A Face in the Crowd (TCM, 2:45pm Tuesday, Oct. 20)

In this age of blustery TV demagogues, Elia Kazan’s 1957 masterpiece, A Face in the Crowd, seems so prescient as to be downright spooky. Of course, screenwriter Budd Schulberg already had plenty of false prophets of the airwaves from which he could draw inspiration — from Father Coughlin to Walter Winchell (who makes a cameo in the movie) — but the film foretold the soul-crushing power of mass media and charlatans smart enough to exploit it.

For anyone who knows Andy Griffith only as sweet-natured Sheriff Andy Taylor or (perish the thought) Ben Matlock, here he is a revelation. Griffith is wild-eyed manic charisma as Lonesome Rhodes, a jailbird drifter catapulted into celebrity after he is “discovered” by a small-town radio producer (Patricia Neal). A man whose ambition is matched only by his ruthless brutality, Lonesome cultivates a down-home huckster charm that takes him from radio personality to a would-be political kingmaker. Along with 1951’s Ace in the Hole and 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, A Face in the Crowd is among the Fifties’ most scathingly cynical examinations of greed and brutality disguised as that American can-do spirit. – Phil Bacharach

Les diaboliques (TCM, 1:15am, Monday, Oct. 26)

This 1955 psychological thriller from France is director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s best known film. In it, his wife, Vera Clouzot plays a shy young teacher in a school run by her husband, the arrogant and sadistic Delasalle (Paul Meurisse). Her marital enslavement is made even more unbearable by her husband’s open affair with another teacher, played by Simone Signoret. The two women plot to murder the horrid Delasalle and dump his corpse into the school’s swimming pool, unused for the season. But when the pool is later drained, what they find is the beginning of their true terror.

Based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the team who would later supply Hitchcock with the novel he adapted into Vertigo, Les diaboliques fairly drips with an eerie decadence that gets clammier and clammier until its stunning Grand Guignol conclusion. Clouzot could even out-suspense the Master, and if you like this one—and you will—track down a copy of his earlier Le salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), which is, minute for minute, the most suspenseful film I’ve ever seen.

Note: Don’t let the mediocre American remake of Les diaboliques or the fact that the original is in French with subtitles dissuade you from seeing this one. Clouzot was misanthropic and pessimistic, and he sure knew how to get under your skin so deeply, he scraped the bone. – Doug Bentin

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The family that slays together . . . Matthew O’Leary and Bill Paxton in Frailty

This week, here’s a double feature of movies inspired by actual crimes, but not closely enough be called “true crime” pictures.

What would one of those true crime programs on A&E be like if it wasn’t made for basic cable? If the filmmakers could really cut loose and depict what it’s like to know you’re going to die in agony any minute now? If you could find an actor to not just play the part of a serial killer, but to actually re-create his thought process? What would it be like?

Wolf Creek, that’s what.

This shocker from Australia , written/produced/directed by Greg McLean, was shot on video to give it that real documentary look. McLean hopes, by emphasizing the fact that the events in the film were suggested by a couple of true abduction-murders in Oz and then shooting the film to recreate the look of on-the-scene film-journalism, he can intensify the audiences’ reactions. It works.

The movie begins innocently enough. Ben, Liz and Kristy (Nathan Phillips, Cassandra Magrath, and Kestie Morassi) are enjoying a vacation on Broome Beach , an Indian Ocean resort on Australia ’s northwest side. They drive to Wolf Creek, site of a meteor crash umpteen thousand years ago. Getting ready to leave, they discover that their watches have stopped and the car battery is deceased.

They cuddle up in the dark to frighten each other with ghost and UFO abduction stories when suddenly Mick Taylor, a friendly but somehow off-putting Bushman, appears. He offers to tow them to his camp where he can fix the car and send them on their way.

It will come as no surprise to you that Mick is crazier than a meowing dingo and what he puts these city twentysomethings through in one hellish night is so brutal it makes Saw look like an episode of “Veggie Tales.” If you already have a hard time reconciling screen sadism with entertainment, forget this one.

McLean has said that the terrain of the country changes as the picture moves from its sunny opening segments to its bleak, nihilistic conclusion, and director of photography Will Gibson captures that change from warmth to chilliness perfectly. McLean’s eye is unblinking and the picture is the ultimate Take-the-shrimp-off-the-barbee anti-tourism movie. You know—see Australia and die.

