference gets under way with Truman, Churchill and Stalin determining the shape of Europe after the war, we suddenly learn that the Cold War has just begun, which was the last thing on the minds of Curtiz and Wilder when they fashioned their simple anti-Nazi love stories. This revelation in The Good German only compounds the confusion in the picture.

Open Up!

Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words, from her own screenplay, builds its very convoluted, almost abstract narrative around the contrasting personalities of Sarah Polley’s Hanna and Tim Robbins’ Josef, as they partially confront each other on an oil rig off the Irish coast, she as a nurse and he as a badly burned patient. I say “partially” because Josef’s accident has left him temporarily blinded, and Hanna’s own partial deafness—and a still-to-be-revealed traumatic experience in her life—has left her unwilling to communicate with other people.

When we first meet Hanna, she is presented as a solitary and mysterious young woman working in a factory somewhere in Europe—though everyone there seems to speak English. Her self-willed solitude is amplified when she turns off her hearing aid, as if to isolate herself from an outside world from which she apparently feels she has to be protected. When her boss calls her to his office, she turns on her hearing aid, but otherwise she is very sparing in her responses to his questions. Actually, he seems as uncomfortable with the situation as she is. He tells her that she has a perfect attendance record and, strangely, has never taken a vacation in the years she has worked for the company. Some of her co-workers have complained about her long and strange silences. He then virtually orders her to take a vacation, which she reluctantly agrees to do. It is hard not to identify with the boss in this scene. He knows he can’t fire her merely because she chooses to remain silent at her work. The best that he can do is to send her on a vacation and hope that she will be more communicative when she returns. Anyway, he has postponed the problem.

For no apparent reason, Hanna travels to Northern Ireland for her vacation and, on a whim, volunteers to be a nurse on an oil rig in the Irish Sea to tend to one patient, Josef, whose temporary blindness has not diminished his flirtatious impulsiveness. He keeps badgering her with questions about what she looks like, the color of her hair, her name—all of which she deflects with questions about how he feels and what he needs to be comfortable.

She is equally mysterious to the rest of the rig’s crew, even its cheerful, seemingly overqualified gourmet chef, Simon (Javier Camara). There are only a few other men on the oil rig, which may be on the verge of being decommissioned. At this point, despite my unrequited passion for Ms. Polley as an actress, I felt I had to consult the production notes to figure out what was going on with Hanna’s aversion to words.

According to Ms. Coixet: “Someone said that from the moment you have an inner life, you are already leading a double life. Words—like shoals of fish—teem around in our heads and crowd against our vocal cords, fighting to get out and be listened to by others. And sometimes they get lost on the journey from head to throat. This film is about those lost words that wander for a long time in a limbo of silence … and then one day come pouring out, and once they start nothing can stop them.”

This is exactly what happens when Hanna decides to confide in Josef, a kindred wounded spirit; and one can feel with Hanna—as one often does with Ms. Polley in these histrionic climaxes—a veritable blossoming out of a long-suppressed womanhood. Her revelations turn out to be shocking enough to justify the long silences that preceded them.

Julie Christie contributes an extra iconic charge to the film as a mysterious presence in Hanna’s post-traumatic existence. It is ultimately a beneficent presence that enables Hanna and Josef to find solace and mutual redemption in each other’s arms. Though I continue to have strong reservations about the stylistic abstractions in Ms. Coixet’s narrative, the performances given by Ms. Polley, Mr. Robbins and Ms. Christie take me a long way in accepting and recommending the whole package.

Ms. Dunaway’s Crawford is one of the most reckless and extreme performances any star has ever dared. Ms. Dunaway goes at the role as if she were exacting revenge for every indignity and slight, every pass made by some Hollywood sleazeball, every ounce of worry expounded over a wrinkle or a bit of sagging flesh, that she or any female star has ever endured. She wants to stand, bloodied and unbowed, on the corpse of the star system—which, of course, is a way of making sure she’s a bigger star than ever. In Mommie Dearest, Ms. Dunaway both tries to slay the demon of stardom and incarnate it. That this terrifying and astonishing performance is regarded as camp says more about the squeamishness of audiences than about the conflicted fearlessness of its star.

You don’t go to a movie like Mommie Dearest out of innocent impulses. Audiences wanted to see the physical and verbal abuse Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina, had detailed in her memoir, published in 1978, the year after Crawford died. But the book’s brand of tabloid kicks is simply the flipside of fan-mag puffery. The movie supplied those moments—the infamous nighttime rampage over the “wire hangers” in Christina’s closet; Crawford’s obsession with cleanliness and order. But Ms. Dunaway gave audiences something they didn’t want: a sense of how they helped create the monster before them.

When Ms. Dunaway’s Joan, her face contorted in rage and smeared in greasy cold cream, leers out at us brandishing the wire hanger she’s about to beat Christina with, it’s a Bizarro World recasting of the preceding scene: Joan greeting the fans and reporters outside her house after she wins the Oscar for Mildred Pierce. She tells the crowd that they and they alone are responsible for giving her this honor. But if the adoring fans put that Oscar in Crawford’s hand, they are complicit in putting the wire hanger there as well. Not that the movie blames anyone but Joan for her explosions. But it understands her rage as coming from her fear of losing the public’s adoration.

You don’t have to know anything about Crawford’s early scrabbling life as a waitress and shopgirl (and the movie doesn’t tell you about it) to empathize with the particularly American hunger in Ms. Dunaway’s performance. It’s the hunger for acclaim and security, the gratitude for achieving it, the fear it will go away and the resentment at whatever threatens it. That’s what those wire hangers represent to Joan: a return to the dreariness she clawed her way out of. Everything Joan does to herself—the skin scoured in scalding water; the face held in bracing bandages while she sleeps, then submerged into ice upon waking; the punishing exercise regimen; the rigid discipline in everything from studying a script to autographing photos; the fawning supplication to photographers and celebrity scribes; a life in which every moment is lived as “Joan Crawford”—all of these are Joan’s sacrifices to the gods of stardom. And like anyone who believes in the gods, she lives in fear of their wrath. When she’s summoned to the office of Louis B. Mayer (Howard Da Silva), who dismisses her from her MGM contract after years with the studio, you understand what she has to be afraid of.

As the child Christina, Mara Hobel gives a very creepy performance; she’s less a child than an automaton playing Joan’s idealized notion of a child. Ms. Hobel’s two big confrontation scenes with Ms. Dunaway go right to the heart of the worst parent-child eruptions you’ve ever been party to, the kind where each side knows exactly what buttons to push to wound the other. (The older Christina, played by Diana Scarwid, has become more subtle and accomplished at striking back.)

Those scenes are a specialty of Robert Getchell, the screenwriter whose best work (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Sweet Dreams) understands the barbed emotional slapstick that takes place between parents and children, husbands and wives. Getchell wrote the original screenplay, and everyone I know who has read it has, to a person, called it one of the best film scripts they know. But the script was reportedly rejected by the original star, Anne Bancroft, and then not reinstated when she left the project. It was then worked on by Tracy Hotchner, and finally cobbled together by the director, Frank Perry, and the producer, Frank Yablans. Maybe that’s why huge swatches of the story seem to have been cut in the last half. Perry’s direction is, at best, serviceable: He brings it no imagination or sensibility to dovetail with its star. The upside is that nothing distracts from Ms. Dunaway—though now she may wish it did.

After Mommie Dearest opened to mocking reviews in the summer of 1981, Paramount quickly began selling it as camp, which is how they’re selling this new “Hollywood Royalty Edition” DVD. As a promotional gag, I was sent a pair of marbou-trimmed rubber kitchen gloves and a bottle of cleanser with “Mommie Dearest” on the label. (To their honor, both John Waters and John Epperson, the drag performer known as Lipsynka, don’t condescend to the movie in their bonus commentary).

Treating the movie as a campy, queeny bitchfest is easier than submitting to the power of Ms. Dunaway’s performance, which, in terms of what we expect from our movie glamour queens, is the emotional equivalent of watching her commit seppuku. As a widely circulated tape of a phone message she left for a Vanity Fair reporter makes clear, Ms. Dunaway loathes the film and resents the ridicule it brought her. That Ms. Dunaway did her finest work in a film about a woman who turned herself into a monster out of fear of rejection, only to wind up ashamed of a performance that should have brought her honor, says as much about that fear as anything in Mommie Dearest.

I do—vaguely. Cast your mind back 30 or more years to a time when the next Arthur Penn movie, the next Coppola, the next Mazursky or Ashby or Bogdanovich excited burning anticipation, and the question of whether or not Billy Wilder could pull it together and mount a comeback (he couldn’t) was the topic of serious conversation.

Then, the movies were the steering winds for the culture. Now, there is no culture, so who needs steering winds?

Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute certainly gets the nod for clunkiest title of the year. (Who would have bought Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By if he’d called it Aged Veterans of the Silent Screen Talk Shop to an Inquiring Young Scholar from England?) Luckily, the title of George Stevens Jr.’s collection of interviews isn’t at all indicative of the content.

The interviews, culled from seminars held at the American Film Institute in its salad days, are valuable for all sorts of reasons. Here, waxing nostalgic—or just waxing—are George Cukor, William Wyler, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Hal Wallis, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Cortez, Ernest Lehman, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, King Vidor, Harold Lloyd, James Wong Howe, William Clothier, Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray … among others.

