Monday, December 4, 2017

"The Spirit of St. Louis" (1957)

Hollywood's telling of the first transatlantic solo flight by pilot Charles Lindbergh in 1927 was a colossal bomb when it was released. Maybe it was because star Jimmy Stewart was way, way too old to play the historic figure (Lindbergh was 25 at the time of the achievement, Stewart was 47), or maybe Lindbergh's luster had faded because of his pro-Nazi stance during WWII, too recently familiar to an Eisenhower-era American public. Whatever the reason, a fresh look now shows this to be an slick and entertaining history lesson. Credit the iconic Stewart for shouldering most of the picture in the tight confines of the titlular flying machine's cockpit. His natural gifts for empathy and facial expression put the performance over (he pulled off much the same feat in Hitchcock's "Rear Window" a few years before). It helps that he has a sprightly script by director Billy Wilder that is filled with a number of flashback scenes leading up to the big flight that sparkle with his patented witty inflection.
He manages to fill the story with edge-of-your-seat suspense despite the fact that we know the ending...SPOILER ALERT: Lindbergh lands.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

"Marked Woman" (1937)

Warner Brothers was the studio for gangster pictures in the 1930's. Tough, realistic, violent, and fast paced they were hard knuckle entertainments and were often based on the real crime stories of the day, "ripped from the headlines"scenarios. This fine entry was based on the takedown of underworld crime boss Lucky Luciano by a group of women who worked in his prostitution ring and who would turn state's evidence against him. Strong-willed Bette Davis is leader of the "hostesses" who run up against the nasty kingpin played by Eduardo Cianelli. She teams up with the earnest DA, Humphrey Bogart, who plays against his usual bad guy type, to bring down the heavy when her innocent younger sister (Jane Bryan) gets in too deep with him. Davis is just great here, feisty and resilient. It's refreshing to see a woman protagonist in this usually male-dominated genre. And her scenes with Bogart play like two fine tennis players volleying that rat-a-tat dialog between them. The gritty direction is by Lloyd Bacon with some uncredited help by Michael Curtiz.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

"The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" (1957)

By all measure of reason, this movie should be unwatchable. But damned if it doesn't suck you in and jerk your tears from one end of the screen to the other. A headstrong youngish British woman (Ingrid Bergman) makes it her heart's desire to become a Christian missionary in 1930's China during the Sino-Japanese war. This despite the fact that she has no training or money to get there. But get there she does. She signs on to work for an elderly missionary woman (Athene Seyler) in a remote northern province who runs a dilapidated inn. With pluck and hard work they begin to turn the place around and to help the local folks and travelers, all the while teaching the word of Christ. As the war heats up and the Japanese infiltrate the territory, Ingrid has to get one hundred--yes, one hundred-- Chinese orphans in a treacherous overland trek to safety. Missionaries, orphans, and a white hero that saves the third world...sound icky? Think again. Bergman's performance is so endearing and she imbues the character with such passion she makes the whole movie. She makes you forget some other questionable casting issues too, like her romance with a half white, half Chinese military officer played by Curt Jurgens and her winning over of the local mandarin,  Robert Donat in his last film role. You could never get away with this white-person-in-native-role business today. If both actors didn't give such sincere performances in their almond eyed makeup you'd be throwing fried rice at the screen. Yeoman director Mark Robson doesn't go in for any flashy direction. He knows where to put the camera to tell the story in solid script by screenwriter Isobel Lennart.  It's a testament to the filmmakers that the whole thing was shot in England! With a nice score by Malcolm Arnold.

