The Big Trail (1930)

Posted on September 30, 2026 by 4 Star Films

It’s remarkable how a pristine print of an old film makes it come alive before your eyes, and I feel this way most ardently with The Big Trail, an early widescreen beauty directed by Raoul Walsh. With all the grit and grime removed, it’s almost like we can reach out and touch it in front of us.

There’s a certain amount of folklore about how the movie didn’t turn a profit, and it put John Wayne through 9 more years of purgatory before John Ford threw him a bone with another leading role in Stagecoach. And maybe now we attach it to the legacy of all the ensuing pictures that came in its wake, but there’s still something agreeable about it on its own terms.

I think of something like Red River, where the images overflow with all sorts of people—the world feels lived in and raw—where so much is possible. There’s an excitement in the prospect even as danger isn’t far off. And the environment itself hardly feels like it’s been faked; everything feels like living, breathing terrain full of character, hardly for the faint of heart. It’s also ripe with treachery.

The Big Trail exhibits the life of mountain men, mercantile stores laden with goods, log cabins, wagons, mud, and strapping heroes like John Wayne. Even if he is a bit more wiry and his voice an octave higher than most of us remember, his unmistakable DNA is right there in front of us.

Veteran Tully Marshall plays the loyal Zeke with a congenial old-timey register in the vein of Walter Huston. Tyrone Power Sr. has what purportedly was his only talkie role as the wagon train’s gruff leader. He’s also one of the most obvious human antagonists if the natural elements weren’t enough already.

Ward Bond, another western mainstay, is plainly visible too, although he speaks only a few lines near the beginning. Meanwhile, the Swedish jokes courtesy of El Brendel make me consider how our noses turn up at the portrayal of certain minorities (it seems like we can throw Swedish people in with them).

From the very first frame, The Big Trail is playing on the American mythos of the west settled by plucky pioneers as eastern civilization continues its slow march to all regions of the austere United States. We understand now that this grand story is in part a convenient myth or at least a sliver of the story, but alongside some of the works of John Ford or even something like The Virginian, we see the syntax around the western genre being solidified to great effect.

There’s also a continued codification of the typical hierarchy: Understandably, it’s a masculine world where women are mostly subordinate, and Indians are to be feared. However, even this element is made slightly more nuanced by Wayne’s character, who respects and keeps company with some Native Americans.

We watch a Pilgrim prostrate with his community, his head raised as he entreats his God for travel mercies on the road ahead. Its imagery presages movies like Our Daily Bread or, most obviously, John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950).

The story is grand and sweeping at this point; we hardly need the details, just the sense of the trail evoked in the title, and the movie gives us that. There are threats from belligerent Natives that lead to a circling of the wagons to take up a defensive stand. Then there’s a seismic thunderstorm unleashing nature’s fury on finite human beings. They feel so puny in comparison, and it evokes the magisterial scenes on the plain John Ford captured in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon a generation later.

Though the scoring doesn’t do the final moment of reunification between Wayne and his girl (Marguerite Churchill) any favors, the images are capable of doing most of the heavy lifting. Because so much is accomplished with two people being set off against the natural landscape in a way that feels full and alive.

It seems pragmatic to say John Wayne was probably unfairly vilified for making a giant picture like The Big Trail a box office flop. The massive budget and pioneering presentation aspects of the feature didn’t do it any favors when the bottom line was concerned.

Thankfully, almost a century later we can concern ourselves more with aesthetic decisions, and it has many of note. Walsh’s movie is a startling, expansive undertaking. At times it lumbers along, but sometimes in that scope and the sense of the images, there are these utterly spectacular moments of visual shorthand. It feels like we’re being treated to a singular experience with grand ambitions in depicting the march of pioneers across the prairies. The battle of man vs. nature has an elemental gravity to it that we so often take for granted now.

And Marion Morrison didn’t do too badly for himself. Wayne became arguably one of the most prolific and fiercely admired personas of all time. It’s instructive to get a firsthand look at his beginnings because, love him or hate ’em, his career gives us a view into the progression of not only the Western genre but Hollywood on the whole.

4/5 Stars

3 Bad Men (1926)

Posted on September 28, 2026 by 4 Star Films

At the outset, 3 Bad Men feels like a pile of tropes. We get a sense of the sprawling West: There are wagons crossing the prairie, a lust for gold, outlaws, and intrepid heroes.

George O’Brien embodies an early Irish portrait from John Ford; he’s strapping and jocund with a giant harmonica and a song in his heart. Olive Borden has a certain Clara Bow aura as a screen beauty, though far more aloof. She has taken to the trail with her father as they look to seek their fortunes.

However, they feel out of their depth in an austere terrain full of natural danger and deceitful characters. Dan’s a friendly face and more than willing to oblige with his services, especially with a pretty girl like Lee nearby.

A little over 15 minutes in, we get our first sense of something truly intriguing for upending the typical conventions you’d expect in a silent picture. It shouldn’t be a total surprise because Ford has titled his movie 3 Bad Men.

It feels like a precursor to Bicycle Thieves in that the title has a kind of ambiguous meaning. It takes something dubious and reclaims it as first Carlton and then the audience put their trust in these three grizzled vagabonds.

They begin as “Wanted” outlaws who spy some thoroughbreds on their way toward the gold rush in the Dakotas, and they’re prepared to raid them, only to become the indignant defenders against another attack.

It becomes a muddying of morality in a world where reputation comes to mean so much even as action tells a very different story about these people. These men have a price on their heads in multiple states and countries, and yet in this moment of need, they become heroic benefactors of a woman he doesn’t have anywhere else to turn.

The primary antagonist is a white-teethed sheriff, Layne Hunter, who’s more despot and renegade than he is an emblem of the law in the booming gold town of Custer. The irony is difficult to miss.

A sad-eyed, wispy-haired Minister arrives and doesn’t represent goodness to the local populace as much as he does a certain utility. With a minister, a woman can be married. Eventually he will have to beseech the sheriff to take action; whether or not it will do any good is another matter.

Bull, Mike, and Spade acknowledge they are three old terrapins not fit to take care of her, and they vow to become her matchmakers to find her a suitable husband. At times, the more comic scenarios feel like two-reeler-type gags from looking for husband material in the saloon. It gives the material an agreeable sense of levity.

There’s a quick, easy camaraderie between the most obvious male leads, O’Brien and Bull, when it would be so easy to turn them against one another for ready-made drama. When they join a saloon brawl together, it galvanizes them, and all future conflicts come from outside forces. They have nothing but goodness and chivalry to offer.

What’s easy to appreciate about the film is how it has many of the archetypes and elements of the early Western, but there’s an intricacy to the character dynamic that makes it more compelling than run-of-the-mill sagebrush fare. It’s not just about a rudimentary plot that we’ve seen umpteen times before.

