Steven Rubio's Online Life

african-american directors series: eleven p.m. (richard maurice, 1928)

A true curio, an historic film, and a perfect fit for Black History Month. Richard D. Maurice was (and is) a little-known figure in early film making who founded a film company in Detroit in 1920. The company's first feature, Nobody's Children, was released that year ... there are no known existing prints. The exact release date of Eleven P.M. is unknown, but it came near the end of the 1920s. Those are the only two feature films known to have been produced by the Maurice Film Company. Maurice went on to become involved in railroad workers unions.

Surviving prints of Eleven P.M. are in poor shape, but it is possible to watch the film today. And it's an oddball, silent, filled with imaginative techniques, narrative complexity, and unexpected turns. One can assume a low budget, as many of the actors play multiple parts. This gets very confusing at times ... Orine Johnson appears to play a key character's girlfriend, the girlfriend's mother (those two appear in the same scene, I'm not so sure about that), and the girlfriend's daughter as a grown woman. So much of the film is confusing, as the story jumps ahead years at a time ... sometimes we see a title card reading "A few days later", other times we're left to infer on our own that years have gone by. Generous film historians have called Maurice's film "experimental", and that's certainly possible. However odd the movie gets, you're regularly reminded that there is some talent behind the camera. But having said that, the final result isn't notably better than cult trash classics by the likes of Ed Wood. The acting is variable (and that's putting it kindly), the plot is incoherent (intended or not), and while it's kinda fun to see the hero reincarnated as a dog who gets revenge on the villain, the effects are painful. It's no surprise when, after barely more than an hour of screen time, everything is wrapped up with "it was all a dream".

Eleven P.M. is worth seeing, although its presence on the Slate New Black Film Canon of the 75 best movies by Black directors says more about the few existing examples of silent Black films than it does about the quality about this film. You can watch the entire picture on YouTube.

comanche station (budd boetticher, 1960)

I'm taking on another challenge. This one is The Criterion Challenge 2025. It's the fifth annual, my first try. "There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories ... between 1/1/25-12/31/25." There is no specified order, so I'll watch them as I get to them. Today's category is North American film.

The final film in the Ranown series of Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott. Criterion released five of them in a box set, and you can see why. These are short pictures, B-movies really, made on low budgets but with plenty of talent behind the camera and the commanding presence of Scott on screen. They work as a group, even if they weren't exactly intended that way ... you could watch Criterion's box and never feel like any particular movie jolted you out of your viewing pleasure. The pleasures are minor, though. These are not grandiose, and the themes, while evident, do not beat you over the head. If you enjoy Westerns, these are like comfort food, a little better than a typical television series but not enough better that you'd notice if you weren't paying attention. I'm talking about the group rather than the movie, because Comanche Station isn't a lot better or a lot worse than the others. Claude Akins does nicely as the heel ... the heels in the Ranown cycle are often fun to watch and not completely evil. The Native Americans are stereotypically bloodthirsty. And Randolph Scott lends his authority, as he does in all the pictures.

i'm not there (todd haynes, 2007)

This is the twentieth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2024-25", a "33-week-long community challenge" where "you must watch one previously unseen film that fits the criteria of the theme for the week." This is the 10th annual challenge, and my sixth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", "2022-23", and 2023-24). Week 20 is called "Different Strokes Week":

The biopic is a more-or-less tried-and-true staple of the movies. The desire to tell the story of intriguing, remarkable, or talented people is understandable. Yet, often, the creativity or uniqueness of these subjects is lazily stretched over the unimaginative framework of The Standard Biopic: birth, struggle, success, downfall, redemption, and death. But extraordinary skill and intriguing lives deserve more than a paint-by-numbers approach. After all, these are people who, for one reason or another, stand out from the crowd, and drafting their stories with a humdrum blueprint is almost insulting. Luckily, not every biopic is so generic.

This week's challenge is to watch a film found on Darren Carver-Balsiger's Unconventional Biopics list. Like most things, some work better than others, but at least the filmmakers thought it worthwhile to honor their chosen subject's real-life story with a deservedly uncommon approach, and that, at least, is worth a couple of hours of our attention.

Now this is my kind of category: a biopic that trashes the idea of biopics. Todd Haynes doesn't make it all up, but he does make it unimportant whether this or that scene "really happened". He doesn't think you explain Bob Dylan that way ... well, I doubt he thinks you can explain Bob Dylan, but you can sniff around the edges, get a deeper feel for the artist than you might have before you saw the film. If there's a flaw in I'm Not There (and I don't know if it should even qualify as a flaw), it's that I imagine it's unintelligible to people who aren't fairly involved in thinking about the Legend of Dylan. The film references many famous moments, but it doesn't often put them into any specific context, and the movie is useless if you are looking for a Wikipedia-style summary of Dylan's career. No, Haynes evokes some of the feelings Dylan inhabits in our collective imagination.

