In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967). I guessed that this film would seem painfully dated. Instead, Jewison’s police drama about a black Philadelphia homicide detective called upon to help solve a murder case in a small Southern town where rampant bigotry still rules the culture holds up nicely. It’s somewhat an artifact of its time, but a dramatically sound one. Jewison makes his points with care, always grounding the conflicts in believable situations populated by well-drawn characters. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in clean, gripping storytelling. Rod Steiger won an Oscar for his portrayal of the local sheriff, begrudgingly and grumpily working with this big city hotshot, and it’s well deserved, even in a year that also saw Warren Beatty gleaming his way through ingenious work in Bonnie and Clyde. Steiger manages to always play the material a step or two off of expectations, relaxed when others would bring heat, or forceful when it seems that a quieter approach is called for. It lends an exciting unpredictability to his performance that flows over to the entire film.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Stephen Sommers, 2009). I alluded to this offering from the Hasbro cinematic braintrust in a recent post paying it the backhanded compliment that it was better than the other toy-derived blockbuster from the same summer. That should not, by any means, be interpreted as an endorsement of this live action version of the extended toy commercial cartoons from the eighties. It’s predictably awful, shuffling a handful of weakly conceived characters with cliched personal conflicts through eyesore action spectacles. The film isn’t even astute enough to have fun with its own ludicrousness. Casting Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a showy villain and then giving him no chance to cut loose and play represents a damning lack of boldness or imagination.

The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985). I can intellectually break apart Spielberg’s film adaptation of Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel, pulling out the pieces that, on their surface, don’t really work. There are instances that can be fairly characterized as overt manipulation. The movie lacks a hard edge in its depiction of the physical and mental abuse faced by the lead character Celie as she endures a loveless marriage of convenience in the American south of the first third of the twentieth century, just as it is famously chaste in relaying the details and liberation of her romantic and sexual relationship with a woman. These gaps are heightened by the many sequences of broad comic relief, which feel a little unearned without unvarnished looks at the toughness of Celie’s existence. Finally, it builds to a cascade of happy endings that have a tinge of falseness to them, even though they’re consistent with the outcomes of Walker’s original work. And yet it all has a richness of life, a consistency of vision, and an astonishing emotional pull. Even among his detractors, of which there are many, Spielberg is generally agreed to be a master craftsman. That praise usually centers on his technical acumen, his shot construction, his complete command of the mechanics on traditional Hollywood narrative filmmaking. I think it also applies to his unerring ability to realize the proper emotional trajectory in his very best films. Every flaw I listed above begins to look like a strength when considered against the landscape of the entire film, the places his characters need to go, and the way that Spielberg, unapologetically invested in them, feels his way through their journey.

The Electric Horseman (Sydney Pollack, 1979). Pollack alternated between slyly inventive directing jobs and workmanlike, station-to-station efforts. This romantic comedy is an example of the former. Robert Redford plays a washed-up rodeo champion who’s drunkenly fumbling his way through an endorsement contact that plays upon his fast fading fame. His soul is stirred into action when he encounters a fellow mascot on the payroll, a champion racehorse that has been drugged into mental oblivion so it will be more agreeable to trots upon Vegas casino stages to shill breakfast cereal and other products. The cowboy steals the horse with the intent of setting it free, and falls into a romance with the television news reporter who begins covering the story and winds up aiding his mission. Jane Fonda is simply adequate in that role. She distinguished herself far more in her other venture as a broadcast journalist that same year. Redford, on the other hand, is pretty terrific. It’s not a performance of bracing depth, by any means, but its charming, wise and built with great care. It’s a nice reminder of the quietly dynamic screen presence that made him a star in the first place.

Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964). The terse, lean drama was notably released the same year as the landmark Civil Rights Act that’s gotten an unexpected fresh spin in the nonstop modern news cycle. Ivan Dixon plays a black man who struggles to settle into a nice domestic life with his new bride in Alabama, largely because of his unwillingness to cow before the prejudiced norms of society. Nothing But a Man is a classic example of old school independent filmmaking, shot in evocative black and white and grappling with big issues in an unadorned, highly humanistic manner. Roemer is clearly interested in exploring the ways that oppression and poverty are outcomes of cyclical systems. To break free, a man needs to defy more than the angry, fearful people blocking his path towards a better life. He needs to be ready to stand up against his own history and the patterns of self-defeat that are all too easy to fall into when confronting a world of no. Roemer’s delicate directing and Dixon’s potent performance offer hope that this sort of freedom is achievable, which also conceding the great difficulty in reaching it.