What was Boris Karloff‘s finest film of the second half of his career, in which he arguably gave his finest-ever performance?

His two most iconic films (containing his most iconic performances) were the original Frankenstein (’31) and Bride of Frankenstein (’35). His most interesting supporting roles were in Howard Hawks‘ The Criminal Code (’31) and Scarface (’32), as a Christian fanatic in John Ford‘s The Lost Patrol (’34), and as a cruel-hearted examiner in Val Lewton‘s Bedlam (’46).

And he was reputedly wonderful as serial killer Jonathan Brewster in the Broadway stage version of Arsenic and Old Lace — Jonathan was the older brother of Mortimer Brewster (played by Cary Grant in the 1944 Frank Capra film version) who was enraged when people said he resembled Boris Karloff.

But the grand old actor’s fullest performance was as himself (a Karloffian horror star named “Byron Orlok”) in Peter Bogdanovich‘s Targets (’68), which is certainly among his all-time best and arguably his best since Bride of Frankenstein.

What’s great about Karloff in Targets is that he finally played his own actual self — a kindly, well-dressed and impeccably-mannered English gentleman. And above all a fellow of dignity and refinement.

There’s a great little moment when Orlok is being driven from one Los Angeles location to another, sitting in the back seat and gazing out at the ugly billboards, used-car lots, taco stands and tacky mini-malls. He sighs, shakes his head and says, “This used to be such a lovely city” or words to that effect.

Directed and written by Bogdanovich, Targets is about the elderly Orlok agreeing to make a promotional appearance of The Terror (’62) at a Los Angeles drive-in theatre and also (concurrently) about a Charles Whitman-like psycho who murders his family, picks off several innocent drivers on the 405 freeway, and ends up being thrashed by Orlok as he’s about to shoot patrons at the same drive-in.

At long last, the white-haired, 80 year-old Karloff was no longer sinister but a hero and vanquisher!

Last night some neo-Nazi hooligans protested the first preview performance of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry‘s Parade, a 1998 historical musical that’s being revived at the Bernard B. Jacobs theatre (242 West 45th Street).

It dramatizes the trial, imprisonment and lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was falsely convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in 1913 Atlanta. After his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1915, Frank was seized by an anti-Semitic mob and hanged from a tree in Marietta, Georgia — Phegan’s home town.

Ben Platt (Dear Evan Hansen) plays Frank in the stage revival. Last night he posted a statement about the anti-Semitic protest.

I don’t have much interest in catching Parade, but this morning I was recalling my one and only viewing of Mervyn LeRoy‘s They Won’t Forget, a 1937 drama based on the same tragedy.

Pic was based on Ward Greene‘s “Death in the Deep South,” a fictionalized account of the Frank case. It starred Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Edward Norris and — in her feature debut — Lana Turner.

For decades LeRoy successfully functioned as a smooth and dependable house director of big-studio features — The Wizard Of Oz (partially — Victor Fleming received credit), Thirty seconds Over Tokyo, Little Women, Any Number Can Play, Quo Vadis?, Million Dollar Mwemaid, Mister Roberts, No Time for Sergeants, The FBI Story, The Devil at 4 O’Clock, A Majority of One, Gypsy. But he made his best films in the early to mid ’30s — Little Ceasar, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and They Won’t Forget.

Consider how LeRoy concluded Forget‘s lynching scene — not with a literal depiction but a snagging of a mail sack as a train speeds by. That’s John Ford-level expressionism.

Parade will open on 3.16.

Every year Hollywood Elsewhere subjects the leading Best Picture contenders to the Howard Hawks grading system. The legendary director is famed for having said that a good movie (or a formidable Oscar-seeker) always has “three great scenes and no bad ones.”

Hawks also defined a good director as “someone who doesn’t annoy you.” I don’t want to sound unduly harsh or dismissive but I’m afraid that the Daniels’ direction of Everything Everywhere All at Once…’nuff said.

