TRANCE.  20th Century Fox, 2013. James McAvoy, Rosario Dawson, Vincent Cassel.  Screenplay by John Hodge, Joe Ahearne (his story). Directed by Danny Boyle. Currently streaming on HBO Max.

   This twisty after the caper heist film somehow went under my radar when it came out in 2013, and that’s a shame because it has an excellent lead cast and a story with more twists than a bag full of Twizzlers.

   Simon (James McAvoy) is a curator at an auction house, and we discover fairly early in the narrative, the inside man in a heist masterminded by Franck (Vincent Cassel), thanks to his crippling gambling debts. During the heist Simon inexplicably attacks Franck and is struck by him knocking him unconscious.

   When Franck gets away with the McGuffin, Goya’s “The Ascension,” which just brought $26 million at auction, he finds the painting missing, and when he finally catches up with Simon after he gets out of the hospital, he claims amnesia from the head injury.

   Franck and his partners are less than happy.

   Suggested by a series of big art heists of the general era, this one goes in for a series of revelations related to Simon’s memory while stringing the viewer along with not only unreliable narrators, but unreliable narration and storytelling.

   No one is telling the truth in this movie, and yet again and again they are telling you exactly what you need to know to figure this out. In that sense Agatha Christie could not have laid out a better set of clues and red herrings, some of which I warn you are not the red herrings they seem.

   After torture fails, Franck and his team decide to try psychology and see if Simon’s traumatic memory loss can be retrieved by hypnosis. The therapist Simon chooses from a list of top therapists given him by Franck is Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) whose successful practice consists of mostly phobics, people wanting to lose weight, and chronic smokers.

   She trips almost immediately to the phony identity they have set up for Simon, and by the second visit has spotted he is wired so they can listen. At that point she meets with Franck and agrees to help recover Simon’s memory if she is in on the profit.

   Now as she plays a dangerous game between the infatuated and traumatized Simon and the attractive and suspicious Franck and the gang he may not be fully able to control, she must breakdown one roadblock Simon has put up after another, as the changing story of what happened to him between the head injury and losing the painting is dragged out, but not always as true as it might seem.

   Simon’s arc changes under McAvoy’s strong performance as we get subtle glimpses that neither things nor Simon are exactly what we think.

   I will warn, or tease, you there is significant full frontal nudity in this one, and also point out it is not at the least exploitative, but a vital clue and plot point that, like dozens like it planted and dropped along the way, absolutely pays off toward the end, as one revelation after another comes at the viewer without ever becoming parodic.

   Stylish, original, not derivative despite the Hitchcockian touches, with forays into Cornell Woolrich country as well as Patricia Highsmith in a world inhabited by near sociopaths, Trance keeps you on the edge of your seat and the edge of your conscience as you try to outguess, and largely fail despite some easy ones planted to let you think you are ahead of the game/ It is not only the screenwriters and director, but the characters who switch power roles from one scene to the next.

   You won’t watch this one casually while doing something else. If you want to keep up you will have to pay attention and even then you may have to go back to see if they really did play fair surprisingly often.

   In that sense it is at much a detective story as suspense, crime, or a caper, but one where you never quite trust the detective and shouldn’t.

   Granted there are a few of the inevitable plot holes where coincidence plays too large a role, particularly one they do make a halfhearted effort to pretend they covered, but generally from the opening to the final shot you have a perfectly good shot at outwitting this film, though I’m willing to wager you won’t, at least not as completely as you think you have.

   Danny Boyle, the golden boy of British film had some fun doing this far less consequential film but he knocks it out of the park with sharp performances, an ever twisting plot, and handsome visuals, none of which you dare to ignore.

   What is real and what has been planted, the nature of memory and the way it can be manipulated and lies to us, all those serious questions are posed, but in terms of one of the better outright old fashioned psychological thrillers of recent years.

RUST CREEK. Premiered at the 2018 Bentonville Film Festival and was released theatrically on January 4, 2019. Hermione Corfield as Sawyer Scott, Jay Paulson as Lowell Pritchert, Sean O’Bryan as Sheriff O’Doyle, Micah Hauptman as Hollister. Script by Julie Lipson, based on an original story by Stu Pollard. Directed by Jen McGowan. Currently streaming on Netflix.