And though Ford can never be called one of the most urbane comedic directors, one of the joys of 3 Bad Men is how it blends goofy antics and the toils of romantic comedy against the underlying drama of the West. It gives it a depth and a breadth so many of its contemporaries lack when viewed from the present. Ford offers us more to enjoy than just superficial pleasures.

The sides are drawn up with a burning wagon sent hurtling toward the church as a harbinger of the chaos to come in the fight for control of the community. What was striking to me in hindsight was how the imagery of Hunter’s mob felt so very much like what I’m accustomed to seeing of the KKK, from burning crosses to fear and intimidation tactics.

There are also Ford landscapes and stunning set pieces like the race to lay down their claims, but even at this early juncture in his career, he never lets the scale get in the way or neutralize the centrality of the character moments that give the film its meaning.

Like watching three men walking across the ridge of the prairie, it suggests something profound. Ford knew how to shoot an ending, and it presages something like The Searchers, where the image feels quintessential to the western milieu, as if walking into the sunset offers a kind of finality. Though it’s just the beginning for some who must keep on wandering.

There are a handful of directors who had the good fortune and skill to have longevity in Hollywood. I think of the likes of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, but before them there was John Ford. There’s little doubt we see a master craftsman being formed in the teens and 20s, and he would continue to exhibit his talents well into the 60s.

We usually look at directors like Ford or some of his contemporaries in their fully formed state with many films under their belts, but it’s equally instructive to look at how they honed their skills early on before they had legendary acclaim. 3 Bad Men is a surprising and unmitigated delight, developing the western genre from the ground up.

4.5/5 Stars

Princess Mononoke (1997)

Posted on August 21, 2026 by 4 Star Films

“The Forest Spirit gives life and takes life away. Life and death are his alone.”

One of the most beautiful things about Princess Mononoke is the magnitude of the world, and it’s not merely in terms of how director Hayao Miyazaki brings his resplendent hand-drawn landscapes to life.

There’s a level of complexity to the ecosystem that knows few equals, allowing the movie to feel not just like a story but a genuine world we are being immersed in. We begin to experience a grand scope and mythology with so many familiar archetypes woven together for our benefit. Somehow, they manage to transcend any differences in culture or belief.

The Princess in the title doesn’t actually show up for some time. Instead, we meet Ashitaka. He is the protector of his village, and he faces off against a demon-possessed warthog. Immediately, I thought of Legion, a spirit Jesus allows to possess a host of pigs before running them into the gully. In that story, the villagers ask Jesus to leave because they recognize some power is at work. Ironically, there is much the same belief here, although they are far from the Judeo-Christian point of view.

It makes for gripping storytelling when you start from a place of belief and awe. Skepticism never enters the equation, and there is evil in the world just as there is good. Their local oracle pays homage to the great unknown god in a show of deference unwittingly similar to the people of Athens. She knows there are forces she does not understand acting upon the world, and she reveres them.

Ashitaka’s arm is left stricken with a curse even as he defends his town selflessly. This propels him on a journey to seek out a forest spirit in the form of a deer who might be able to bestow his life back to him.

Princess Mononoke is a feudal Miyazaki film and the closest inheritor of Akira Kurosawa’s cinema; it’s darker and bloodier than some of the Ghibli maestro’s movies for a youthful audience, and yet these attributes simply make it feel like an epic adventure in the grandest sense of the word. There is danger and blood and evil, just as there are heroes and grand acts of sacrifice.

I was recently reinvigorated reading C.S. Lewis on his thoughts on Fairy Tales and writing for children. He says:

“Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book.”

I’ve heard Miyazaki compared with Lewis’s compatriot J.R.R. Tolkien, and the differences are so vast as to almost dismiss comment altogether. However, in the broadest strokes, I can see it with Mononoke. A mythic hero like Ashitaka or Strider who gleams with attributes almost preordained to make them heroes. There is treachery as much as supernatural impositions. The struggle between civilization vs. nature–technology allowing for a kind of perversion of the natural world, even as the beasts are prone to violence as they feel humanity encroaching on their forest home.

Tolkien represents it with orcs in their mines, building weapons of destruction. Here, there is Lady Eboshi, a regal leader who leads an outpost of ironworkers. However, far from being a tyrant, she has a degree of tenacity in defending their position and extending compassion toward a grateful troupe of freed women and the ostracized sick. Meanwhile, they’re prepared to use their flintlocks to tame the wild around them and obliterate any human enemies who descend on them.

The story is full of conflicts of interest, and every character desires something different. We are told this is how great stories are made, but Mononoke shows us what it looks like in action with compelling acuity.

The emperor desires for the lady to hunt down the aforementioned deer god, sending some of his best trackers and hunters to bring him the mythic beast’s head. Meanwhile, an unseen warlord, Asano, has been terrorizing the countryside and continues to extort the ironworks before deciding to ambush them at their most vulnerable.

These are mere human concerns. It would be drama enough, and yet Miyazaki’s story is equally concerned with the natural world and the original inhabitants of the land. There are giant wolves, warthogs, apes, and every other creature imaginable.

Ashitaka gets the opportunity to be a mediator between all sides with a kind of stoic clarity that feels almost supernatural. He comes in contact with the wolf girl San, who has turned her back on the human culture and runs with the wolves as one of their own. They both act as these borderstalkers existing between cultural spaces based on blood or allegiance. First, contentious and then drawn together by a mission bigger than either of them.

Princess Mononoke is not just a feast of images but of sound design and scoring. I noticed one dialogue scene where Ashitaka rests in a cave at night, sharing a conversation with a fellow travel companion; there’s the underscoring of Joe Hisaishi, of course, but also the faint sounds of cicadas and birds chirping. Easy to miss but hardly immaterial. It’s this layering that feels so extraordinary in its attention to the full breath of the soundscape. It mirrors the forethought in every frame of the narrative.

Miyazaki and his team have an almost inexhaustible fount of creative imagination. Consider the human toadstool-like creatures twirling and clicking in the forest depths — a cross between mechanized toy soldiers and playful apparitions. There’s the molasses-like ooze of the demonic, a startling visual manifestation of this cankerous evil familiar across the director’s oeuvre. Or the curious nightwalker, which goes from a translucent Godzilla tramping around the forest depths to a transfigured creature of great repute.

We also witness the saving power of water and a rebirth and rejuvenation scene with plants sprouting up again. There were even a few solitary moments, whether it was the deer god appearing or the growth in his wake, reminding me of some of the more delightfully psychedelic faces and foliage in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine movie. Perhaps it sounds like an almost crass comparison, but I don’t mean it to be. Because there is something so striking and singular about it; magic is in the air, and it affects us profoundly.