Friday, August 4, 2017

"Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954)

The poster bills it as "MGM's Love Making Musical!" They weren't lying. This is one of those movie premises that on the surface seems innocent enough, but when you really give some thought to what's going on you clearly see what the filmmakers were trying to slip  by the buttoned-down sensibilities of the 1950's American public (and the censors). Seven hearty red-headed mountain men, all brothers, in the pioneering days of the Oregon territory, fall in love, woo, and marry seven women from the nearby town. Let's be clear, though. They're main motivation is that they're pent up. Really pent up. Something awful. And they need...well, you know. There's a robust swagger in this musical that differentiates it from most of the glossier MGM fare. The groundbreaking choreography, by Michael Kidd, is almost purely acrobatic, giving the proceedings a decidedly lustier feeling. The justly famous barn raising sequence where the brothers are flirting with the girls and trying to fend off local suitors is a thrilling showstopper. A lot of the songs in the fine score by Johnny Mercer and Gene de Paul have a big, expansive Copland-esque feel to them. And when they're sung by the full throated baritone of Howard Keel, who's the eldest brother, and the lovely trilling Jane Powell as his intended, it's musical ear candy. But back to the sex. There are two hot scenes in underwear, in one the brothers roust about only in their longjohns, the sexiest bunch of ginger lumberjacks ever put on film, and in another the girls have a whole number wearing only their petticoats and super cinched corsets. And let's not leave out the song and dance number where the brothers are pining for their cloistered girl crushes while they're synchopatedly swing their, ahem, axes. Look for a young Julie Newmar (here billed as 'Julie Newmeyer') as one of the brides. The direction is by Stanley Donen. Filmed in Cinemascope.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

"The Spoilers" (1942)

This was the third filming of Rex Beach's novel of the Yukon gold rush of the early twentieth century and it brings together the unlikely, but charming, pairing of John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich as a fortune hunter and his dance hall proprietress ladyfriend. They're trying to protect their claim from a new unscrupulous gold commissioner who's out to swindle them played by Randolph Scott. He's also got a roving eye on Dietrich. And who wouldn't? She's stunning here in one feathered and sequined gown after anther which her hair done up in the highest Gibson Girl 'do you've ever seen. She's the one oasis of visual prettiness in the hardscrabble, muddy town of Nome where all the action takes place. This was clearly a bid to capitalize on Dietrich's other western role, the big hit "Destry Rides Again". Sadly, she doesn't do one of her patented dance hall ditties here. There's a lot of action, culmination with a huge fistfight between Wayne and Scott  where they tear up practically all the sets. It's a rouser. Solid entertainment all around.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

"Sylvia Scarlett" (1935)

Probably best described as "offbeat", director George Cukor, deemed it "picaresque"; suffice it to say it's an odd little film that has grown into a minor cult classic over the years. A young girl (Katherine Hepburn) and her recently widowed father (Edmund Gwen) are on the lam because of his gambling debts. She disguises herself as a boy so as not to attract attention. The plot is shambling and rambling as they stumble into one minor adventure after another. Along they way they pick up a Cockney grifter (Cary Grant) in a performance that showed Hollywood he could do more than look handsome, it was a career breakout. By far the most interesting aspect of the film is the shuffling of gender roles and gay subtext. Every new person Hepburn encounters (she's equally impressive as both sexes) has an impulsive attraction to her character, one they most often can't explain...even when they find out she's a girl. A definite filmic curio to seek out.

Thursday, July 6, 2017

"Bluebeard's Eighth Wife" (1938)

One thousand kilowatt star power on display here. A luminous Claudette Colbert is the daughter of a penniless marquis (the ubiquitous Edward Everett Horton). When she falls for, and agrees to marry, a rich businessman on holiday in the French Riviera (Gary Cooper at his most unbelievably handsome),  she finds out she's not his first wife but his eighth. That's a problem for her so she decides to make sure he's sincere. It's a paper thin plot, but it's wrapped in a script filled with asides, non-sequiturs, one-liners, and sightgags by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Some of the bits are laugh-out-loud great. Maybe it's that famous "touch" of the director Ernst Lubitsch, but big credit goes to the effortless élan of the two stars who make it all look way to easy. And isn't that the definition of 'star' anyway?