There are phenomenal bullshit artists in the mix, and serious artists, and every gradation of craftsman in between, but the prevailing tone set by three quarters of the interviewees is a fierce idealism. Many of these men—yes, it is an all-male crew—say the same thing in different words.

Fred Zinnemann: “I just like to do films that are positive in the sense that they deal with the dignity of human beings and have something to say about oppression, not necessarily in a political way but in a human way. I have to feel that what I’m trying to do is worthwhile.”

Rouben Mamoulian: “I firmly believe that art, like everything else, is for life’s sake. It’s not for art’s sake. It should serve life; everything should add to the goodness and the beauty on this earth, to the dignity and the size of man so he can walk proud again.”

Another thing that consistently comes through is the stylistic self-effacement of most of the filmmakers who matriculated in the studio system. “You shouldn’t be aware of the director,” says Richard Brooks. “If anybody at any time says, ‘Wow, what a shot,’ then you’ve lost the audience. They should never know there’s a director in it. They should never know where the music starts or ends. They should never see the camera move …. They should be lost in the story.”

Would somebody explain this to Baz Luhrmann?

What keeps the entire volume from dissolving into where-are-the-snows-of-yesteryear nostalgia are, first, some astringent laughs, as with Billy Wilder on actors: “I would say that 55% are bores.” Or Elia Kazan’s crack about Mervyn LeRoy: “It’s got everything. Surprise, great characters, an important theme, fine writing! But I think Mervyn can lick it!” And George Stevens Sr. proves to have a wickedly accurate take on one of his most beloved films: “The concept of [Gunga Din] was a kind of ‘Rover Boys in India’ adventure. It’s an insular film aimed at a narrow stratum of audience. Anglo-Saxon Krauts, I’d say.”

In addition, there’s the peppery, contrarian honesty of Frank Capra: “I guess I don’t actually think that the definitive pictures were made in the thirties and forties. Yes, we made some good films, but hell, that’s past. Who the hell’s interested in that? I’m surprised you even watch old films. What should interest you is tomorrow.”

Well, tomorrow for Frank Capra is today for us. Where did the idealism go? Most of these men, who spent 40 or 50 years working in an industry that wasn’t really much less commercial than it is now, were raised in a literary, or at least literate, culture—in many cases European—that valued learning as a worthy goal in and of itself. That foundation was inevitably reflected in their films—which, it should be noted, were usually made for a reasonable cost.

But their great-grandchildren were nurtured in a pop culture that values … what, exactly? Money? Notice ascending toward fame? If the paradigmatic director of the studio period was a happy studio craftsman like George Cukor, who could manage to make even mediocre material radiate concision and class, and who could tailor quality material into something fit for entertaining generations yet unborn, then the paradigmatic director of today would be a happy hack like Doug Liman (Mr. & Mrs. Smith), excreting unamusingly grubby commercial movies with ridiculous pretensions in a business that makes no economic sense. Imagine an au courant director today truthfully echoing the sentiments of Ingmar Bergman: “If I have nothing to say and I just want to make a film, I don’t make the film. The craftsmanship of filmmaking is so terribly stimulating, dangerous and obsessing that you can be very tempted. But if you have nothing to come with … try to be honest with yourself and don’t make the picture.”

Mr. Stevens’ collection reminds us about the primary importance of creative passion in a world curdled by the lack of commitment.

Scott Eyman’s Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer was published by Simon & Schuster last May; he reviews books regularly for The Observer.

I do—vaguely. Cast your mind back 30 or more years to a time when the next Arthur Penn movie, the next Coppola, the next Mazursky or Ashby or Bogdanovich excited burning anticipation, and the question of whether or not Billy Wilder could pull it together and mount a comeback (he couldn’t) was the topic of serious conversation.

Then, the movies were the steering winds for the culture. Now, there is no culture, so who needs steering winds?

Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute certainly gets the nod for clunkiest title of the year. (Who would have bought Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By if he’d called it Aged Veterans of the Silent Screen Talk Shop to an Inquiring Young Scholar from England?) Luckily, the title of George Stevens Jr.’s collection of interviews isn’t at all indicative of the content.

The interviews, culled from seminars held at the American Film Institute in its salad days, are valuable for all sorts of reasons. Here, waxing nostalgic—or just waxing—are George Cukor, William Wyler, Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, Hal Wallis, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Cortez, Ernest Lehman, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Federico Fellini, King Vidor, Harold Lloyd, James Wong Howe, William Clothier, Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, Ingmar Bergman and Satyajit Ray … among others.

There are phenomenal bullshit artists in the mix, and serious artists, and every gradation of craftsman in between, but the prevailing tone set by three quarters of the interviewees is a fierce idealism. Many of these men—yes, it is an all-male crew—say the same thing in different words.

Fred Zinnemann: “I just like to do films that are positive in the sense that they deal with the dignity of human beings and have something to say about oppression, not necessarily in a political way but in a human way. I have to feel that what I’m trying to do is worthwhile.”

Rouben Mamoulian: “I firmly believe that art, like everything else, is for life’s sake. It’s not for art’s sake. It should serve life; everything should add to the goodness and the beauty on this earth, to the dignity and the size of man so he can walk proud again.”

Another thing that consistently comes through is the stylistic self-effacement of most of the filmmakers who matriculated in the studio system. “You shouldn’t be aware of the director,” says Richard Brooks. “If anybody at any time says, ‘Wow, what a shot,’ then you’ve lost the audience. They should never know there’s a director in it. They should never know where the music starts or ends. They should never see the camera move …. They should be lost in the story.”

Would somebody explain this to Baz Luhrmann?

What keeps the entire volume from dissolving into where-are-the-snows-of-yesteryear nostalgia are, first, some astringent laughs, as with Billy Wilder on actors: “I would say that 55% are bores.” Or Elia Kazan’s crack about Mervyn LeRoy: “It’s got everything. Surprise, great characters, an important theme, fine writing! But I think Mervyn can lick it!” And George Stevens Sr. proves to have a wickedly accurate take on one of his most beloved films: “The concept of [ Gunga Din] was a kind of ‘Rover Boys in India’ adventure. It’s an insular film aimed at a narrow stratum of audience. Anglo-Saxon Krauts, I’d say.”

In addition, there’s the peppery, contrarian honesty of Frank Capra: “I guess I don’t actually think that the definitive pictures were made in the thirties and forties. Yes, we made some good films, but hell, that’s past. Who the hell’s interested in that? I’m surprised you even watch old films. What should interest you is tomorrow.”

Well, tomorrow for Frank Capra is today for us. Where did the idealism go? Most of these men, who spent 40 or 50 years working in an industry that wasn’t really much less commercial than it is now, were raised in a literary, or at least literate, culture—in many cases European—that valued learning as a worthy goal in and of itself. That foundation was inevitably reflected in their films—which, it should be noted, were usually made for a reasonable cost.

But their great-grandchildren were nurtured in a pop culture that values … what, exactly? Money? Notice ascending toward fame? If the paradigmatic director of the studio period was a happy studio craftsman like George Cukor, who could manage to make even mediocre material radiate concision and class, and who could tailor quality material into something fit for entertaining generations yet unborn, then the paradigmatic director of today would be a happy hack like Doug Liman ( Mr. & Mrs. Smith), excreting unamusingly grubby commercial movies with ridiculous pretensions in a business that makes no economic sense. Imagine an au courant director today truthfully echoing the sentiments of Ingmar Bergman: “If I have nothing to say and I just want to make a film, I don’t make the film. The craftsmanship of filmmaking is so terribly stimulating, dangerous and obsessing that you can be very tempted. But if you have nothing to come with … try to be honest with yourself and don’t make the picture.”

Mr. Stevens’ collection reminds us about the primary importance of creative passion in a world curdled by the lack of commitment.

Scott Eyman’s Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer was published by Simon & Schuster last May; he reviews books regularly for The Observer.

I never thought I’d rave about a movie based on a graphic novel, though Canadian-born-and-based auteur David Cronenberg has almost always delivered the goods in the more gruesome and disreputable genres in his now 30-year feature-film career, beginning with the soft-core exploitation/horror movie They Came from Within (1975). Now in his early 60’s, Mr. Cronenberg, a one-time honors student in English language and literature at the University of Toronto, has retained his obsession with the yearnings and vulnerabilities of the human body and mind in increasingly depraved human societies, in such films as Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome and The Dead Zone (both 1983). Of his remake of The Fly (1986), Molly Haskell once observed its relevance to all marriages in which “he changes, and she doesn’t.”

Dead Ringers (1988), with Jeremy Irons in the dual role of warring identical-twin gynecologists, was an artistic and commercial success that led to Mr. Cronenberg being elevated to more prestigious but less effectively rendered projects, such as Naked Lunch (1991), M. Butterfly (1993) and eXistenZ (1999). In career terms, therefore, A History of Violence represents the first of Mr. Cronenberg’s efforts to merit consideration as the best picture of the year, despite being what traditional critics might once have dismissed as a pulpish enterprise with excessive violence and eroticism. After all, there had to be a revisionist revolution in taste to legitimize not only the genres of John Ford, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, but also the neo-flourishes of Quentin Tarantino, Lars von Trier and the Coen Brothers. How else could a movie that produces a dozen or so corpses in 96 minutes be accorded such a wide range of ecstatic reviews, both here and abroad?

