The recent arrival of BILLY ELLIOT THE MUSICAL on Broadway (I have tickets in early December) prompted me to take another look at the beloved 2000 film on which the show is based.  I’m happy to report that the movie is just as wonderful as I remembered.  Set in northeast England in 1984, in a hopeless mining village during a prolonged miners’ strike, BILLY ELLIOT is about an 11-year-old boy (Jamie Bell) who finds something beautiful in his grimy world: the transformative power of dance.  Whether angry and frustrated or passionate and joyful, Billy discovers dance as an outlet for, and expression of, his feelings.

In the film’s standout sequence, Billy’s disapproving father catches Billy dancing.  Instead of defending himself verbally, Billy launches into a spontaneous dance of defiance, a thrilling declaration of identity.  I’m hoping that this soaring feel-good drama translates into an equally triumphant musical.

Though we have about six weeks of holiday releases to come, filled with what is known as Oscar bait, I’d have to say that, as of right now, my favorite American film of the year is Pixar’s computer-animated WALL-E (released this week on DVD).  WALL-E is set on a no longer habitable Earth, 700 years in the future, seemingly occupied by only Wall-E (a trash compactor) and his roach companion, plus all the detritus left behind by humans (now living on a starship).  Wall-E is fascinated by all these artifacts of humanity, particularly his treasured VHS copy of HELLO, DOLLY!  He may not have great taste in movies, but the songs in DOLLY, with their sentimental sweetness, heighten the poignancy in Wall-E’s non-human ache to feel and love as we do.

When the film moves to the starship, its satire of humanity, initially scalding, is ultimately replaced with a surprising generosity of spirit.  Instead of finger-wagging at earthlings for their super-sized, shopping-mad passivity (and for hastening the planet’s demise), WALL-E is a hopeful and forgiving work.  Call it an optimistic cautionary tale.  Lacking smart-aleck smugness and heavy-handed condescension, WALL-E swept me away.  I’m not embarrassed to admit that it moved me to tears.

This week’s DVD release of the Budd Boetticher Box Set is especially good news to me. Among the box’s five films is COMANCHE STATION (1960), one of the five westerns featured in my book SCREEN SAVERS. That means that there are now 30 films available on DVD of the 40 films discussed at length in the book. Only 10 to go!

The set features the five westerns that director Boetticher made with star Randolph Scott at Columbia. There are two others, SEVEN MEN FROM NOW (already on DVD) and WESTBOUND, both from Warner Brothers. The Boetticher/Scott partnership is one of the genre’s most important director-star collaborations, right up there with John Ford and John Wayne or Anthony Mann and James Stewart. The seven Boetticher/Scott westerns, each under 80 minutes, are noted for their simplicity, economy, and unstinting feeling of authenticity.

COMANCHE STATION, the final picture in the series, is my favorite. Past sixty by this time, Scott had never been more effective as a movie actor, performing with poignant reserve. In COMANCHE STATION, he’s searching for his wife, captured by Comanches ten years earlier. He rescues someone else’s kidnapped wife (Nancy Gates) and makes a perilous journey to bring her back to her family. Along the way they meet up with baddie Claude Akins and his two young sidekicks. There’s not a single interior scene in this film, just as there isn’t in the great Stewart-Mann western THE NAKED SPUR. Boetticher’s masterful use of long takes and his gorgeous wide-screen compositions make this a beautiful ride. This tale of painful emotion and jolting violence, set against some gnarled landscapes, is grippingly realized. Burt Kennedy’s penetrating dialogue has unusual (for a western) intimacy and introspection.

You can read much more about COMANCHE STATION in SCREEN SAVERS and on this site. And now, at last, you can put the movie right onto your Netflix queue!

That’s the title of a 1940 Boris Karloff mad-scientist movie, but it’s a tag that might also be hung on Mr. Karloff himself. After all, his film career lasted five decades! He may not have had a thousand faces like Lon Chaney, but didn’t he come awfully close? So, for Halloween, here’s a mini-tribute to the screen’s greatest horror star and a marvelous, underrated actor who never got the acclaim he deserved because of the genre to which he was attached. He was brilliant, both terrifying and moving, as the Monster in the FRANKENSTEIN series, and no one elevated more drek (not just B pictures but C and D pictures, too) than Karloff.