The wolves want to eat Ashitaka’s faithful elk Yakul in an early scene. By the end, the world has been remade, and the lion has laid down with the lamb, as it were. It feels like an immaculate portrait of new beginnings and a new creation, even as Ashitaka is reunited with his love as they vow to live on the fringes.

It’s as if Miyazaki knows a world such as this cries out for a happy ending. What makes it resonate is the height and depth of the evil and the disrepair the world was saddled with, as embodied by Ashitaka’s wound. It’s these very realities making the denouement that much more extraordinary. We crave stories with the level of gravitas and satisfaction that the likes of Tolkien and Miyazaki build. When you’re given something such as this, so many other tales pale in comparison. Because they fail to do justice to our deepest human longings — longings not dictated solely by culture, creed, or even faith. If these stories ring true, they run deeper still.

5/5 Stars

The Odyssey (2026)

Posted on August 12, 2026 by 4 Star Films

Like many, I read the Odyssey as part of my high school education, but what remains are bits and pieces of iconography passed down through popular culture as much as the text itself. To state the obvious, Christopher Nolan’s latest film is an adaptation, and it makes creative choices that a myriad of voices have said yay or nay to for any number of reasons. But choices are necessary for any adaptation, or else it wouldn’t be worth making in the first place.

It took me some minutes to grow accustomed to the story and settle myself. Nolan lays the groundwork of a wife and mother, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), waiting for her husband’s triumphant return from the Trojan Wars. It’s been years, and she still hasn’t given up hope, even as a host of suitors, led by the duplicitous snake Antinous (Robert Pattinson), squat in her dining hall. They have designs on winning her hand in marriage once she acquiesces. To them, her husband is as good as dead, and her son (Tom Holland) is barely a threat to their ambitions. Meanwhile, the master’s most faithful servant is a blind herdsman named Eumaeus (John Leguizamo).

The movie trades in colloquialisms and a moral parlance of Zeus’s law, a simplified expression for what the Greeks would call xenia. In Judeo-Christian teaching, this might be analogous to the exhortation in Hebrews not to forget to show hospitality to strangers, because some have welcomed angels unawares. In the Greek empire of Nolan, there’s a decidedly treacherous bent to it; one must maintain honor at all costs and not give your enemy a reason to undermine you…

It truly hits its stride when Nolan’s penchant for visual ingenuity and grand spectacle is allowed to take over. We have enough exposition to be sent off on an epic adventure as Odysseus (Matt Damon) makes his journey home through fragments of flashback recounted to a surprisingly affable Calypso (Charlize Theron).

The director takes a setpiece most of us are familiar with and grounds it not simply in myth but in a reality we can understand. The horse is buried in the sand as a discarded offering, the men inside betting their lives on their foes letting their guard down. It’s a tense bit of dramatic irony as they slink down into the bowels of Troy, woozy-legged but fit enough to free their compatriots and subdue the frantic enemy at nightfall.

Another indelible image injecting the movie with visual adrenaline centers on the cyclops, a lumbering creature who is both terrifying and oddly sympathetic. A beast injured by these marauders who wander into his home. What makes these moments satisfying is not simply because they involve action; the action defines the attributes of this character and the world around him. It also becomes evident each scenario represents a perversion of the attributes at the center of the movie’s moral framework.

Nolan does his best to make deified gods and supernatural powers into phenomena moderns can understand. However, there are still monsters, an island of malevolent giants, and the enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton in arguably the most unnerving performance in the film). They take our breath away while reminding us of the durable bravery and continual hubris which are two sides of Homer’s protagonist.

Likewise, a detour to the pits of Hades and the underworld has a sense of enchantment we cannot hope to fully comprehend as mere mortals. James Remar is unidentifiable as Tiresias, a soothsayer spitting omens about their fate. The Sirens, Charybdis, and Scylla are present but feel like less of a focal point because, as entities, they no longer feel anthropomorphized in the same way.

But the serpentine scope of the journey must lead to only one place. Eventually Odysseus appears as a hooded beggar to his faithful servant, who never wavered. Then he appears to his son, who failed to find him, and finally Penelope, who struggled so mightily in his absence. Anne Hathaway plays the double edge of strength and grief with a moving aplomb. There is a magnitude and a cost to the choices a world away. They actually mean something with reverberations through time.

The archetype of the returning protagonist offers us the promise of narrative fulfillment. This is the return of the king, the arrival of Robin Hood, Luke Skywalker, or any hero you want humbling themselves and putting on the garments of the lowest to enter the mouth of the lion for a final stand. Catching their antagonist unawares.

We yearn for him to come in and bring justice — to show himself and take back what is rightfully his. Penelope puts herself on the line, offering her hand to any man who can complete her husband’s feat. And of course only one man can master it: Stringing his bow and shooting the arrow pure and true through a line of axes.

It’s an annunciation to go with the music struck with his bowstring, courtesy of Ludwig Goransson. One clear, bold note, but it’s the kind of rousing return the movie has been calling for, and the hard yards pay off as they lock down the weapons in the armory, and the father and husband looks to avenge what is rightfully his.

Perhaps it took the years away and the wisdom gained from his own transgressions to recognize what he must do. It’s true the movie offers a recognition of a breach of Zeus’s law but also atonement — giving up what is most painful and bearing the greatest sacrifice. Odysseus burned the city of Troy and desecrated the altar of Athena. There must be penance. He welcomes self-exile, vowing to ride the high seas with his reunited bride to honor his fallen men while leaving the throne to his rightful unblemished heir.

It’s no revelation, but Nolan has followed up one man who would be a god thanks to the atomic bomb with another who seemingly courted the gods, even if he did not always orient his life around their powers. There’s also a residual cost to war and a complicated relationship with decisions that cannot be retracted.

The sheer scope and scale never ceases to amaze. Nolan’s continued prerogative involves always pushing the cast and himself in the execution of these gargantuan stories. It’s the on-location environs, and the blending of technological expertise with an appreciation for practical effects. Giant IMAX cameras juxtaposed with intimate castle tete-a-tetes.

One does wonder if there will continue to be diminishing returns and where else the man can go in an attempt at larger scale and greater ambitions. Will the man who gave us Memento or The Prestige ever be content making a movie of that size that nevertheless pushes the medium in terms of narrative or performance?

I hope so because Nolan still brings people out to the cinema, and he maintains a faithful following who have come to appreciate his tentpole movies with a touch of the cerebral. He can stretch himself in other ways, and many of us will look on with anticipation.

