Movies in 2026 199

 

Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940

As we've discussed, there are some movies that you can't help but watch (no matter how many times you've seen them) when you get the chance. One of them for me is definitely Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film Foreign Correspondent. It's certainly not the best Hitchcock film, but it just might be my favorite Hitchcock film. I'm not a huge Joel McCrea fan, but he's pretty good as a classically American Johnny Jones (this definitely falls into the propaganda film category - but then, it 2as 1940) who is hired to go to Europe (about which he knows nothing, even suggesting to his boss that "maybe we should talk to this Hitler guy, he probably knows some stuff") to act as a foreign correspondent. Laraine Day (who, I guess, was 19 at the time) plays his love interest, and she sparkles, which is a nice change of pace from the icy blondes that Hitchcock loved. Herbert Marshall is wooden as only Herbert Marshall can be. George Sanders, as was his wont, stole every scene. Edmund Gwen, who I tend to associate with love able characters in Miracle on 34th Street and Them! plays a menacing role. The ending must have really spoke to an American audience not yet in the war. Definitely recommended.

Movies in 2026 198

 

The Passionate Friends (David Lean, 1949)

David Lean is another one of those directors that I don't know nearly enough about. I tend to focus on his epics, and forget that he made many smaller, more intimate films. Last night I watched his 1949 film The Passionate Friends, which starred Ann Todd, Trevor Howard, and Claude Rains. Ann Todd played a very Ann Todd-like role: a beautiful, intelligent woman who spreads unhappiness wherever she goes (I think I was engaged to her for six years, but that's another story). She was married to Lean at the time - or soon would be - and that must have been an interesting dynamic. She's married to the much older Claude Rains (who is very good) but having an affair with Trevor Howard. The ending is a little different than I would have thought, and it almost copied Anna Karenina (and it probably would have been better if had). Still, it was pretty solid.

Screened In

 This is what welcomed me when I made it back from my usual Saturday morning run to the dump. Either they could tell that their mom would be coming soon, or they sensed that I was spoiling Willow and Misty, my dog friends at the dump.

Just as I started to snap the picture Mollie turned her head. I called "Mollie" so that I could get them both in the picture, and as soon as she heard her sister's name Cici began bitching at me in her classic way.

Movies in 2026 197

 

Trade Winds (Tay Garnett, 1938)

While I watch many movies several times over - and consider it a blessing that I get to do so - I certainly don't rewatch the vast majority of films that I've seen over the years.  Some I watched, and was quite happy to watch them, but I also know that I'll never see them again. So, for every Grand Illusion there's a Trade Winds (Tay Garnett, 1938). It's sort of a slapstick, although in other ways it's a whodunit (although that's introduced awfully late) and almost a travelogue. Frederic March (who is one of the most unfairly forgotten actors, especially for the common watcher of movies) and Joan Bennett are typically good, and it has some witty banter (Dorothy Parker worked on the script). So, I don't think I'd recommend it per se, but if you stumble across it don't turn off the TV, you'll have an enjoyable hour and a half.

Movies of 2026 196

 

Lumiere, Le Cinema! (Thierry Fremaux, 2025)

As I've proposed many times, the Criterion Channel introduces me to so many films and directors and actors that I'd never see elsewhere. This also relates to documentaries, and last night I watched a wonderful one: Thierry Fremaux's 2025 Lumiere, Le Cinema! It tells the story of the Lumieres, especially Louis, and the origins of cinema. It must show all of some of a hundred of the Lumiere 50 second films (usually of events in real life, although some more staged). The narrator was classically French, so there's a lovely running commentary on aesthetics and references so many artists and thinkers (Proust, naturally, the Renoirs, both Auguste and Jean; Fellini; Rossellini, etc.). It's amazing how beautifully preserved the films were, especially since some of them are 130 years old. Essential for film nuts.

A Sort of Psychology in Space

 "And no doubt all these different planes, in relation to which Time, as I had grasped in the course of this party, arranged my life, by giving me the idea that in a book whose intention was to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use, in contrast to the flat psychology people normally use, a sort of psychology in space, added a new beauty to the resurrections that had taken place in my memory while I was lost in my thoughts alone in the library, since memory, by bringing the past into the present without making changes to it. just as it was at the moment when it was the present, suppresses precisely this great dimension of Time though which a life is given reality."

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (Finding Time Again)

OK, as my friend MK often opines, shit is getting real. Although I've read Proust several times, although the first time in this particular translation, I have to be honest in admitting that there are still times when he mystifies me - or at least it's better to say that I'm slowing, with each rereading and reflection, that I'm slowing honing in on his meaning. I guess when I think about it I come back to the notion that for Proust time and space are not separate, discrete entities, but rather influence each other, it not actually merge. 
Granted, everything is relative, but with Proust things are really relative. It's not completely Buddhist (with it being pointless to talk about the self since everything changes second to second), but rather that there is no fixed self, and that it evolves throughout time, and hence our understanding of reality and our place in it and thus meaning transforms over time. It's impossible to understand the self, and thus write a novel about the self, without taking into account this evolving/devolving psychological reality. OK, that's what I'm thinking today, ask me again tomorrow and I'll have a different answer.

This morning I finished my latest rereading of Proust, and I'm definitely looking forward to my next one. This may best be shown that as soon as I finished (my actual, beautiful, physical Penguin volumes) that I purchased Kindle copies of each of them, so that I'm not left without them. I mean, what would happen if the box of books I mail to Italy falls of the boat?

Movies in 2026 195

 

Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)

Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli had been sitting in my Criterion Channel queue for way too long, and last night I finally got around to watching it. For some reason I often have an initial negative reaction to Rossellini films, although I don't know why. I remember starting his Rome, Open City (1945) and stopping, before starting up again weeks later, and absolutely loving it. It's like I didn't think it would be interesting after fifteen minutes or so, and then paused it - not deciding not to watch it - but rather thinking of something else I had to do that seemed more pressing/interesting at that moment. Inexplicably, I think I did exactly the same thing with Stromboli. This is by way of pointing out that I truly am a moron. I also liked Stromboli quite a bit. It tells the story of Karin (Ingrid Bergman), who is a Lithuanian who somehow ends up in an internment camp in the chaos of the end of the war, and who ends up marrying Antonio (Mario Vitale) to start to new life on the island of Stromboli. Antonio is not a bad guy, necessarily, but this is clearly not the life that she wanted. It's weird to think that in Trapani we'll be able to catch a ferry to Stromboli, which is doubtless how I'll end up dying in a volcanic eruption (my friends will only smile, sadly, and say, "You know, it's OK, I think he would have wanted it that way."). The initial response in the American press to the film was horrifically terrible, which was a stupid, puritanical American response to Bergman's affair with Rosselini. Now there are folks who consider it one of the great films ever made. I'm going to come down in the middle on that one. I liked it quite a bit, and would definitely recommend it, but I just don't think I would agree that it's one of the greatest couple hundred films ever made. Still, it's very good, and check it out.