4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
122 years ago, on this date, the great French director Robert Bresson was born in Bromont-Lamothe, France. In honor of Robert Bresson’s life and cinematic legacy, it is time for….
4 Shots From 4 Robert Bresson Films
Pickpocket (1959, dir by Robert Bresson, DP: Leonce-Henri Burel)
Mouchette (1967, dir by Robert Bresson, DP: Ghislain Cloquet)
Lancelot Du Lac (1974, dir by Robert Bresson, DP: Pasqualino De Santis)
L’Argent (1983, dir by Robert Bresson, DP: Pasqualino De Santis)
Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1986’s The George McKenna Story! It can be viewed on Netflix, under the title Hard Lessons!
George Washington High School is a school that has defeated many well-meaning principals. The hallways are full of drugs and gang members. A good deal of the student body never shows up for class. Fights are frequent. The police are a common sight. The majority of the teachers are men like Ben Proctor (Richard Masur), burned-out and content to hide in the teacher’s lounge.
New Orleans-raised George McKenna (Denzel Washington) is the latest principal and, from the minute that he shows up at the school, he seems a bit more confident than the other principals that the school has had. He barely flinches when a raw egg hits his suit. When he hears a fight occurring, he doesn’t hesitate to head down the hall to investigate. McKenna is determined to make George Washington High into a worthwhile institution and that means inspiring both the students and the teachers.
When it comes to films about dedicated educators trying to reform a troubled school, most films tend to take one of two approaches. One approach, the well-intentioned but not always realistic liberal approach, features the teacher or the principal who demands respect but who also treats the good students and teachers with equal respect and who turns around the school through the power of benevolence. The other approach is the one where the principal or teacher grows frustrated and turns into an armed vigilante who forces the students to shut up and learn. Think of The Principal or The Substitute or Class of 1984. The first approach is the one that most teachers claim that they try to follow but I imagine that, for most of them, there’s an element in wish-fulfillment to be found in watching the second approach. In the real world, of course, neither approach is as automatically successful as it is in the movies.
The George McKenna Story was made for television and it’s based on a true story so, not surprisingly, it follows the first approach. Denzel Washington plays McKenna as someone who could probably handle himself in a fight if he ever got into one but, for the most part, the film portrays McKenna as succeeding by treating his students with more empathy and respect that they’ve gotten from anyone else in their lives. Though cranky old Ben Proctor thinks that McKenna’s methods are foolish and that he’s asking the teachers to do too much, McKenna starts to turn the school around. One student, whose father was threatening to make him drop out, ends up getting nearly straight A’s and reciting Shakespeare. Unfortunately, not everyone can be rescued. One student is arrested for murder and taken away by the cops but McKenna is still willing to be there for that student. McKenna doesn’t give up on his students and, unlike that music teacher in The Class of 1984, he doesn’t allow them to fall through a skylight either.
The George McKenna Story is a predictable film. It’s easy to guess which student will be saved by McKenna’s approach and which student will end up getting stabbed in a gang fight and which student will end up in prison. That said, the film definitely benefits from Denzel Washington in the lead role. Washington exudes confidence from the minute that he appears on screen and you’re left with little doubt that if anyone could reform a school simply through good intentions, it would definitely be Denzel Washington.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, Deanna Dawn will be hosting 1983’s The Being!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime. I’ll probably be there and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
Today’s blast from the past comes to use from 1982.
In A Very Delicate Matter, teenager Kristin Sorenson (Lori-Nan Engler) spends the summer working at a camp. After her nominal boyfriend, Greg Pscharapolus (Zach Galligan), fails to call her even once, Kirstin ends up dating her superhot co-worker, Larry (future daytime drama star Grant Aleksander, making his television debut). Once summer ends, Kristin returns home where Greg apologizes for not calling her. Kristin takes Greg back and decides not to tell him about Larry. But then Kristin gets a call from Larry. Larry tells her that she might want to go by the free clinic and get some penicillin because Larry’s got gonorrhea and there’s a good chance to Kristin now has it as well. And, since Kristin and Greg previously spent a day making up, Greg might have it too!
