The Crazy Ray (1925)

Director: René Clair
Writer: René Clair
Stars: Henri Rollan, Albert Préjean, Madeleine Rodrigue, Louis Pré Fils, Antoine Stacquet, Marcel Vallée, Charles Martinelli and Myla Seller

Index: That's a Wrap!

Less than a week after Josef von Sternberg’s debut with The Salvation Hunters, another film legend of the future, René Clair, debuted with this short and unusual science fiction feature, although I believe his second picture, Entr’acte, was released first, in 1924.

It’s usually titled The Crazy Ray in English, a much edited version released as At 3:25, but its original French title translates to Paris Asleep, which carries a lot more depth. As French film tends to do, it asks many questions, but it isn’t particularly interested in answering any. It’s a happy and very cinematic curiosity.

Initially it’s a curiosity because of its dream of a location. Albert wakes up one morning to look out over Paris from a singular point: he’s at the very top of the Eiffel Tower, where he’s presumably working as a night watchman. The views of 1924 Paris from this height are magic andshots of the tower are even better still. The one of him walking down the spiral staircase at its heart while the camera slowly descends alongside him is a thing of beauty indeed.

The Shooting (1966)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Adrien Joyce
Stars: Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins, Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates

Index: The First Thirty.

Before this project, I hadn’t seen any of the four movies Jack Nicholson made for and often with Monte Hellman, given that he wasn’t just an actor; he wrote Flight to Fury and Ride in the Whirlwind and he co-produced Back Door to Hell and The Shooting. After seeing the first couple, shot back to back in the Philippines, I can’t say I had much hope for the second couple, shot back to back in the Utah desert.

How wrong I was! These two westerns turn out not only to be good movies but important ones too. They’re arguably the very first acid westerns, which weren’t necessarily all about drugs but about flipping a genre on its head. It has been said that westerns are a path towards freedom and justice, while acid westerns are a path towards death.

It was first used as a term by Pauline Kael in a review of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1971, but Jonathan Rosenbaum later applied it to these earlier films. I’ve long appreciated the alternative list he put together to counter the AFI’s annoyingly safe 100 Years... 100 Movies list, including films that dared to be different and sparked change in film. The Shooting is on that list, because that’s precisely what it did.

A Raisin in the Sun (1961)

Director: Daniel Petrie
Writer: Lorraine Hansberry, from her play
Stars: Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee

Index: 2025 Centennials.

It’s Black History Month, whether Trump’s administration is willing to acknowledge it or not. It therefore seems appropriate to review this film now, even though I’m actually doing so for a white actor, in fact the one and only white actor in the entire movie. He’s literally the token white guy.

He’s John Fiedler, who would have been one hundred years old today. While he only has a supporting role, it’s a notable one. The entire closing monologue, a tearjerking showcase of a monologue, is delivered to him and he walks out utterly silenced. Well, for now, at least.

A Raisin in the Sun is a powerful film indeed and part of its success is that it was based on a powerful play, the first Broadway production by a black woman, Lorraine Hansberry, as well as the first by a black director, Lloyd Richards. It didn’t win a Tony from its four nominations but it was the New York Drama Critics’ Circle’s best play of 1959. It ran for 530 performances.

Crucially, almost the entire cast transferred over to this feature version, as did the writer, so they were all well and truly invested in the roles they played and the relationships their characters had with each other.

Back Door to Hell (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writers: Richard A. Guttman and John Hackett, based on a story by Richard A. Guttman
Stars: Jimmie Rodgers, Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Annabelle Huggins and Conrad Maga

Index: The First Thirty.

This is the second of four pictures in a row that Nicholson made with Monte Hellman and there’s some powerful irony in play this time.

Flight to Fury was his tenth picture and none of the ones before it had established him as an actor, so he began to diversify his roles off the screen. He wrote that one, he co-produced this one and he did both for Ride in the Whirlwind, two films on. He got the opportunity because producer Robert Lippert had been impressed by his writing for Thunder Island a year earlier.

After all, if he wasn’t going to make it as an actor, then maybe he’d make it as a writer or a producer. Those jobs paid well. Given all that, it’s acutely ironic that this be his first film in which he is without a doubt the best actor.

The Salvation Hunters (1925)

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Writer: Josef von Sternberg
Stars: George K. Arthur, Georgia Hale and Bruce Guerin

Index: That's a Wrap!

After precisely no notable new feature films in January 1925, February started off with one from a complete unknown of a director, Josef von Sternberg.

He was Austro-Hungarian, born in Vienna in 1894 and he would become a major filmmaker, often credited for inventing the gangster film, with 1927’s Underworld, and lauded for a string of important films starring Marlene Dietrich, not least The Blue Angel, Morocco and Shanghai Express, the latter two landing him Oscar nods. Talking of Oscar, he’d also direct Emil Jannings in what would become the very first Academy Award-winning performance for Best Actor, in 1928’s The Last Command.

Needless to say, this picture isn’t up to those standards, but it’s an interesting one, notably artistic and feeling much more European than American, though it was made in Hollywood.

It’s a depressing picture but it’s meant to be. The Great Depression didn’t happen until 1929 but times were tough in the twenties and this film makes them seem even tougher. Tellingly, everything is kept vague, none of the locations or characters given names, and stripping their identities helps us to realise not only that they could be anyone anywhere but also that they simply don’t matter to the world at large.