   A week or so ago, I reviewed Borrego, a female-centered indie thriller in which a young protagonist must evade nefarious drug dealers. And as I mentioned in the review, the whole affair – despite the stellar cinematography – seemed forced, artificial. That’s not the case in Rust Creek, another survivor thriller movie that has a similar premise, but which delivers vastly more satisfying results.

   Sawyer Scott (an exceptionally well cast Hermione Corfield) is a senior at Centre College in Kentucky. Rather than returning home to her family during Thanksgiving break, she decides to embark on a solo road trip to Washington D.C. for a job interview. Big mistake. What starts off as a promising venture turns into a nightmare when she stumbles upon two backwoods brothers up to no good. Although they are not nearly as grotesque as the villains from Deliverance (1972), Hollister (Micah Hauptman) and Buck (Daniel R. Hill) are what you might expect. Crass, brutal, and not all that bright.

   But evading these two brothers isn’t the least of Sawyer’s difficulties; she also must navigate her survival in the face of the harsh Appalachian outdoors, a leg injury, and a meth cook by the name of Lowell Pritchert (Jay Paulson) who happens to be the outlaw brothers’ cousin. And if that’s not enough, there’s also a corrupt local sheriff (Sean O’Bryan) who, as it turns out, is in business with the brothers, hoping to make significant inroads into the methamphetamine trade.

   Jen McGowan directs the proceedings with skill and a delicate understatement, never really forcing her cast to present artificial emotions or to engage in the maudlin-type moments that marred Borrego.

   Rather, she generally relies on her actors to convey complex emotions through physical mannerisms and their actions rather than through overly emotive dialogues. There is one exception to this – a monologue by Lowell (Paulson) that I didn’t find convincing given his socioeconomic and class status – but otherwise, the movie delivers the goods without forcing a message upon the audience.

   Rust Creek apparently didn’t have much of a theatrical release, having been released to video-on-demand after premiering at a film festival. But it did quite well on Netflix, which is where I happened upon it. I don’t think that I will ever particularly seek out the film for a second viewing, but I enjoyed it for what it was. Solid, steady film-making that doesn’t condescend to the audience and which provides good escapist entertainment. Which is all too much a rarity these days.

THE DEVIL STRIKES AT NIGHT. West Germany, 1957. Zenith International Films, US. 1959. Originally released as Nacht, wenn der Teufel kam. Claus Holm, Mario Adorf, Hans Messemer, Peter Carsten, Carl Lange, Werner Peters, Annemarie Düringer, Monika John. Screenplay by Werner Jörg, from an article by Will Berthold. Directed by Robert Siodmak.

   This fine West German film noir, by noir master Robert Siodmak (Phantom Lady) is based on a true story that bears an uncanny resemblance to a similar incident in the Soviet Union, a powerful condemnation and revealing expose of the twisted mindset of totalitarian governments regardless of their political leanings.

   The time is the summer of 1944 with the West and the Russians both pushing forward and Germany under constant bombardment from Allied planes. Wounded hero Kommissar Axel Kersten (Claus Holm) has returned to Berlin from the Russian front sick of war and heroics with shrapnel in his leg and still less than enamored of his Nazi superiors, which is why he is less than happy when he is assigned a murder in Hamburg of a waitress, one Lucy Hansen (Monika John) by minor Nazi functionary Willi Keun (Werner Peters).

   It seems all rather cut and dried. Keun frequently pestered and sexually harassed the woman, is known for being free with his hands with women, and her body was found in the doorway of his flat during an air raid with her neck broken. There is everything but an eyewitness to the murder.

   But Kersten sees inconsistencies and we the viewer know Keun is innocent, however little we sympathize with him. The film is very careful not to allow the viewer to identify with Keun. He’s a small bureaucratic monster, just not a murderer. Saving him is an act of conscience and justice, not any virtue he possesses.

   For Kersten the case doesn’t hold up either, not the least problem being the fact the soft Keun could not possibly have had the strength to strangle a healthy grown woman and shatter her hyoid bone with one hand. It just isn’t possible.