For our sakes, I’m thankful he’s making films, whether or not he believes in the gods. Some might observe a chasm between deifying gods and defying them. However, within this universe, perhaps it’s only a matter of perception.

It strikes me how one offers a standard outside ourselves, and the other is so often made in our own image. That hasn’t changed much in a couple thousand years, even as our cultures have. It also fundamentally impacts what it looks like to love our neighbor, thereby treating them as we desire to be treated.

4/5 Stars

Crawford and Borzage Films: Sadie McKee (1934), Mannequin (1937), Strange Cargo (1940)

Posted on August 3, 2026 by 4 Star Films

I’ve been dipping back into the work of Joan Crawford and director Frank Borzage, so here are some capsule reviews of some of their films:

Sadie McKee (1934) – Dir. Clarence Brown

Sadie returns home to the playful shenanigans of her former compatriot (Franchot Tone). Her mother is the long-time cook of a well-to-do family, and he is the privileged son. But class need not be a dividing line, at least initially.

There are so many wonderful evolving supporting players in Sadie McKee, with Crawford, the effervescent working girl with a chip on her shoulder, remaining the constant focal point.

She leaves behind her mother to chase after her crush (Gene Raymond) even as (Tone) openly criticizes his instability. She doesn’t care. It’s all the more reason to prove him wrong. On her journey, she’s befriended by the worldly-wise Opal (Jean Dixon). Meanwhile, Akim Tamiroff and Leo G. Carroll show up in adroit side parts as a giddy waiter and a stuffy valet. The movie is stuffed full of such roles.

Edward Arnold might actually be the most delightful of the litter as a gregarious millionaire. It’s a far cry from the corrupt business tycoons he was often remembered for, and he proves himself more than game for a little comedy. He and Crawford have a grand ol’ time playing drunk together as Tone looks on with a level of disdain.

Because his boss takes a shine to Crawford, and why not? But surely she only gravitates toward him for his money? It’s a great convenience after a lifetime where she’s had to scrimp and save every day.

Between moments verging on the social strata absurdity of screwball comedy blended with a couple of show tunes like “All I Do Is Dream of You” and “Old Pal,” there’s a lot of good fun to be had to stave off the Depression blues.

To its credit, the story fits the schema of a conniving melodrama about a gold digger, only to break out on its own. If memory serves, Crawford knew how to play such characters. And yet here, despite what circumstances might suggest, she’s a more complex, even sincere individual. She falls into things and can’t help feeling what she does, regardless of what others say, namely Tone.

Crawford forcefully tears through the formalities of the upstairs-downstairs drama. She has the upbringing and the gumption to push through the door to the kitchen. What first looks to be a standoff, even an insurrection from the bottom up (led by the manservant Carroll), becomes a meeting of the minds and a pact to keep their boozy proprietor alive. She vows to keep her job as a wife, so she doesn’t look like the vamp, and the backroom staff want to keep their jobs as well.

The resolution is conventional stuff, but then again, the road to get there is quite charming. An added undercurrent is the real-life relationship between Crawford and Tone at the time. It can’t help but color the entire storyline from front to back.

3.5/5 Stars

Mannequin (1937) – Dir. Frank Borzage

Once again, Joan Crawford is the quintessential working-class hero, doing anything she can to beat the dregs of a life she has. By day, Jessie’s working in a factory. By night, she’s helping her mother with dinner as they dote over a deadbeat Irish father and an ungrateful kid brother (Leo Gorcey). Her only solace comes with escaping to spend time with her boyfriend, Eddie (Alan Curtis).

She wants him to marry her and take her away from the dead-end life in the family’s abode on the Lower East Side. And with some further cajoling, he does, and they prepare for a delirious life together as newlyweds.

If you read the names on the marquee, you know Spencer Tracy must show up eventually, and he does as shipping magnate John L. Hennessey. He’s a self-made man who’s worked hard for every penny he has, and his workers respect him for his candor.

He spies the new husband and wife celebrating their matrimony. Obviously, Crawford is radiant and eye-catching, but he seems genuinely happy for them, having the waiter bring them champagne and his compliments.

Although it’s not quite as good as Tracy and Young in Borzage’s Man’s Castle, there’s still something electric in seeing two stars together at an early juncture in their career ascendancy as studio contractors.

At first, there was something uneven about Curtis being placed onscreen between them, and how are they ever to get together? It becomes apparent in due time. He’s an idea man, always coming up with something new and never following through on any of it. His wife constantly bails him out. But it’s a thankless place to be in, and the promise of marriage continues to sour.

The final scene is an impeccable bit of dramatic irony — embodying the conceit underpinning the whole story. Because Eddie sees how smitten John is with his wife. He’s not above suggesting they get divorced so she can marry the other man and give Eddie a cut of her newfound wealth. It’s a horrible insinuation. Her eyes are finally opened, and she leaves.

The fates develop the story exactly as Eddie might have orchestrated it, but the motives are important. Jessie winds up marrying John because something real blooms between them. He’s deliriously happy until doubt creeps in.

In the end, his business ventures are sunk, but it means nothing to him compared to potentially getting stabbed in the back by Jessie. He doesn’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. And here they reunite in his office for one final time…

He’s got no money, but she doesn’t know that. She vows to leave him nobly so her ex can’t gouge him further. They both have the wrong idea about the other, and somehow it all turns into a right. Love covers a multitude, and so it is here again. It’s romance in the Borzage mode.

3.5/5 Stars

Strange Cargo (1940) – Dir. Frank Borzage

“So God created man in his own image…Look at me. Do I look like a God to you?”

I have to admit I do miss adventure pictures like these. They take place in a vaguely distant place conjured up on the Hollywood movie screen courtesy of a studio lot. It feels like we don’t have a license to make pictures like this anymore for various reasons. Some understandable and a few regrettable.

Right now, Clark Gable is still an MGM stalwart. Joan Crawford really has some feisty barb to her. You have to be tough in an environment like this. I lost track of what number this is in their ongoing onscreen partnership. All you need to know is he’s a prisoner in an island penal colony, and she’s a local dance hall girl trying to pay her way to the mainland. Her animosity and his cocksure attitude are the perfect tinder to set their chemistry ablaze yet again.

You know he’s going to take it upon himself to escape, and she’s going to get caught up in it. Given the amalgamation of all the different genre elements, it’s difficult to categorize Strange Cargo, although it was adapted from the debut novel of author Richard Sale.

Among the contingent of fugitives is the Christ-like Cambreau, who plays almost like a precursor to the remake of Magnificent Obsession with its brand of cinematic mysticism. He rises up as a quietly providential force among the worldly cynics, the bible-thumpers spewing fire and brimstone, and the He-Man self-assurance of Gable.