How do the leading 2023 Best Picture contender films (numbering ten) rate on the Hawks chart? Here we go…

1. Edward Berger‘s All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix): I’m thinking of several good or very good scenes that happen during the last 20 or 25 minutes, but no great ones. Paul (Felix Kammerer) and Kat (Albrecht Schuch) steal a goose from a farm they’d stolen from earlier, but Kat is shot by the farmer’s young son and dies. General Friedrichs (Devid Striesow) maliciously orders an attack to start 15 minutes before the 11 am ceasefire. And during the final battle Paul is killed with a bayonet, only a little before 11 am. AQOWF is indisputably urgent and compelling and often jarring, but I can’t honestly say that it contains a great scene, much less three of themk.

2. James Cameron‘s Avatar: The Way of Water (Disney): The climactic 45-minute battle aboard the sinking bad-guy craft — I think it’s fair to call this a great scene. But that’s the only one. Everything in this film is highly involving and proficient and certainly eye-filling, but emotionally and thematically it doesn’t really stay with you. Hawks shakes his head.

3. Martin McDonagh‘s The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight): It has a few weird scenes and a couple that stand out in a certain off-kilter way, but none that really sink in — not in a way that really kicks up the dust and feels great. If you disagree please tell me what I’m missing or have forgotten. The cute little donkey choking to death on one of Brendan Gleeson‘s stubby fingers? That was just weird. Kerry Condon gently rejecting Barry Keoghan‘s proposal to become Mrs. Village Idiot…kind of a gulp moment. Condon’s dialogue aside, everything said in this film is eccentric and moody and nhilist. And yet it stays with you after it’s over. How many great scenes? I’m sorry but none.

4. Baz Luhrman‘s Elvis (Warner Bros.): The first very good scene is when Colonel Parker (Tom Hanks) realizes that the unknown Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) is perfect rocket-fuel — a white guy who sings black, and who also has an intense sexual rapport with the girls in the audience. The second keeper is Presley’s 1968 NBC comeback special. The third is when fat Elvis sings “Unchained Melody” at the very end. These are certainly standout scenes, but I can’t honestly call them great. Hawks is underwhelmed.

5. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All at Once (A24): This alternate-universe hellscape subjects viewers to cruel and unusual punishment, regardless of whichever universe it may be happening in. For this is a 139-minute excursion into mind-boggling, brain-taffy torture. And yet it has one excellent scene, which happens inside Jamie Lee Curtis‘s IRS office at the end. Michelle Yeoh‘s Evelyn briefly slips into a daydream about her alternate selves and the multiverse blah blah, and when Deirdre asks if she’s paying attention Evelyn says, “I’m sorry…were you saying something?” Perfect! This is the only great scene though.

6. Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans (Universal): Three strong scenes — Sammy giving direction to a young actor prior to shooting Nazis vs. good guys war footage, Judd Hirsch delivering his bedroom rant about destiny, and Sammy explaining to his dad that he created a muzzle-flash effect by sticking pins into certain frames in the celluloid. The one great scene is when blustery and cantakerous John Ford barks at Sammy about what constitutes interesting vs. shit-level horizon lines. Overall The Fabelmans isn’t a bad film, but it flunks the Hawks test.

7. Todd Field‘s Tár (Focus Features): One great scene: at Juilliard Lydia (Cate Blanchett) exchanges challenging, brittle words with Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist) about his disdain for white cisgender composers like Johann Sebastian Bach. Intriguing creepy scene #1: Running through a Berlin park, Lydia is startled by a woman screaming in the woods, but she never explores what happened or who it was or anything. Intriguing creepy scene #2: While searching around in a dank basement of a rundown Berlin apartment building, Lydia is freaked by the sight of a huge black dog, or maybe a timber wolf. She runs up the concrete stairs and falls on her face. Shocking scene: The dismissed Lydia slips into a live performance of Mahler’s Fifth and violently assaults her replacement, Eliot (Mark Strong). Alas, Tar‘s one great scene equals a failing grade.

8. Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount): In a way the entire film is filled with “great” scenes, if you accept the idea that Maverick is perfectly fused and calculated — every scene is part of a single unpretentious, super-glammy, crowd-pleasing whole. Okay, it has no great scenes but is filled with dozens of good and very good ones. TG:M is the most satisfying, least problematic film of the year, plus it earned a shitload of dough.

9. Ruben Ostlund‘s Triangle of Sadness (Neon): An ascerbic social satire that has a few stand-out moments, but no great scenes…sorry.

10. Sarah Polley‘s Women Talking (UA Releasing): It’s a decent dialogue-driven film that should have been called Decision To Leave, but it has no great scenes…sorry. I don’t even think it has any extra-good ones. It’s just a sturdy, workmanlike thing with good performances all around.

In sum, not one of the ten Best Picture nominees satisfies the Hawks definition of a really good film. But of the ten, Top Gun: Maverick is easily the “best”.

Above The Line‘s Jeff Sneider and Perri Nemiroff clash over Women Talking starting around the 53:00 mark. Sneider: “It’s number 10! It will win if every woman in the Academy votes for it. It won’t win because no men in the Academy will be voting for it. This is a bad movie…simple as that.” It gets even better at 56:30: Sneider: “It belongs nowhere near this [Best Picture] race…what a fucking boring waste of time!”

HE to Sneider, Nemiroff: Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans has no chance to win…nobody hates it but nobody really thinks it’s all that great…it’s a semi-agreeable, very broadly acted family film (especially on Michelle Williams‘ part) which contains very little compelling material except for that concluding scene with John Ford / David Lynch. If it weren’t for the kneejerk Spielberg kowtow factor, it wouldn’t even be in the conversation.

HE to readership, Movie Godz, everyone within the sound of my voice: “Watch the skies…no. For the love of God and the betterment of civilization, stop Everything Everywhere All At Once…a grueling, agonizing, interminable piece of medieval torture …a harbinger of cultural ruin and a cinematic apocalypse if I ever saw one…all hail the GenXers and boomers who despise it with every fibre of their being, and there are many who feel this way.”

BAFTA’s long lists are bringing me down, man. ’20 and ’21 were downish years, obviously, but so was ’22 to some extent. Several “good” films and performances here, but nothing really turns me on except for Top Gun: Maverick and Cate Blanchett‘s Lydia Tar. Not a single Best Picture long-list selection made me swoon…not really. Each creme de la creme film has stuff that irritates me. Example: I hated, hated, hated Todd Field‘s decision to run Tar‘s closing credits at the very beginning.

The whole year was like that. What happened to the concept of movies reaching into your soul and altering the way you see life? Half the time after seeing a film in a commercial megaplex I want to pick a fight with an usher, preferably a fat Millennial one. Well, not actually but I fantasize about this from time to time.

BAFTA’s Best Picture Long List (alphabetized) + HE reactions + my own preferred list of ten.

Aftersun (HE: Dreary, inconclusive, middle-of-the-night nothingness inside a Turkish coastal resort for British tourists…my eyes glazed over, my brain left the room.)

All Quiet on the Western Front (HE: “I respect and admire AQOTWF for what it is and what it’s worth. But in our current realm this kind of large-sprawling-canvas, chaos-and-brutality-of-war film can only sink in so far. And 147 minutes felt too long. 120 or 125 would have sufficed.”)

The Banshees of Inisherin (HE: “There are many sane people out there who’ve found this film mystifying. I respect many things about it, including Kerry Condon’s performance. It’s not ‘bad’ as much as infuriating.”)

Elvis (HE: “Elvis isn’t quite as bad as I feared, but several sections are punishing to sit through. It’s a flashy, pushy, often exhausting carnival sideshow, very primary and primitive, clearly made for the ADD peanut gallery…a fairly blunt tool. And Tom Hanks‘ Colonel Parker accent is impossible.”

Everything Everywhere All At Once (HE: “It made me want to jump off the top of a 50-story office building with the intention of pressing a hand grenade against my chest and pulling the pin halfway down.”)

