The James Bond Cocktail Hour rings in the new year with a throwback review to 1968's spy-fi opus Danger Diabolik!
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Sunday, 25 January 2026
Friday, 9 January 2026
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
When world-famous thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) turns his sights on wealthy heiress Marietta Colet (Kay Francis), he finds himself in a trap no policeman could have devised: a love triangle with the M. Colet and his lover and fellow crook Lily Vautier (Miriam Hopkins).
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- "I know all your tricks."
- "And you're going to fall for them."
- "So you think you can get me?"
- "Any minute I want."
- "You're conceited."
- "But attractive."
- "Now let me say..."
- "Shut up. Kiss me."
Man, no matter how many times I watch it, Trouble in Paradise always sweeps me up.
Taking place in a magical world where characters are judged not by their desires but by whether they are willing to hide them, the film is often held up as one of the final and best examples of sexual frankness in pre-Code Hollywood.
And no one was better at discussing sex than Ernst Lubitsch.
I recently re-read Scott Eyman's biography of the filmmaker and it spurred me to re-watch Trouble.
I first watched the movie about 15 years ago. I was in the middle of post-graduate studies, and I was taking a paper on depictions of love.
From memory I think I also wrote about The Lady Eve.
The world of the film is a game.
And the game is sex.
The film’s tone is unsentimental.
I always take a certain melancholy from the film.
The world the characters live in is a sham. They take pleasure from it, but they do not take it for granted. They know the money and jewels can pass, that they can always get more.
The melancholy also comes from the knowledge that this type of movie was on the way out.
Our antiheroes get away with it, almost providing a coda to the pre-Code era.
Kay Francis, a favourite on this blog, plays the besotted tycoon with a preening confidence that never comes across as conceited and arrogant.
As the thief who steals her heart, Herbert Marshall is all unflappable charm. As the third piece of the central love triangle, Miriam Hopkins is his opposite - a spinning ball of energy who could bring their whole caper down.
Apparently some of the onscreen chemistry was the result of offscreen shenanigans - the very married Marshall had affairs with both of his co-stars.
It is a testament to how sly this film is that the central romantic triangle does not go a predictable route - Marshall and Francis May bid farewell but there is no sense of regret to their parting, only a savouring of what they shared.
Filled with wonderful moments of visual storytelling (the use of a gondola ornament is a brilliant take on the eureka moment), and wordplay (“You see, Francois, marriage is a beautiful mistake which two people make together. But with you, Francois, I think it would be a mistake”), Trouble in Paradise comes off as a miracle of imagination and understatement.
I always come away enraptured, and also dumbfounded at the ease with which it handles every element. It is the work of a cinematic magician, one of the best to ever do it.
A masterpiece.
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Thursday, 8 January 2026
OUT NOW: The Housemaid (Paul Feig, 2025)
After she is hired as the in-home hep for a wealthy family, Millie (Sydney Sweeney) realises the family is not picture perfect. But she is holding her own secrets which make leaving almost impossible…
Why do I not gel with Paul Feig?
When he made comedies, I was all in.
When he pivoted to thrillers with A Simple Favour, I thought it felt a little anodyne.
The Housemaid is the type of movie I gravitate to: an erotic thriller with sexy people doing terrible things to each other.
The movie certainly builds up a certain level of tension, but it is never that sexy.
I have been struggling to work out why and I think it is a combination of certain things: firstly, none of the actors have any real chemistry. The other element is shooting on digital. There is an inherent coldness to shooting on digital that removes any sense of eroticism. I think Fincher has figured out how to utilise it, in films like Gone Girl, and even The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but no-one else.
It does not help that the primary setting - the Winchester’s mansion, feels like a model home. There is a point behind the aesthetic, but at no point does it feel like this is a space where people live.
In the lead, Sweeney is a blank. There is some intentionality to this, but in the early running, when the character is dealing with the family’s increasingly disturbing dynamics, she never convinces as someone who is trying to hold onto her job. The character is in severe economic hardship, but you never get to one stakes coming from Sweeney’s performance.
The film wants to be about doubling, by casting Sweeney opposite Amanda Seyfried, an actress who you could describe as fitting the same archetype of a curvy blonde. But the film becomes about another kind of doubling - Hollywood’s double standard in casting actresses to film similar roles.
I could not stop comparing Seyfried’s performance to Sweeney, and how the film would have probably worked more successfully with Seyfried in Sweeney’s role.
I kept thinking about her role as an ambiguous femme fatale in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe - not a good movie, but Seyfried works so well as a young woman who appears to be both in over her head yet still unreadable.
It is not a perfect one-to-one of roles, but I spent the movie thinking about this mirror version.
I hope the movie’s success leads to more genre movies like this that are made for adults. I just do not think this is a particularly good one.
Related
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
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Wednesday, 7 January 2026
The Thin Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1934)
Happily retired and married to wealthy Norah (Myrna Loy), former detective Nick Charles (William Powell) finds himself unwillingly drawn into a new case he has already refused. Where Nick is against going back to work, Norah is excited at the prospect of solving a mystery with her husband.
What a joy.