   Further when he starts looking, he finds a series of murders in Hamburg dating back to before the war that suggests a serial killer, a madman, is stalking the women of the city.

   Complicating things for Kersten is a developing romance with Helga Hornung (Annemarie Düringer) who has secrets of her own and pressure in from charming cynical SS Grupenfüher Rossdorf (Hans Messemer) who informs him in no uncertain terms that in Adolf Hitler’s Germany there is no such thing as a mentally degenerate serial killer and Willi Keun’s trial and certain conviction will be expedited.

   There are a few spoilers here, but this is not a detective story or a suspense film really. It has element of those, but they aren’t the purpose here.

   Kersten continues to push though and soon enough he discovers simple minded Bruno Lüdke (Mario Adorf) who has a reputation for hanging around women, but even when he has a confession from the real killer he may not be able to save Willi Keun from a corrupt bureaucracy and the State’s unwillingness to face reality while his actions expose him and Helga to increasing danger.

   In the Nazi Germany of 1944 Bruno Lüdke simply cannot exist no matter how many women he murdered.

   Ironic and intelligent, West Germany submitted this as their 1958 entry in the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards. With a cast more familiar to American audiences than most (Messeemer, Carsten, and Peters in particular), a lean script, and Robert Siodmak at the helm having returned to his homeland after work in Hollywood dried up, The Devil Strikes at Night is a taut and cynical film that covers much of the same ground as much bigger productions like Night of the Generals, based on the bestselling Hans Helmut Kirst novel. The sheer banality of evil has seldom been as well presented.

   Holm, Messemer, Adorf, and Peters are particularly effective with Holm’s decent man caught in a moral predicament easy to identify with. The almost Orwellian lengths a society is willing to go to to deny the truth, even at the cost of an innocent life and one of their own gives added weight to the film.

   It would have been simple to make Willi Keun a sympathetic character and identify the viewer with him and Kersten’s attempt to save him, but this film chooses a more complex path with Keun a pathetic self-serving cog in the very machine that destroys him, and Kersten’s crusade to save him almost quixotic considering he represents everything Kersten loathes.

   The grim reality of a few decent people in a society where madness is the norm trying to survive when national suicide is seen as heroic and inevitable makes this a powerful film and still effective.

   It, and quite a few German Krimi films are currently available on YouTube with English subtitles, and while most of them are more along the lines of the somewhat campy Edgar Wallace films there are some gems among them worth looking into.

BORREGO. Saban Films, 2022. Lucy Hale, Leynar Gomez, Jorge E. Jimenez, Nicholas Gonzalez, Olivia Trujillo. Written & directed by Jesse Harris. Currently streaming on Netflix.

   The opening is exceedingly promising. Working alone in the empty desert under the hot California sun, botanist Elly (Lucy Hale) is both focused and distracted. While she is squarely devoted to her botanical survey, she’s also lost in her own thoughts and mourning the loss of her younger sister. But the desert has its own plans for her.

   Unbeknownst to her, she’s not the only one who is toiling in semi-solitude in the great emptiness of eastern San Diego County. Also out there is Guillermo (Jorge E. Jimenez), an enforcer for an unnamed Mexican drug cartel and father-and-daughter duo, local sheriff Jose (Nicholas Gonzalez) and Alex (Olivia Trujillo).

   The inciting event that interrupts Elly’s solitude is the type of thing that happens mostly in the movies: a plane crash. While out in the desert examining local flora, she bears witness to a small plane going down in the desert. The pilot – the only one on board – survives. But he’s not an innocent traveler. Far from it. Rather, he is also working for the drug cartel and is ferrying highly dangerous fentanyl across the California-Mexico border.

   The movie thus changes course and the narrative thrust comes into focus. Tomas (Leynar Gomez), the pilot, takes Elly hostage and demands she take him and the remaining pills to the Salton Sea in Imperial County. What follows is a survival thriller that runs out of steam well before the movie ends. While Elly and Tomas bond over their shared life struggles and tragedies, Guillermo seeks to retrieve the drugs and to kill all who get in his way. And the sheriff is trying to stop any further bloodshed. It’s all rather predictable and formulaic and doesn’t really offer the viewer anything refreshingly new.

