Melissa Kaercher

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

Windy’s Pick of the Week: McLintock!

Pairing up John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara (of The Silent Man) but this time in a comedy western! John and Maureen are older now, but the chemistry is still there. It’s easy to believe that they just moved their squabbling love affair from Ireland to the American West somewhere. From the IMDB: “Cattle baron George Washington McLintock fights his wife, his daughter, and political land-grabbers, finally ‘taming’ them all in this Western comedy with Taming of the Shrew overtones.” This is another entry in the category of “movies Mom made me watch” and the selling point is definitely the Mud Slide sequence.

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: Caged

I’ve name-dropped this film during a few episodes of Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome and I’ve written about it at length on my personal web site, but it’s great enough to suggest again. This 1950 film is a drama about life in a women’s prison. Not only does the film feature a nearly all-female cast, it was also written by a woman who spent time inside women’s prisons as a journalist. (She also wrote White Heat, one of the greatest gangster flicks ever.) The movie is very odd for its time, in that it does not shirk away from subjects that were often scrubbed from films by the Hays Code: out-of-wedlock pregnancies, prostitution, murder, and various critiques of the patriarchy. The characters spend their time behind bars smoking, fighting, plotting revenge, dreaming, and making deals, and you can tell the actresses are relishing every minute of it.

Every Monday, each of us will suggest a film that we feel too few people have seen.

Melissa’s Pick of the Week: Take Shelter

I’m sad we didn’t talk about this film during our mental illness episode, because it is one of the more remarkably executed films about mental illness created in recent years. Michael Shannon, in one of the best performances I’ve ever seen him give, plays a blue-collar family man who starts having visions of apocalyptic storms. The film is carefully crafted so we, the viewers, are placed inside the character’s perspective, and the film plays coy with whether what we see onscreen is the truth or not. The film wraps us up in the sheer scale of these visions and the fear they bring. It also treats the characters with great sympathy and intelligence. If you like your thrillers with a dose of psychological drama, this is the film for you.

Windy’s Pick of the Week: Liza with a Z

This is not technically a movie, but the only way you can watch it is on DVD, so – that counts, right? This is a video of a live television broadcast from 1972. For those of you who aren’t huge Liza fans (which I get – she’s a distinctive stage presence), you should still give this one a shot as it was produced, choreographed, and directed by Bob Fosse – and his style is ALLLLL over it. Featuring many songs by Kander and Ebb (of Chicago and Cabaret), it’s a delightful musical revue that shows off just what a craftsman Fosse was. (This was also the year that Fosse won a Tony for Pippin on Broadway, an Oscar for the film Cabaret, and an Emmy for directing this.)