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Beatriz at Dinner, which opened theatrically in June, was one of the most heavily promoted independent films of the year. The hilarious trailer made it seem like a modern-day version of Ruggles of Red Gap in which an English butler teaches a bunch of rubes what it means to be an American. Through much of the film, Salma Hayek’s holistic medicine practitioner is Ruggles infused with the old soul of Mrs. Moore from A Passage to India. John Lithgow’s money grubbing real estate mogul is no match for her wrath, just as she is no match for his cruelty. So far, so good. The film begins to feel like something of a minor masterpiece, but then begins to pile on too much political angst for its own good.

The film opens with Hayek’s character grieving for her pet goat, murdered by the man next door in her downtrodden L.A. neighborhood. Undaunted, she spends the day massaging cancer patients, some who will be cured, some who will soon die. Then she drives to swanky Newport Beach to give a private session to the mother of a former patient. It’s late and her old car won’t start. She’s invited to dinner by the patient (Connie Britton). The guests include Lithgow and his third wife, an up-and-coming state legislator and his wife (Chloe Sevigny), and Britton’s husband (Mark Duplass). The wordplay between the guests has an edge to it, but remains largely civil until Lithgow brags about his illegal game-hunting in Africa in which he killed a rhinoceros. This is the point at which the film begins to go downhill as Hayek equates Lithgow with the man who killed her goat as well as the real estate mogul who destroyed her hometown in Mexico years before. There will be no more clever lines, no more comedy. From here to the end of the film it’s all downhill for poor Hayek.

See it for Hayek’s career best performance and Lithgow’s best big screen role in decades, but don’t expect the laugh fest that the trailer has led to believe it will be.

Beatriz at Dinner is available on standard DVD only.

Also, still only available on standard DVD, are several Katharine Hepburn films rereleased by Warner Archive in commemoration of the 110th anniversary of her birth. Among them are 1933’s Morning Glory, for which she won her first Oscar; 1944’s Dragon Seed in which she played a Chinese peasant; 1945’s Without Love, the least known of her comedies opposite Spencer Tracy; and 1979’s made-for-TV The Corn Is Green in which she was directed by George Cukor for the last time.

Morning Glory is a badly dated, poorly edited film about a supposedly charming aspiring actress, Hepburn at her most arch in the early scenes in which she beguiles producer Adolphe Menjou, playwright Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and veteran actor C. Aubrey Smith. After this initial scene, the film jumps to a party at Menjou’s house after Hepburn has apparently been given her chance at Broadway fame and failed. At the party, however, she does Hamlet‘s soliloquy and the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and is given a second chance at stardom. Hepburn was much better in the same year’s Little Women for which she should have won her first Oscar. She would do much better as an aspiring actress in 1937’s superior Stage Door.

Dragon Seed was made at a time when it was routine for Caucasian actors to play Asians on screen. Seven years earlier, Luise Rainer had won her second Oscar for playing a Chinese wife and mother in the film version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, so why couldn’t Hepburn do the same with the film version of Ms. Buck’s Dragon Seed? It’s because unlike Rainer and both Warner Oland and Sidney Toler, character actors who found late-life stardom as Charlie Chan, Hepburn makes no attempt at playing Chinese. She’s Hepburn in slant-eyed makeup and nothing more. It’s a really bad performance, one of the worst of her career. The film, itself, is saved from being a total trainwreck, however, by the performances of Walter Huston and Aline MacMahon as her in-laws, with MacMahon receiving the only Oscar nomination of her long career for her efforts.

Without Love is based on a play by Phillip Barry who created two of Hepburn’s strongest characters in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. The emphasis here, however, is on Spencer Tracy’s scientist who forms a marriage of convenience with Hepburn, a rich widow who rents him her house in wartime Washington, D.C. The two eventually fall in love with the aid of Lucille Ball, Keenan Wynn, and Patricia Morison. This is no Woman of the Year or Adam’s Rib, but it has its moments thanks to the two legendary stars in their third of nine collaborations.

The Corn Is Green was Ethel Barrymore’s last Broadway triumph before she embarked on her Hollywood career at the age of 65. Bette Davis played the role of the dedicated schoolteacher who mentors an exceptional Welsh coal miner in the 1945 film version, but at 38 she was a bit young for the part. Hepburn, at 72, may have been a bit long in the tooth, but she is still mesmerizing under the guidance of 80-year-old George Cukor directing her for the tenth and final time [in the 1979 version].

Sony’s 30th Anniversary Blu-ray of 1987’s Suspect is a bare-bones but welcome reminder of what an excellent film this was.

If Cher hadn’t won an Oscar for Moonstruck, in theatres two months after Suspect, she might well have been nominated for this thriller in which she plays a Washington, D.C. Public Defender who is assigned the case of a homeless deaf-mute (Liam Neeson) accused of murdering a young State Dept. worker. The girl, it turns out, was working on assignment to a Supreme Court Justice who committed suicide a week before Christmas. The two deaths are obviously connected.

Dennis Quaid, who had a major success with The Big Easy earlier in the year in which he played a New Orleans homicide detective, plays a congressional lobbyist who is assigned jury duty on her case. He and Cher break all kinds of ethical boundaries as he becomes involved both with her and in solving the murder. John Mahoney is the strict judge assigned to the case and Philip Bosco is a senior State Dept. official who may have some involvement in the murder. The film is top drawer suspense that keeps you guessing up to the highly effective conclusion.

Classic Flix has released a striking new Blu-ray of 1957’s Crime of Passion, an underrated film noir at the end of the cycle of such films, starring Barbara Stanwyck at her most cunning and manipulative since Double Indemnity. Here she is playing the pushy wife of homicide detective Sterling Hayden (fresh from The Killing) who will stop at nothing to help advance his career, including murder. A pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr co-stars as Hayden’s boss and Fay Wray (King Kong) turns in a lovely performance as Burr’s anxious wife.

This week’s new releases include The Big Sick and Hero.

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