The Nixon administration and its misdeeds inspired this queasy horror comedy set in the august halls of the White House. Writer/director Milton Moses Ginsberg could have gone for a more on-the-nose scenario with vampires sucking blood out of bodies and the body politic, but instead he unleashes a malevolent hound on the Oval Office. In this curio from 1973, playing on the Metrograph‘s virtual screen Oct. 16-22, Dean Stockwell is the hapless assistant press secretary for whom things get a little hairy at the full moon.
It is the director’s cut that the Metrograph is screening and Ginsberg has added a note to the beginning of the film that it has taken him 40 years to come to terms with Nixon’s presidency and find the right cut to The Werewolf of Washington. The statement seems innocuous enough until you watch this slim – only 70 minutes – but wild feature and are left to wonder what ended up getting cut and what might have been restored at some point. This film is bonkers.
Among the few oblique references to the actual Nixon administration is newly minted deputy Jack Whitter’s (Stockwell) address in the Watergate apartment complex. A one-time reporter who used to cover the White House and dated the president’s (Biff McGuire) daughter Marion (Jane House), Jack leaves his latest post in Hungary to take the new job. But he brings a little bit of Eastern Europe back with him in the form of a curse, something Jack only becomes aware of at the first full moon after his arrival.
Ginsberg juggles two narratives, one a satire of Washington politics, with a boorish blowhard (no, really) installed in the Oval Office. McGuire is terrific as a crass pol who never listens to anyone and blusters his way through every situation. In one of the film’s funniest moments, the president is bowling in the bowels of the White House when his ball gets stuck in the return. He insists that Jack accompany him down the lane to retrieve it. The site of McGuire and Stockwell gingerly making their way down adjoining gutters is hilarious.
The rest of the movie is taken up with Jack and his problem. He tries to explain it to Marion’s fiancé (Beeson Carroll), a Navy psychiatrist, only to be met with derision. As the body count around Washington mounts, Jack’s panic mounts, but no one will take him seriously. He is tortured and cannot stop staring at his hands, but the president and others are not sympathetic. Instead, they question Jack’s masculinity.
A two-time acting award winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 for Compulsion and 1962 for Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a future Oscar nominee in 1989 for Married to the Mob, Stockwell attacks his role here full-throttle. He makes grand use of those expressive eyebrows of his as he begins his transformation, signaling another wild night out on the town. It is not a subtle performance, but Jack is a role that cries out for over the top and the actor delivers.
In the waning term of our own century’s shambolic presidency, a scant two-and-a-half weeks before the election and two weeks before Halloween, the time is right for the return of this monster mashup. It’s a howler. – Pam Grady
The echoes of two actors’ shared reality lend unexpected emotional resonance to this engaging Tuscany travelogue, actor James D’Arcy’s (Agent Carter, Homeland) feature writing/directing debut. What might have been a slight relationship drama between a fractured father and son takes on real weight when the father is played by Liam Neeson and the son by his own progeny, Micheál Richardson. In a story that touches on a young adult feeling like he can never measure up to a celebrated parent, Richardson proves that is not an issue in the Neeson household.
Alice (Gemma Arterton) has well earned her reputation as the town crank in her small seaside village. So nasty is she that you half expect the townspeople to start shouting, “Burn the witch!” She has that effect, but her surliness does not mean she is not expected to do her part as World War II ravages Europe. Volunteerism is thrust upon her – a woman without an ounce of maternal instinct or selflessness – when Frank (Lucas Bond), a young refugee from the London Blitz, is put in her care. So goes the set-up of Summerland, Olivier award-winning playwright and theater director Jessica Swale’s big-hearted feature writing/directing debut.
Charles Bukowski would recognize the habitués of Las Vegas dive bar the Roaring 20s. So, would you if you put in any time in a bar that is welcoming enough and has been around long enough to attract a dedicated family of regulars. One of those places that doesn’t call itself a “cocktail lounge” and doesn’t employ mixologists, but a joint for a beer and a shot among strangers who become friends. And for the regulars at the Roaring 20s in Bill and Turner Ross’ shambling, engaging documentary, it is time to spend one last night together there as “last call” really is just that for a watering hole about to close forever.
What if aliens really did walk among us? What if they brought us technology that could solve the world’s thirst for energy without destroying the planet? What if there were government entities whose sole mission, going back decades, was to keep all of this a secret in order to preserve the status quo? What if every American president was in on it, but was prevailed upon to never reveal the truth? What if a gadfly reporter stumbled upon all this? These questions are the starting point for writer/director Christopher Munch’s sometimes intriguing, sometimes silly sci-fi drama The 11th Green.
Bruno Ganz famously played Hitler in Downfall. Now, in one of his final roles in Nicolaus Leytner’s The Tobacconist, he steps into the role of Sigmund Freud, a man who might have been one of the Fuhrer’s victims had he not been to flee to England. Ganz’s delightful performance portraying the warm, soft side of the father of psychoanalysis is a ray of light in this otherwise dark drama set in pre-war Vienna.
An icon plays an icon as Catherine Deneuve steps into the role of a French cinema legend who reunites for a rocky reunion with her screenwriter daughter (Juliette Binoche) in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s elegant drama The Truth. The Japanese master delivers his first film made outside his home country, in French and English – two languages not his own, and loses not a step in an intimate drama that unfolds between the family home and a Paris soundstage.