   The best parts of the movie are those that utilize the stunningly empty landscapes of the California desert. The cinematography, especially in the first thirty minutes or so, is quite good and the movie is effective in transporting the viewer to a land that is equally enchanting as it is dangerous. Like Budd Boetticher’s minimalist westerns with Randolph Scott, the landscape is as much as character as any of those portrayed by the actors.

   But unlike Boetticher’s films, the characters in Borrego aren’t complex, multilayered, or particularly compelling. This new release, at its best, is a decent adventure yarn. At its worst, it’s a socially conscious message film that doesn’t seem to have anything more compelling to say other than drugs are bad and that they will not only ruin your life, but the lives of those you love.
   

THE FULL TREATMENT.   Hammer Films/Columbia Pictures, UK, 1960. Also released as Stop Me Before I Kill. Claude Dauphin, Diane Cilento, Ronald Lewis, Francoise Rosnay. Screenplay by Ronald Scott Thorn based on his novel, with Val Guest, who also directed.

   On their honeymoon Alan (Ronald Lewis) and Denise Colby (Diane Cilento) are involved in a terrible car wreck. Alan, a race car driver, is terribly injured and takes a long time to recover, and even when he comes out of the hospital he is still weak and suffering from nerves, tension, paranoia, and the psychological after effects of the traumatic event.

   He also fears he may be dangerous after he briefly tightens his hands around her neck during a passionate moment.

   On the Riviera to rest up they meet Dr. David Prade (Claude Dauphin … “He’s too elegant to be an aristocrat. Most aristocrats look like peasants.”) who takes an interest in them both despite Alan’s distrust and aggressive behavior (“…you’re refreshingly rude.”).

   Told by Denise about the accident, Prade reveals he is a psychiatrist, and that he fears Alan may suffer from repressed emotions that could make him dangerous to her and himself, but he overplays his hand and Alan and Denise decide to go back to London and try to start over.

   But things are no better in London, and Denise becomes increasingly concerned as she and Alan argue and he becomes more violent. When she learns Prade has followed them to London in his concern for Alan, she finally persuades Alan to see him in his Harley Street offices.

   Under intense therapy, he slowly begins to convince Alan to trust him and reveals the trauma that is causing all the problems. Alan is cured and sent home to Denise before they fly out the next day for the start of the racing season.

   But when Prade visits the next morning Denise is gone and there are signs of a violent struggle and bloody second hand medical instruments like the ones Alan described under hypnosis as the kind he would use if he was disposing of Denise’s body having killed her.

   Prade persuades Alan to let him institutionalize him before going to the police, but on the way to the asylum they are in a wreck, Prade is knocked unconscious and Alan flees.

   Hiding out on the Riviera Alan watches the London papers expecting to read about Denise’s body being found, and that he is wanted by the police, but then sitting at an outdoor bistro he sees a woman that looks suspiciously like Denise and watches as she climbs on a yacht, owned by Prade…

   The Full Treatment based on a novel by fine British suspense novelist and humorist Ronald Scott Thorn (Second Opinion, Twin Serpents, Upstairs Downstairs — the Michael Craig movie, not the Masterpiece series) was directed and co-written by director Val Guest (Penny Princess, The Runaway Bus, The Quatermass Experience, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Where the Spies Are) for Hammer Studios.

   Though this isn’t the only suspense film made by Hammer in this period, it is closer to the Hitchcockian model than films like Maniac, Sudden Fear, and The Snorkel that all had more shocker and borderline horror elements. It’s very much a psychological suspense film and not a shocker.

   The cast is excellent: Lewis’s well controlled and believably dangerous protagonist; Cilento’s sexy (there is a brief but distant nude scene) and concerned French wife; and Dauphin’s enigmatic Prade, by turns a bit creepy and yet believably solicitous and professional, all hit their marks perfectly. The suspense is genuine and the black and white photography gorgeous and the script intelligent.

   Admittedly the movie runs a little long, and perhaps some of the early scenes before they reach London could be tightened or even eliminated, but overall it’s an effective suspense film that ties what seems like loose ends up in the final moments. What holes there are in the plot are no worse than the ones in most Hitchcock films as far as that goes.

