8 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
EVERETT
A romantic melodrama of gender ambiguity that swerves into screwball
comedy and back, “Sylvia Scarlett,” from 1935, is among the most boldly
idiosyncratic films of Hollywood’s studio era. (It’s on TCM on Aug. 16 and
available to stream.) Katharine Hepburn, who’d already won an Oscar for
Best Actress, plays a young Englishwoman who disguises herself as a boy to
sneak her embezzler father (Edmund Gwenn) from Marseille to London,
provoking the flirtations of both women and men. Cary Grant, not yet a
star, plays an English grifter who teams up with them to launch a new life of
crime and romance—and a new sideline, show business. The movie’s direc-
tor, George Cukor, sets the group’s sordid schemes awhirl with giddy revelry
and unveils the grim realities of scuffling troupers—along with the desires
and frustrations that put the whole machine in motion. The daring film
flopped, and Hepburn’s career recovered only in 1940, via another collab-
oration with Grant and Cukor: “The Philadelphia Story.”—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
1
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-townin that Hockney is on camera for much of the
time, joined by friends and comrades from the
art world—supporting players from the early
nineteen-seventies, such as the fashion design-
ers Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, a married
couple. We also see Hockney at work on “Por-
trait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),”
which features his lover Peter Schlesinger.
On the other hand, many scenes, though un-
scripted, are clearly set up, and Hazan thinks
nothing of cutting away to passages of fantasy,
some of them erotically charged. By means of
suggestive editing, plus a potent score by Pat-
rick Gowers, Hazan makes us feel that we are
watching a mystery. Naturally, no solution is
provided.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue
of 6/24/19.) (Streaming on Amazon.)An Easy Girl
The plot of Rebecca Zlotowski’s passionate and
finely observed drama is bracingly spare: at the
end of the school year, Naïma (Mina Farid), a
sixteen-year-old girl in Cannes whose mother
works in a hotel kitchen, is visited by Sofia
(Zahia Dehar), her twenty-two-year-old Pa-
risian cousin who’s living in the fast lane and
making money with no obvious form of work.
Sofia befriends a pair of high-finance yachtsmen(Nuno Lopes and Benoît Magimel), and, for
about ten days, Naïma follows her into their
high-society orbit, savoring its comforts and
thrilling to its temptations—and then Naïma
returns to her ordinary life. From this simple
premise, Zlotowski develops a complex array of
dramatic subtleties and psychological nuances
and, with poised yet urgent images that stay
close to Naïma, evokes the character’s conflict-
ing impulses and shifting ideas. Against the
backdrop of Naïma’s regular life—including her
friendship with a gay classmate who’s an aspiring
actor (Lakdhar Dridi)—her partly perceptive
and partly bewildered view of the rich and the
powerful emerges as a crucial apprenticeship in
the ways of the world. In French.—R.B. (Stream-
ing on Netflix.)King: A Filmed Record...
Montgomery to Memphis
This 1970 documentary, produced by Ely Lan-
dau, conveys grief and bewilderment at the loss
of the political and moral leadership of Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr. Running more than three
hours, it’s composed almost entirely of archival
film clips of King’s work with the civil-rights
movement, detailing the visionary strategies,
the galvanizing passion, and the agonies of
the bus boycott in Montgomery, the Freedom
Rides to integrate interstate transit, and the
drive for voting rights that led from Selma to
Montgomery. The March on Washington cul-
minates in the entire sixteen minutes of King’s
historic speech. The movie also emphasizes
the wide range of his activism, including his
opposition to the Vietnam War and his battles
against economic injustice. An extended set of
clips from 1966 show King leading a march in
Chicago for equal access to housing, in the face
of a violent counterdemonstration by thousands
of white residents—some brandishing “White
Power” signs, Confederate flags, and swastikas.
It’s a reminder that the movement’s scope was
not only Southern but also national—and that
its struggle continues.—R.B. (Streaming on
Kino Now, Amazon, Kanopy, and other services.)Silver Lode
This understatedly lucid 1954 Western, di-
rected by Allan Dwan, is one of the greatest.
A U.S. marshal, Fred McCarty (Dan Duryea),
interrupts a wedding to arrest the bridegroom,
the rancher Dan Ballard (John Payne), for the
murder of McCarty’s brother. Though Ballard
claims innocence, the mob turns against him
and the bodies start piling up. In this McCar-
thy-era allegory, Dwan bares the community’s
social structure, linking courthouse and whore-
house; a climactic battle in the telegraph office
traces the town’s very survival to the power of
modern communications. The camera (thanks
to John Alton’s cinematography) traverses the
town’s length and breadth in a thrillingly re-
lentless tracking shot, and depicts in jagged
diagonals the trust-rending violence that cuts
through it. Dwan hazards a sardonic deploy-
ment of the American flag, and devises bell-
tower symbolism to rival that of “Vertigo”; in
his calmly furious view, the town’s sweet order
spins into chaos from fear of disorder.—R.B.
(Streaming on Amazon Prime.)of much more acerbic pieces in The New Yorker
by Simon Rich (who wrote the script). Seth
Rogen plays Herschel Greenbaum, a thirtyish
Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who,
in 1920, falls into a vat of pickles in a Brooklyn
factory where he works—and, a hundred years
later, he emerges intact and vigorous. After an
initial burst of publicity, Herschel is soon united
with his only surviving descendant, his identical
great-grandson, Ben Greenbaum (also Rogen), a
lonely and awkward app developer in Brooklyn,
whose life he promptly ruins. Herschel—relying
on his long-ago work experience—becomes an
artisanal-pickle vender and then an Internet
celebrity who must face the risks of fame while
confronting Ben’s enmity. Unfortunately, the di-
rector, Brandon Trost, exhausts most of the fun
in the exposition; the effortful satirical flashes
of sociopolitical relevance yield a paean to tra-
dition and family and reduce the clever clash
of history and modernity to clichés.—Richard
Brody (Streaming on HBO Max.)
A Bigger Splash
Jack Hazan’s film about the painter David
Hockney is forty-six years old, but in this new
restoration it looks as bright and unabashed
as ever. Does it count as a documentary? Yes,