The plot description probably makes A Very Delicate Matter sound considerably campier than it is. For the most part, this is a sensitive and nonjudgmental film, one in which no one is portrayed as being a villain. (As one doctor points out, even Larry showed more courage than most by immediately calling Kristin and letting her know what was going on.) While the two leads both give good performances (with Galligan just two years away from starring in Gremlins), the film is stolen by Marta Kober and John Didrichsen, who play the best friends of Kristen and Greg and who have a nice flirtatious chemistry with each other. Just because your friend has a social disease, the film seems to be saying, don’t give up on love. Marta Kober is probably best known for Friday the 13th Part 2, which featured its own warning about having unprotected sex at a summer camp.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on Twitter and Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, at 10 pm et, #FridayNightFlix has got 1986’s The Best of Times! When Robin Williams teams up with Kurt Russell, it’s time for football action!
If you want to join us this Friday, just hop onto twitter, start the movie at 10 pm et, and use the #FridayNightFlix hashtag! It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
The Best Of Times is available on Prime and Tubi! See you there!
Here’s the trailer for William Friedkin’s final film, an adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial Trailer. The film will be premiering on Showtime in October and I look forward to seeing Kiefer Sutherland in the role of Lt. Commander Queeg.
First released in 1985, Prizzi’s Honor tells the story of Charley Partanna (Jack Nicholson), a blue collar guy who lives in Brooklyn and who is a hard-working hit man for the Prizzi crime family. Charley is the son of Angelo (John Randolph), who is the right-hand man to the family’s elderly but still ruthless Don (William Hickey). In the past, Charley came close to marrying the Don’s daughter, Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston), and he is almost as much a member of the family as the Don’s two sons, Eduardo (Robert Loggia) and Dominic (Lee Richardson).
While attending a family wedding, Charley meets and is immediately infatuated with a woman named Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner). Later, when Charley is sent to California to kill a man who robbed one of the family’s Vegas casinos, he is shocked to discover that the man is Irene’s husband. Irene swears that she didn’t have anything to do with the casino theft and, after a whirlwind courtship, Charley and Irene get married in Mexico. What Charley doesn’t know (but eventually discovers) is that Irene is herself a professional killer. While Charley and Irene try to balance work and love, Maerose conspires to turn the family against Irene and win Charley back.
Directed by the legendary John Huston, Prizzi’s Honor is pitch black comedy about two hard-working people who kill for a living. (The film’s big set piece is an extended sequence in which Charley and Irene’s attempt to pull a job together goes wrong in every way and they end up arguing about their relationship while dragging dead bodies from one room to another.) Though Prizzi’s Honor was released long before the series premiered on HBO, the film feels almost like a companion piece to The Sopranos, full of mobsters who are not as clever as they think they are and who struggle to uphold the old ways in an increasingly complicated world. Particularly when compared to the gangster who populate a film like TheGodfather, the Prizzis are defined by their pettiness. If Don Corleone epitomized wisdom and honor, Don Prizzi epitomizes someone who holds onto power solely for power’s sake.
Prizzi’s Honor is one of those films that probably seemed a bit more revolutionary when it was first released than it does today. At this point, we’ve seen so many films about hired killers who have quirky conversations while carrying out their work that the mix of violence and dark humor can feel almost like a cliché. As well, there are certain parts of the film, like the opening wedding sequence, that feel as if they go on for just a few minutes too long, as if John Huston himself was not always comfortable with the balance between the dark drama and the comedy of mob manners. That said, Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner (who gives a performance worthy of the great femme fatales of film noir), Anjelica Huston, John Randolph, and especially William Hickey all give strong enough performances to hold the audience’s attention and the film’s finale cuts to the point in such a way that it leaves you reconsidering everything that you’ve previously seen. Prizzi’s Honor has its flaws but Nicholson and Turner have such chemistry that the film’s ending sticks with you.
Prizzi’s Honor was nominated for 8 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor for William Hickey. (Oddly, Kathleen Turner was not nominated for playing Irene.) In the end, it only won one Oscar that year, for supporting actress Anjelica Huston. The Oscars that year were dominated by a far more convention love story, Out of Africa.
To be honest, I’m not really sure that we need a film version of the prequel to The Hunger Games. The first two HungerGames adaptations were excellent but the two-part conclusion was a bit of a bore. The only thing that really set The Hunger Games apart from any of the other YA dystopian adaptations out there was the presence of actors like Jennifer Lawrence, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman and none of them are going to be in the prequel.
That said, everything gets a prequel nowadays and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is due to be released in November of this year. So, for all of you who were like, “I wish I knew more about President Snow’s youth,” have at it!
Through the Shattered Lens 