The key is the sense of stylization involved in the first anachronistically and poetically pastoral shots of Millbrook, Ind., with its polite citizens exchanging cheerful morning greetings on a peaceful, sunny day. But this isn’t the first image we see on the screen: Instead, we’re treated to a masterly depiction of pure evil unfolding outside a motel, where two men are bickering about the details of their departure. The younger man (Greg Bryk) is clearly if sullenly taking orders from the older, more formally dressed man (Stephen McHattie). The younger man is sent inside with the camera to get some water for the long trip ahead. We are not surprised to discover the evidence of a blood-spattered crime inside, but also a further impromptu act of shocking violence that is brilliantly intercut with a screaming child’s nightmare in a hitherto happy and untroubled home far away. Mr. Cronenberg, Mr. Olson, cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, editor Ronald Sanders and production designer Carol Spier have combined their talents and expertise to thrust us into an oncoming collision between good and evil in the most economical manner imaginable. The feeling of inevitability is enhanced by the deliberately slow pacing and oblique method of revelation in this opening sequence.

The dark cloud cast by the evildoers hovers over what would otherwise have been an almost laughably idyllic presentation of a happy family preparing for a normal day in their quiet town. Tom Stall (Mr. Mortensen) runs a small luncheonette on the town’s main street, while his wife Edie (Maria Bello) works as a lawyer. Their teenage son Jack (Ashton Holmes) attends high school and their little girl Sarah, grammar school. It is, of course, an old trick for noir films to begin in the bright sunshine of a peaceful life before plunging us into the darkness of menacing death. We know that something awful is about to happen, but the film delays the explosion with an incredibly wicked role-playing marital-sex scene between Edie and Tom, with Edie taking the initiative. This only increases the foreboding.

Meanwhile, their son is being bullied in high school by an obnoxious boy, who casts homophobic aspersions on the unresisting Jack, a self-proclaimed pacifist. One isn’t sure if some kind of subtext is screaming for recognition in the narrative, particularly when Jack’s girlfriend is shown as a boyishly dressed and coiffed girl. The point is that Mr. Cronenberg is in such tight control of the film that we’re never given time to worry about any incongruities that arise.

We don’t have long to wait before all hell breaks loose, as our still-bickering travelers from the motel decide to visit Tom’s luncheonette. In an electrifying sequence that begins like the opening bravado-dialogue section of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” then escalates with the flaunting of a gun and the manhandling of a terrified waitress, the soft-spoken Tom hurls boiling hot coffee in one assailant’s face and springs over the counter to seize his gun, which he swiftly uses to kill both men. Tom is an instant hero in the town, though he declines to expand on his feat for television reporters—as it turns out, with good reason.

All the publicity leads to a visit to Millbrook by more conventional mobsters in a menacing black car. Their leader is Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), who wears dark glasses even indoors. Carl walks into the luncheonette one day and, as he orders coffee, addresses Tom as “Joey” and insists that Tom knows him, which Tom denies in his familiar soft-spoken manner. Carl removes his glasses, revealing telltale scars and a ravaged, blinded left eye that he attributes to one Joey Cusack, Tom’s former name as a hit man in Philadelphia. By this time, even Edie is becoming suspicious of Tom’s true identity. When Carl’s car passes their house, Edie insists that they call their friend, Sheriff Sam Carney (Peter MacNeill), to investigate Carl. Sam stops Carl outside of town, but finds that all of his papers are in order and allows him to drive on.

Meanwhile, Jack finally loses his temper with the school bully and beats him up so badly that he sends him to the hospital, for which he is suspended from school. Tom severely reprimands Jack for his behavior, but as Jack remains uncharacteristically defiant, Tom begins to fear that the contagion of his own past violent behavior is beginning to infect his family. Edie no longer believes his denials about his criminal past, and when he disposes of Carl and his henchmen with his professional skills, she turns away from him, which drives Tom into such a frenzy of frustration that he virtually rapes her in order to regain her love.

Realizing that his marriage has collapsed around the foundation of lies he has constructed it upon, Tom finally and fatalistically drives to Philadelphia to confront his destiny as Joey Cusack, the brother of gangster chieftain Richie Cusack (William Hurt). The ending takes on a darker shade of gray as the rituals of guilt and atonement come into full play.

With all of its sociological improbabilities, A History of Violence isn’t so much a comment on America in the proudly ill-informed von Trier ideological mold as it is a comment on American movies and the violent ecstasies they have provided to audiences around the world. There is a spiritual price to be paid for almost a century of guilty pleasure and self-indulgence with the potent narcotic of cinematic violence, however harmlessly vicarious it may have seemed.

The paradox of A History of Violence consists in reminding us of the great action films of the past, while at the same time succeeding, by its perfect execution, in adding a new and highly original link to that chain of transcendent excellence. This is especially true of the complex and flawless performances of Mr. Mortensen, Ms. Bello, Mr. Hurt and Mr. Harris.

But let’s face it: Mr. Cronenberg is some sort of sorcerer in beating the bottom-line dream merchants at their own game, which is to say that I can’t think of another film this year that has given me so much unalloyed pleasure without leaving a bitter after-taste in my mouth. Its violence is just unreal enough—or, rather, surreal enough—to make its moral fantasies believable on their own terms. Yet above all, Mr. Cronenberg has imbued his narrative with a style of personal conviction that is found in only the greatest auteurs.

Or, Maybe, Hell

Mark Waters’ Just Like Heaven, from a screenplay by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon, based on the novel If Only It Were True by Marc Levy, plays out fairly pleasantly as a moderately entertaining after-life romance between the spirit of a patient on life support and a gloomy Gus mourning the death of his significant other—until, that is, the life-support issue pops up as a melodramatic reminder of the national trauma over Terri Schiavo. In fact, I was beginning to grit my teeth until I realized that this was a Hollywood movie and, as such, predisposed to sentimentalize every issue until it bears as little resemblance to reality as possible in its quest for the happiest ending imaginable. So not to worry: No one, not even the Supreme Court, is going to pull the plug on love in Just Like Heaven.

The story begins obliquely in a frantically busy hospital in which Elizabeth (Reese Witherspoon), a new physician seeking permanent employment, is working like a demon to get herself a promotion. Brett (Ben Shenkman), her chief rival, prefers to butter up the chief physician rather than care for his own patients. Surprise, surprise: The chief physician chooses buckle-down Elizabeth for the vacancy over suck-up Brett, and he makes no bones about revealing his reasoning to Elizabeth. Still, it’s not clear at this point why Brett has been so laboriously targeted as a villain.

After working a long shift, Elizabeth drives to her sister Abby’s (Dina Spybey, credited as Dina Waters), where she is to be introduced to a blind date despite her protestations. Along the way, she crashes into a truck. Cut to a moody young man named David (Mark Ruffalo), who is in the process of apartment hunting with a pushy female real-estate agent. A stray breeze magically whips a “To Sublet” flier onto his coat as David is leaving an apartment that he doesn’t like. The apartment on the flier proves more to his tastes, particularly the rooftop terrace. He has settled comfortably—that is to say, messily—into his new digs when he is confronted one evening by Elizabeth, who demands to know what he’s doing in her apartment. David begins to think he’s hallucinating when she walks into another room and then mysteriously disappears.

But when Elizabeth reappears, it is she who comes to realize that she is in an unusual state—one that enables her to walk through walls. Several reviewers have noted quite accurately that Elizabeth is being played by the direct Ms. Witherspoon of Election and not the ditzy Ms. Witherspoon of Legally Blonde. Elizabeth’s aggressive attitude plays well against David’s inconsolable moodiness. When he finally breaks down to complain about all the foibles of his lost love, Elizabeth smiles to herself with marvelously sweet womanly compassion. But who is she, and where did she come from? To aid him in his search for the identity of the living (or possibly dead) Elizabeth, David enlists the help of Jack (Donal Logue), his best friend and an amateur analyst, and Darryl (Jon Heder), a weirdly knowledgeable clerk in a bookstore devoted to supernatural phenomena.

Finally, they find Elizabeth on life support in her own hospital, and the odious Brett, who has inherited her job, seeking to pull the plug on her, though first he must convince her sister Abby to sign the necessary papers. As you might expect, in the race against time and Brett’s determined villainy, all ends well, nor does Elizabeth appear to have suffered any brain damage during her ordeal (which, of course, is convenient for the sake of her future life with David). I don’t mean to be facetious about this life-and-death situation: It’s a dilemma that any one of us may have to face for ourselves or our loved ones. There are religious and financial issues of great complexity to be considered, but in the end they are private matters, matters of personal conscience—though ones that are currently in jeopardy thanks to the invasions of privacy that have been sanctioned by ultra-right ideologues like our own President. But see Just Like Heaven just the same, to see two charming characters make beautiful music together.

True West

Sergio Leone’s magnificent Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), from a screenplay by Leone, Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, is being shown in a new 35-millimeter Scope Print of the complete version at Film Forum from Sept. 30 through Oct. 6. Leone (1921-1989) is here at the peak of his epic powers, with the invaluable assistance of cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli and composer Ennio Morricone, and a cast consisting of the righteously vengeful Charles Bronson, the smilingly villainous Henry Fonda, the philosophically ambiguous Jason Robards Jr., and the soulfully earthy Claudia Cardinale in a spaghetti western transformed into artistic caviar by the time the final credits roll around. The climactic shootout in particular eclipses every other confrontation of its kind.

