Malibu High aka Death in Denim (1979)

An old R-rated sex movie. They didn't bother with a plot that made sense which probably improved the film.

A girl flunking high school (Jill Lansing) sleeps with her male teachers. Out of a confused sense of professional ethics, one of them (John Yates) still refuses to give her a passing grade. She wisely resorts to blackmail.

She becomes a prostitute. When she kills a sadistic client (James Devney) in self-defense, her pimp (Garth Pillsbury) is so impressed he makes her a "hit girl" and has her murder another pimp (Alex Mann).

At school, the decrepit principal (John Harmon) calls her to the office. He had looked into the sudden turnaround in her grades, noticed this only happened in classes with male teachers and that she's taken to dressing provocatively for school. He gets angry and suddenly clutches his chest and staggers to his coat to get his pills. She later kills him by inducing a heart attack with her nakedness. 

"Don't I deserve an 'A' now, sir?" she says as he's in his death throes.

Even her pimp thinks that killing a man for a high school diploma is rather extreme. He sends her to murder the wealthy hoodlum father (Clark Gordon) of the classmate (Tammy Taylor) who stole her boyfriend (Stuart Taylor).

I was in high school when this thing was made. I never once heard boys in school refer to female classmates as "broads".

In the final sequence they use the same stock music used two years later on The People's Court.

The auteur, Irvin Berwick, took an unusual route to become a director. He worked as a dialogue coach on over 40 films in the '40's, '50's and '60's. He directed eight movies from 1959 to 1979. I've now seen at least half of them. 

Free on Tubi.

Habemus Papam -- We Have a Pope (Italy, 2011) directed by Nanni Moretti

A new pope is elected, but when it comes time to present him to the world on the balcony in St Peter's Square, the poor guy has a panic attack and runs screaming. He's pope. If he refuses to go out, there's nothing they can do. They can't get rid of him even though it's obvious they made a terrible mistake electing him. Sound familiar?

They dress the Pope in regular clothes and take him to a psychologist for help. They don't tell her who he is and she has no way of knowing.

"So you've always lived alone?" she asks him. "...You say you're not married, you have no children. Any important ties of affection?"

"No."

"Has this been a problem for you?"

He says it's just the way his life has been.

The cardinals can't leave the Vatican until the problem is resolved. In the evenings, they sit alone in their rooms. One plays solitaire, another works on a jigsaw puzzles. This seems to be how they usually spend their evenings. 

The movie looks great. A lot of it was stock footage. Made for 9 million euros. They get a lot more for their money in Europe.

Vendetta of a Samurai (Japan, 1952)

Not terribly good. Script by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, Directed by Kazuo Mori. It's mostly a group of samurai hanging around waiting to ambush another samurai and his entourage and they pass a saki house, I guess it is. They hang around and have flashbacks explaining what's going on. They're after the guy who murdered a family member. They seem like regular guys who are horrified to find themselves having to kill people with swords which seems like it would make a pretty good movie. Like the son in Yojimbo who is deeply disturbed when his parents tell him he should kill Toshiro Mifune.

Available on the Criterion channel.

Bye Bye Braverman (1968)

In the description, it said it was about four Jewish intellectuals trying to find their way to the funeral of a friend who died suddenly at 41. Intellectuality didn't have much to do with it. It might have come across as slightly anti-Semitic, but the director, writer and cast were all Jewish, so what do I know. It was 1968, just twenty-three years after the bloody end of the Third Reich. The four of them were going to the funeral together in a Volkswagen. One initially refuses to ride in a German car. Not just a German car, but one Hitler ordered into existence. 

I wouldn't want to ride in one, either. They were deathtraps. I thought I would feel more claustrophobic watching adults riding in the back seat of one of those things, but it wasn't so bad. They may have been trying to counteract that when Levine (Sorell Booke), proud new owner of the Beetle, enthuses about how roomy the backseat is. I went through a long period where the few friends I had all drove two door subcompacts. I'll never crawl into one of those things again. 

The movie starts with several scenes, each with just two people talking, and it seemed promising, but things go downhill with conversations about pop culture. Sorell Booke is going to teach a course on comic strips and mentions articles he's written about movies. George Segal and Jack Warden talk about Hitchcock movies for some reason. 

They drive around trying to find the funeral with only vague directions from Braverman's widow (a young Jessica Walter). 

I was disappointed. Directed by Sidney Lumet, written by Herb Sargent just seven years before Saturday Night Live. With Joseph Wiseman, Phyllis Newman, Alan King and Godfrey Cambridge as a Black Jewish cabbie.  

Available on The Criterion Channel.

Withnail & I (UK 1987)

In Withnail & I, two young out-of-work actors (Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann) are freezing in their apartment. They go out to the country for a few days and freeze in a cottage owned by Withnail's uncle. They go there in a battered Jaguar Mk 2. Even if you don't care what your car looks like, make sure it has fully functioning windshield wipers and headlights.

