What We’re Watching – February 2024

This February, we have been viewing a number of lesser-seen films. You can read below our thoughts on a trio of films that we recommend for their ingenuity, memorability, and sheer oddity.

The Pirate (1948)

At this point in her career, Judy Garland wanted to break way from the doe-eyed ingenues that she had been famous for almost a decade now. Or at least that is the common wisdom. Garland herself seemed to underestimate her abilities to evoke strong emotions such as in Meet Me in St. Louis. And The Pirate would not be the vehicle for her to show off her skill for verbal pitter-patter Garland plays the sheltered Manuela Alva, who is betrothed to the town mayor Don Pedro, a much older, imperious man. She dreams of escaping the island she lives on and having adventures with the pirate Macoco. Gene Kelly plays Serafin, the leader of a traveling troupe of players who is so captivated by Manuela that he pretends to be the pirate Macoco, posing as a traveling player.

Hijinks a la “The Comedy of Errors” ensue, and much of it is extremely silly. Garland takes a bit of a backseat to Kelly partly because of her struggles with her health, a combination of years of overwork and postpartum depression. As serious and draconian a taskmaster as Kelly was behind the scenes, he is really in his element as playing a supreme goof. His opening number where he woos nearly every woman in town culminates in an extraordinary scene where he swallows a still-lit cigarette and then spits it back out while he’s dancing. Vincente Minnelli’s eye for theatrical spectacle strikes the right tone of absurdity in his compositions by not shying away from the stagey nature of most of the film’s scenes. And Judy Garland still gets her memorable moments, including one of the most frenzied and comical fits of anger to ever be captured on screen. The Pirate ended up being a box-office disappointment, but it is still a delight to watch. – Eugene Kang

Top of the Heap (1972)

Christopher St. John‘s Top of the Heap shows that the genre picture (here “Blaxploitation”) and avant-garde sensibilities could exist in a complex gray space. St. John plays George Lattimer, a disgruntled police officer who faces not just racism and prejudice in his job, but also the hatred of Black civilians who dismiss him as a “pig,” including his own family. We follow him as he reacts violently to real and imagined slights (a scene where he apprehends a White mugger has the criminal at first expressing fear and then, in an ambiguous cut, angrily yelling a racist slur).

More surreally, he imagines himself as an astronaut as a means of disassociating with his miserable reality, but even in these daydreams, he cannot escape the toxicity that plagues him in his regular life. Top of the Heap is full of piss and vinegar but is not without humor and some humanity. There is real pathos and tragedy when Lattimer confronts how much he has failed as a husband and a father, especially as his daughter turns to drugs and sex. It is an unfortunate injustice that St. John has never followed up his directorial debut due to lack of interest stemming from racism and the other usual suspects that tend to plague BIPOC directors. Top of the Heap is uneven and could have used someone with more experience in the directing chair, but St. John would never really get the chance to refine his art. – Eugene Kang

I Saw the Devil (2010)

South Korea produces some of the most bleak horror films. Films like Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing and Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil deviate from most mainstream horror in that there is nothing of positivity or of hope to observe in watching these films. Violence in these films is no spectacle or portrayed for theatrical entertainment – it is instead something to be repulsed by. 

I Saw the Devil revolves around a revenge story. Serial killer Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) has taken his next victim in Jang Joo-yun (Oh San-ha). Joo-yun’s fiancé Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun) is a National Intelligence Service agent, and is more than equipped to pursue the killer and have his revenge. For the hideousness of Kyung-chul’s murders and mannerisms, Soo-hyun believes that simply killing Kyung-chul is too light a sentence. Throughout I Saw the Devil, Soo-hyun and Kyung-chul are locked in a game of cat and mouse, and it’s with horrendous consequences for those who cross paths with Kyung-chul and for Soo-hyun as he becomes more and more twisted in his means of enacting justice. Once the authorities become involved with Soo-hyun’s chase, it’s clear to Soo-hyun that this cannot carry on much longer. I Saw the Devil builds to a horrifying conclusion and, like The Wailing, surviving comes with an almost unbearable burden. – Alex Sitaras