And Still More Wilder!

The Billy Wilder series at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, still has 17 films to go, and all are worth seeing in October and November—but there are three that shouldn’t be missed under any circumstances. The first is Love in the Afternoon (1957), Wilder’s most underrated masterpiece, from his screenplay with I.A.L. Diamond (the first of 12 collaborations between the two) and starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier. It’s the closest Wilder ever came to Ernst Lubitsch. (Saturday, Oct. 8, 2 p.m.)

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is Wilder’s second most underrated masterpiece, with Robert Stephens, Colin Blakely, Geneviève Page, Irene Handl, Stanley Holloway, Christopher Lee and Clive Revill. (Saturday, Nov. 5, and Sunday, Nov. 6, 4:15 p.m.)

Finally, Sunset Boulevard (1950), with Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Jack Webb, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Cecil B. DeMille, Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner—from a screenplay by Wilder, Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr., with a musical score by Franz Waxman—is still the best Hollywood movie ever made about Hollywood. (Friday, Nov. 11, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 13, 2 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.)

I say this because at the screening of Corpse Bride I attended, the children in the audience seemed delighted by the ghoulish proceedings much more than I was. But what do you expect? Death is far more remote a prospect for them than it is for an old geezer like me. In any event, Mr. Burton, like many filmmakers, seems to have had a comparatively lonely childhood. The biographical entry from Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia is instructive in this regard:

“Born in 1960 in Burbank, California, the son of a Parks Department employee, he spent many reclusive childhood hours watching cartoons and horror films on TV and began drawing cartoons while still in grade school. He won a Disney fellowship to study animation at California’s Institute of the Arts and at the age of 20 began working at Disney as an apprentice animator. He achieved success with his own first animated film, the six-minute award-winning short, Vincent, modeled after and narrated by his childhood hero, Vincent Price. Turning to live-action shorts, he made a version of Hansel and Gretel featuring an all-Asian cast. He next directed for Disney Frankenweenie, a 30-minute live-action parody of Frankenstein in which the monster is a dog. Deemed too scary for children, the film was never released, but it led to Burton’s hiring by Warner Bros. as the director of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which became a box-office hit. Meant for the kiddie market, the film struck certain critics with its originality, visual inventiveness, and an eye for the absurd, qualities that became Burton’s hallmarks and were strongly evident in his next three films: the box-office sleeper Beetlejuice, the blockbuster hit Batman, and the widely acclaimed adult fairy tale Edward Scissorhands. The sequel Batman Returns extended the movie’s weird symbolism of childhood images and adult obsessions. Following Batman Returns he signed a deal to produce films for Disney.”

I have followed Mr. Burton’s emergence as an undeniable auteur even when he did not direct his productions, but at a great distance—so great, in fact, that I can’t remember for the life of me anything I ever wrote about him. I didn’t dislike the Batman duo and was mildly repulsed by Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, though I was moderately impressed by the subtly reticent acting styles of Johnny Depp and Michael Keaton.

Corpse Bride turns out to be a ponderous mixture of puppetry and animation that is far too technologically complex and laborious for this hopelessly Luddite reviewer, who is banging out this review on a Smith-Corona SCM Classic 12 portable typewriter. All I know is that all of the characters, living and dead, have huge eyes and misshapen bodies. The voices are provided by Johnny Depp as Victor Van Dort, the hapless bridegroom who finds himself engaged to two women, only one of them alive, at the same time: Helena Bonham Carter as the Corpse Bride and Emily Watson as Victoria Everglot, the living bride-to-be. Victor’s parents are voiced by Tracy Ullman as Nell Van Dort and Paul Whitehouse as William Van Dort, Victoria’s parents by Joanna Lumley as Maudeline Everglot and Albert Finney as Finnis Everglot. Richard E. Grant is the ever-sneering voice of total villain Barkis Bittern. Christopher Lee sounds off as the grotesquely domineering Pastor Galswells, and composer Danny Elfman (who’s been with Mr. Burton from the beginning of his career) sings the voice of Bonejangles, the leader of the graveyard band.

The plot, such as it is, hinges on Victor’s extreme clumsiness in the wedding rehearsal, forcing him to flee in humiliation to a wooded graveyard, where he mistakenly places Victoria’s wedding ring on a tree branch that suddenly metamorphoses into the Corpse Bride’s hand and finger, with the bride herself emerging in all her spare, skeletal form from the grave in which she’d been languishing ever since she was murdered by her wicked, fortune-hunting bridegroom. There is, at first, a touch of Ichabod Crane in Victor Van Dort, but with much broader strokes of hysterical nervousness. As the story develops, however, the lyrical expansiveness of Mr. Elfman’s music provides a background of sweetness to serve as counterpoint to the attendant grisly details of decaying and disintegrating body parts. Indeed, if Corpse Bride works at all—and I am not sure that it does—it is as a mordant musical not without wit and a measure of emotional engagement.

All three leading characters take turns à deux for stretches of two-hand piano courtship, but the demarcation lines between this world and the next become increasingly blurry. This is especially true when the Bonejangles chorus steals the show (as it were) with their recurring refrain to each increasingly mournful stanza of the Corpse Bride’s tale in “Remains of the Day.”

It goes like this: “Die, die, we all pass away / But don’t wear a frown ’cause it’s really O.K. / You might try and hide and you might try and pray / But we all end up the remains of the day.” Now I know somewhere inside me there’s a little man nodding in agreement with the existential truth of the refrain, but I absolutely forbid this little man to clap in unison with the Bonejangles singers. What follows next in the narrative is as neat and sweet as a nursery rhyme. Normally, I would have considered the resolution of this bizarre triangle so sentimentally contrived that it became an example of having your cake (or corpse) and eating it, too. Still, Mr. Burton does come down, albeit belatedly, on the side of life and love, and I couldn’t have stood it if he hadn’t. So enjoy Corpse Bride if you can. I didn’t, though I had to admit that it was pretty accomplished for what it was.

Daddy’s Girl

Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, from his own screenplay, is the third distinctively independent and highly regarded first-person narrative film that Mr. Kerrigan has turned out in the past 11 years. He made his debut with Clean, Shaven (1994), a close study of a schizophrenic character named Peter (Peter Greene), who wanders about trying to find some purpose to his existence after being released from a mental institution. Meanwhile, his young daughter has been put up for adoption by her mother, a policewoman who suspects that Peter is the brutal murderer of another little girl and who is hot on his trail.

Mr. Kerrigan’s second feature, Claire Dolan, was a more straightforward and less doubt-ridden narrative than Clean, Shaven as it followed the title character, played by the late Katrin Cartlidge, on her appointed rounds as a high-priced call girl operating in various locales between New Jersey and New York, a region that has become Mr. Kerrigan’s chosen turf. It’s a transient world of motels, cheap bars and one-night stands.

Keane is closer in its rambling indistinctness to Clean, Shaven than to Claire Dolan from the moment it begins, somewhat mysteriously, in the New York Port Authority bus terminal, where William Keane (Damian Lewis) is frantically searching for his 6-year-old daughter, who has been missing for six months after reportedly disappearing in the bus terminal while in Keane’s care. At least that’s what Keane claims as he buttonholes complete strangers with a picture of his daughter and a faded newspaper clipping of her disappearance, neither of which we ever see for ourselves, leading to the suspicion that the unkempt and seemingly demented Keane may have invented the whole story. For one thing, he is shown always muttering or even shouting aloud to himself as he is trailed relentlessly by cinematographer John Foster’s handheld camera, which stays close to Keane, but not close enough to make the audience identify with his point of view. It’s as if a third unseen person is keeping tabs on Keane for some unspecified reason.

Mr. Lewis, a highly talented British actor, displays a flawless American accent in what amounts to a hyper-Wellesian monopolization of screen time and screen space. Just when he has begun to exhaust our patience by inciting a silly brawl around a taxi stand with a man he pointlessly suspects of having kidnapped his daughter, the plot begins to thicken considerably as he meets a down-on-her-luck single mother, Lynn Bedik (Amy Ryan), and her 7-year-old daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin) at his hotel. Keane is clearly fascinated by the little girl, possibly because she reminds him of his own lost daughter, and just possibly because he is a dangerous pedophile who has fantasies about a long-lost daughter.

We have seen Keane indulge in a coke-sniffing bathroom-stall sexual encounter with an otherwise unidentified woman, but his lack of sexual potency in this encounter arouses more suspense-laden suspicions of his sexual perversities. When Lynn asks Keane to baby-sit her daughter while she goes out of town to get some child-support money from her ex-husband, the tension rises perceptibly as Keane and Kira bond together like devoted surrogate father and completely trustful surrogate daughter. As Kira, well played by the completely adorable Ms. Breslin, tries to cheer up the despondent Keane, he never makes the false or suspicious move we anxiously anticipate. I can’t say if Mr. Kerrigan is playing dirty pool with us in the audience or not. Child molestation is still a grave taboo, both on and off the screen, but recent films have crossed the line (particularly in the “independent” sector), and in any event, we can never be sure about a character who seems to belong in a mental institution.

