Tod Browning's "The Devil-Doll" (1936)

The diminuative thief/killer Lachna (Grace Ford) is the focal point of a scene from Browning's "The Devil-Doll," which features a bravura Lionel Barrymore

As part of its month-long lead up to Halloween, Turner Classics is screening Tod Browning's sublime 1936 trick, "The Devil-Doll," Saturday morning (October 17) at 7:30 (est). It was his next-to-last movie (his final was "Miracles for Sale" in 1939) but he isn't credited on screen for directing it. There is no directorial credit, in fact.

It is billed only as "A Tod Browning Production"...

Browning conferring on the film's set with star Lionel Barrymore in disguise as Madame Mandelip

Anyway, if you haven't seen it, by all means, watch it. You're in for a treat. If you're familiar with the movie, you might want to pay attention to the material's skeletal similarity to the "Sweeney Todd" legend which was the basis for the acerbic Stephen Sondheim stage musical and the subsequent (and impressively faithful) 2007 Tim Burton film adaptation.

Lionel Barrymore is absolutely masterful as Paul Lavond, a respected Paris banker who, like Sweeney Todd's barber, was set up for a crime he didn't commit and is obsessed with exacting bloody revenge.

Framed for robbery and murder by three of his partners, Paul is sent to Devil's Island from which, after 17 years, he escapes.

He goes on the lam with a fellow escapee, Marcel (Henry B. Walthall), an ailing scientist who has perfected a method to reduce the size of living creatures, humans included. Consumed with revenge, Paul teams up with with Marcel's very creepy and possibly deranged widow, Malita (an entirely memorable, scene-stealing Rafaela Ottiano in the partner-in-crime Mrs. Lovett role), after the scientist dies.

They reduce the young servant girl Lachna (Grace Ford), whose memory is erased in the process, and dispatch her to carry out Paul's deadly deeds. As a doll, she remains inanimate until Paul, using hypnotic thought, instructs her to steal the jewelry of the wife of one of Paul's old associates, paralyzing the associate for good measure. Her first job.

Also, like Sweeney, Paul has a grown daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan) on the sidelines, impoverished and embittered - unaware her father is back.

One of the singular touches of "The Devil-Doll" is the curious conceit that has Barrymore donning a disguise as "Madame Mandelip," the supposed maker of the amazingly, well, lifelike little dolls. This is an idea that could have flopped with a thud, but the legendary actor outdoes himself in his drag scenes, convincingly affecting the voice and movements of a pandering, unctous and vaguely annoying old woman. Brilliant.

It would be a kick to have Drew Barrymore introduce this film one day on Turner. It would be even better if she thought about a remake. I'd go.

Note in Passing: The film's working title was "The Witch of Timbuctoo." Oh, and by the way, its special effects are astonishingly good.

Poster art for the film, and Barrymore in a scene with Robert Graves)

cinema obscura: Jordan Brady's "Waking Up in Reno" (2002)

A game Swayze with Theron and...

Thanks to the vagaries of life, Natasha Richardson and Patrick Swayze, both of whom passed this year, happened to co-star in a little-seen comedy by a first-time filmmaker named Jordan Brady. "Waking Up in Reno" is one of those unfortunate Miramax titles that was filmed, shelved and then barely released during the waning days of the Weinstein reign.

Not surprisingly, given its bumpy journey, "Waking Up in Reno" was promptly dismissed by those few critics who bothered to see it. (TV Guide gives it one star, although it is highly questionable that the person who graded it even watched it.) Fact is, "Waking Up in Reno" is something of a comic find, a sort of redneck "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," with Swayze paired with Theron and Richardson with Billy Bob Thornton as two rural couple-y friend from Little Rock, Arkansas who head to Reno for a holiday, arranged around a Monster Truck Show there, only to get sidetracked by some unexpected country-western feelin's.

The film tickles and teases and earns its laughs. The script by actors Brent Briscoe and Mark Fauser is genuinely witty, with some unexpected underlying intelligence that Brady keeps subtle.

The four leads have terrific chemistry, with Swayze revealing a rarely displayed comic edge and both Ricardson and Theron mastering credible cornpone drawls. The funny comic David Koechner has a bit here, and Penélope Cruz puts in a game cameo. Worth checking out.

Richardson with Thornton in "Waking Up in Reno"

Richardson, who sustained blunt impact trauma to the head during a skiing accident outside of Montreal on March 16 and died two days later in a New York hospital, was immediately memoralized by Swayze.