The clash of tonalities is perfectly embodied by the Red Dust energy as Crawford goes trampling through the jungle in her high heels with Gable yanking her along. Then, in another moment, they’re warming themselves by the fire as he reads her some love poetry out of Song of Solomon. Look in her eyes, and it would seem like no one ever shared such affirmations, even if it’s done facetiously.

For such a glamour queen at MGM, Crawford shows a willingness to go unadorned as much as the studio system allowed. It’s easy to gain a new kind of respect for her because it feels like new terrain as she’s left adrift with the rest of the men and identifies with this man fighting for her companionship under the bleak circumstances.

The other difficult balance is indeed the spiritual timbre of the film with the very physical nature of Gable, the generation’s idea of a Greek Adonis with his big, broad shoulders functioning as his temple. In many ways, the movie pits the movie star as this kind of temporal image-god against the transcendent message of this Messianic figure.

Borzage’s Catholic sympathies are overt in this one, and it makes for a fascinating exploration. The fact that it was based on a contemporary piece of fiction seems to suggest an openness to these spiritual, albeit unorthodox themes.

However, in some ways, I was intrigued to read that the Catholic Legion of Decency gave the film a “condemned” rating. It does feel like a potential precursor to the criticisms aimed at Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. In personalizing the God-Man, they almost made him too human for the audience.

One could see how the church gatekeepers were left queasy by a film that’s hardly a hallowed depiction of conventional saints. However, any complaints about the depiction of lust feel slightly ironic given the inclusion of Song of Songs love poetry directly from the Biblical text. Still, Gable and Crawford are fiery enough to make the remonstrations understandable, given social mores at the time.

3.5/5 Stars

Libeled Lady (1936)

Posted on July 30, 2026 by 4 Star Films

The topical sweet spot of screwball comedy, journalism, and ocean-liner romances makes Libeled Lady feel like a quintessential 1930s movie. Trusted studio director Jack Conway and the stars peg it as prime MGM.

Spencer Tracy is Warren Haggerty, the managing editor of the New York Evening Star. He’s pulled away from the altar because the paper has made a major boo-boo. In his absence, they erroneously published a story about aristocrat Connie Allenbury. Before they can quash the story, her influential father James (Walter B. Connolly) gets a copy and prepares to slam them with a libel suit.

There’s only one man who can save the paper from utter ruin, and so they go tracking down a real firecracker named Bill Chandler (William Powell) all across the country and all over the world. Of course, he’s right under their noses all the time, barely able to pay his hotel bill.

The two men converge on one another, looking to feel each other out because they both have something they need. It makes for great comedy because this situational irony underpins every proceeding action. Likewise, Tracy and Powell taking stabs at each other is one of the great cinematic pleasures in life because they both have a knack for it. Ultimately, Chandler leverages his position and agrees to bail them out for a small fee.

It calls for him to “marry” Haggerty’s girl. The peeved bride-to-be is Jean Harlow, who makes the part something because she’s a girl who can give it as well as she takes it. Gladys is conscripted into their ploy, and it’s the absurdity that such a picture thrives on. Once Chandler has “married” Gladys, he will woo Ms. Allenbury, and then the Evening Star will either retroactively have proof for their baseless story or, better yet, new fodder will be whipped up. The loopier the better, and they make it stick.

Harlow’s character is indignant and also proves her to be one of the great comediennes, schmoozing with her faux husband and hamming it up with the boys. The intertextual relations between Powell and Harlow certainly help matters, because you can read their real relationship into the convoluted pseudo-couplings of the film, all played for comedy.

Bill gets to work meeting the jovial Mr. Allenbury and his far more guarded daughter. As part of the game, he coaches himself on all types of fishing, including anglers because his mark is an avid fisherman; Loy’s quick to pick up that Mr. Chandler is quite the “angler” himself. He even has a fishing instructor sent to their honeymoon suite to learn how to hook curtains and lampshades (if not fish).

Of course, Loy and Powell prove themselves to be another cinematic dream team. My wires probably got crossed somewhere, but to my mind, they’re one of the most prolific screen couples ever. Libeled Lady is another ticklish feather in their cap.

Their excursion out on the stream bed devolves into a wonderfully goofy corralling of a fabled trout as Powell goes splashing and stumbling through the frigid waters. What’s most curious about the moment is how it’s not drummed up with a lot of score, but we just have the sound of the water as Powell struggles hook, line, and sinker like any of us would. He’s an amiable hero, and though it’s funny, it’s a turning point: the moment Loy likes him for real. Perhaps he realizes too that if he tries to be something different, it’s really possible to change (Maybe it’s just a good joke).

But he and Loy have some wonderful moments of more sentimental chemistry. It makes the relationship feel less like the required beats of a plot we know must end badly when he’s caught in a lie. If you’re like me, you like them together, and you have goodwill from the movies they made previously. We want the best for them no matter the screwball antics at the film’s disposal.

These moments are suspended in time. And what’s more, for these isolated instances with Harlow and Tracy out of the frame, they nearly steal away the picture and make it their own like so many others. It’s a credit to the strength of the ensemble that you’re never going to forget their other scene partners completely. They’re too shrewd and incomparable as performers in their own right.

Tracy throws out the middle man, and Conway forgoes any kind of interstitial exposition, allowing the newspaperman to cut straight to the chase with Mrs. Allenbury, reasoning with her to drop the libel suit. The fact he’s cut out all the fancy stratagems shows his genuine desperation. Part of it is Chandler.

Haggerty has the feeling the man he’s hired might have been working on the wrong girl — his girl — though it’s exactly the opposite. He was working so well on the right girl that it affected him, and he found himself changed. He’s falling in love.

The two men have a pointed conversation of innuendo as Myrna Loy looks on without the foggiest notion, or maybe she just doesn’t care. Instantly, the ball is in Tracy’s court; he seems to hold the power because he knows the other man’s secret. He’s caught him in something.

However, soon after, Tracy stands astounded at his news desk as his nemesis waltzes in with his fiancée. They just went dancing, and she’s not going to oust him as they had planned. There’s nothing particularly elegant about the blocking because there doesn’t need to be. This time Harlow’s in the middle of the frame, though favoring her “husband,” and we have quite a different dynamic. This round goes to Powell.

For all his grousing, we begin to feel a little sorry for Tracy. If this keeps up, he’s going to be jobless and girless. A lovely bit of narrative verve and confluence brings them together in one space to have it out as we always imagined they would. We go ping-ponging with every imaginable plot twist one could imagine, and we would expect nothing less for such a screwy story. But the joy is watching everyone end up where they need to be, and the cockeyed journey to get there is just about as fun courtesy of our stars.