But the film’s most outstanding element is John Jarratt’s performance as the mad Bushman. Watch him before he runs amok, sitting round the campfire with these tourists, 20-years his junior. He wants them to think he’s Crocodile Dundee, but he can’t quite pull it off. His eye contact is too intense, too insistent. Jeez, those eyes are creepy as all hell. He laughs in the wrong places, and continues the laugh a beat too long. Watching him try to mask his insanity is like listening to a deaf person talk. They think they sound right, but something’s off. Jarratt’s Mick is never quite at ease until he has a truly captive audience.

The script is pretty much standard issue, but it manages a couple of nice surprises and reversals. Just when you think it’s going to use all the usual cliches, it kicks the slats out from under you. And when Mick performs what he calls “putting a head on a stick,” whew. I won’t tell you what this means, but if you see it, you won’t like it.

Wolf Creek is unremittingly grim and, like TV news reporting used to be before anchors told you what to think of every report—“Now here’s a story that’ll shock you”—it’s disturbingly amoral.

There are a couple of obligatory shots of kangaroos in the movie, but it’s human nature here that is hideously red in tooth and claw.

(originally appeared in the Oklahoma Gazette)

The most frightening thing about killers like Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac is that we know if they didn’t look just like everybody else, they’d never get close enough to their victims to strike.

In Frailty, Bill Paxton plays the generically named Dad, a guy raising 10 and eight-year-old sons in Texas in 1979. He’s a mechanic. The boys have friends at school. The guys eat together, do their chores together, and watch TV together. They are all decent if unexceptional fellas and the household is as happy as can be expected since mom died giving birth to the youngest son.

But one night Dad is visited by an angel who tells him that he and the boys have a new mission in life. The angel will get a list of names to Dad, names of demons who walk around disguised as humans, and Dad and the boys will kill these demons with an ax named “Otis.”

The older boy, Fenton (Matthew O’Leary), thinks his dad is going crazy but hopes for a recovery and the younger boy, Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) thinks it’s kinda cool to have a family member who’s a cross between St. George and a Ghostbuster. Dad is convinced that when he lays hands on the demons, he can see them for what they really are—sins and all. Fenton doesn’t see anything; Adam claims that he does.

This history of the family is related through flashback as the adult Fenton (Matthew McConaughey) confesses all to a Dallas FBI agent named Doyle (Powers Boothe) while the corpse of his brother sits outside the FBI offices in a stolen ambulance.

First time director Paxton spins a disturbing web of madness and murder from Brent Hanley’s unsettling screenplay. There are indications throughout the film that Dad may be telling the truth about his mission in life, but every time we begin to wonder, Paxton reminds us that we are not necessarily seeing what took place, but what a disturbed young man says took place. One of Hitchcock’s least popular films, Stage Fright, capitalizes on a similarly unreliable narrative. Personally, I think any slight of hand is permissible in thrillers as long as filmmakers don’t resort to out and out cheating. I like Stage Fright, and I like what Paxton is able to pull off here.

We could be watching a madman turning his sons into serial killers or we could be watching an agent of a most unforgiving god removing the vermin from our midst. This is all taking place in Texas where, sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference.

With a role like Dad, Paxton the director needs to keep firm control of Paxton the actor. And he does. When Dad comes into the boys’ room in the dead of night to tell them about the angel’s first visit, and he talks to them just as he would if he were discussing the day’s most mundane events, he leaves us shaking our heads and wondering if he’s really saying what it sounds like he’s saying.

Even when abusively punishing Fenton, who never admits he believes anything supernatural is going on, Dad appears to be merely frustrated at the intransigence of youth, never insane. Paxton delivers a performance that is completely terrifying because it’s always so calm and loving. Remember that line about the banality of evil? This is it.

As Fenton grown up, McConaughey seems to have inherited his father’s gentleness. Just as with the film itself, the madness of the character is revealed slowly and McConaughey leads us—or perhaps drags us—to a conclusion that seems to answer all our questions and deliver us unto evil at the same time.

The two kid actors are just fine, never for a minute losing their grasps on the intricacies of the characters and their relationships.

Nelson Coates’ and Kevin Cozen’s sets recreate the atmosphere of late ‘70s small town Texas well, and Bill Butler’s camera captures both the beauty and innocence of the light and the sinister creepiness of the shadows.

What exactly is it in the film that is so frail? Our hold on reality, or what passes for it? Our belief in a good and merciful God? The human personality? The minds of children? I choose All of the Above. Fenton and Adam are good kids. When Fenton says good bye to another kid at school, he does it by slapping his pal on the back and patting his shoulder, gestures of true friendship. Even while fearing what Dad has become, he lets us know that he still loves his father and is willing to help him with his “mission” until he gets over his madness.