The Fabelmans (HE: “A truly fair-minded, non-obsequious opinion would have to acknowledge that the saga of Spielberg’s teenage years (mostly Phoenix, some Saratoga) is neither boring nor hugely interesting…it’s diverting in an on-the-nose, broadly performed way, but it mainly boils down to ‘decent with three pop-throughs — the Judd Hirsch rant, filming the Nazi war flick in the Arizona desert, and John Ford lecturing 17-year-old Steven about horizon lines.'”)

Living (HE: “The descriptive terms are ‘low-key,’ ‘no hurry,’ ‘tonally and visually accurate” (it’s set in 1952 London) and ‘quietly affecting emotional undertow.’ One quibble: Whenever old-school British bureaucrats of yore sat down in their first-class train compartments and unfolded their newspapers, they took their bowler hats off. Not so in Hermanus’ film.”)

Tar (HE: “Atmospherically transporting, powerfully charged and yet curiously infuriating. Watching with subtitles definitely helps. The best of the bunch, but I almost wish it wasn’t.”)

Top Gun: Maverick (HE: “High-powered San Diego flyboy saga, great action sequences, unambiguously straight-while-male-ish, “Great Balls of Fire”, etc.

Triangle of Sadness (HE: Not as good as The Square.)

In this order, HE’s top ten picks of ’22 (originally posted on 12.20.22):

Empire of Light
Close
Happening
Vengeance
She Said
Emily The Criminal
Christian Mungiu‘s R.M.N.
Top Gun: Maverick
Avatar: The Way of Water
Tar (despite the many irritations)

I’d forgotten that Gabriel LaBelle‘s Sammy Fabelman (aka young Steven Spielberg) conveys a joy face** while twirling around twice.

I’d also forgotten that John Williams‘ score sounds a little too peppy and jaunty — a tad reminiscent of Franz Waxman‘s Rear Window score at the very end.

Honestly? I’m kinda okay with the center-horizon shot. Or at least I didn’t find it “boring as shit.”

The Fabelmans has my favorite ending of the year, the fact that this is verbatim what John Ford said to Spielberg makes it even better lmao pic.twitter.com/28JTdTsbzu

— anish🇦🇷 (@sithshailaRRR) December 14, 2022

** the satisfaction that any fledgling director would feel after meeting and getting instructed by a showbiz legend.

Ari Aster‘s Disappointment Blvd. — a very cool, take-it-or-leave-it smarthouse title, one that sticks to your ribs — is no longer being called Disappointment Blvd. The new title, according to A24, is Beau Is Afraid — presumably an allusion to the first name of Joaquin Phoenix‘s main protagonist, “one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.”

Beau Is Afraid is obviously a wimpy-sounding title. It was presumably chosen to appeal to Millennial and Zoomer “safeties”, or basically your under-40 lily-livered types who live in various states of perpetual anxiety and have frequently shared concerns online about not feeling safe enough. We’re talking about gentle reed candy-asses with peep-peep pussy voices and squeaky shoes…intimidated types who wear baggy jeans and normcore clothing…this is your target audience for Beau Is Afraid.

In a simultaneous decision, A24 has announced that The Whale it also being retitled. Darren Aronofsky‘s film will now be called Brendan Fraser Isn’t Attending the Golden Globes Because He’s Afraid That Phillip Berk Will Once Again Insert A Finger Into Brendan’s Anus.

Let’s re-title various classic films according to the A24 “safety” aesthetic. Point Blank is now called Walker Is Afraid. Sam Peckinpah‘s The Wild Bunch is now called The Fraidy Cats. John Ford‘s The Searchers will henceforth be called Ethan Is Afraid of the Comanches. The title of Steven Spielberg‘s The Fabelmans is now Sammy Is Afraid of Failing As A Filmmaker (And Has Therefore Decided To Live In His Mother’s Basement). We can play this game all day.

I’m afraid, you’re afraid, we’re all afraid. Jordan Ruimy is afraid. Roger Durling is afraid. Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander are afraid that they’ll never write another Ed Wood or The People vs. O.J. Simpson. Sasha Stone is afraid. Each and every day David Poland awakes with fear in his soul. Life is full of terror, anxiety and intimidation.