MGM was always hailed as the studio with more stars than there are in the heavens. I take this to be attributed mostly to prestige pictures and early Oscar bait. However, Libeled Lady is a reminder that screwball comedies are no less indebted to the studio system. Very rarely have we seen a picture hum with stars of this caliber.

4/5 Stars

Man’s Castle (1933)

Posted on July 28, 2026 by 4 Star Films

“God chose the foolish things of the world, that He might put to shame those that are wise. And He chose the weak things of the world that he might put to shame those that are strong” – Ira quoting 1 Corinthians 1:27

Man’s Castle has a wonderful set-up for a beautiful gag, although we have to come face to face with the throes of the Depression to truly appreciate it. A man (Spencer Tracy) in a top hat and tails is feeding the pigeons on a park bench. He spies a hesitant young ingenue (Loretta Young) watching nearby. He gives her a smart remark, and she almost cries. She’s soft-hearted and hungry. She just wants to eat the crumbs he’s tossing to the birds.

He’s not a complete curmudgeon and has a change of heart. Blink, and they’re in a fine restaurant. He’s chomping on a cigar, a look of satisfaction on his face, watching her put away a whole plate of food. She may be all skin and bones, but she eats ravenously. This is how we meet Bill and Trina.

But we have yet to mention the punchline. Bill calls on the manager of the establishment casually, then he proceeds to tell the preening man that he’s dead broke…He doesn’t have any money to pay for the food, and yet in a world littered with wealth, what’s one gift of charity? They end up walking out with full bellies without greater implications.

It’s an upside-down world they live in. This is what Frank Borzage gives us. We get down to the humble roots of the temporal world of shantytowns and impoverished working stiffs only for the director to bring his quintessential transcendence to the proceedings. It may come off as high-minded talk for such a meek picture, and yet with Borzage, romanticism can break into any environment within any strata of society.

In such a space, Bill and Trina become an unlikely couple. Bill’s always looking to make a casual buck to maintain his unattached lifestyle. It means light-up signs on his chest, stilt walking, and serving summons to one dancehall starlet, Fay La Rue (Glenda Farrell). The lady is visibly impressed, watching his self-confident shrewdness in getting to her. He’s a man with ingenuity.

Loretta Young has the most voluminous eyes in cinema, and with the fresh-faced garb of youth and what butterfly lighting can do, she fills up the screen with radiance. Trina contents herself with keeping a home for Bill. She takes his demeanor in stride, knowing full well it obscures an affable heart. All she knows is that she’s deliriously happy with their meager slice of paradise.

When you’re dead, you get a hunk of dirt, and while he’s alive, Bill wants to hang on to the hunk of blue up above him in the sky. He could do a lot worse. He is a character of paradox. At his best, he’s like a grown-up kid who hasn’t lost his impishness. He has a buddy in Hollywood lifer Dickie Moore and even finds time to get booted off the stickball team by the local kids.

He’s founded on a gruff, insult-laden shtick, and then he comes right around and pulls out the new stove his girl’s been eyeing. Actions speak in ways belying his words. It’s how he shows his affection. In another scene, he swipes a zinnia when his neighbor (Walter Connally) isn’t looking and drops it in the soup Trina has lovingly prepared.

He makes a whole stink about it, grousing, then half-heartedly belittling while he half-smiles through the other side of his face. He does a little playacting before both Trina and Ira, before slipping the man a dime in the moment. It’s such a wonderful encapsulation of who this man is in a single crystallized moment. Like Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.”

But this is part of what made Borzage such a preeminent filmmaker because his stories can be distilled down to these remarkable moments showing off the acumen of someone well-versed in the syntax of visual storytelling carried over from the silent days. Where the images seem to evoke more than the mere sum of their parts. There is a depth and pregnant meaning to some of the more somber, starry-eyed sequences.

Bill is a kind of begrudging Joseph with Trina, his pure Madonna keeping all these things in her heart. Eventually, they get a common-law marriage presided over by Ira. In the ’30s, it might seem scandalous, but watching it play out is nothing of the sort. There’s not a lot of fanfare, and it means something deeply profound. Bill makes a vow to be with his “Whosit” for life, and whatever he might say to the contrary, there’s a sense he’ll make it stick.

Even when he half-heartedly robs a safe for some quick cash to leave his bride, he’s more concerned with the view outside the window and the wind-up doodad he’s going to take home to his girl. This is what his life revolves around, even as the world can be harsh, disrupting his reverie with a cruel twist of fate.

If you let it, Man’s Castle is the kind of unassuming film with the capacity to break into your own existence and remind you in all humility what it means to live radically in the mundane rythyms of life. It’s not about religious zealots or powerful leaders, but the kind of folk who have much to teach us about what’s actually important. If we look down at them or disregard what they have to teach us, we miss the whole point. Just as seeing this as a little film with a short running time is a grave mistake. This might be one of the biggest, grandest films you have the chance of experiencing.

The final images almost feel like a sculpted piece of marble or an illumination by one of the greats. Bill and Trina are in repose in a cattle car, glowing like saints, lowborn royalty. It’s not so much a gospel movie, even as Borzage is not an overtly Christian filmmaker, and yet the imagery and language of the beatitudes are hard to miss.

It’s an upside-down world where the last will be first. The meek shall inherit the earth, and the passionate forces to save the world can be found in the most common places, be it a manger or a cattle car.

4/5 Stars

Bad Girl (1931)

Posted on July 22, 2026 by 4 Star Films

“Nobody knows if a person’s good or bad except the person themselves, and they won’t tell.”

Pre-Code has garnered a salacious reputation for the titillating nature of its content and themes, which all but fly in the face of what contemporary society perceives to be Classical Hollywood morality as imposed by Joseph Breen and his minions.

Frank Borzage is a director who was held in high regard throughout the ’20s and ’30s as a popular success and a maker of star-crossed, transcendent romances. For whatever reason, he is very rarely canonized as a great filmmaker. That’s a conversation for another day, but given his penchant for heartfelt romance, there’s an initial inclination to see his sensibilities fitting like oil and water with the uninhibited 1930s.

However, this proves far from the truth. Bad Girl is hardly neutered. It’s drenched in this newfound freedom of the 1930s. The opening shot is a bit of ironic trickery as we watch a wedding procession unfold. This is traditional matrimony playing out in front of us until we realize we’re actually in the middle of a high-end establishment, and these women march forward (without Spencer Tracy’s father of the bride to be seen) for the clientele looking on. Everything falls into place.

Girls dress in scanty clothes to pick up men right off the modeling floor. The men try their best lines only to be rebuffed with a foolproof excuse. The girls are streetwise enough to judge their intentions. Always ready and willing to shoot down a pickup line that’s getting too fresh. Still, relations between men and women are stripped down to their bare essentials with an almost primordial sense of mating and love.