Saturday, June 24, 2017

"Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948)

Oh, the perils of life before smartphones and caller I.D. It could get you murdered. Barbara Stanwyck, in a performance that starts at frantic and goes up from there, is a wealthy heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, "the Cough Drop Queen" as the tabloids dub her. She's a bedridden invalid all alone in her Sutton Place swankienda who overhears a couple of thugs plotting her death on a party line. The whole movie is then told in flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks to show us how she got in this pickle. Director Anatole Litvak keeps this noir thriller moving as the moments tick by leading up to the time Stanwyck thinks she's a goner. The suspense is pretty nifty. Burt Lancaster plays her patient husband who may or may not have something to do with the set-up and Ed Begley is her no-account father. Put it on a double bill with "Rear Window", another shut-in in peril flick.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

"Bigger Than Life" (1956)

One of the more interestingly subversive films of the buttoned-down 1950's. It utilizes a well-worn theme, that underneath the placid surface of squeaky clean suburbia lie messy undercurrents, but in its own unique way. Director Nicholas Ray is playing in the same expressionistic territory as that other dissector of mid-Century mores,  Douglas Sirk, as in his best films of the same period like "All That Heaven Allows" and "Imitation of Life". James Mason is a perfectly ordinary school teacher in a perfectly ordinary suburban small town with the requisite beautiful wife (Barbara Rush) and cute little boy (Christopher Olsen, who also played the iconic 50's tike in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" ). But Mason starts to suffer from painful 'spells' that incapacitate him, one of those convenient Hollywood maladies that help the plot. When he's diagnosed and given only a year to live the only answer his doctors come up with is a new experimental miracle drug. The catch? It turns him into a nasty, mean, S.O.B, a hundred and eighty degrees from his former self, and to make matters worse, the drug is expensive and it's killing the family finances. This is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde comes to Pleasantville. The story turns from weapy melodrama to tense thriller as  Mason, truly frightening here, torments his poor family. Rush is effective in her noble suffering, does she choose to watch her husband die...or live with a monster? Watch how Ray heightens the mood and symbolism through sets and lighting. Walter Mathau is on hand too as a family friend. This is an underrated find for cineastes.




Wednesday, June 21, 2017

"Compulsion" (1959)

There have been many plays, roman a clef novels, and movies based on the famous Leopold and Loeb murder case of the 1920's, most notably Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" and Tom Kalin's "Swoon". This version is adapted from Meyer Levin's 1956 book of the same name. It hews pretty closely to the major incidents in the case: two very wealthy college students, devotees of the Nietzschean "superman" philosophy, believe they can pull of the perfect crime; they plan and cold bloodily kill a young boy, but through happenstance and smart police work are found out and brought to trial in what at the time was billed as 'the crime of the century". Their lawyer was the famous Clarence Darrow and a media circus ensued. If you don't know the outcome, the suspense of the courtroom drama is whether the two murders will get the electric chair. Director Richard Fleischer does right by all the actors here. The young and swoon-worthily handsome Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell play the culprits. Dillman brings just the right amount of smarm to his cocky to-the-manor-born half of the duo, while Stockwell is the shyer, introspective one. Of course no telling of the Leopold/Loeb story is complete without a strong undercurrent of gay subtext, and the film is pretty explicit (by late '50s standards) about indicating the strong attraction these two culprits have for each other...and murder. The last third of the piece is the trial itself and Orson Welles (who gets star billing but doesn't show up for over an hour), is quite effective in a subdued world-weary performance for the Darrow role, as is the always stalwart E.G.Marshall as the prosecuting attorney.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

"Lust for Life" (1956)

By sheer looks alone Kirk Douglas was born to play the doomed artist Vincent Van Gogh. When you see him with his hair dyed red to match the subject's in this respectful biopic, there's an uncanny resemblance to all those famous self-portraits this tortured soul created. But the performance goes beyond looks. Douglas goes for broke in conveying the zealous passion Van Gogh had for his art, along with his lifelong struggle to overcome insurmountable inner demons. Is the suffering really explained? No. But you do get an informative overview of Van Gogh's life, how he discovered his technique, and how is was inspired by so much of the natural world around him (and don't forget that ear business). Best of all, of course, are all those glorious paintings. Director Vincent Minelli explodes the widescreen with all the luscious colors in Van Gogh's palette. Much of the film was shot in the same locations that Van Gogh recreated. It's fun to see the art vs. the original place. Anthony Quinn won an Oscar as the spirited rake Paul Gauguin who befriends Van Gogh and goads him to go with his gut and paint what he feels. An added bonus is Miklos Rozsa's emotional score.





