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The Hospital (1971): Paddy Chayefsky's biting satire of the bureaucracy and incompetence of inpatient care, some of which rings true 40 years later...sadly. George C. Scott plays a suicidal Chief of Medicine, who simultaneous confronts serial murders in his big-city medical center. A zone of confusion, the hospital is also beset by some serious 60s-type social anarchy from community activists. Chayefsky's story goes off the rails during a prolonged encounter between Scott's character and the daughter of a comatose inpatient (played by Diana Rigg and Barnard Hughes, respectively). But the film still amuses owing to the fact that several actors—including Nancy Marchand, Frances Sternhagen, and an uncredited Stockard Channing—were cast in bit roles.

A buried joke:
Patient: At 9:15 this morning I rang for my nurse.
Doctor: You rang for your nurse?
Patient: To ensure one full hour of uninterrupted privacy.

Small Town Murder Songs (2010): A heavy and heavily mustachioed Peter Stormare (the kidnapping guy from Fargo) plays Walter, a born-again cop who investigates the local murder of a stripper in his rural Canadian town. However, director Ed Gass-Donnelly places less emphasis on the murder than on the ideas of salvation, redemption, and forgiveness, particularly as they are informed by the local Mennonite community. Most notably Gass-Donnelly cuts up his too-short film with jarring sectional edits that feature bold, all-caps biblical admonitions and disturbing, percussion-heavy, group chants by the strangely named Canadian band Bruce Peninsula. With a plump Martha Plimpton and a trailer-trashy Jill Hennessey as Walter's current and former girlfriends, respectively.

The Guard (2011): John Michael McDonough, brother of Martin, directs the outstanding Irish character actor Brendan Gleeson in a wry, self-aware homage to the provincial Irish cop, or Garda. Gleeson is a highly unconventional officer who partners up with a highly orthodox FBI agent (Don Cheadle) to collar a group of major-league drug traffickers. Running jokes abound through McDonough's darkly humorous screenplay, including arguments about the street value of the trafficked drugs (half a billion dollars is $500,000,000) and local disappointment that the visiting G-Man is not from the Behavioral Science Unit.

The Mill and the Cross (2011): Slowly, methodically—but sometimes violently—Bruegel's famous painting The Way to Calvary comes to life through the varying perspectives of its host of characters, most of whom are Flemish peasants going about their mundane lives in the midst of Christ's march to his crucifixion. Polish director Lech Majewski toys mightily with varying perspectives here and exploits the play among them: from the tension between two and three dimensions to a deeper penetration of the painting that imagines what lies behind the depicted settings. Rutger Hauer, as Bruegel, and Michael York, as his patron, are an interactive unit within the painting and act as an essential reference for the work's composition and its use of allegory. While The Mill and the Cross (like so much art, I guess) approaches the abyss of pretension, its stunning craftsmanship pulls it from the brink.

Still of Rutger Hauer as Bruegel from The Mill and the Cross.

Pushover (1954): Back to noir. As a cop after a bank robber, Fred MacMurray romances the criminal's girlfriend (Kim Novak) to get a lead on the stolen money; but then he falls hard for real. Essential elements of Pushover, specifically the police surveillance of Novak, echo the entire setup of Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)—which was released almost simultaneously. And of course, Novak's turn as a potentially duplicitous girlfriend anticipates her troubling role in Vertigo (1958). With E. G. Marshall, Philip Carey, and Dorothy Malone.

Murder! (1930): Despite its year of production, this very early effort from Hitchcock (his third talkie!) displays the important signature elements of the director's enduring stories of suspense and murder, including deliberate camera placement, liberal scenes of comedic relief, and an exploration of abnormal psychology. Particularly notable here is the blurred distinction between events on and off the theatrical stage.

While serving on a jury, a famous English thespian, "Sir John," reluctantly votes to convict a pretty young actress of murder. But nagging doubts about the actress's guilt prompt a reexamination of the crime, and Sir John uses his dramatic knowledge in an attempt to catch the real killer.

Poster for Murder! from Wikipedia and reproduced under fair use law.