   I don’t want to oversell this, and I am a fan of Thorn, a suspense novelist in the tradition of Winston Graham, but it is a solid entertaining and attractive suspense film done on a decent budget and well handled all around.

MY LEARNED FRIEND. Ealing, 1943. Will Hay, Claude Hulbert, Mervyn Johns, and Ernest Thesiger. Written by Angus MacPhail & John Dighton. Directed by Basil Dearden & Will Hay. Currently streaming on Plex.

   Will Hay — for reasons that escape me — was an enduring star of British stage, screen and airwaves. His observations seem obvious to me, his delivery deliberate, and his timing tortuous. Still, you can’t argue with Success (Or rather, you can, but It won’t listen,) he made a score of well-received films, and I actually enjoyed this one.

   Hay stars as Will Fitch, a former barrister brought up on charges of fraud, who easily gets himself acquitted with a flurry of wheezy old jokes, then invites the flummoxed Crown Prosecutor, fittingly named Claude Babbington, back to his digs for a drink.

   But there they are confronted by a recently released felon gone mad (a delightfully miscast Mervyn Johns, whom you may remember as Bob Cratchit to Alastair Sim’s Scrooge.) who has sworn to kill everyone who had a hand in sending him up, and just wants to give Hay a heads-up you know, because he’s last on the list.

   Duly alarmed, Fitch and Babbington set about trying to thwart the madman by getting to his prospective victims first, following clues he has thoughtfully provided them. All they manage, though, is to arrive late or at the wrong places and get themselves suspected and ultimately hunted by Scotland Yard.

   It’s a tenuous concept for a comedy, but it gets more than its share of laughs, mostly because Babbington, Fitch’s partner in not-solving crimes is played by veteran comic actor Claude Hulbert.

   Hulbert specialized in playing the Silly Ass, and even essayed a turn as Algy Longworth in Bulldog Jack (aka: Alias Bulldog Drummond). Everyone involved had the wisdom to give him free rein here, and he’s simply and completely hilarious, even when the jokes are not. Indeed, he gets a tour de force dance number that he handles with amazing gracefulness (sorry) and split-second timing.

   Friend ultimately devolves into a farcical set-to inside an explosive-laden Big Ben, but by that time I had surrendered to Hulbert’s charm and found myself enjoying this nonsense in spite of myself. You might, too.

INSIDE MAN. Universal Pictures, 2006. Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Kim Director, James Ransone. Director: Spike Lee.

   This is a heist film, but a puzzling one, as the thieves seem more interested in stalling around than they are in negotiating their demands in exchange for the release of their hostages, several dozen of them. In fact it gradually seems clear that the hostages are an integral part of their well-constructed plan: for some unknown reason, they don’t appear to be interested in the money at all.

   Complicating matters for Denzel Washington as the head negotiator for the NYPD is the presence of Jodie Foster as a “fixer” whose client is the aristocratic owner of the bank (well played by aristocratic Christopher Plummer). She has something on the mayor, and that allows her carte blanche to do whatever she pleases with the hostage situation.

   As expected with a Spike Lee production, the camera work is terrific, the actors are superb, the several comic side bits are wonderful, and the story simply didn’t work for me. The thieves (as well as the hostages) are fully masked at all times, and in so doing are essentially anonymous. There is a reason for this, from their point of view. It is part of their plan, but why Clive Owen agreed to be in this picture with his face covered 90 percent of the time is a good question.

   Denzel Washington is, as always, the strong figure in the film, cool and collected, always with a good quip when a good quip is exactly what’s needed. Jodie Foster’s role, on the other hand, simply fizzles out, especially at the end, exactly when a good ending is needed. Not her fault, though.

   The movie did well at the box office, and that’s the bottom line, so you may call me Mr. Grumpy when I point out that no matter how elaborately the thieves’ plan was worked out in advance, it just doesn’t work. I don’t want to give away anything, but the security cameras watching the doors before the thieves break in *were* working, weren’t they?

NOBODY. Universal, 2021. Bob Odenkirk, Alexey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd, Michael Ironside. Director: Ilya Naishuller.