There is very little blood splattering in the film and the ax murders take place out of frame. We know how hideous they are by watching the faces of the boys. The worst moments for the queasy ones in the audience are probably those times the family gets together to bury bodies in the rose garden, and even then we don’t see anything nasty.

Frailty is more than the best psychological thriller to come along in some time. It is a genuinely upsetting film about the horrors we can inflict on our children while all the time thinking that we are saving them.

Herb and Dorothy (OETA, 10 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 13)

Usually, I’m a see as I’ve seen rather than as I’ve heard-about-but-not-seen kind of film critic, but I’m making an exception in this case. I’ve read enough about Herb and Dorothy to know we all need to see it together.

As the first offering in this season’s Independent Lens series, Megumi Sasaki’s documentary sounds as if it fulfills all my doc dreams. The film tells the story of Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, he a postal clerk and she a librarian, who built an amazing collection of contemporary art starting in the early ’60s by living on Dorothy’s check and using Herbert’s to buy, buy, buy. With more than 4,000 pieces in their collection, this sturdily middle-class couple bought so much that their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment became too full to live in.

The Vogels, who donated much of their collection to The National Gallery of Art in 1990, are just plain ol’ folks who loved and learned and acquired. Because the collection was so large, The National Gallery arranged for one museum in each of the 50 states to receive 50 works from it. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art is the Oklahoma repository. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 96 percent. I’m 100 percent sure that it’s a good recommendation for this week.

This film sounds like an intriguing bookend to Who the @#$% if Jackson Pollock, a documentary that explores classism and the whole idea of what makes art and who says so when it pits a long-haul trucker who thinks she has bought an authentic Jackson Pollock for $5 in a thrift shop against the — understatement alert — snobbish, elitist world of art. — Kathryn Jenson White

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey

The Cuckoos – Hook, Line, and Sinker – Caught Plastered – Peach-O-Reno (TCM, 7pm – 1am, Wednesday, Oct. 14)

The vaudeville-laced comedies of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey have been called a taste that most film lovers would not wish to acquire, but I say “Pfui” to that. Wheeler and Woolsey dragged every wheezy gag, painful pun and excruciating double-entendre they could remember from vaudeville and presented them to a new audience. Here’s a sample from The Cuckoos: Woolsey, as Prof. Cunningham, tells young Fannie Furst “You smell so sweet.” “That’s because I always have violets in my bath. You should, too.” “I would,” he replies, “but I don’t know Violet.” And yes, the female character is really named “Fannie Furst.”

The team made 24 films between their screen debut in Rio Rita in 1929 and Woolsey’s early death in 1936. While they flew, they flew high. Woolsey’s surprised cry of “Whoooa!” became a national catchword. Unfortunately and unlike many comedy teams, W&W never rose above their material so following their joint-career can make for a bumpy ride. Yes, much of the humor and satire is dated and will leave you scratching your head, but the songs are catchy, the girls are pretty, seeing musical production numbers in early two-strip Technicolor is fun, and finding out how risqué pre-code comedies could be is eye-opening.

And who knows, Luke—you might actually like it. You know why I call you Luke, don’t you? Because you’re not so hot. Rimshot. – Doug Bentin

Sisters (IFC, 4:35pm Sunday, Oct. 18)

This blood-spattered 1973 thriller from AIP heralded the arrival of Brian De Palma as a major player of the New Hollywood. The trailer above sells Sisters as knife-slashing grindhouse entertainment — and its initial murder won’t disappoint connoisseurs of such things — but De Palma’s meticulous direction and cinematic references make it clear he’s after nothing less than Hitchcockian suspense. Creepy and wickedly funny in a Seventies’ hipster way, Sisters is an exhilarating middle ground between De Palma’s early counterculture give-it-to-The-Man pics (Greetings, Hi Mom) and the hermetically sealed stylistics that choked the life out of many of his later works. Future Lois Lane Margot Kidder is great fun as a mysterious French-Canadian beauty whose separated conjoined twin might just be a psychopathic killer. With great supporting turns by Charles Durning and William Finley, this is not to be missed. — Phil Bacharach

The ubiquitous trailers for this four-couples-vacation-in-paradise flick make it look like perfect escapist fare. Starring Vince Vaughn and pals on a gorgeous island, it looks like sand, sun and fun, all laughs and colorful drinks sporting tiny umbrellas.

The movie is a downer, with almost no laughs. People will enjoy the film if their idea of an escape is to attend a marriage counseling session.

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