Indeed, I don’t want to short-circuit the suspense by telling you what happens in the end. Still, I cannot avoid some auteurist speculation about a cryptic biographical note that Mr. Kerrigan included in the production notes for the film: “He lives in New York City with his daughter Serena.” In his first film, Clean, Shaven, the protagonist has lost custody of one daughter and is suspected of the murder of someone else’s daughter. In Claire Dolan, the protagonist wants to abandon prostitution so that she can have a child of her own. And in Keane, a possibly real daughter is almost magically replaced by a surrogate daughter with a strikingly similar backpack in the same bus terminal.

The obsession with daughters is plausible enough, but the mobile solitude of Mr. Kerrigan’s protagonists raises different questions about the auteur’s vision of life and society. It would seem that we are all swimming in a sea of communal indifference, and I suppose this is as apt a description of today’s world as any.

More Wilder

“Some Like It Wilder: The Complete Billy Wilder,” a 26-film retrospective, continues its run at the Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria) with A Foreign Affair (1948), Wilder’s raucous return to Berlin after the war, with Marlene Dietrich cast against reality as an unrepentant Nazi and Jean Arthur brutalized as an Iowa Republican Congresswoman in an uneven sexual competition with Dietrich for the love of a corrupt American soldier (played by John Lund). Also prominent in the cast is Millard Mitchell, as the comically no-nonsense commanding officer. Dietrich sings “Black Market” and “Ruins of Berlin.” The hilarious screenplay was credited to Wilder, Charles Brackett and Richard Breen, and the on-location footage of bombed-out Berlin made its own wry statement. (Saturday, Sept. 24, 2 p.m.)

Stalag 17 (1953) was reportedly superior to Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski’s Broadway stage hit. In the film adaptation by Wilder and Edwin Blum (which won an Oscar for William Holden), the initially prickly anti-hero turns unexpectedly heroic in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, the aforementioned Stalag 17. The splendid ensemble cast includes the impromptu comedy team of Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck (reprising their stage antics), Don Taylor, Richard Erdman, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Ross Bagdasarian and Gil Stratton Jr., as well as the brilliantly acted and wittily written villains of Otto Preminger (as the sardonic camp commandant) and Sig Ruman (as the deceptively jovial barracks guard). Despite the later Hogan’s Heroes—the tasteless sitcom “inspired” by the film’s success—Stalag 17 remains one of Wilder’s most resonant blends of comedy and melodrama. (Sunday, Sept. 25, 2 p.m.)

The Front Page (1974) is—alas—Wilder’s tired remake of Howard Hawk’s His Girl Friday (1940), which had deftly heterosexualized (with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell) the original buddy-buddy romance of the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur 20’s stage comedy, as well as the 1931 Lewis Milestone film version with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brian (after producer Howard Hughes reportedly turned down Clark Gable and James Cagney, in the early stages of their careers, for the lead roles). In the Wilder version, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau restore the venerable buddy-buddy tradition. (Saturday, Oct. 1, 2 p.m.)

The Apartment (1960), being shown in a restored 35-millimeter Dolby Digital print, won well-deserved Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Best Editing (Daniel Mandell) and Best Art Direction–Set Decoration (Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle). Undeserved was Shirley MacLaine’s Oscar loss as Best Actress; her winsome bad-girl performance was infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor’s ridiculous call girl in Daniel Mann’s Butterfield 8, for which Ms. Taylor won one of her periodic Hollywood awards paying tribute to her cynical acquisitiveness and well-oiled publicity machine. Fred MacMurray is saddled with the thankless role of cheating husband and mean-spirited adulterer, but Jack Lemmon and Ms. MacLaine are nothing short of exquisite in their shared vulnerabilities, which they finally triumph over in a burst of spectacular camera movement. (Saturday, Oct. 1, 4 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 2, 4:30 p.m.)

I say this because at the screening of Corpse Bride I attended, the children in the audience seemed delighted by the ghoulish proceedings much more than I was. But what do you expect? Death is far more remote a prospect for them than it is for an old geezer like me. In any event, Mr. Burton, like many filmmakers, seems to have had a comparatively lonely childhood. The biographical entry from Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia is instructive in this regard:

“Born in 1960 in Burbank, California, the son of a Parks Department employee, he spent many reclusive childhood hours watching cartoons and horror films on TV and began drawing cartoons while still in grade school. He won a Disney fellowship to study animation at California’s Institute of the Arts and at the age of 20 began working at Disney as an apprentice animator. He achieved success with his own first animated film, the six-minute award-winning short, Vincent, modeled after and narrated by his childhood hero, Vincent Price. Turning to live-action shorts, he made a version of Hansel and Gretel featuring an all-Asian cast. He next directed for Disney Frankenweenie, a 30-minute live-action parody of Frankenstein in which the monster is a dog. Deemed too scary for children, the film was never released, but it led to Burton’s hiring by Warner Bros. as the director of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which became a box-office hit. Meant for the kiddie market, the film struck certain critics with its originality, visual inventiveness, and an eye for the absurd, qualities that became Burton’s hallmarks and were strongly evident in his next three films: the box-office sleeper Beetlejuice, the blockbuster hit Batman, and the widely acclaimed adult fairy tale Edward Scissorhands. The sequel Batman Returns extended the movie’s weird symbolism of childhood images and adult obsessions. Following Batman Returns he signed a deal to produce films for Disney.”

I have followed Mr. Burton’s emergence as an undeniable auteur even when he did not direct his productions, but at a great distance—so great, in fact, that I can’t remember for the life of me anything I ever wrote about him. I didn’t dislike the Batman duo and was mildly repulsed by Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, though I was moderately impressed by the subtly reticent acting styles of Johnny Depp and Michael Keaton.

Corpse Bride turns out to be a ponderous mixture of puppetry and animation that is far too technologically complex and laborious for this hopelessly Luddite reviewer, who is banging out this review on a Smith-Corona SCM Classic 12 portable typewriter. All I know is that all of the characters, living and dead, have huge eyes and misshapen bodies. The voices are provided by Johnny Depp as Victor Van Dort, the hapless bridegroom who finds himself engaged to two women, only one of them alive, at the same time: Helena Bonham Carter as the Corpse Bride and Emily Watson as Victoria Everglot, the living bride-to-be. Victor’s parents are voiced by Tracy Ullman as Nell Van Dort and Paul Whitehouse as William Van Dort, Victoria’s parents by Joanna Lumley as Maudeline Everglot and Albert Finney as Finnis Everglot. Richard E. Grant is the ever-sneering voice of total villain Barkis Bittern. Christopher Lee sounds off as the grotesquely domineering Pastor Galswells, and composer Danny Elfman (who’s been with Mr. Burton from the beginning of his career) sings the voice of Bonejangles, the leader of the graveyard band.

The plot, such as it is, hinges on Victor’s extreme clumsiness in the wedding rehearsal, forcing him to flee in humiliation to a wooded graveyard, where he mistakenly places Victoria’s wedding ring on a tree branch that suddenly metamorphoses into the Corpse Bride’s hand and finger, with the bride herself emerging in all her spare, skeletal form from the grave in which she’d been languishing ever since she was murdered by her wicked, fortune-hunting bridegroom. There is, at first, a touch of Ichabod Crane in Victor Van Dort, but with much broader strokes of hysterical nervousness. As the story develops, however, the lyrical expansiveness of Mr. Elfman’s music provides a background of sweetness to serve as counterpoint to the attendant grisly details of decaying and disintegrating body parts. Indeed, if Corpse Bride works at all—and I am not sure that it does—it is as a mordant musical not without wit and a measure of emotional engagement.

All three leading characters take turns à deux for stretches of two-hand piano courtship, but the demarcation lines between this world and the next become increasingly blurry. This is especially true when the Bonejangles chorus steals the show (as it were) with their recurring refrain to each increasingly mournful stanza of the Corpse Bride’s tale in “Remains of the Day.”

It goes like this: “Die, die, we all pass away / But don’t wear a frown ’cause it’s really O.K. / You might try and hide and you might try and pray / But we all end up the remains of the day.” Now I know somewhere inside me there’s a little man nodding in agreement with the existential truth of the refrain, but I absolutely forbid this little man to clap in unison with the Bonejangles singers. What follows next in the narrative is as neat and sweet as a nursery rhyme. Normally, I would have considered the resolution of this bizarre triangle so sentimentally contrived that it became an example of having your cake (or corpse) and eating it, too. Still, Mr. Burton does come down, albeit belatedly, on the side of life and love, and I couldn’t have stood it if he hadn’t. So enjoy Corpse Bride if you can. I didn’t, though I had to admit that it was pretty accomplished for what it was.

Daddy’s Girl

Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, from his own screenplay, is the third distinctively independent and highly regarded first-person narrative film that Mr. Kerrigan has turned out in the past 11 years. He made his debut with Clean, Shaven (1994), a close study of a schizophrenic character named Peter (Peter Greene), who wanders about trying to find some purpose to his existence after being released from a mental institution. Meanwhile, his young daughter has been put up for adoption by her mother, a policewoman who suspects that Peter is the brutal murderer of another little girl and who is hot on his trail.