"It is such a great loss to this community to lose an actress and person such as Natasha," the ailing actor commented upon her death. "Gifts like her don't come along very often. It's a rare thing in this industry to have someone with so much talent, beauty, and dedication and yet is imbued with such humility. I know for me and many other people, the world will be a different place without her. My heart goes out to Liam and his two boys, but I'm sure that Natasha's light is shining down on them,"

Coincidentally, Swayze also worked with Liam - Liam Neeson - on John Irvin's 1989 thriller, "Next of Kin."

Six degrees in Hollywood is not restriced to Kevin Bacon exclusively.

cinema obscura: Lewis Gilbert's "Haunted" (1995)

Lewis Gilbert's "Haunted" from 1995 is one of those films with a high-profile pedigree which would have guaranteed it a high-profile release. Seemingly. With a tony cast including Aidan Quinn, Kate Beckinsale, Anthony Andrews, Anna Massey, Linda Bassett, Liz Smith, Alex Lowe and the late John Gielgud in one of his last film roles and a ghost-story plotline, "Haunted" would have had some kind of visibility had a major studio handled it. While Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope was involved in its production, the movie was released by October Films - or supposed to be. It played theatrically in England but went straight to video here.

Set in the English countryside of Edbrook in the early 1900s, "Haunted" casts Quinn as a professor of psychology and defiant skeptic who arrives from America to teach at the University of Camberley. An author of books debunking most psychic phenomena, Quinn is solicited by Massey who, as an elderly nanny, is convinced that she is seeing ghosts in the house where she raised Andrews, Lowe and Beckinsale, who becomes romantically involved with Quinn. Gilbert, who directed several Bond films as well as "Alfie," "The Adventurers" and Educating Rita," imbues "Haunted" with atmospheric touches that lend it both credibility and companionablity.

Barrymore's "Whip It" - or "Kansas City Gidget"

Barrymore and Wiig try to keep up with Juno

Drew Barrymore's "Whip It" is the most purely pleasurable movie I've seen in, well, a long, long time. Hands-down. It's "Kansas City Bomber" (Yeah!) crossed with "Gidget" (Ahhh!) and it's ir-re-sistible. Ellen Page sheds her flip, self-satisified "Juno" persona and turns in a performance that's a study in diminutive perfection - sad, funny, smart and fully-felt. Kristin Wiig, Juliette Lewis, Zoe Bell, Alia Shawkat, Eve, Marcia Gay Harden and The Goddess herself, Drew, have her back all the way.

You go girls!

cinema obscura: Dennis Lee's "Fireflies in the Garden" (2008)

Julia Roberts and Ioan Gruffudd in Dennis Lee's high-profile/low-profile film, "Fireflies in the Garden"

Movies that don't open - or that open without any advance critics' screenings - are automatically (hastily?) written off by said critics as embarrassing failures. Hence, the reluctance on the part of the studios.

Not so. Sometimes films are abandoned - or dumped, to use a less polite term - strictly for political reasons. If the head of a studio doesn't personally like you, chances are your film will be sacrificed. Or maybe your film is politically incorrect, stepping on the toes of other companies associated with the studio (see Mike Judge's "Idiocracy") that paid you.

The fact is, Hollywood routinely markets and screens awful films all the time and sometimes quite enthuiastically. I mean, the big-screen version of "The Avengers," hidden from the critics in 1998, was no better or worse than any other film released by Warner Bros. (or any studio) that year.

Willem Dafoe with Roberts

This is all in preamble to bringing to your attention Dennis Lee's "Fireflies in the Garden," which was made in 2008 but whose planned June 24th release in New York this past summer never happened. Which is odd, considering the film's star wattage: Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hayden Panettiere and Ioan Gruffudd.

Carrie-Anne Moss and Ryan Reynolds

It would be too facile to dismiss a movie that can attract a cast of this calibre. Certainly, there must be something about "Fireflies in the Garden" that's appealing and/or compelling - at least, to actors. Or, it could be awful.

Who knows?

Dennis Lee, who based his film on the Robert Frost poem, is an Asian filmmaker new to me. He had penned the scripts for a well-regarded shorts prior to making his directorial debut with this one.

A domestic drama, "Fireflies in the Garden" reportedly is driven by a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards as it delineates three generations of a troubled family, headed by Roberts and Dafoe as a woman and her domineering husband. Reynolds plays their grown son, a writer driven to examine his life, particularly his childhood, when his mother dies in an automobile accident. Moss plays Reynolds' wife, and both Panettiere and Watson play Roberts' sister, then and now.

The core of "Fireflies in the Garden" revolves around the edgy, contentious dynamic between father and son - Dafoe and Reynolds. I, for one, would have liked to witness it.