Sunday, June 18, 2017

"My Favorite Brunette" (1947)

By 1947 the film noir genre had firmly taken hold as a type of Hollywood film. The tough talking, big city detective prowling an urban landscape of underworld criminals and femme fatales, trying to solve some sordid crime with too many suspects on hand. So it was inevitable that it was a ripe for parody. What's interesting about this entertaining little film is that the filmic ribbing came so quickly to the nascent genre and it manages to bend the rules but also play by them as well. Bob Hope, sans  his usual screen cohort Bing Crosby, although Der Bingle does make a cameo appearance here, is a frustrated advertising photographer who dreams of being a hard boiled private eye. Without spoiling anything, he gets his wish, but he bumbles his way through the entire proceedings. Everyone in the picture is playing it straight, as if they're in a real noir thriller, including the heavies, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney. Hope plays all the comedy to himself, in sotto voce asides so that only we the audience hear his thoughts. It's a running stream of consciousness gag that was later stolen by Woody Allen in his nervous comedies to great effect. Luscious and lovely Dorothy Lamour is on hand as the wealthy widow who hires Hope to find her missing husband. She's just window dressing, but then so many noir females were just that. At least she's game and has fun with the part. If you like genre-bending fare do put it on your list.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

"Fahrenheit 451" (1966)

One of the strangest pairings of director and movie genre ever attempted. Francois Truffaut was one of the seminal creators of the French New Wave, a style of filmmaking noted for it's looser, grittier, less formalistic approach to storytelling. It's themes were contemporary and dealt with current social issues. So what was he doing helming an adaptation of a popular science-fiction novel set in a dystopian future? Well, the answer was probably (and primarily) Truffaut's love of the written word and/or art, and, secondarily, the dangers of totalitarian governments. It's a frightening future where books are banned, not just censored. You can't read them, own them, write them. Oskar Werner is a "fireman" working for the state. It's his job to ferret out and extinguish any books owned by lawbreakers. When he meets a lovely girl on the monorail (Julie Christie) who we find out is part of an Underground devoted to saving and preserving books, his sentiments begin to change. But if his superiors find out he's fried, pun intended. The movie has strange rhythms. It doesn't have the pacing of a typical Hollywood thriller, but the oddly antiseptic production design of this paranoid world somehow fits. It's got a Flash Gordon-meets-Mod-Sixties vibe. Werner and Truffaut famously hated each other through this production but the actor's Teutonic accent works to heighten the Nazi-like proceedings. In a another odd touch, Christie plays a dual role as Werner's mind-numbed wife who spends her days in a drug induced torpor watching her giant flat-screen TV (a future prediction the art directors got right). This is one of those quirky movie curios that's definitely worth the time, if only for the haunting and beautiful ending, justifiably famous, that only an artist like Truffaut could pull off.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

"My Favorite Wife" (1940)

This is the movie that put the screw in screwball comedy. An amazingly sexy sex farce that somehow manages to tell you exactly what's going on but only by inference and innuendo, all while remaining smart, witty, and very funny. The Hayes Code censors were either asleep at the wheel or just plain dumb to let this one slip through. It's a modern take on a tale as old as Methuselah. Roughly based on a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Irene Dunne returns to her family and husband (Cary Grant), after seven years having been assumed dead from a shipwreck. Grant has since remarried to a stiff new wife (Gail Patrick) and hilarity ensues. He's married to two women while both are staying at the same resort hotel, wink wink. To complicate things, he finds out that Dunne wasn't alone on that deserted island, she was with Randolph Scott, who breaks the Hunk-O-Meter scale he's so blindingly handsome here. Grant fumes when he imagines the possibilities of those two canoodling on their island hideaway. But on a meta level, there's more here than meets the eye. See, in real life Grant and Scott were "roommates" living together, hopeless bachelors, FOR TWELVE YEARS in the '30s and '40s. Was it a real love affair as many have speculated? Just Google "Cary Grant Randolph Scott lovers" and look at the cozy pictures of their living arrangement and you decide. But it does add a spicy layer of meaning to the film, as in the scene where Grant first spots Scott at a swimming pool in his skimpy bathing suit. His eyes bug out so much it's like he's a character from a Tex Avery cartoon. Dunne is luminous and her chemistry with Grant is undeniable, that's  probably why they made three pictures together. Director Garson Kanin concocted this frothy cocktail and it's laced with some pretty strong spirits that'll leave you with a groggy smile on your face.