Dorothy (Sally Eilers) and Eddie Collins (James Dunn) fit into this testy Depression-era ecosystem. In fact, she’s aghast when she learns there’s a man who won’t give her girlfriend the time of day. Everything she’s learned about men tells her this can’t be true, and so she takes a friendly bet from her pal Edna (Minna Gobell) that says she can’t get a sourpuss on deck to flirt.

She turns on the charm and whips out her ukulele only to meet with a hard-edged cynic (“Listen, sister, if you don’t want a guy to salute you, take down your flag.”). But pretty soon, it becomes apparent that Eddie’s caustic sarcasm and prevailing meanness are a kind of defense mechanism.

Somehow, it’s this very friction leading to sparks, and some kind of mutual inertia develops between them. Here, already, we have entered the solar system of Borzage, as he draws his two improbable lovers together into the throes of romance. Eddie sees her home one evening to her tenement and subsequently leaves her out in the rain, missing their next date because he’s too preoccupied with his work at a radio shop. Dorothy gives him a mouthful. It stings.

The beauty of their courtship is how the acerbic nature is never fully lost, but they shed some of their claws and fangs in isolated moments, only to be vulnerable with one another. Her demonstrative brother all but disowns her for being a harlot. Eddie proposes marriage, effectively making a fight out of popping the question as he does with everything in his life. That’s just his way as he fumbles clumsily at earnestness.

While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend such a belligerent and bickering foundation for marriage, it lends the movie its get-up-and-go as they look to carve out a humble life together. Because even if we don’t want them to fail, there’s a sense that such a tenuous foundation surely will not last. So many Hollywood melodramas have been cast this way to a maudlin effect.

There’s further drama in their young marital life with a baby on the way and Eddie trying to ensure they have ample money and shelter to make ends meet. Even as their context evolves, the prevailing mood is all Borzage. Love conquers all yet again. It’s spectacular and sprinkled with bits of goodness and human decency.

I’m reminded of fathers of various temperaments pacing the floors of the hospital waiting room. Eddie spends nights out boxing to make extra dough, and not knowing where he’s going makes her teary-eyed. His wife feels abandoned on the eve of her due date. Meanwhile, he’s taking a beating, and in the clinch, he confesses to his rival in the ring that he needs to make it a few rounds more. The other man obliges by helping to prop him up.

This is not the obvious reaction in an arena of brutality, nor in a Pre-Code film. But again, it gets its fire from other places and surreptitiously sheds its spikes in the most propitious moments. They somehow ambush you and maintain this paradox of cynical reality with a heart of gold. Obviously, the title Bad Girl is sensationalized because it’s the height of irony in the hands of Borzage. He takes what looks slightly risque on the outside and imbues it with such a wealth of sensitive affection.

He was a filmmaker made in the silent era, and yet he proves himself to be evergreen because Bad Girl could not be anything other than a talkie. It’s a film about communication, even the lack thereof. Because that still counts. People like to talk. Gleeful. Angry. Belligerent. Soppy. And by the end, they’ve fired shots, professed love, shared hopes and dreams, and fallen more in love.

I’m still incredulous that Dorothy and Eddie are together at the end of the picture, but I am willing to accede to their conventional Hollywood ending because all roads seem to lead somewhere else. Given the circumstances, it feels like a greater narrative statement to keep them together. Is it unbelievable? Perhaps, but then again, love is an unbelievable force.

4/5 Stars

Miroirs No. 3

Posted on June 15, 2026 by 4 Star Films

Christian Petzold is one of my favorite directors working today, and part of this might come from hearing his interviews. Because he’s such a charismatic, hilarious person to listen to. It might be surprising to those familiar with more than a few of his films. Still, his knowledge and love of movies are just so infectious.

Like many of us, he is plagued by the condition of always seeing movies through other movies. And this applies to his own films, too. Except he also has an aptitude for literature and music, while layering in ideas buried deep within the German cultural consciousness.

There is so much to like about his work. How he’s built out his own stock company, including long-term collaborators like Nina Hoss and Paula Beer. He’s distinctly reliable; his movies are always economical and still pregnant with so many worthwhile themes.

As best as I can describe it, they are grounded in the real world with real people, and still, somehow, we witness the kind of mysteries on screen only movies can provide. In the same way, you know, watching his movies, images have meaning, and they are there for a reason. We have mirrors, we have refractions, even dreams.

This movie’s inciting incident comes when a woman (Barbara Auer) overhears a nearby car accident and races to the scene. The young man (Philip Froissant) driving the car was killed instantly. His girlfriend, thrown from the car, lies nearby in shock, but almost without a scratch. It’s one of many uncanny events in the story.

The middle-aged woman, Barbara, comes to her aid. She’s going to fetch an ambulance, but this young music student, Laura (Paula Beer), asks her not to leave. From then on, they form a bit of a symbiotic relationship out of the wreckage.

A red sports car is meant to evoke the car crash in Contempt as much as the iconography of The Graduate. Why are those there exactly? It’s in conversation with film history. Jean-Luc Godard, Brigitte Bardot, Mike Nichols, and Dustin Hoffman. The music does the same, be it Ravel or Frankie Valli.

Miroirs No. 3 is a film that betrays so many elements of disrepair. A fence needing painting, a la Tom Sawyer. A dripping faucet gone kaput. A bicycle with a busted seat and an out-of-tune piano.

There is so much existing on the fringes, unexplained, even inscrutable, with the screen logic of a Hitchcock thriller in the countryside. We have very little background for Laura or Barbara, for that matter. Instead, we are offered the opportunity to watch, learn, and respond in kind.

Barbara brings Laura into her home and allows her to recuperate, doting over her with quiet compassion. At the same time, there is a felt absence around an unseen girl named Yelena and a noticeable dissolution of a family.

Why do the father (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs) no longer live with the woman of the house? Instead, they come over and have dinner after a day of work at their nearby garage. It’s awkward and stunted, and then Laura comes in with a special meal, and they don’t quite know what to do or say.

So they eat together in silence before doing odd jobs around the home, like fixing the dishwasher. This is what they’re comfortable with, and it is another expression of care. Certainly, external injury and broken appliances need repairing, but there is simultaneous work needing to be done on the interior of these lives, Laura’s included.

I know Petzold stuck “The Night” by Frankie Valli in his film because he likes The Deer Hunter, and that film features “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” It’s a sprawling working-class movie. The context feels so far away from what he is crafting, and yet there is a shared understanding of how this music can develop these incubated moments of joy amid trauma.