Pimpernel Smith (1941) is Leslie Howard's updated riff on his previous leading role in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), the classic espionage adventure of rescue set during the French Revolution. In the former movie, released just 2 years before Howard's shocking and untimely death at the hands of the Luftwaffe, Howard is Horatio Smith, an absent-minded archeology professor at Cambridge who recruits his students for a summer trip to Socialist Germany. From the very beginning of the film, it is utterly transparent that the professor leads a double life as a smuggler of human cargo out of the terrorist state, but Howard consistently sustains the film with his nonpareil blitheness and comical faux obliviousness in the company of Nazi officers. In the end, the film is nothing but shameless Allied propaganda,* complete with a heavy-handed, proselytizing monologue; but by God, Howard's unapologetic delivery at this point is truly energizing.

* Which is possibly why the Luftwaffe targeted Howard for death in 1943.

Poster for Pimpernel Smith, released as Mister V in the United States, from Wikipedia and reproduced under fair use law.

Watching The Final Countdown (1980), starring the recently departed James Farentino, is more of an exercise in "How could I make this movie really good?" as opposed to recognizing its few merits—one of which is the evergreen premise of rewriting history through time travel. This is a solid, if not always entertaining, sci-fi theme, which is unfortunately directed and scored here in cringe-inducing, ham-handed fashion. And let's not even talk about the special effects, which are laughably rudimentary, even for 1980. One wonders what Spielberg and John Williams would have done with the not-so-terrible screenplay in their prime (and if Spielberg had actually passed on the project at some point during its development).

The setup: For some completely inexplicable reason, the USS Nimitz, the world's largest aircraft carrier, is transported through a freakish Pacific wormhole on December 7, 1980, to—you guessed it—39 years earlier.* The conflict (shouldered largely by the ship's commander, who is played solidly by an otherwise too-old Kirk Douglas): To prevent the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor or to not fuck with the Day of Infamy and the world's destiny generally. Military men being military men, most are completely up for a technology-fueled ass-kicking of Japan's propeller air fleet; while an on-board civilian from the Defense Department (Martin Sheen**) warns of the so-called butterfly effect and other pesky philosophical stuff. The ship's commander must also have the safety of his crew in mind, especially given the haphazard nature of the arbitrary wormhole. What if the warship accidentally travels back to 1980 while its F-16 pilots are in flight, chasing the Japanese?

The movie also stars a sputtering (no matter what decade he's in) Charles Durning and a forever-young Katharine Ross—whose character (like us) worries most about what happens to her gorgeous collie.

* When "Nimitz"--ha, ha--was only the name of the guy who commanded the US Pacific fleet.
** This must have been a refreshing walk in the park after Apocalypse Now.

"Life on Mars" (2006-2007): A modern-day Manchester policeman (played by the terrific John Simm) is transported back to politically incorrect 1973 after being struck by a car. Is he mad, in a coma, or back in time? The nifty opener to the equally nifty British TV series*—which was really just an excuse to produce a 70s cop show—asks this question repeatedly, and we're given kind of an answer in the show's remarkably satisfactory finale (at the end of the second season).

Because of the show's popularity and critical acclaim in the UK, it was predictably bought for an American treatment, and the results were almost as predictably disappointing. A glimpse of both shows indicates that a successful trans-Atlantic adaptation is heavily dependent on casting, which may be about 99.44% of the formula in my estimation. (The lead for the NYC version was, somewhat ironically, an Irish actor, and his charisma as an American detective was sorely lacking, also somewhat astonishingly.) There's also something a bit disingenuous about a 70s show in the US drawing on inspiration from a Bowie song (ie, "Life on Mars"). Glam rock was and always will be the purview of England, while urban soul would be the period equivalent for Manhattan, I would think. Eh, the whole US rendition just didn't work, in definite contradistinction to the gritty, groovy, and frequently comical British production.

* Two seasons, 8 episodes each.

The October Man (1947): Seriously brain injured in a bus crash (which takes the life of his young companion), a recovered, but terribly guilt-ridden, man (John Mills) is suspected of murdering a needy female acquaintance. Given his mental handicap, he, himself, is not sure of his innocence and spends the remainder of the film vacillating between suicide and a desperate search for the real murderer. A very acute eye will catch a young and wholly charming Juliet Mills, the real-life daughter of the collectively beloved leading man.