Mr. Kerrigan’s second feature, Claire Dolan, was a more straightforward and less doubt-ridden narrative than Clean, Shaven as it followed the title character, played by the late Katrin Cartlidge, on her appointed rounds as a high-priced call girl operating in various locales between New Jersey and New York, a region that has become Mr. Kerrigan’s chosen turf. It’s a transient world of motels, cheap bars and one-night stands.

Keane is closer in its rambling indistinctness to Clean, Shaven than to Claire Dolan from the moment it begins, somewhat mysteriously, in the New York Port Authority bus terminal, where William Keane (Damian Lewis) is frantically searching for his 6-year-old daughter, who has been missing for six months after reportedly disappearing in the bus terminal while in Keane’s care. At least that’s what Keane claims as he buttonholes complete strangers with a picture of his daughter and a faded newspaper clipping of her disappearance, neither of which we ever see for ourselves, leading to the suspicion that the unkempt and seemingly demented Keane may have invented the whole story. For one thing, he is shown always muttering or even shouting aloud to himself as he is trailed relentlessly by cinematographer John Foster’s handheld camera, which stays close to Keane, but not close enough to make the audience identify with his point of view. It’s as if a third unseen person is keeping tabs on Keane for some unspecified reason.

Mr. Lewis, a highly talented British actor, displays a flawless American accent in what amounts to a hyper-Wellesian monopolization of screen time and screen space. Just when he has begun to exhaust our patience by inciting a silly brawl around a taxi stand with a man he pointlessly suspects of having kidnapped his daughter, the plot begins to thicken considerably as he meets a down-on-her-luck single mother, Lynn Bedik (Amy Ryan), and her 7-year-old daughter Kira (Abigail Breslin) at his hotel. Keane is clearly fascinated by the little girl, possibly because she reminds him of his own lost daughter, and just possibly because he is a dangerous pedophile who has fantasies about a long-lost daughter.

We have seen Keane indulge in a coke-sniffing bathroom-stall sexual encounter with an otherwise unidentified woman, but his lack of sexual potency in this encounter arouses more suspense-laden suspicions of his sexual perversities. When Lynn asks Keane to baby-sit her daughter while she goes out of town to get some child-support money from her ex-husband, the tension rises perceptibly as Keane and Kira bond together like devoted surrogate father and completely trustful surrogate daughter. As Kira, well played by the completely adorable Ms. Breslin, tries to cheer up the despondent Keane, he never makes the false or suspicious move we anxiously anticipate. I can’t say if Mr. Kerrigan is playing dirty pool with us in the audience or not. Child molestation is still a grave taboo, both on and off the screen, but recent films have crossed the line (particularly in the “independent” sector), and in any event, we can never be sure about a character who seems to belong in a mental institution.

Indeed, I don’t want to short-circuit the suspense by telling you what happens in the end. Still, I cannot avoid some auteurist speculation about a cryptic biographical note that Mr. Kerrigan included in the production notes for the film: “He lives in New York City with his daughter Serena.” In his first film, Clean, Shaven, the protagonist has lost custody of one daughter and is suspected of the murder of someone else’s daughter. In Claire Dolan, the protagonist wants to abandon prostitution so that she can have a child of her own. And in Keane, a possibly real daughter is almost magically replaced by a surrogate daughter with a strikingly similar backpack in the same bus terminal.

The obsession with daughters is plausible enough, but the mobile solitude of Mr. Kerrigan’s protagonists raises different questions about the auteur’s vision of life and society. It would seem that we are all swimming in a sea of communal indifference, and I suppose this is as apt a description of today’s world as any.

More Wilder

“Some Like It Wilder: The Complete Billy Wilder,” a 26-film retrospective, continues its run at the Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria) with A Foreign Affair (1948), Wilder’s raucous return to Berlin after the war, with Marlene Dietrich cast against reality as an unrepentant Nazi and Jean Arthur brutalized as an Iowa Republican Congresswoman in an uneven sexual competition with Dietrich for the love of a corrupt American soldier (played by John Lund). Also prominent in the cast is Millard Mitchell, as the comically no-nonsense commanding officer. Dietrich sings “Black Market” and “Ruins of Berlin.” The hilarious screenplay was credited to Wilder, Charles Brackett and Richard Breen, and the on-location footage of bombed-out Berlin made its own wry statement. (Saturday, Sept. 24, 2 p.m.)

Stalag 17 (1953) was reportedly superior to Donald Bevan and Edmund Trzcinski’s Broadway stage hit. In the film adaptation by Wilder and Edwin Blum (which won an Oscar for William Holden), the initially prickly anti-hero turns unexpectedly heroic in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, the aforementioned Stalag 17. The splendid ensemble cast includes the impromptu comedy team of Robert Strauss and Harvey Lembeck (reprising their stage antics), Don Taylor, Richard Erdman, Peter Graves, Neville Brand, Ross Bagdasarian and Gil Stratton Jr., as well as the brilliantly acted and wittily written villains of Otto Preminger (as the sardonic camp commandant) and Sig Ruman (as the deceptively jovial barracks guard). Despite the later Hogan’s Heroes—the tasteless sitcom “inspired” by the film’s success— Stalag 17 remains one of Wilder’s most resonant blends of comedy and melodrama. (Sunday, Sept. 25, 2 p.m.)

The Front Page (1974) is—alas—Wilder’s tired remake of Howard Hawk’s His Girl Friday (1940), which had deftly heterosexualized (with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell) the original buddy-buddy romance of the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur 20’s stage comedy, as well as the 1931 Lewis Milestone film version with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brian (after producer Howard Hughes reportedly turned down Clark Gable and James Cagney, in the early stages of their careers, for the lead roles). In the Wilder version, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau restore the venerable buddy-buddy tradition. (Saturday, Oct. 1, 2 p.m.)

The Apartment (1960), being shown in a restored 35-millimeter Dolby Digital print, won well-deserved Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond), Best Editing (Daniel Mandell) and Best Art Direction–Set Decoration (Alexandre Trauner and Edward G. Boyle). Undeserved was Shirley MacLaine’s Oscar loss as Best Actress; her winsome bad-girl performance was infinitely superior to Elizabeth Taylor’s ridiculous call girl in Daniel Mann’s Butterfield 8, for which Ms. Taylor won one of her periodic Hollywood awards paying tribute to her cynical acquisitiveness and well-oiled publicity machine. Fred MacMurray is saddled with the thankless role of cheating husband and mean-spirited adulterer, but Jack Lemmon and Ms. MacLaine are nothing short of exquisite in their shared vulnerabilities, which they finally triumph over in a burst of spectacular camera movement. (Saturday, Oct. 1, 4 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 2, 4:30 p.m.)

Talk about odd couples: Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is a cool-headed hotel executive who is terrified of flying. Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) is a blue-eyed stranger who seems, at first, to be the smoothest pick-up artist any pretty girl could hope to meet in an airport lobby during a long wait for the weather to clear. Within a few minutes, he’s making jokes about his name, especially when people call him Jack. When their plane is finally cleared for boarding, Lisa is happy to find that she and Jackson are seated together. She could be forgiven for imagining that the fates have conspired to promote their spur-of-the-moment romance, but, as Jackson tells her almost immediately, the fates have nothing to do with his apparent flirtatiousness. In fact, he has been stalking her for weeks and knows all of her habits and routines, as well as those of her widowed father, Joe Reisert (Brian Cox), who is waiting for her to call him when she arrives in Miami.

It turns out that Jackson is part of a terrorist conspiracy to assassinate Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Charles Keefe (Jack Scalia, presumably no relation to the controversial Supreme Court justice), as well as his entire family. What Jackson wants Lisa to do is to call Cynthia (Jayma Mays), her tremulously insecure subordinate at a luxury hotel in Miami, and tell her to change the room at which Keefe and his family are staying. If Lisa refuses to follow Jackson’s instructions, one of his confederates parked outside the home of Lisa’s father will be given the signal to kill him.

Lisa’s dilemma isn’t exactly that of the heroine in Hitchcock’s two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956). The choice faced by Edna Best (in 1934) and Doris Day (in 1956) was whether to jeopardize the life of her child by interfering with the planned assassination of a foreign statesman who is a complete stranger to her. By contrast, Lisa knows Keefe and his family from their stays at her place of employment, and she is determined to find some way to save them from the terrorist group without getting her father killed. And she must do this completely on her own, without any help from a competent Prince Charming in or out of government.

At first, she simply plays for time in the battle of wits with her wily antagonist. Jackson proves to be as slick in reassuring the passengers and attendants on the plane that nothing is wrong between Lisa and himself as he was in picking up Lisa. It’s largely a cerebral contest between the two, because at no time is the plane itself or its passengers in any danger. After being thwarted by Jackson time and again, despite the ingenuity of her deceptive stratagems and delaying tactics, Lisa improvises one final desperate act of violence that will ensure a climactic battle to the death between the two, which is resolved by a completely unexpected (and unlikely) deus ex machina.

Red Eye is one of the few films in recent years to empower its female characters by refusing to depict their intelligence as being overwhelmed by their feelings of vulnerability. It is not only Lisa who prevails, but also her loyal but vulnerable assistant, Cynthia. The film ends on a note of female bonding such as is seldom even attempted in contemporary movies.