   From all outward appearances, Hutch Mansell is a perfectly ordinary guy with a totally boring life. Up in the morning with his wife and two kids, off to work at  some uninspired factory job, home again, and off to bed. Until, that is, a home invasion initiates a chain of events that has him (and his father, played by Christopher Lloyd) up against a Russian mobster whose only wish is to kill him.

   Not so easily done, though. Mansell is not the wimp his current life says he is. The Russian mobster does not have a fighting chance. Mansell has a past life that’s apparently been a secret for some time, and once the secret’s out, it’s all out Gangbusters.

   Audiences usually enjoy revenge movies – once Mansell’s family is threatened, there’s no stopping him – and this movie is no exception. It’s been quite popular, even with the critics.

   I demur, however. The last rather lengthy scene in which the Russian kingpin and his dozens of minions are utterly wiped off the face of the earth? Lots and lots of firepower in this one. Me, I dozed off. Utterly boring — and yet, I admit, enjoyable enough if you’re into movies like this. Here’s another one.

NEW ORLEANS AFTER DARK. Allied Artists, 1958. Stacy Harris, Louis Sirgo, Ellen Moore. Director: John Sledge.

   According to TV Guide, this sad imitation of Dragnet was based on a television series. It took some searching, but I finally discovered that Stacy Harris was also the lead on an obscure syndicated series called N.O.P.D. so that must be the one but that’s all I know about it.

   This movie version concerns dope traffic coming into New Orleans, and two homicide detective who investigate when two showgirls who use the stuff are bumped off. The motive is not exactly clear, but apparently there is a chance they’ll talk if they’re arrested and forced to go without their regular supply.

   Stacy Harris was a veteran radio star — in fact, he was the leading man on This Is Your FBI for most of its eight years on the air — and while his voice is about twice the size he actually is, he does a decent job, but everyone else in this movie acts as stiff as a board.

   At best, this would be fifth-rate TV. How’d they ever come to make a whole movie of it?

OUTSIDE THE WALL. Universal, 1950.Richard Basehart, Marilyn Maxwell, Signe Hasso, Dorothy Hart, John Hoyt, Joseph Pevney, Lloyd Gough, and Harry Morgan. Written by Henry Edward Helseth and Crane Wilbur. Directed by Crane Wilbur.

   No classic, but it’ll keep you watching.

   Richard Basehart plays Larry Martin, a convict just shy of 30, released after fifteen years in prison (do the math.) At loose ends on the outside, he gets a job in a TB sanitarium. A bit of exposition shows Martin to be tough and savvy, but lacking in social skills and completely at a loss with women — elements that will figure into the plot just ahead.

   About this time Martin sees newspaper headlines about a million-dollar heist of an armored car, the gang decimated in a shoot-out that left only two at large with the loot — and recognizes photos of head-perp Jack Bernard (John Hoyt) from the time he spent in stir. And as plot would have it, a few days later Bernard is admitted to the sanitarium under an assumed name, near death from TB.

   All this time, Martin has been struggling to establish a relationship with his co-workers, passing over pretty and pleasant nurse Celia (Signe Hasso) for greedy blonde Charlotte (Marilyn Maxwell.) When Charlotte lets him know she wants the “finer things” in life, Martin accepts a job offer from the fugitive Bernard.

   It seems Bernard is paying protection to his ex-wife Ann (venomous Dorothy Hart) and needs Martin to deliver it while he’s laid up. Ann only seems interested in how soon Bernard will croak, but it soon develops that she has a few nasty friends (including a sadistic Harry Morgan) who think Martin must be the other survivor of the heist, and their ticket to the hot millions.

   From this point on, Outside the Wall gets agreeably tricky and enjoyably violent. Helseth wrote the novel basis of the classic Cry of the City, and he has a sure feel for dishonor among thieves. He’s not helped at all by Crane Wilbur’s flat-footed direction, and neither are the actors, but Richard Basehart gives out with a neatly-played character — smart and tough among the low-lifes he grew up with, but lost and vulnerable with ordinary folk, and quite unable to cope with the decent woman who wants to save him.

   The result is a film that mostly misses its potential. But it comes close enough to stay with.