I had been meaning to check out the Thin Man series for years but it was not until I read Rob Kozlowski's biography of stars Powell and Loy, Becoming Nick & Nora, that I finally took the plunge.
I repeat - what a joy.
Chemistry is one of those magical things that is almost impossible to describe. The mysterious charge of two actors working together, creating a symbiosis that is so intensely watchable, it feels like you are watching something completely alive and real.
Powell and Loy are absolutely dynamite together.
Like most great detecctive films, the actual mystery is completely superfluous - a catalyst to get our heroes into action.
Our heroes do not have any conflict between them: they each enjoy a drink, there are no fears of infidelity (one mistaken embrace just leads to our heroes mugging at each other), and the case’s pressures do not lead them to question their devotion).
The only real friction is Nick’s (relative) disinterest in working, and Norah’s enthusiasm for a caper. Even the threat of death only gets her more excited.
One gets the sense Norah has been so embedded in la dolce vita it takes the danger and unknowns of a murder mystery to get her juices flowing.
A sparkling soufflé of a movie, The Thin Man would prove to be so popular it would lead to multiple sequels, and cement William Powell and Myrna Loy as a cinematic team.
Related
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
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If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!
Pretty in Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986)
Andie (Molly Ringwald) is in her final year of high school. She lives her father who is unemployed and depressed over his wife's abandonment of the family.
After attracting the attention of wealthy kid Blane (Andrew McCarthy), Andie finds herself in the crosshairs of Steff (James Spader), Blane's best friend, who is determined to undermine her unintended shaking of the school's hierarchy.
This new relationship is also driving a wedge between Andie and Duckie, who has pined in secret for her for years.
Looking back over the blog last year, I found I was falling into a familiar groove of focusing almost completely on action and action-adjacent movies. Compared with previous years, last year felt like I was just treading water, with little experimentation or curiosity.
For 2026, I am making a concerted effort to expand the blog’s horizons and stretch some muscles I have ignored.
I was introduced to John Hughes movies as a teenager.
I had seen plenty of his nineties fare by then - the juggernaut of the Home Alones, along with Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Uncle Buck and Christmas Vacation were familiar staples - but I only became aware of him as a creative force at high school.
My media studies teacher ran a course based around teen movies from the fifties on, and one of the films we watched was The Breakfast Club. I liked the movie but the biggest thing I took away was a massive crush on Ally Sheedy’s Alison.
I watched Some Kind of Wonderful a few years later, and once again, I liked the movie a lot (I also came away with a big crush on Mary Stuart Masterson’s Watts).
Watching Some Kind of Wonderful before Pretty In Pink was probably a bad idea - I was aware of the changes made to the latter’s ending, and how Hughes' regrets over the reshoots inspired Some Kind of Wonderful.
Having that awareness made Pretty In Pink feel like a first draft. And who wants to watch the first draft of something that was improved later?
What utter rubbish.
Even watching the movie through the lens of its successor, Pretty In Pink has plenty to recommend it.
In the lead, Molly Ringwald is terrific - she grounds the movie with a fierce sense of integrity. She encapsulates the Hughes protagonist - a smart teenager who is still wracked with self-doubt - but balances this with a flinty sense of independence. Andie has had to group fast to help her family, and RIngwald never loses sight of that.
As her would-be beau, McCarthy is a bit of a blank slate - it kind of works for the character, since Andie and everyone else seems to project their assumptions onto him. This is a theme that Some Kind of Wonderful would pick up and run with in the arc of Lea Thompsons' Amanda Jones.
Aside from Ringwald, the film's standout is James Spader. Coolly sauntering through the movie with half-lidded eyes, he is a genuinely loathsome super-villain. His disdain for Andie is completely class-coded, and coloured by jealousy: She previously rejected his advances, and he cannot stand that his status means nothing with her.
I found Cryer grating. I could not see Andie being won over by his antics. Considering the changes to the ending, I wonder if the filmmakers re-edited the rest of the film with footage of Duckie that diminished him as a potential romantic rival for Blane.
I will say the one scene with him that works is when Andie arrives at the dance and finds Duckie waiting to escort her inside. It is a lovely scene, and a moment of redemption for Duckie that ultimately gets sidelined for the traditional romantic finale.
I was so won over by the movie, once Blane and Andie get together, I completely checked out.
One sad realisation I had while watching the movie was realising how class-conscious it is - and how this has almost completely disappeared from mainstream Hollywood movies.
I am not talking about some deep critique of Western or US capitalism: I mean characters who have real concerns about money and how they are going to make it day to day.
It informs everything: Andie’s thoughts about her future and her father, the conflict between the popular kids and the outsiders, and Andie’s conflicts with Blane.
While the movie is realistic about the importance of money to solve problems, it does not see the accumulation of wealth as a virtue: Andie is worried if dating Blane could make her superficial.
Aside from Sinners, which is set during the Great Depression, I am struggling to remember a mainstream movie where class and economic concerns were a part of the diegesis.
A fine showcase for Ringwald, Pretty In Pink may fumble the ending, but it is definitely worth a watch.
If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour.
You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!
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