Friday, May 19, 2017

"Mrs. Miniver" (1942)

Maybe the most successful piece of war propaganda Hollywood ever produced. A moving and sentimental story of one British family during the early stages of the WWII and their town's siege by German forces, this film caused American audiences to sympathize with the Allied cause in spades. Isolationism was a dead, let's go kill those Jerries! This is one of those classy, glossy MGM prestige pictures that still works because director William Wyler carefully calibrates the message without getting preachy, and the tears are earned, not squeezed out of you. The fine cast, headed up by Greer Garson as the stalwart mother, Walter Pidgeon as her affable husband, and Teresa Wright as the teenage ingenue who falls for the Minivers' son (Richar Ney), are just the sort of likable people Americans identified with. Besides one nasty German soldier, the great Dame May Whitty is on hand as Wright's grandmother to inject some stuffy antagonist troubles into the family's tribulations. A sincere and entertaining effort all around.




Saturday, April 29, 2017

"Call of the Wild" (1935)

If you needed any other proof why Clark Gable was nicknamed 'The King' in 1930's Hollywood, then look no further than his charismatic star turn in this tale of the the Yukon Gold Rush at the turn of the 20th Century. He's sexy as all hell as a down on his luck fortune hunter who's searching for an apocryphal gold mine up in the backcountry mountains. He's aided by three loves, Loretta Young as the wife of lost prospector who knows the way to the gold, Jack Oakie as his comic relief sidekick, and Buck, his loyal St. Bernard sled dog. The story gives only a passing glance to the plot of Jack London's popular novella which put the anthropomorphized Buck at the center of the action. This being Hollywood they weren't going to make the biggest male lead of the day play second fiddle to a dog. What you do get is a lot of fun romance, dog races, snarling wolves, and stunning wintry vistas shot in Washington state. Reginald Owen shows up as the hissable baddie trying to steal the gold (and Buck). And let's not discount the performance of the canine himself. It's no wonder that Gable ends up with the lovable pooch over Young!

Monday, April 24, 2017

"Key Largo" (1948)

Proof an all star cast can take okay material and transform it into something great. Liberally adapted from a play by Maxwell Anderson, John Huston directs this story of a WWII vet (Humphrey Bogart) visiting the widow (Lauren Bacall) of one of the men in his company who died under his command in the battle of San Pietro. She lives with her wheelchair ridden father-in-law (Lionel Barrymore), the proprietor of a seen-better-days resort hotel in the remote Florida Keys. Things take a noir turn when we find out the the other guests at the place are a snarling kingpin mobster (Edward G. Robinson), his band of thugs, and his desperate ex-lounge singer gun moll (Claire Trevor). A bad hurricane hits and there's much verbal sparring, as Robinson tries to strong arm Bogie into getting him to Cuba and away from the law. Things could've gotten stagey here but Huston keeps things moving and the cast is like a finely tuned machine, everyone doing what they do best, especially Trevor who won a much deserved Oscar for her emotionally bruised character. When she does a boozy off-key rendition of "Moanin' Low" she's an exposed raw nerve. Robinson is always good as the heavy and Bogie is...well, Bogie. Nobody did the reluctant hero better in the history of movies.