I’ve written about Karloff in my two most recent books. In 100 GREAT FILM PERFORMANCES YOU SHOULD REMEMBER BUT PROBABLY DON’T, I included Karloff’s terrific work in THE BLACK ROOM (1935), in which he stunningly delineated twin brothers, one good, and, naturally, one evil. In SCREEN SAVERS, I write about ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945), one of the great Val Lewton-produced horror pictures. In ISLE, Karloff is a cold, unyielding general whose world is shaken when a plague strikes and his skills are of little use. You can read more about this extraordinary film on this site, so let me get back to THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES, a good example of one of those quickie fantasy pictures that Karloff churned out between his FRANKENSTEIN and Val Lewton years.

The title is an exaggeration, but THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES (available on DVD) is a better-than-average mad-scientist melodrama despite some lame dialogue and a bland supporting cast. The plot is an entertaining grabber and Karloff, yet again, gives a B picture some class and heft. It’s all about “frozen therapy,” the 1940 version of cryogenics, with the ingenious Dr. Karloff making this disease-fighting research his life’s work. He disappeared ten years ago, while working on Crater Island, but he’s found frozen and is promptly thawed. Of course, Karloff’s mad scientist gets madder as the film proceeds, needing to continue his work at all costs. He’s a good man with a noble cause, but he eventually resorts to murder to keep his work going. More sci-fi than horror, the film’s most memorable visual is its ice chamber, a magical (if inexpensive) movie set. When you made as many B movies as Karloff did, every once in a while one of them turned out better than expected. I guess the title makes sense because Karloff and this little picture are still with us all these years later.

Here’s Part Two of my look at the WIZARD OF OZ cast members and their pre- and post-OZ interactions. Below are some of the pre-OZ match-ups.

Frank Morgan (the Wizard) and Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow) were both in two Nelson Eddy musicals: ROSALIE (1937), starring Eleanor Powell, and SWEETHEARTS (1938), starring Jeanette MacDonald. Morgan, who romanced Billie Burke (Glinda) in the aforementioned post-OZ WILD MAN OF BORNEO (1941), had already been amorously linked to her in the pre-OZ PICCADILLY JIM (1936). Morgan plays Robert Montgomery’s never-employed Shakespearean-actor father, which, unfortunately, never proves to be as fun as it sounds. These three films are disappointments, despite their intermittent pleasures.

Better is PARTY WIRE (1935), a comedy-drama sleeper starring the fresh and radiant Jean Arthur on the brink of superstardom (which came with the following year’s MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN). It’s a small-town tale set in Rock Ridge (a different Rock Ridge than the one in BLAZING SADDLES), all about the damaging power of idle gossip.  Not only is Clara Blandick (Auntie Em) featured in the supporting cast (as the vicious-tongued banker’s wife) but you’ll also find Charley Grapewin (Uncle Henry) as Jean Arthur’s apple-jack-loving father. Blandick and Grapewin would get along better once they moved to Kansas.

The best pre-OZ teaming of OZ cast mates has to be EVERYBODY SING (1938), an unpretentious black-and-white musical that also happens to be a spirited screwball comedy. It’s about a showbiz family, in all their theatricality, and it’s fast, merry, and occasionally hilarious. A pre-Dorothy Judy Garland sings sensationally. She’s a young and brassy vocalizer, stuck in her in-between years, who gets kicked out of school for “swinging” in music class. (Try to forgive Judy’s later black-face number.) As Judy’s star-actress mother, there’s Glinda herself, Billie Burke, in what may be her greatest performance. Burke gives a model high-comedy acting turn as a stage actress who is ALWAYS acting and can’t STOP acting. When Burke is on-screen, extravagantly so, the film is as funny as MY MAN GODFREY. Taken as a whole, EVERYBODY SING is a minor MGM musical, but, whenever Billie can’t stop acting or Judy can’t stop swinging, it’s wonderful. And off to OZ they went.