Mind you, I’m not claiming masterpiece stature for Red Eye, just a solid professionalism in the acting, writing and direction that seems inextricably related to the modesty of its intentions. Still, once Lisa is hit in the eye, literally and figuratively, with the truth about Jackson’s objectives, a negative chemistry comes into play between Ms. McAdams and Mr. Murphy, which is to say that their characters’ implacable hostility toward each other becomes curiously sexy in the old movie manner. It probably helps that we never find out anything about the terrorist cell of which Jackson is so clearly a prominent part. We are thus spared any speeches on the righteousness of causes, good or evil as they may be. I am beginning to wonder if all the apparent chaos in today’s world has any arguable rationale. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine the applicability of any “intelligent design” to the horrors unleashed by Hurricane Katrina.

Get It On

Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, from a screenplay by Mr. Apatow and Steve Carell, has been No. 1 at the box office for two weeks running and has received generally favorable notices, but count me among the naysayers, though not in a spirit of complete revulsion. Newcomer Steve Carell, in the title role, is too engagingly earnest a personality to arouse negative vibes, even when he becomes entangled in many silly and unconvincing situations. Still, the whole premise of the movie repelled me. Who knows how many 40-year-old males in real life have yet to experience the ecstasies of sexual intercourse? I am not trying to suggest (albeit grotesquely) that they represent yet another pressure group out there demanding respect; I am merely trying to point out, in an admittedly old-fashioned way, that it should be nobody’s business but the 40-year-old male virgin’s. Of course, in the last dying days of the Production Code, Otto Preminger defied the Hollywood censors by using the word “virgin” in The Moon Is Blue. The use of the term was regarded as particularly offensive given the context, a witty exchange between William Holden’s male pursuer and Maggie McNamara’s forthrightly virginal object of pursuit. (He asks her why she keeps announcing that she’s a virgin; she asks him what’s so wrong with that; he replies that you only advertise what you want to sell.) It’s hard to believe, even after more than 50 years, that the V-word could have stirred up such a fuss in its time.

Still, movies may have gone too far in the opposite direction by suggesting or even demanding that every male of whatever age has a constitutional right (and obligation) to get laid, no matter how. When the hapless Andy of Mr. Carell tries to bluff his buddies at Smart Tech, an electronics superstore, into thinking that he spends his nights womanizing, he lets the cat out of the bag by comparing a woman’s breasts to bags of sand. The supposedly more sophisticated buddies leap to the challenge of devirginizing Andy, thus setting the stage for a series of comedy skits of overwhelmingly witless banality. It’s not so much the fault of the performers as it is of the characters they play: The three buddies—David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco) and Cal (Seth Rogen)—are, individually and collectively, far less appealing to women than Andy, to whom they are supposedly teaching the ropes. This is the one bit of charm in the movie.

Consequently, when Andy meets the true love of his life, Catherine Keener’s Trish, we root for them to overcome the clumsy plot contrivances strewn in their path. Along the way, Andy survives a car crash with a drunk-driving, hot-to-trot pickup named Nicky (Leslie Mann, who is also the director’s wife), as well as encounters with Beth (Elizabeth Banks), a too-beautiful-to-be-true blonde pushover that he meets in a bookstore, and Paula (Jane Lynch), Andy’s boss at Smart Tech, who promises to initiate him into a world of forbidden delights.

The only deeper chord is struck by the film’s brief glimpse into the alternate world that the asexual Andy inhabits, one well stocked with games and toys. But such an abridgement of the sexual symmetries is always given short shrift at the movies.

A Wilder Time

The Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens) is opening “Some Like It Wilder: The Complete Billy Wilder” with The Major and the Minor (1942), one of the least-known of Wilder’s great comedy romances, and one of the most evocative expressions of America’s pre-war mood on the eve of Pearl Harbor (even though the movie was released after we had entered the war, and ended up serving as a prophetic rebuke to the widespread isolationist feeling in America). Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley, Diana Lynn, Frankie Thomas and Norma Varden comprise the smoothly functioning cast of ultra-professionals capable of making a smooth transition between the wildest and wackiest farce and the most stirring and rousing romance. It was the first film that Wilder directed in Hollywood after a brilliant screenwriting career in the 30’s with Charles Brackett, with whom he co-wrote The Major and the Minor. (Saturday, Sept. 10, at 2 p.m.)

Double Indemnity, with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, Tom Powers and Fortunio Bonanova, was one of the earliest Hollywood film noirs. Wilder’s long-time screenwriting partner Charles Brackett bowed out of the project over concerns with the seamy plot, which has the two leads embroiled in a grisly murder for profit. Classic mystery writer Raymond Chandler replaced Brackett as Wilder’s collaborator. Robinson almost steals the show as an intuitive insurance investigator, but MacMurray made the greatest leap forward from his prior status as a very light romantic lead. (Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 10 and 11, at 4 p.m.)

The Bad Seed ( Mauvaise Graine) (1934) was directed by Wilder and Alexander Esway in France while Wilder was there in flight from Nazi Germany. It would hardly be worth mentioning except for the presence in the cast of a very young Danielle Darrieux in this otherwise forgettable melodrama about car thieves on the loose in the French countryside. (Sunday, Sept. 11, 2 p.m.)

The Seven Year Itch (1955) has been wildly overrated because of the iconic scene with Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate, her skirt being blown in too many upward directions for her then husband, Joe DiMaggio. The only laughs in the film come from Tom Ewell’s wild, womanizing fantasies (reprising his triumphant performance in the Broadway stage version). The cast includes also Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts, Victor Moore, Oskar Homolka, Carolyn Jones and Robert Strauss. Wilder collaborated on the screenplay with the playwright, George Axelrod. Although the plot was cleaned up at the insistence of the Production Code office, no one foresaw the worldwide repercussions of Marilyn on that subway grate. (Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 17 and 18, 2 p.m.)

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), the most underrated of all of Wilder’s films, is presented here in a restored, uncensored 35-millimeter print with Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr, Barbara Pepper, Doro Morande, Henry Gibson and Mel Blanc. Wilder collaborated with I.A.L. Diamond on the screenplay. Much like the film itself, Kim Novak has always been ridiculously underrated vis-à-vis Marilyn, who always struck me more as an icon in the two dimensions of photography than in the three dimensions of cinema. That is why her films are seldom revived and her photos are omnipresent. Frankly, I like Ms. Farr better than Marilyn, too. (Saturday, Sept. 17, 4 p.m.)

The Lost Weekend (1945) was much ahead of its time in its grim, realistic depiction of failed writer Don Birnam (Ray Milland) and his descent into an alcoholic, hallucinatory hell during a weekend binge. Despite winning Oscars for their adaptation of Charles Jackson’s searing novel, Brackett and Wilder were later criticized for having softened the author’s downbeat ending and completely eliminated his gay subtext. Still, the film was uniformly well-acted by the Oscar-winning Milland, Jane Wyman (in her first major role) as his supportive sweetheart, Phillip Terry as his long-suffering brother, Howard da Silva as the philosophical bartender, Doris Dowling as a memorable bar girl, Frank Faylen as a slyly sadistic male nurse in the alcoholic ward, and Mary Young as a nosy neighbor. John F. Seitz’s blistering cinematography of the El-shadowed Third Avenue was one of Hollywood’s rare on-the-scene depictions of the city at the time, and Miklós Rózsa’s theremin-punctuated musical score added its own spell. (Sunday, Sept. 18, 4 p.m.)

Some Like It Hot (1959) is still the funniest transvestite comedy ever made in Hollywood, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis doing the honors in high heels and lipstick while fleeing a Chicago mobster (George Raft) and his gunmen after accidentally witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Along the way, Curtis seduces Marilyn Monroe (playing a songbird in an all-girl band), and Lemmon is picked up by dirty old rich man Joe E. Brown with the funniest film-ending laugh line in movie history. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond provided the screenplay, and Pat O’Brien and Nehemiah Persoff added their talents to the straight plot. (Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 24 and 25, 4:30 p.m.)

Talk about odd couples: Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is a cool-headed hotel executive who is terrified of flying. Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy) is a blue-eyed stranger who seems, at first, to be the smoothest pick-up artist any pretty girl could hope to meet in an airport lobby during a long wait for the weather to clear. Within a few minutes, he’s making jokes about his name, especially when people call him Jack. When their plane is finally cleared for boarding, Lisa is happy to find that she and Jackson are seated together. She could be forgiven for imagining that the fates have conspired to promote their spur-of-the-moment romance, but, as Jackson tells her almost immediately, the fates have nothing to do with his apparent flirtatiousness. In fact, he has been stalking her for weeks and knows all of her habits and routines, as well as those of her widowed father, Joe Reisert (Brian Cox), who is waiting for her to call him when she arrives in Miami.

It turns out that Jackson is part of a terrorist conspiracy to assassinate Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Charles Keefe (Jack Scalia, presumably no relation to the controversial Supreme Court justice), as well as his entire family. What Jackson wants Lisa to do is to call Cynthia (Jayma Mays), her tremulously insecure subordinate at a luxury hotel in Miami, and tell her to change the room at which Keefe and his family are staying. If Lisa refuses to follow Jackson’s instructions, one of his confederates parked outside the home of Lisa’s father will be given the signal to kill him.