Wednesday, March 29, 2017

"The Scarlett Empress" (1934)

The paper thin plot of this historic epic is beside the point. It's all about the sumptuous over-the-top visuals. And what visuals! Under the exacting eye of director Josef von Sternberg this eyecandy feast is unlike any other film from the golden era of the Hollywood studio system. Played almost like a silent film (there are numerous title cards detailing plot points), it's the story of Russia's Catherine the Great as played by von Sternberg's oft used muse, Marlene Dietrich. We see her from young womanhood as Germany's Princess Sophia, then as she's whisked away in an arranged marriage to be the wife of the Grand Duke of Russia, then as she ultimately becomes the famed Empress. Each scene, each frame, is chock-a-block full of detail, the beautiful and the profane. Given this was the Pre-Code era, there's a lot of sex and sexuality to go around, even the depraved. Scenes of Russian torture are hard to watch even today. Von Sternberg has a heyday with the layered, sometimes grotesque sets of the Russian palace, and he films Deitrich as if she was a goddess, and by gosh, with her unique beauty she was. Festooned in one Travis Banton creation after another she's the celluloid screen icon of your dreams. It's fascinating to see her transform from the innocent and wide-eyed  princess--not the usual way we see this actresss-- and bloom into the infamous manhandling czarina who uses her sex to conquer a country. This is one film that must be seen to be believed. Gorgeous indulgence.




Monday, March 27, 2017

Haiku review: "Kong: Skull Island" (2017)

Everyone's fave ape
performing better than his
real human co-stars.

"Gentlemen's Agreement" (1947)

A textbook case of noble Hollywood liberalism. The cause here was anti-Semitism. Gregory Peck is a successful magazine writer on his first big assignment for a new publication. His brainstorm (which takes a while to hit him) is to tell everyone he meets that he's Jewish, so that he can experience first-hand this nasty societal practice. Why the magazine couldn't get a real Jew to write a similar story is never really touched on, we're supposed to assume that Jews just weren't given those kinds of jobs? Nevertheless, experiece it he does, at work, at parties, at hotels, even his little boy (a very good Dean Stockwell) gets taunted in the schoolyard. You get walloped with the message--anti-Semitism, BAD!--over and over again. Concurrently, Peck falls in love with a beautiful socialite (a starchy Dorothy MacGuire) who claims to be open minded about Jews but it irks Peck that she too easily accepts the the social status quo, the unspoken rules about those people and their place in the world. It's all done with taste and decorum and that's probably why it feels so dated and preachy. But sometimes the reason to watch a film like this is for the time capsule aspect of understanding what times were like when the movie was made...to let us see how far we've come and how fare we've still to go (it's not like anti-Semitism has been banished for all time, hell, there's a white supremacist in the White House now!) The other reason is a fine generous performance by Celeste Holm who took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. She's the fashion editor of the magazine who befriends Peck and almost, just almost, gets the guy. She's funny, self-effacing, witty, and smart. A nice depiction of a career woman which was a rarity in those days.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Hiaku review: "Weekend" (2011)

A gay one night stand
turns serious, maybe real?
Tender verité.

"Fort Apache" (1948)

This is essentially director John Ford's telling of Custer's Last Stand , with bits of dramedy and romance thrown in. It's the 1870's and a strict by-the-book captain (Henry Fonda) arrives to take command of a remote western army post with his teenage daughter in tow (Shirley Temple). He quickly alienates all the servicemen including the second in command, an easy-going John Wayne. His biggest mistake is underestimating the tribes of indians in the territory, one that brings about his doom (that's not a spoiler, if you don't know what happened at Little Big Horn then tough luck). Fonda plays against his good guy screen persona effectively here, he's a tight ass martinet that's really frustrating. Temple is around for the secondary story, a budding love angle between her and a young officer (John Agar). She's pretty but her acting abilities never really followed her into adulthood. The rest of the cast is filled out with Ford's recurring stock company (Ward Bond, Harry Carey, etc), and they provide some strained humor as the ragtag misfits trying to measure up to Fonda's strict standards. The real reason to see this picture are the action scenes with the calvary going at it full force with the injuns. There's something so Hollywood about all those whooping Indians on horseback in long tracking shots running smack dab into the cavalry with their bugler blaring away. And it's all set in Ford's beloved location, Monument Valley, with the odd mesa and rock formations dwarfing the men fighting below. The vistas he composed solidified to this day most Americans' mental image of what expansion into the West must've looked like.