But Petzold also enjoys the act of people listening to music. There are no bits of business or shrouds of performance they can put up. At their very best, the actors are laid bare. It’s small, seemingly inconsequential, but it is a kind of visual exposition for us as understanding builds in an interlude between Laura and Max. Then, the darkness breaks in again, and the light is momentarily extinguished.

Despite this tension, I kept on thinking about what a different perspective Petzold gives to the modern domestic movie. With the likes of fellow auteur Bong Joon Ho, it’s easy to look at the landscape and distrust strangers as the parasites move in. Petzold upends this and makes us think maybe strangers can actually give something to us. Or there might be something deeper in need of excavation and then refurbishment.

At the same time, there are the reverberations of Vertigo and themes related to the remaking of people. One image in the place of another image, in this case, Laura for the unseen daughter. Except Laura has so much to offer on her own, and in many ways, down to the very last frame, this is her movie, thanks to the hypnotic presence of Beer.

It’s easy to call a movie like this minor, but it uses its space sagaciously, and it has bounties in the intermittent passages that a lot of larger spectacles never quite discover. Ironically, they don’t have time.

It feels like Petzold at his very best precisely because it fits in concert with all his work, and in feeling small, it suggests what it needs to in such a perplexing, even exciting way.

Watching Miroirs No. 3 is another stirring reminder of why I continue coming back to movies and why Petzold remains one of my modern-day favorites. If you are new to his filmography, please give his earlier work with Nina Hoss a watch, and if you have the opportunity, watch his interviews.

In the hands of some people, films can come off pretentious, but I appreciate the care and creativity the writer-director puts into every story he writes. There’s a personal spark to them, fully alive and made in the tradition of all his favorite films that came before. Because he is a fan just like us, and he lets this shine through everything he does.

4/5 Stars

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

Posted on May 28, 2026 by 4 Star Films

Before the movie played, there was a short featurette following famed animator Hayao Miyazaki leading up to his Oscar win for Boy and The Heron in 2024. He sits with one of his fanciful drawings and mumbles something to the effect that it’s a pain going back to the real world.

You only say that if you have an extraordinary imagination. But like many of us, Miyazaki seems to yearn for a better if not a different world altogether. When he wins the award, the man’s nowhere to be found.

Because that’s not why he made his film. It was the process and the exhilaration of reaching back into his imagination and exploring a different world. In documentaries, the director always strikes me as a somewhat cagey if unassuming individual, but what a joy it is to be privy to his creations.

It’s little different with Howl’s Moving Castle, which now sees its 20th anniversary come to pass. It’s a striking opening image following this mechanical Baba Yaga-like castle (from Russian folklore), almost anthropomorphic in its movements. Howl’s abode is not only a visual marvel, but it is also the seat of this entire story.

The eponymous man is a charismatic wizard, benevolent if somewhat vain and periodically selfish. But he is not the film’s only hero. Its true core begins with Sophie, a young girl who works as a hat maker. She has the humble beginnings that fit right at home in a fairy tale, and true to convention, her fearlessness means she has a spell cast on her by the menacing Witch of the Waste.

Instantly, her youth is snatched away from her, and she’s stricken with the wrinkles and arthritic posture of old age. But Sophie is a driven, ever stalwart heroine, and she resolves to find a resolution for her fate. She must venture to Howl’s Castle in search of answers. Upon seeing how dank and grungy the wizard’s abode is, she hires herself on as a cleaning woman, determined to cultivate it.

Once again, I’m struck by how Miyazaki conjures up a world of the grotesque, from creepy crawlies to ghoulish, otherworldly adversaries, and dark forces. But the fairy tale almost demands these elements; they feel like a prerequisite because they give us a threshold for great beauty and even serenity in the lap of nature. One would not be as potent without the other.

Like some of the great adventure stories, Sophie and her newfound acquaintances form a disparate family unit reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, or even Pixar’s UP.

There’s Markl, a precocious little boy with a bearded cloak who earnestly tries to hold down the fort while the master of the house is indisposed. Calcifer is the obstinate fire demon who begrudgingly powers Howl’s mobile fortress even as he dreams of being freed from his fate. Later additions include a scarecrow christened “Turnip Head” by Sophie, and then a sad-eyed, wheezing canine Heen and, eventually, a wilting Grandma.

In a subsequent scene, Markl looks up to his surrogate maternal figure and asks her if they are family, and she quietly affirms him with added conviction. What he asks is right and good. Not only that, it is true. They look after one another.

Joe Hisaishi’s score, including the jaunty waltz-inflected “Merry Go Round Life,” augments the entire panoply of Miyazaki’s world as the composer always seems to do. In this case, it’s an added European flavor to go with the opulent architecture. I could not help thinking of the French phrase, “La Ronde.” It no doubt has many meanings, but it suggests to me that stories, like life, often come full circle. We’re all interconnected.

In another sense, I was struck by the way Howl seems timeless, even as a film that turned 20 years old in 2024. It stands outside of that moment to mean something more to us that’s universal.

The story is gripped in the throes of war and the destructive chaos it engenders. It’s difficult not to see the film living in the literal shadow of The Bomb, as many Japanese films have post-WWII. Because while Howl is not about a literal time and place, that’s not to say history cannot bleed into the storyline. Especially because Miyazaki is a personal filmmaker laying himself bare and sharing his thoughts and emotions through his creative offerings.

The glory of a Miyazaki movie is how deep his imagination takes him as he pushes to the limits in the most glorious of ways. I come out of his most epic films overwhelmed. If you asked me to give a rundown of plot points, I could not without feeling discombobulated, because watching his films is not about plot points but an overarching experience. It’s so easy to remember crystallized interactions, character moments, and these grand, almost innate themes.

In the deepest sense, perhaps Howl’s Moving Castle is a love story. Transcendent, yes, but also a tale about opening up your heart. I’ve often heard the words in a spiritual context, but it fits here too: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. The metaphor is clear.

It feels as if Howl is transformed and regains a heart and a desire for love he never had before. As the Narnia author C.S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.”

Howl is injured, and our heroes are taken to the brink of death on multiple occasions, and yet the risk seems worth it. Because there is hope and then elation before the final curtain when those who are meant to be together are reunited.

Of course, this is all a world Miyazaki has conceived with the aid of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel, but just as his real life seems to bleed into the fantasy, I feel like we would like to believe that the fairy tale permeates the real world, too. Love, sacrifice, beauty, camaraderie, these are profound things to strive for in life. They can hardly put us to shame.

They give meaning in ways worldly accolades like an Oscar could never satiate. Miyazaki seems to know deep within his bones that this is true. Look no further than his films for proof.

4/5 Stars

Note: This review was originally written in 2024 around the 20th anniversary of Howl’s Moving Castle.