Photo caption: Park Ji-min in RETURN TO SEOUL. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of Turn Every Page and the first Must See of 2023 – Return to Seoul.
CURRENT MOVIES
- Return to Seoul: brilliantly crafted and emotionally gripping. In theaters.
- Broker: in the margins, finding a profound humanity. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
- The Whale: regret to redemption. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
- Everything Everywhere All at Once: often indecipherable and mostly dazzling. back in theaters plus on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
- Aftersun: who’s coming of age is this? Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
- The Fabelmans: a mom, a dad and their genius kid. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
- All Quiet on the Western Front: the trauma of war. Netflix.
WATCH AT HOME
The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:
- The Sapphires: Here’s a crowd pleaser: Motown meets Aborigines. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu
- Mustang: repression challenged by the human spirit. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
- Truman: how to say goodbye. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
- Love & Mercy: a tale of three monsters and salvation. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
- Searching: A ticking clock thriller that captures the Silicon Valley vibe. Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
- Venus: Meeting your kid for the first time while transitioning. Amazon, AppleTV..
- Wind River: “This isn’t the land of backup, Jane. This is the land of you’re on your own.” Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, redbox.
- Radio Dreams: stranger in a strange and funny land. Amazon, AppleTV.
- Little Dieter Needs to Fly: an unimaginable escape and a quirky guy Project Nim: .Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube.
- We Believe in Science: denying science on a monumental scale. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube.
ON TV
If you want to understand what Pre-Code is all about, take a look at the 1931 The Maltese Falcon, which has an entirely different tone than the 1941 John Huston/Humphrey Bogart/Mary Astor The Maltese Falcon that you’ve surely seen. The 1931 Falcon, which is coming up on Turner Classic Movies on April 4.
Ricardo Cortez’s Sam Spade is lecherous, cocksure, leering and pawing. Indeed, if this Pre-Code The Maltese Falcon is about anything, it’s about sex. It opens with a woman adjusting her hose before leaving Sam Spade’s office, evidence of a just-completed sexual encounter.
Bebe Daniels plays Miss Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy as sexually aggressive. She’s shown taking an obviously post-coital bath, and deals out lines like “who’s that dame wearing MY kimono?“. At one point, a large banknote is missing and Spade takes Brigid into an adjoining room and strip searches her. This 1931 movie is the only Maltese Falcon that contains this sequence. What we see on camera is an apparently nude Brigid clutching her clothes behind the door.
The Hays Code prevented the re-release of The Maltese Falcon in 1936, which led to the 1936 remake, Satan Met a Lady. Because it’s so risque, the complete version of this 1931 film was not screened again in the United States until 1966.Here’s my essay on the three faces of The Maltese Falcon.