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Thursday, February 23, 2017

"Romeo and Juliet" (1936)

Steep balconies and tight leotards. This is by no means a definitive version of Shakespeare's classic play, look to the stage for that, but it is a fine movie version of the celebrated work, one that showcases a major Golden Era Hollywood studio working at full throttle. MGM pulled no punches on the stars, sets, and costumes, that's because wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg wanted a showcase for his popular leading lady (and wife) Norma Shearer. Sure you can quibble with a lot here. Purists will cringe that more than half of the dialog of the play has been cut, but the essential story stays in tact. Shearer and  her co-star, Leslie Howard are way too long-in-the-tooth to play the star crossed teenaged lovers, but they both give sincere nuanced performances. Nothing stagey here, they're intimate and conversational, the age thing becomes moot. Credit director George Cukor for drawing out the realism in his cast, but for also balancing out the story with some big set-pieces. This production is stuffed with visual delights. Massive outdoor Verona sets for all those Capulet/Montagu sword fights, elaborate Agnes DeMille choreographed dance numbers for the party where the leads first meet (it's fun to visualize the dance at the gym from "West Side Story"here), and eye popping Renaissance costumes by Adrian. And then there's John Barrymore as Mercutio and Basil Rathbone as Tybalt. Again, both too old for the roles but what fun to hear those voices spouting the Bard. Reflecting years later , Cukor said he would have gotten more "garlic and Mediterranean into it" but it holds up fine and is worth the look.

Monday, February 20, 2017

"Trouble in Paradise" (1932)

Film historians have pegged this as Hollywood's first romantic comedy talkie. It's pure style and wit are of the kind rarely seen anymore, how sad is that? Herbert Marshall, droll and debonair, is having a torrid affair with Miriam Hopkins, smart and seductive. The catch is that they're not the high society denizens they purport to be, they're a thief and a pickpocket who prey on rich marks. When mega-wealthy perfume company heiress Kay Francis crosses their path, well, it's a larcenous opportunity too good to pass up. She falls for Herbert, he falls for her (maybe), and Hopkins is stuck in the middle. Lots of quick you-can't-believe-they-got-away-with-that banter and innuendo in this pre-Code script, the brainchild of director Ernst Lubitsch. It's sexy but not salacious, the hallmark of "the Lubitsch touch", that ethereal quality of storytelling that many have tried to copy ever since. Best to watch the real thing and revel.

Friday, February 17, 2017

Thursday, February 16, 2017

"The Outrage" (1964)

An intriguing curio, an art house Western. Director Martin Ritt and screenwriter Michael Kanin remade Akira Kurosawa's classic meditation on memory and truth, "Rashomon", and plopped the action in the old West of tumbleweeds and saguaro cacti. It almost works. Three travelers--a preacher (a pre-Trek William Shatner), a gambler (Edward G. Robinson), and a panhandler (Howard DaSilva)--meet at an abandoned railroad depot and recount a recent trial of a Mexican outlaw on trial for the murder and rape of a Southern aristocrat (Laurence Harvey) and his wife (Claire Bloom). In flashbacks we hear three different versions of what happened, all different (the murder victim's take is told thru the mystical conjuring of an old Indian shaman). Who do we believe? Who's telling the truth? And even more importantly, is truth ever really knowable? It's a profoundly simple premise that's been borrowed countless times since, but here's no better telling than Kurosawa's original. This one falls short for one big reason: the culprit is played by a game Paul Newman in dark pancake makeup and garbling a Frito Bandito accent. The performance just doesn't work in our PC culture. That said, the rest of the cast  does a fine job. And the first version's justly famous cinematography is rivaled by some beautiful work this time by master DP James Wong Howe. The dappled clearing where the crime takes place and the desert vistas look like Ansel Adams prints. There's also a less ambiguous and explanatory Hollywood ending, just to make sure you 'get it', as if us dumb Americans can't think for ourselves. A sincere, if failed, effort that film buffs will want to compare and contrast with the masterwork.

