Pieter Brueghel’s “The Way to Calvary” is a large painting of many figures in a surreal landscape. With his master’s eye for detail and perspective, he packed the canvas with the almost hidden story of Christ bearing his cross to Golgotha. Part of the strangeness is that the scene is reimagined as taking place in 16th Century Flanders, and the Roman soldiers are replaced by the Spanish soldiers who currently terrorized the country, crucifying heretics (in the name of the holy church) across wheels jutting into the sky. Thus Brueghel combined an angry political statement with a nominally holy subject, creating a masterpiece with many levels of meaning in his typically beautiful, arresting, intense, numinous, almost grotesque style.

Although Christ is at the center of the picture, the viewer’s eye is distracted by the multifarious dramas around him, and this is part of the painter’s philosophy of how cataclysmic events happen almost unnoticed while life goes on. W.H. Auden expressed this idea in a famous poem on Brueghel’s “Fall of Icarus”.

Night Watch is a British thriller from Elizabeth Taylor’s most interesting period, not necessarily the same as her best period. Her best period was her stunning debutante youth, when she seems a radically different actress from what I’m calling her interesting period: her post-Virginia Woolf attempts of the late 60s and early 70s to choose odd, unusual, ambitious projects that flopped and earned increasing critical scorn. This is the period marked by her idiosyncratic hyperventilated delivery, which somehow goes hand in hand with the outré nature of the projects.

These films are highly watchable (at least the ones I’ve tracked down) and include Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony and Boom, John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye about being married to a repressed homosexual husband (ahem), an all-star version of Graham Greene’s The Comedians about political unrest in Haiti (with another fine late performance from Lillian Gish), the neglected existential oddity The Driver’s Seat, the crazy Hammersmith Is Out, George Stevens’ swansong The Only Game in Town with Warren Beatty, George Cukor’s disastrous floperoo Soviet co-production of The Blue Bird, and the lovely Under Milk Wood (though she has only an eyeblink cameo). Several of these star then-husband Richard Burton.

Thanks to Warner Archive’s made-on-demand service, this gorgeously styled “tragedy” is now finally available after decades of legal limbo.

Based on Margaret Kennedy’s novel, the story has barefoot country lass Joan Fontaine (unrecognizably sprightly as a very convincing teen) running around an Alp while quietly mooning for dull composer Charles Boyer, who’s married well to brittle cookie Alexis Smith. Peter Lorre hangs around but fails to strangle anyone, although there are some fine candidates. It’s one of those highbrow pictures about “the artist” that’s also populist enough to show aged character actor Charles Coburn fuming and clumping around in philistine disapproval while sopranos warble.

The Jazz Singer isn’t a lost masterpiece of TV drama, but it’s fascinating for many reasons. The oddest and most commercial reason is the chance to see Jerry Lewis in his first effort at serious drama, right in the middle of his reign as the movies’ wackiest comedian.

It’s an anodyne update of Samson Raphaelson’s play, which became the first talkie with Al Jolson, about Jewish assimilation into mainstream American life. The cultural conflict between generations and traditions is expressed musically. Will the son be a cantor like his father or break his father’s heart by going on the stage to perform secular vulgarities? The original version uses blackface as a curiously mixed signal of “Americanism” to which the son aspires. Being American means in some way emulating the African-American experience. True, it looks like a grotesque parody of same, but that element of identifying with and wanting to be “black”, which is equated with being a personal outcast as well as a vital part of culture, is at least an unspoken undercurrent, though modern viewers have trouble seeing beyond the surface make-up.

That sound you hear is Ayn Rand rolling over in her grave. As a matter of fact, the forced philosophical face of the so-called Tea Party Movement has been doing so much crypt spinning as of late that she’s probably burrowed halfway to China by now - and anyone who knows anything about the author turned academic realizes how horrid that prospect would be - especially for her. After growing up in and around the Russian Revolution, Rand moved to the US. There, she became a famous writer and a controversial thinker. She hated Communism with a passion (good) while equally despising the ‘virtue’ known as altruism. Instead, she argued for a man’s ability to maximize his own abilities, without impediment, which when filtered through the fervent call to Conservatism that seems to be swallowing the Middle Class, has become a wounded war cry for social upheaval. Or something like that. 

It only seems fair then that a flat, lifeless film (the first in a proposed trilogy) of Rand’s most ridiculous novel, Atlas Shrugged, is out and about this election season. A long term labor of love for its producer, it attempts to turn the tale of a failing railroad concern in a dystopia America into a rallying cry against - well, you name it: social security; welfare; entitlement programs for the poor; big government; corporate backstabbing; personal greed; familial distrust…the list goes on. What it doesn’t do is entertain. Or engage. Or even enrich. It would be one thing of Atlas Shrugged, Part 1 offered something to think about. Instead, it’s a strident political diatribe that has neither its purpose nor its inferred intentions in the right Right place. As a matter of fact, the movie is so meaningless it almost argues against its preposterous polemics.