Beatrice Arthur has the peculiar distinction of having provided a reason to watch the 1974 movie musical Mame, based on the Broadway show and starring Lucille Ball (and when I say "watch", I of course mean, "keep your finger pressed hard on that fast-forward button at all but the appropriate times). The movie, which was intended as a crowning high point to Ball's career, proved to be a source of embarrassment to the star, who at 62 couldn't (or at least didn't) dance and who gargled her songs in a voice that would have done Ernest Borgnine proud, but it did give Arthur a chance to reprise her Tony-Award-winning performance as Mame's formidable sidekick, Vera Charles, for the camera. (The movie was directed by Gene Saks, who was married to Arthur from 1950 to 1978.) Arthur's work in the movie inspired New Yorker critic Pauline Kael to one of those vivid prose poems of hers that made performing in light entertainment sound like an act of battlefield heroism that might get the subject's face included in the redesign of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Kael wrote that Arthur's Vera was "monstrously marvelous--like a coquettish tank. When she sings, the low growls that come out of her cathedral chest make Ethel Merman sound like a tinkling virgin. Beatrice Arthur can deliver a single-syllable word with enough resonance to stampede cattle three thousand miles away."

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Some twenty years ago, Matt Groening produced a parody of a typical film festival brochure that was full of such titles as "Land of Ice, Land of Sighs." The title The Secret of the Grain is almost as perfect in conjuring up exactly what people who don't see many foreign films dread they must be like. ("Grain! Why will you not grow so that I can feed my family!? What is your secret!?") It turns out that the movie isn't set on a barren plain ravaged by drought but in contemporary France, and the plot is something of a traditional family farce, though it's debatable whether the writer-director, Abdellatif Kechiche (Games of Love and Chance) understands just how traditional and just how farcical. His hero is Beiji (Habib Boufares), a sixty-year-old manual laborer with a sprawling Franco-Arab family of friends and kinfolk. When his already meager work opportunities go-getting stepdaughter, and when the screen is filled with people with resentments and competing agendas--as in the opening-night sequence that takes up most of the last hour, with Beiji's daughters from his first marriage hissing bitchy remarks about their mother's replacement behind her back-- things even spark a little, thought they never quite catch fire. At its best, it's a pretty fair example of what Quentin Tarantino calls a "hang-out movie."

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