Monday, February 6, 2017

"My Favorite Year" (1982)

An affectionate valentine to Old Hollywood and the early days of live television. The year in question is 1954. The incomparable Peter O'Toole is a faded and boozy big screen swashbuckling idol--think Errol Flynn--who has been booked to guest star on the popular comedy/variety show of the day, "The King Kaiser Comedy Hour". It's up the the writing staff's novice, Benjy Stone, to keep O'Toole sober and present during the week's prep for the show. And although he commands the whole movie with a performance that deftly balances laughs and pathos, the rest of the supporting cast are all stellar, each carving out quirky characterizations that bounce off each other like fizzy bubbles. Mark Linn-Baker is the young writer, a newcomer whose timing rivals the best of the Borscht Belters. He holds his own with the formidable presence of O'Toole. Joseph Bologna is the bombastic headliner of the show, supposedly based on the infamous reputation of Sid Caesar. Other zany standouts are Bill Macy as the head writer, Selma Diamond as the sandpaper voiced wardrobe lady, Adoph Green as the manic producer, and Lainie Kazan as Linn-Baker's mother, who hosts the big star to a home cooked meal in the deep recesses of Brooklyn. This one sequence is worth seeing the whole picture, it's comedy gold. If the whole enterprise has the rhythms of a classic sitcom, like the writers' room scenes of the old "Dick Van Dyke Show",  that's not necessarily a bad thing. Director Richard Benjamin so clearly has a love of the era that it shows in every slapstick set piece and in the way the whole candy-colored production looks like a confection that could only exist in our misty water-colored memories.

Monday, January 30, 2017

Thursday, January 26, 2017

"Cool Hand Luke" (1967)

Probably Paul Newman's most iconic performance. He's a freshly incarcerated vandal (for sawing off the tops of parking meters while blotto), who's doing time in a prison work camp somewhere in the rural deep South. He refuses to buckle under to the heartless warden, famously played by Strother Martin --"What we have here is failure to communicate"--and to the other domineering guards. The plot is simply his indefatigable resistance played out in a series of vignettes both comical and painful. He becomes the hero to the other inmates which include a who's who of character actors of the day, including George Kennedy, Dennis Hopper, Ralph Waite, Wayne Rogers, Harry Dean Stanton, and Joe Don Baker. If you're looking for parable, you don't have to look any further than the laid-on-thick allusions to Newman's character as a Christ figure, suffering mightily for his peeps. By the last reel you'll lose count of all the symbolic crosses. But considering the tumultuous backdrop of what was happening societally when the picture was made, it's much more interesting to view the film as a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit in the face of authoritarianism, and given our current political climate isn't that a better reason to watch and  learn? Huge props go to cinematographer Conrad Hall for making a chain gang look so visually stunning scene after scene. And Newman? Try as he might to tamp down his innate star power, he's sexy as hell here. A screen legend.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

"Green for Danger" (1946)

Let's face it. The British are superlative at whodunnits. Those ingenious mind puzzles where some diabolical murder has happened and there are multiple suspects but everyone has an airtight alibi and it takes a whipsmart detective to figure out the clever (but improbable) solution. Many are often set in wealthy mansions, or grand hotels, or sumptuous trains or ocean liners. That's what makes this smart entry fascinating. It's the English countryside during WWII and a murder takes place in an Army hospital caring for the war casualties. All the suspects are the doctors and nurses, think "M*A*S*H meets Agatha Christie". Only this inspector is played by that rascally old scene-stealer Alistair Sim. He manages to inject bits of dry humor in between his interrogation of all the hospital personal played by a cast of first rate, veddy British thespians. There's even some thriller overtones as we see the murder happen (but of course not who the murderer is). The whole thing is deftly crafted by the director/writer/producer team of Sydney Gilliat and Frank Launder. A satisfying little mystery gem.

Image result for "Green for Danger" movie poster