I watched 6 movies last week:
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- The Importance of Being Earnest is exceptionally charming.
- If Five Minutes to Live is worth watching—and that’s a sizeable if—that’s really only because of Johnny Cash’s performance, and that’s unfortunately not because his performance is very good. As an article on TCM describes it, the movie “demonstrates why Cash didn’t seriously pursue an acting career but, at the same time, his see-saw performance which goes from flat line readings to crazed, amphetamine-like behavior is fascinating to behold.” Cash loosened (and likely sobered) up as an actor going forward, but this, his first theatrical film role, was also only one of two, which is maybe a little bit of a shame. The movie itself isn’t any great shakes; it has some potential but too often calls to mind other movies that treated similar plot devices much better. (The film that immediately came to mind for me, oddly enough, was Cash on Demand, starring Peter Cushing and released the very same year.) Five Minutes to Live has been described, I think unconvincingly, as a cult classic, but while the oddity of Cash’s performance—alongside early screen appearances of Vic Tayback and little Ronnie Howard—it’s hardly worth investing in that cult.
- Bring Them Down doesn’t quite hold together in the end. While there is a lot to like about the film—from the performances, to the tension, to the nonlinear narrative that slowly reveals some of the reasons for that tension—too much is left unclear and unresolved.
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- There’s a lot that doesn’t quite add up in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, not least of all its title, but Coburn’s con man is charming and clever, and the film comes awfully close to being a forgotten gem.
- Top Secret! is very silly. There isn’t a lot more to say about the movie other than that. Personally, it won’t top my fondness for the other ZAZ spoof movies like The Naked Gun or Airplane, but it is a lot of fun.
- There’s a lot that doesn’t work about The Savage Innocents, from a modern point of view, but most of it comes down to that title—to the likely well-intentioned, but nonetheless dehumanizing, idea of the noble savage. It’s fed by the film being intermittently framed as a nature documentary, by the casting of non-Inuit actors, by the decision to call them Eskimos. And yet there are things that work, including Quinn’s performance, and those good intentions—the filmmakers’ attempt to actually subvert stereotypes—do shine through.
I also enjoyed a rewatch of The Vast of Night.