To take the most obvious starting point, there is no character named "Bob Dylan" in this biopic of Bob Dylan. Instead, six very different actors portray Dylan-type characters that roughly correspond to various moments in Dylan's life and career. It's not all that helpful to list them, but here goes. There's Ben Whishaw as "Arthur Rimbaud", a poetically-minded teenager; Marcus Carl Franklin as "Woody Guthrie", an 11-year-old black kid who carries a guitar with a case that reads "this machine kills fascists"; Christian Bale as "Jack Rollins", a folk singer with a career reminiscent of early Dylan; Heath Ledger as "Robbie Clark", an actor who plays Jack Rollins in a biopic; Richard Gere as "Billy the Kid"; and best of all, Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn", who is clearly modeled on the Dylan that went electric. Does it "make sense"? I doubt it, if you don't already have this stuff in your head. But if Dylan's career is part of your own history, then I'm Not There is magical, delightfully so.

And this is best exemplified by Blanchett's performance. She was nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar, and all of her fellow nominees are excellent actors, including eventual winner Tilda Swinton, and it's not like the Academy ignores Blanchett, who already had a Supporting Actress Oscar at the time and who later won a Best Actress award as well, but geez. I don't know that there is a better portrayal of Bob Dylan on film than Cate Blanchett as "Jude Quinn". She is remarkable.

So yes, I think the audience for this movie is fairly narrow. But within those confines, it hits the spot. It exposes A Complete Unknown for the merely good movie it is. #352 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.

the story of temple drake (stephen roberts, 1933)

I'm taking on another challenge. This one is The Criterion Challenge 2025. It's the fifth annual, my first try. "There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories ... between 1/1/25-12/31/25." There is no specified order, so I'll watch them as I get to them. Today's category is Criterion Releases Never Picked in the Closet.

I was surprised to find The Story of Temple Drake to be the kind of film where it's almost more interesting to talk about its surroundings than about the film itself. The most recent one I watched was Dead & Buried ... when I wrote about it, I mentioned the big-but-not-yet famous names behind the scenes, a cast of former TV "stars" and a future horror icon, and finally, after I'd used up my anecdotes, I said a few words about the movie, which wasn't very good.

The Story of Temple Drake has a lot of those "behind the scenes" stories. It's known as a pre-Code film that is in some ways blamed for the ultimate strengthening of the Code ... Temple Drake went so far, Hollywood had to do something. It was based on the Faulkner novel Sanctuary, set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. There are stories that Faulkner wrote it because he knew it would be popular ... I guess he was tired of waiting for the general public to fall in love with As I Lay Dying. Wikipedia has some choice quotes. "Most reviews described the book as horrific and said that Faulkner was a very talented writer. Some critics also felt that he should write something pleasant for a change.... Faulkner once headed a troop of Boy Scouts but the administrators removed him from his position after the release of the book." There was rape with a corncob, syphilis, impotence, prostitution, and lots of extreme drinking during Prohibition. The book was a hit, and so the idea was proposed that it be turned into a movie. Yeah, right. Cartwheels were turned to stuff the events of the novel into acceptable form, but even then, The Story of Temple Drake was scandalous ... popular, but scandalous. George Raft had been offered the male lead, a gangster, but he turned it down because even George Raft worried his career would be ruined if he played such a worthless character (the part was taken by Jack La Rue).

And here is where the film enters history. With the final tightening of the Code, any pre-Code movie with "unacceptable" scenes would have those scenes edited out before the movie could be re-released. Often, the parts that were edited out were destroyed by the studios, leaving lots of mangled pictures for future film historians. But The Story of Temple Drake was so beyond what was allowed that editing out one scene was never going to be enough. So no editing was done, it just was never re-released. The movie essentially disappeared, for almost 80 years. But when the Code was long gone, lo and behold, there was Temple Drake, unmangled. So the version we see today is the correct one.

Usually with movies like this, I end by pointing out the film is poor. But in fact, The Story of Temple Drake is excellent. Miriam Hopkins is at her 30s best in the title role, and La Rue is marvelously scary. The use of close ups was extensive and added to the terrifying nature of what we were seeing. There were some fine films from Hollywood in 1933, and Temple Drake stands with them, perhaps best-paired in a double-bill with Design for Living, which also starred Hopkins. What a delight to finally encounter this film.

music friday: marianne faithfull

We saw her a couple of times in the early-80s ... as I said elsewhere today, "She looked like she sounded, a tough cookie who'd been to a few too many rodeos. She radiated star power." For people of our age, she was an icon, and then she was an icon for a second time.

In 1978, the Rolling Stones released Some Girls, their last great album. In 1979, Marianne Faithfull released Broken English. I thought at the time there was delicious irony in the fact that, even then, I knew the Stones would never again release an album as good as the one Marianne had just put out there. I was right.