Che Guevera, a ghost and a flirt: movies

CHE Part One (2008) is the first half of Steven Soderbergh’s four-hour biopic of Che Guevera, the iconic (almost literally — the poster image here had a long reach) Latin American revolutionary of the 1960s. The film alternates between scenes of Che in the Cuban revolution and a 1964 interview (which serves to put a lot of this in context); while the individual scenes are good, there’s not enough of a dramatic arc to keep me reading even to the end of Part One (it makes me look fondly at fictionalized biopics like Viva Villa).“I think you should forgive me in advance as i know you will not like what I’m about to say.”

The great British TV writer Nigel Kneale (best known for the Quatermass TV serials—Quatermass, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit) adapted Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black for TV in 1989. As in the novel, THE WOMAN IN BLACK has a solicitor in post-Great War England visiting an isolated house to dispose of the recently deceased owner’s possessions. But why does this woman in mourning wear constantly show up, watching him from a distance? What’s in the room that he can’t unlock? Are those screams of terror from the marsh really just birds? This is slow, old-school horror, taking its time to get to the scary bits but it works — much better than the later Daniel Radcliffe version. “You’re a London solicitor — have you ever heard a gull?”

BALL OF FIRE (1941) is the Billy Wilder-scripted, Howard Hawks take on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the dwarves being seven elderly professors (including Richard Haydn and SZ Sakall) led by Gary Cooper in compiling the ultimate encyclopedia. When Cooper discovers his section on slang his hopelessly out of date, he goes looking for help and winds up meeting nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). She wants nothing to do with him —

—until triggerman Dan Duryea shows up on behalf of her mobster boyfriend (Dana Andrews) and tells Sugar she needs to hide from the cops. Next thing Cooper and his crew know, they’ve got a beautiful, flamboyant woman moving in with them and tying them up in knots. Hmm, is it possible she might start developing some knotty feelings of her own? This is a fun, fast-moving film and one of my favorite Stanwyck movies. A shame I didn’t watch it with TYG as there are lots of scenes she’d have enjoyed making raunchy jokes about. “That man spoke a living language; I’ve embalmed a dead one.”

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