Set in 1969. Based on an unpublished novel by writer-director Bruce Robinson based loosely on his life in London at that time. Withnail's uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths) coming on to Paul McGann was based on Robinson's experience acting in the movie Romeo & Juliet when Zeffirelli took an inordinate interest in him. 

Usually, I look at movies like this and think the characters' lives wouldn't be so bad if they would just cheer up, but their lives looked awful, freezing in an apartment, McGann being friends with an alcoholic and living with him as a roommate.  

To paraphrase the late Alexander Cockburn, friendship is often a question of how much you're willing to put up with and for how long.

Not quite the same genre as Midnight Cowboy or Of Mice and Men where you have two impoverished people who have no one but each other, but neither one is of any help to anyone. These two have theatrical agents and one has a wealthy uncle he turns to.

I guess I should mention that it's a comedy. 

Available on The Criterion and on Max.

Jay North, RIP

Jay North has died of colon cancer at age 73. He played Dennis the Menace on TV from 1959 to 1963. He was abused by his horrible aunt who for some reason acted as his guardian on the set. Some years ago, he gave some very angry interviews about his time as a child actor. Made me feel guilty for having ever watched it.

There was an episode of Dennis the Menace I remember seeing, but now I wonder if I really did. My memory was that Dennis had befriended a kid who had recently moved to the United States, perhaps from Latin America. You know how Dennis would say "Jeepers" all the time? The kid asks him in his foreign accent, What is this 'jeepers'? Dennis says, well, it means Jiminy Crickets, or Gee Whiz, and I think he named a couple of other such expressions. And it dawned on me that each one he named was a euphemism for "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ". It seems like the writers must have known this. I had never thought about it before, but they exposed Dennis's constant, barely disguised blasphemy. 

I had seen him on Dennis the Menace, watched Maya on Canadian TV in the middle of the night, saw Zebra in the Kitchen on TV one afternoon and his R-rated exploitation film, The Teacher. I even saw him on The Dating Game in the episode's original broadcast premiere. 

And there was the time, on the Fourth of July---my grandmother was living with us and couldn't go to see fireworks so we set off fireworks in the driveway. I bought some discarded educational films on eBay and showed a patriotic film aimed at kindergarteners or first graders. There were shots of American flags in various public places while Jay North and maybe Margaret O'Brien recited the Pledge of Allegiance several times. I used an extension cord and projected the film on the side of the house to set start things off. 

Pietro Germi's Divorce Italian Style (1961)

Long ago, I watched the Italian movie Alfredo, Alfredo (1972) starring Italian-dubbed Dustin Hoffman in the title role. He impulsively marries his girlfriend but should have put more thought into it because it was the late '60s and divorce was illegal in Italy. They could legally separate, but he could go to prison if he got caught with another woman.

Divorce Italian Style was made eleven years earlier by the same director. Marcello Mastroianni as a down and out Sicilian nobleman who wants to marry his teenage cousin, which is weird enough in itself. He's already married. There's no divorce in Italy but, at least in Sicily, if a husband finds his wife with another man, he can murder her and receive a light sentence for committing an honor killing. All he has to do is manipulate his wife (Daniela Rocca) into sleeping with another man and he's home free. But would you want to be that guy's second wife?

I didn't find it hilarious. We see him fantasizing about his wife being boiled to death, fired off in a rocket, drowning in quicksand or being gunned down by the Mafia. Sicily looked beautiful but I wouldn't want to live there.

Available on The Criterion Channel.

There are used copies of Alfredo, Alfredo available on dvd.

A Knife for the Ladies (1974)

This is going to be short. A not-very-good western crossed with a not-very-good slasher movie. In fairness, it was made before slasher movies really took off in the '80s so it didn't have anything to model itself on. A private detective arrives in a small western town to investigate a series of knife murders of prostitutes. A 10-year-old played by the director's son is a witness but extrapolates on what he saw and gets an innocent man lynched. 

I assumed the wealthy town matriarch was using cocaine or heroin, both perfectly legal at the time, but, whatever her problem was, she was buying large amounts of a drug that was also used to treat syphilis. I won't give it away here, but there were some questions about her late son.

It wasn't very good. They should have let Jack Elam clean himself up. He was playing the sheriff. Let him have some dignity. Did he have to be an alcoholic?

There wasn't that much blood and no gore, really, which is okay with me. It was rated R in its day.

Picks up a bit at the very end.

Free on Tubi.

I don't know what's wrong with me. There was a time when I only watched arthouse movies. 

Walter Hill's Dead for a Dollar (2022)

I started watching the movie thinking about how idiotic westerns were and wondering how they were ever popular. But it got better as I started to relax and accept it. I turned it on because I had been watching old episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine and Hamish Linklater was in both. In Dead for a Dollar, he plays a very bad man who hires a bounty hunter to find his (white) wife who had run away with a Black Army deserter. 

There's a dedication to Budd Boetticher in the closing credits. He made a series of westerns in the 1950s and this movie had some elements of the formula his movies followed. You had a woman who had some monetary value, there being a reward out for her and her being the subject of a ransom demand. 

Hamish Linklater was great.

Free on Tubi.