Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

This is pretty rare: a movie that was highly esteemed when new, both at home and overseas, but did so poorly at the box office that the production company folded. I don't recall how it got my attention, but it did receive a Best Actress Oscar nod, losing to Mary Poppins. Well, at least Julie Andrews didn't have to fake a British accent.

In London, alleged medium Myra Savage (Kim Stanley) badly wants money, which doesn't come easily when husband Billy (Richard Attenborough) is too asthmatic to hold a job. She persuades Billy to kidnap Amanda Clayton (Judith Donner), preteen daughter of aristocrats. Instead of the typical scheme of simply pocketing ransom money, Myra plans to fake a séance to determine where to find Amanda, hoping to gain renown and thus so much business that she can pay back the "borrowed" ransom. Charles Clayton (Mark Eden) doesn't believe in her powers, but his wife (Nanette Newman) does, and Charles has to admit that no other method is making headway.

The Harder They Fall (2021)

I would not have thought to see this if my friend hadn't asked to while visiting. I'm not sure I'd even heard about it before, despite a few familiar names involved (he knew the cast better). Some rating sites score it highly; others deem it fair to middling. At worst, we could enjoy snarking together, but we both hoped it wouldn't come to that primarily.

On-screen text warns up front that the story is fictitious, but the main characters -- seven of them, at least -- are not. The lead is Nat Love (Jonathan Majors), a late-19th-century outlaw who makes a point to target fellow outlaws, as by robbing robbers. Marshal Bass Reeves (Delroy Lindo) ostensibly arrests him but means to enlist his help against a mutual foe: Rufus Buck (Idris Elba), who had killed Nat's parents in front of preteen Nat and carved a cross on his forehead. Buck has just been released, and while his intentions for the town of Redwood might be honorable, he will stop at nothing to acquire the money to fix it up, even at the citizens' expense.

Sands of Iwo Jima (1949)

OK, so I got a head start on my war movie viewing for Memorial Day. This one may have caught my attention because of John Wayne getting an Oscar nod for it when he thought his She Wore a Yellow Ribbon performance worthier. As it is, some viewers think SoIJ is great, and some think Wayne is the only great thing about it. I'm sure four years after World War II wasn't great timing for public interest either.

The story begins with some U.S. Marines arriving in New Zealand in 1943. Sgt. John Stryker (Wayne) strikes me as a typical harsh sarge, but his men deem him unusually so. Most personally hostile to him are PFC Pete Conway (John Agar), son of a colonel whom Stryker liked but who wasn't a kind father, so Conway tars Stryker by association; and PFC Al Thomas (Forrest Tucker), on whom Stryker had snitched in the past. As a former sergeant major with a drinking problem, Stryker doesn't have the cleanest record himself. Nevertheless, his overall approach gradually wins the men's admiration, starting with the Battle of Tarawa. And you can guess the climactic setting.

Christ in Concrete/Give Us This Day/Salt to the Devil (1949)

Yes, it's all one picture. The first title, used by Netflix, is from the adapted novel, but that wasn't allowed in UK theaters. The second appears on screen in the edition I watched, but with the blacklisting of director Edward Dmytryk, it was interpreted as anti-Christian, hence the third stab, which didn't really help. Perhaps it's just as well not to use the original title, because from what I read, the film ends about where the book begins.

In the 1920s, Geremio (Sam Wanamaker) lies about owning a home in order to persuade Annunziata (Lea Padovani) to move from Italy to Brooklyn and marry him. They still hope to scrimp and save for one, thanks to a generous realtor (Karel Stepanek), even as their apartment-dwelling family gets bigger. They almost make it before Black Friday. After that, Geremio and his buddies in the bricklaying business get desperate enough to take on a low-safety demolition project....

Conan the Barbarian (1982)

This is one of those movies I watched for education more than entertainment. It still gets cited now and then, particularly for a handful of quotable lines, but I was warned that it could really use a best-of cut. If it weren't streaming, I probably wouldn't have bothered checking it out.

In an unspecified land and century evocative of early medieval Europe, young Conan (then Jorge Sanz) sees the army of Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones) slaughter all the adults in his village and sell the children into slavery. Between manual labor, pit matches, and oriental training, Conan becomes quite the brawny fighter (now Arnold Schwarzenegger in his star-making role) before his voluntary release. He allies himself with two thieves, archer Subotai (Gerry Lopez) and fellow swordmaster Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), in his quest for vengeance. But Doom is worse than a mere warlord; he leads a snake-themed cult whose adherents readily kill themselves at his bidding, even tho he himself is reportedly more than a millennium old.

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

On a whim, I decided to watch something playing at the AFI Silver Theater today. This French oldie was playing at a convenient time for me. That's right: 5 p.m. Since it showed only once today, I can only assume someone chose the slot on purpose.

Cléo (Corinne Marchand) is a fairly successful singer, albeit not widely recognized on the street. Expecting to take an exam for a potential cancer diagnosis soon, she visits a tarot reader (Loye Payen), whose verdict is unpromising. Convinced of her own doom, Cléo spends most of the film trying to come to grips with it or take her mind off it while doing various things with other people in the city before seeing the doctor (Robert Postec).