Lisa’s dilemma isn’t exactly that of the heroine in Hitchcock’s two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 and 1956). The choice faced by Edna Best (in 1934) and Doris Day (in 1956) was whether to jeopardize the life of her child by interfering with the planned assassination of a foreign statesman who is a complete stranger to her. By contrast, Lisa knows Keefe and his family from their stays at her place of employment, and she is determined to find some way to save them from the terrorist group without getting her father killed. And she must do this completely on her own, without any help from a competent Prince Charming in or out of government.

At first, she simply plays for time in the battle of wits with her wily antagonist. Jackson proves to be as slick in reassuring the passengers and attendants on the plane that nothing is wrong between Lisa and himself as he was in picking up Lisa. It’s largely a cerebral contest between the two, because at no time is the plane itself or its passengers in any danger. After being thwarted by Jackson time and again, despite the ingenuity of her deceptive stratagems and delaying tactics, Lisa improvises one final desperate act of violence that will ensure a climactic battle to the death between the two, which is resolved by a completely unexpected (and unlikely) deus ex machina.

Red Eye is one of the few films in recent years to empower its female characters by refusing to depict their intelligence as being overwhelmed by their feelings of vulnerability. It is not only Lisa who prevails, but also her loyal but vulnerable assistant, Cynthia. The film ends on a note of female bonding such as is seldom even attempted in contemporary movies.

Mind you, I’m not claiming masterpiece stature for Red Eye, just a solid professionalism in the acting, writing and direction that seems inextricably related to the modesty of its intentions. Still, once Lisa is hit in the eye, literally and figuratively, with the truth about Jackson’s objectives, a negative chemistry comes into play between Ms. McAdams and Mr. Murphy, which is to say that their characters’ implacable hostility toward each other becomes curiously sexy in the old movie manner. It probably helps that we never find out anything about the terrorist cell of which Jackson is so clearly a prominent part. We are thus spared any speeches on the righteousness of causes, good or evil as they may be. I am beginning to wonder if all the apparent chaos in today’s world has any arguable rationale. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine the applicability of any “intelligent design” to the horrors unleashed by Hurricane Katrina.

Get It On

Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, from a screenplay by Mr. Apatow and Steve Carell, has been No. 1 at the box office for two weeks running and has received generally favorable notices, but count me among the naysayers, though not in a spirit of complete revulsion. Newcomer Steve Carell, in the title role, is too engagingly earnest a personality to arouse negative vibes, even when he becomes entangled in many silly and unconvincing situations. Still, the whole premise of the movie repelled me. Who knows how many 40-year-old males in real life have yet to experience the ecstasies of sexual intercourse? I am not trying to suggest (albeit grotesquely) that they represent yet another pressure group out there demanding respect; I am merely trying to point out, in an admittedly old-fashioned way, that it should be nobody’s business but the 40-year-old male virgin’s. Of course, in the last dying days of the Production Code, Otto Preminger defied the Hollywood censors by using the word “virgin” in The Moon Is Blue. The use of the term was regarded as particularly offensive given the context, a witty exchange between William Holden’s male pursuer and Maggie McNamara’s forthrightly virginal object of pursuit. (He asks her why she keeps announcing that she’s a virgin; she asks him what’s so wrong with that; he replies that you only advertise what you want to sell.) It’s hard to believe, even after more than 50 years, that the V-word could have stirred up such a fuss in its time.

Still, movies may have gone too far in the opposite direction by suggesting or even demanding that every male of whatever age has a constitutional right (and obligation) to get laid, no matter how. When the hapless Andy of Mr. Carell tries to bluff his buddies at Smart Tech, an electronics superstore, into thinking that he spends his nights womanizing, he lets the cat out of the bag by comparing a woman’s breasts to bags of sand. The supposedly more sophisticated buddies leap to the challenge of devirginizing Andy, thus setting the stage for a series of comedy skits of overwhelmingly witless banality. It’s not so much the fault of the performers as it is of the characters they play: The three buddies—David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco) and Cal (Seth Rogen)—are, individually and collectively, far less appealing to women than Andy, to whom they are supposedly teaching the ropes. This is the one bit of charm in the movie.

Consequently, when Andy meets the true love of his life, Catherine Keener’s Trish, we root for them to overcome the clumsy plot contrivances strewn in their path. Along the way, Andy survives a car crash with a drunk-driving, hot-to-trot pickup named Nicky (Leslie Mann, who is also the director’s wife), as well as encounters with Beth (Elizabeth Banks), a too-beautiful-to-be-true blonde pushover that he meets in a bookstore, and Paula (Jane Lynch), Andy’s boss at Smart Tech, who promises to initiate him into a world of forbidden delights.

The only deeper chord is struck by the film’s brief glimpse into the alternate world that the asexual Andy inhabits, one well stocked with games and toys. But such an abridgement of the sexual symmetries is always given short shrift at the movies.

A Wilder Time

The Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria, Queens) is opening “Some Like It Wilder: The Complete Billy Wilder” with The Major and the Minor (1942), one of the least-known of Wilder’s great comedy romances, and one of the most evocative expressions of America’s pre-war mood on the eve of Pearl Harbor (even though the movie was released after we had entered the war, and ended up serving as a prophetic rebuke to the widespread isolationist feeling in America). Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley, Diana Lynn, Frankie Thomas and Norma Varden comprise the smoothly functioning cast of ultra-professionals capable of making a smooth transition between the wildest and wackiest farce and the most stirring and rousing romance. It was the first film that Wilder directed in Hollywood after a brilliant screenwriting career in the 30’s with Charles Brackett, with whom he co-wrote The Major and the Minor. (Saturday, Sept. 10, at 2 p.m.)

Double Indemnity, with Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Edward G. Robinson, Porter Hall, Jean Heather, Tom Powers and Fortunio Bonanova, was one of the earliest Hollywood film noirs. Wilder’s long-time screenwriting partner Charles Brackett bowed out of the project over concerns with the seamy plot, which has the two leads embroiled in a grisly murder for profit. Classic mystery writer Raymond Chandler replaced Brackett as Wilder’s collaborator. Robinson almost steals the show as an intuitive insurance investigator, but MacMurray made the greatest leap forward from his prior status as a very light romantic lead. (Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 10 and 11, at 4 p.m.)

The Bad Seed (Mauvaise Graine) (1934) was directed by Wilder and Alexander Esway in France while Wilder was there in flight from Nazi Germany. It would hardly be worth mentioning except for the presence in the cast of a very young Danielle Darrieux in this otherwise forgettable melodrama about car thieves on the loose in the French countryside. (Sunday, Sept. 11, 2 p.m.)

The Seven Year Itch (1955) has been wildly overrated because of the iconic scene with Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway grate, her skirt being blown in too many upward directions for her then husband, Joe DiMaggio. The only laughs in the film come from Tom Ewell’s wild, womanizing fantasies (reprising his triumphant performance in the Broadway stage version). The cast includes also Evelyn Keyes, Sonny Tufts, Victor Moore, Oskar Homolka, Carolyn Jones and Robert Strauss. Wilder collaborated on the screenplay with the playwright, George Axelrod. Although the plot was cleaned up at the insistence of the Production Code office, no one foresaw the worldwide repercussions of Marilyn on that subway grate. (Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 17 and 18, 2 p.m.)

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), the most underrated of all of Wilder’s films, is presented here in a restored, uncensored 35-millimeter print with Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr, Barbara Pepper, Doro Morande, Henry Gibson and Mel Blanc. Wilder collaborated with I.A.L. Diamond on the screenplay. Much like the film itself, Kim Novak has always been ridiculously underrated vis-à-vis Marilyn, who always struck me more as an icon in the two dimensions of photography than in the three dimensions of cinema. That is why her films are seldom revived and her photos are omnipresent. Frankly, I like Ms. Farr better than Marilyn, too. (Saturday, Sept. 17, 4 p.m.)

The Lost Weekend (1945) was much ahead of its time in its grim, realistic depiction of failed writer Don Birnam (Ray Milland) and his descent into an alcoholic, hallucinatory hell during a weekend binge. Despite winning Oscars for their adaptation of Charles Jackson’s searing novel, Brackett and Wilder were later criticized for having softened the author’s downbeat ending and completely eliminated his gay subtext. Still, the film was uniformly well-acted by the Oscar-winning Milland, Jane Wyman (in her first major role) as his supportive sweetheart, Phillip Terry as his long-suffering brother, Howard da Silva as the philosophical bartender, Doris Dowling as a memorable bar girl, Frank Faylen as a slyly sadistic male nurse in the alcoholic ward, and Mary Young as a nosy neighbor. John F. Seitz’s blistering cinematography of the El-shadowed Third Avenue was one of Hollywood’s rare on-the-scene depictions of the city at the time, and Miklós Rózsa’s theremin-punctuated musical score added its own spell. (Sunday, Sept. 18, 4 p.m.)

Some Like It Hot (1959) is still the funniest transvestite comedy ever made in Hollywood, with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis doing the honors in high heels and lipstick while fleeing a Chicago mobster (George Raft) and his gunmen after accidentally witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Along the way, Curtis seduces Marilyn Monroe (playing a songbird in an all-girl band), and Lemmon is picked up by dirty old rich man Joe E. Brown with the funniest film-ending laugh line in movie history. Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond provided the screenplay, and Pat O’Brien and Nehemiah Persoff added their talents to the straight plot. (Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 24 and 25, 4:30 p.m.)