Mississippi Burning

There's a real ugliness in people, a festering sickness in one's soul that emerges time and time again. And it's shown its presence throughout history, its effects lingering for decades after. Worse still, it's something that never fully disappears.

Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning isn't just simmering in hatred -- it's full-on marinated in it. (It's telling that non-American directors are more than willing to expose America's hideousness.) It may have been a few decades after the film's setting but as the coming years would also show, very little had changed.

Frustratingly, for a film about the civil rights movement, Mississippi Burning doesn't put a lot of focus on the Black characters. Preferring to spotlight the agents played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe, the film only gives the Black characters any attention when they're about to be subjected to violence, as they're being brutalized, or as they're licking their figurative and literal wounds -- in other words, they only exist to suffer. Were this made today, that would absolutely not happen.

That aspect aside, Mississippi Burning is captured stunningly by cinematographer Peter Biziou. You can practically feel the Mississippi heat through the screen, the smell of the swamps. It's little wonder that Biziou was a regular for Parker (and that his work got him an Oscar).

Mississippi Burning is very much not an easy watch. (Then again, what else would one expect from the man responsible for Midnight Express the previous decade?) To say things have changed since both the setting's time period and the film's release would be a colossal lie. If anything, we're repeating what had happened ad nauseam.

My Rating: ****

Fun with Dick and Jane

The opening credits of Ted Kotcheff's Fun with Dick and Jane shows how the titular couple grew up, met, and settled into the American Dream. A comfy life, for sure...and then Dick (George Segal) gets sacked from his job. Soon, he and Jane (Jane Fonda) struggle to both make ends meet and keep up appearances.

But desperate times call for very desperate measures. Dick comes up with committing robberies to keep food on the table. Jane gets involved as well, and things seem to be going well. But how long can they keep this up?

Made during a time where everyone was feeling financial strain, Fun with Dick and Jane probably seemed absurd to certain audiences upon its release. In hindsight, however, it paints a far more cynical picture. Once one reaches a particular standing in society, others feel schadenfreude at seeing them fall from grace.

Speaking of, Fun with Dick and Jane portrays its setting as a dog-eat-dog world. You have to stoop to levels you'd normally never stoop to. Your self-respect takes a backseat as you try to survive. And after a while, you don't recognize your own reflection.

Fun with Dick and Jane still holds up after nearly a half a century. Aside from a few jokes that aged like milk in the August afternoon sun, you could remake this beat for beat. Just goes to show that the more things change, the more things stay the same.

My Rating: ****

The In-Laws

Comedy is a hard thing to get right. What's funny in one decade could be seen as offensive in the next decade. It's all a matter of making sure you hit your mark without any mistakes along the way.

So you could imagine the undertaking Andrew Bergman went through in writing Arthur Hiller's The In-Laws. A few years after the success of Blazing Saddles (he co-wrote it), he was tasked with writing the script for a picture that was to star Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. (It was initially going to be a sequel to Freebie and the Bean, which had also starred Arkin.) Knowing the potential that could be mined from the two actors, Bergman took on the opportunity.

While a little slow in its build-up, The In-Laws goes out on all pistons running. Falk plays with his Columbo persona, seemingly not all there but very much is. Arkin, meanwhile, plays the straight man to Falk beautifully. It's a shame the two didn't work together more after this.

Now Hiller isn't the kind of director you'd associate with this type of picture, having made Love Story earlier in the decade. But bear in mind that just three years earlier, Hiller made Silver Streak, which starred Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. He may not have done comedy often during his career but Hiller knew how to get the beats down.

The In-Laws may be one of the more underappreciated comedies of the last half century. It takes someone who really knows what they're doing to get something like this right. Thankfully, it's directed by, written by, and stars such people.

My Rating: ****1/2

Trapeze

Carol Reed is one of the names most synonymous with the film noir genre. With other genres, there always seemed to be something amiss. Most of the time, it has to do with the picture being more about style than substance. Still, some of the tricks Reed learned from his noir pictures show up in these.

Take, for instance, Trapeze. Being one of his few films made in Hollywood, Reed has more of a scale to work on than Odd Man Out and The Third Man the previous decade. But as was commonplace for titles of the time, having more isn't always a good thing. It tries to put in too much with a two-hour runtime.

Starring in Trapeze are Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lollobrigida, all of whom as the film's living eye candy. Of them, Lollobrigida (and co-star Katy Jurado) has the more substantial role, acting as the classic femme fatale in some scenes. (Amusingly, Lancaster and Curtis' earlier interactions are similar -- albeit less cynical -- to what they'd do in Sweet Smell of Success the following year.)

Now Trapeze was shot in CinemaScope, and boy, does it show. The sweeping shots of the circus interiors courtesy of Robert Krasker proves that cinema can lead to something beautiful. The problem is that the general picture relies more on the images than the story that goes with them. Such is life.

Trapeze is by all accounts the standard spectacle picture of the 1950s but it still has its moments. A little bit more time spent on the script would've benefited it greatly. But all in all, it's the kind of film you can't see yourself watching again...unless you're in that kind of mood.

My Rating: ***1/2