Flight to Fury (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Jack Nicholson, based on a story by Fred Roos and Monte Hellman
Stars: Dewey Mann, Fay Spain and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

This is not a good movie. Let me get that out there right away. However, it’s an interesting movie, the first of four that Jack Nicholson did for director Monte Hellman and the first of a pair shot back to back in the Philippines. It’s also a thoroughly enjoyable movie with an odd charm to it. It’s much more enjoyable than it really has any right to be.

That’s because it’s a cheap pulp flick with an over-complex story built on no background at all and which is reliant on its characters to do a whole lot of things that aren’t believable. It ought to suck royally. However, it grabbed me early and it kept me all the way, even while I acknowledged a host of problems as it went.

For a start, I have no idea where we are and I’m not sure anyone ever tells us. All we know is that it’s a city and a bunch of people in a car watch another man arrive at the docks by taxi, surreptitiously take something from a man on a boat and then leave in another taxi.

They’re interesting characters, at least. The three in the car include a young driver, exotic muscle and a beautiful woman. I recognise the muscle as Vic Diaz, a memorable villain in a lot of memorable Filipino movies. He channels his best Peter Lorre for this one.

Ensign Pulver (1964)

Director: Joshua Logan
Writers: Joshua Logan and Peter S. Feibleman, based on the novel Mister Roberts by Thomas Heggen
Stars: Robert Walker, Burl Ives, Walter Matthau, Tommy Sands, Millie Perkins and Kay Medford

Index: The First Thirty.

Ensign Pulver is a sequel to an adaptation of a play that was an adaptation of a novel, and it’s something of a scar on that franchise.

It began as Mister Roberts, a novel by Thomas Heggen, published in 1946 and based on what he went through in the Pacific theatre during World War II. It was soon adapted to the stage by Heggen and Joshua Logan, the play opening on Broadway in 1948 and winning five Tonys. It took seven years to bring it to the big screen but Henry Fonda came with it and delivered a seriously good performance, even if it was Jack Lemmon who won the Oscar.

Fast forward nine more years and the play’s director helmed this sequel, with precisely no returning actors and no Mister Roberts, hence the new name and focus. The former turns out to be a small problem but the latter a big one.

Slap Shot (1977)

Director: George Roy Hill
Writer: Nancy Dowd
Stars: Paul Newman, Strother Martin and Michael Ontkean

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’ve seen a lot of Paul Newman movies, from early films like Somebody Up There Likes Me to late ones like Road to Perdition. Somehow I not only hadn’t seen Slap Shot but hadn’t realised it was a comedy.

I knew that it was an ice hockey movie from the seventies and that it was violent, famously so, but I was under the impression that it was a more realistic equivalent to Rollerball. Well, it isn’t. It’s violent, for sure, but I found it to be a drama, first and foremost, that often took time to be funny. I liked it more than I expected to.

The humour is almost cartoonish, so much so that it’s not very realistic, but the funniest thing of all is that almost everything that feels unrealistic actually happened in real life. This is no documentary, but it seems to be true to the spirit of what was happening in the minor hockey leagues during the early seventies and, in many instances, the detail as well.

The Terror (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writers: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill
Stars: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and Sandra Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

The Terror is one of those movies that’s a lot more interesting than it is good. Then again, it really had no business being any level of good, given that it was shot on the sets of The Raven during the two days Roger Corman had before they would be torn down, the same two days he had the continued use of Boris Karloff.

He didn’t have a script, just a vague idea, so had Karloff and a few other actors do generic things like walking down hallways or through doors and, of course, talking to each other, as people do, so a writer could conjure up a story around it later. The idea was coherent enough, at least, to have Karloff spend a few hours in a tank of cold water for the finalé.

That writer was Leo Gordon, a co-writer of The Cry Baby Killer. Once his script was written, Corman brought in another director to shoot everything else, because he was union and he didn’t have the budget to shoot extra footage according to union rules.

More footage was needed but that director had taken another job, so a friend of his shot some scenes. Then a fourth director took care of some exterior shots, a fifth supposedly took care of the rest but a sixth shot the last day. A two day shoot therefore ended up taking nine months and the results are about as coherent as you can imagine, with creative input from all of those different people.

The Raven (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Richard Matheson, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe
Stars: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff

Index: The First Thirty.

I’ve always been in two minds about Roger Corman’s fifth Edgar Allan Poe adaptation and a fresh viewing doesn’t change that.

On one hand, it’s a flimsy movie indeed, the source material—Poe’s famous poem—adapted so loosely that it would be unrecognisable but for Vincent Price’s memorable voice reading a part of it at the very beginning. There are very few characters and, twists aside, they’re all of little substance. What’s more, unlike its four predecessors, it’s played primarily for laughs and with inconsistent effect.

On the other hand, it’s a ridiculous amount of fun. Price camps it up unashamedly. Peter Lorre steals every scene he can from him with ruthless intent. And Boris Karloff adds some weight to proceedings by playing it straight, a stellar decision regardless of how outrageous his character actually is. Hazel Court and Jack Nicholson are really just icing on the cake. We could focus only on the sorcery duel with 1963 special effects and this would be worthy.

As a result, the critic in my head continued to find fault, but the fan next to him ignored it all and revelled in its insanity. How it will play to you in 2025 will depend on which voice you want to listen to.