Francois Truffaut’s SMALL CHANGE (1976) proved something of a challenge to find, as it was released in the US as Pocket Money —
— and Amazon’s streaming listings confuse it with a Lee Marvin/Paul Newman film of the same name. Happily it was worth the hunt
The film has a lot in common with Truffaut’s first film, The 400 Blows, in that it’s largely a child’s eye view of childhood; unlike the earlier film it’s lighthearted. Kids in a small French town grapple with babysitting, minor rebellion, creative defiance, first love and parental cluelessness (we also see the parents struggling to deal with things). A charmer.“Gregory went boom!”
As I like Howard Hawks, Jean Arthur and Cary Grant and have long wanted to see ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939) I’m baffled that I apparently recorded it off the air in Florida and never saw it until recently. It is indeed as good as I’d heard.
Geoff (Cary Grant) runs a seat-of-its-pants South American airline. The risks are high, the planes are old and failure will wipe out the owner, Dutchy (Sig Ruman), breeding a fatalistic approach reminiscent of Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol — when a pilot dies in one scene, the others matter-of-factly divide up his stuff, never letting on to any grief. That horrifies stranded showgirl Bonnie (Jean Arthur) though she soon comes to see that Geoff and his team aren’t unfeeling, just coping the best they can. She and Geoff start a romance though he’s cynical about anything long-term: he doesn’t even keep a box of matches in his pockets and has to borrow them from someone else to light up.
It’s different from the usual Cary Grant role but Grant does well with it. Arthur shines too — as one of my film reference books says, where Katherine Hepburn seems to charge into a scene without knowing the risks, Arthur knows them but charges in anyway. The results could easily have come off corny and cliched but instead they work, though Hawks didn’t entirely think so — he wanted Arthur to play it cool, like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, and that wasn’t her style. “If he hadn’t got it tonight, he was bound to get it sooner or later.”
HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940) is another outstanding Hawks/Grant collaboration, with Rosalind Russell as the leading lady. It’s based on the Ben Hecht play The Front Page, about a manipulative Chicago newspaper editor determined not to let his star reporter leave the paper, no matter what. Hawks changed the reporter’s role to a woman and improved it immeasurably.
Editor Walter (Grant) and reporter Hildy (Russell) were married but now she’s divorced and about to quit the writing game to marry staid, small-town Ralph Bellamy. Trouble is, there’s a possibly innocent man going on trial for murder, a maelstrom of corruption and conniving around the case and it’s so hard to resist … As Films of Howard Hawks says, the core relationship resembles Hawks’ Twentieth Century but Grant is funnier than John Barrymore and Russell’s role is considerably stronger than Carole Lombard’s in the earlier film. “The last person to say that to me was Archie Leach, a week before he cut his own throat.”
CAT VIDEO FEST IV (2024) was a collection of cat videos that played at the local Carolina Theater showing cats climbing, hiding, scaring dogs, snuggling and so on. Cute if cats are your thing.
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