Knock knock, open up the door, it’s real: What’s Worth Watching is back! Not back with a vengeance, mind. As Charles Bronson’s Death Wish pentalogy taught us, retributive violence is never the way to gain true justice. Neither is watching shite films. So it’s a good thing we’re (I’m) here to recommend you some top-tier cinema beyond the Netflix productions your younger relatives inform you are problematic because a man with a haircut on the TikTok told them so. Let’s get cracking!
Recommendation round-up
Kansas City Confidential (1952, Phil Karlson) 99 minutes
Phil Karlson is best known, if he’s known at all, as a preeminent director of the film noir era. Kansas City Confidential might just be his masterpiece in the genre. Let’s say it is for the sake of the newsletter, since it’s in the public domain and thus available to watch free and legally on all sorts of sites, including the blessed Internet Archive. John Payne stars as a delivery driver framed for the robbery of an armoured van who sets out to clear his name. The actual robbers, who all wear masks and have goofy codenames, apparently inspired the similar conceit in Reservoir Dogs. Idk if you’ve heard of that, pretty obscure, I could talk to you about it for four hours though if you wanted to come to my dorm room?
Mandibles (2020, Quentin Dupieux) 77 minutes
Quentin Dupieux is best known, if he’s known at all, for his musical work as Mr Oizo; specifically, his well deserved international hit “Flat Beat.” You know. With the little guy. For the past decade-or-so he’s been knocking out singularly peculiar and surreal comedies in his native France, beginning with 2010’s Rubber, which centred on a psychic, sentient, murderous car tyre. Your reaction to that concept should tell you if you’d be game for Mandibles, one of his more recent efforts,1 about a couple of yokels who think a giant fly they find in their car boot could make their fortune.
Party Girl (1995, Daisy von Scherler Mayer) 94 minutes
Okay so I can’t repeat the gag a third time because this actually is Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s best-known film2, and it’s a real hidden gem. Want to know why everyone was so gassed at Parker Posey’s casting in the third season of The White Lotus? Well, it’s probably because of her notable and impossibly charismatic starring and supporting roles in everything from cult incest “comedy” The House of Yes to You’ve Got Mail. Don’t sleep on this early lead of hers, though, a sweet confection of a comedy about an inveterate, uh, party girl, who doesn’t so much have to go straight as learn some measure of responsibility when she’s arrested outside a rave and is bailed out by her strict grandmother.
Film of the month (sponsored by Boots Max Strength Cold & Flu Relief Capsules)
Stop! (1970, Bill Gunn) 89 minutes
Bill Gunn is best known, if he’s known at all, as the writer/director behind pioneering and strange Black horror Ganja & Hess. A disturbing take on the vampire movie, it starred Duane Jones in his most notable starring role besides Night of the Living Dead, and Spike Lee remade it in 2014 as Da Sweet Blood of Jesus. A prolific filmmaker, novelist, and playwright, Gunn should be better known. Yet it’s Hal Ashby who is credited as the auteur behind The Landlord, which Gunn wrote, and his two other directorial efforts have been largely unavailable: 1980’s Personal Problems, a “meta soap opera” which emerges every once in a while for a museum screening, and his debut, Stop!
Stop! was shot in 1969 and never released. Produced by Warner Bros, it would have only been the second major studio picture directed by an African-American…except they fucked up some paperwork and so the film existed in a legal limbo, forbidden from any kind of release or exhibition. Until this week, when it appeared without fanfare on a Russian stream site, for free! For the time being, anyway!
Okay yeah so that’s why it’s an interesting curio from film history, but is it any good? Uh, yeah, obvs, that’s why I made it the film of the month. A feel-bad take on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, it follows couple Michael (Edward Bell) and Lee Berger (Linda Marsh), who try to save their failing marriage by moving to Puerto Rico. While there, they take up at the house where Michael’s brother killed his wife and then himself, and get involved in the local swinging community. Not the sort of thing Mariella Frostrup would recommend, perhaps, but hey ho. Of course, things devolve, as they get involved in acid-fuelled orgies that threaten to pull both their minds and their legal union apart. An acute, unwavering, and resolutely NSFW excavation of the racial and sexual tensions undercutting the swingin’ sixties, if that’s what you’re into…
Best of the rest
The Outlaw and His Wife (1918, Victor Sjöström) A groundbreaking silent film which, inexplicably, found its way onto Netflix, and focuses on an 18th-century Swedish outlaw (Watch on Netflix)
The Railrodder (1965, Gerald Potterton) Both Buster Keaton’s final silent film, and his final film period, this is a great and archaically comic travelogue produced by the National Film Board of Canada (Watch on Vimeo)
Smithereens (1982, Susan Seidelman) Debut feature from the director of Desperately Seeking Susan sees a wannabe punk rocker running away from home and coming a cropoer when she hooks up with a cynical member of a one-hit wonder band, played by Richard Hell (Watch on Prime Video)
Maryada Ramanna (2010, S. S. Rajamouli) Another over-the-top Telugu action epic from the director of the superlative R.R.R., this time inspired by, of all things, a Buster Keaton film… (Watch on YouTube)
He’s released another four since, and another since I started typing this footnote
Sorry to stans of 1998’s live-action Madeline, or The Guru starring Jimi Mistry
A gentle reminder that Freevee is Amazon’s “free with ads” service, so go ahead and fire that ad blocker up, comrades!
I’d keep your ad blocker on for that one and all